Special Worker Bee! Weekend Edition! I biked in along the lake-shore path from my Wrigleyville-area apartment to Hyde Park today to accomplish a couple tasks. (I did that bike commute somewhere between 1 and 5 times a week until the weather got really bad last year and as it's gotten warmer I've started up on it again.) We've been having something of a heat wave over the last couple weeks here in Chicago, so the path has been crowded like crazy. Today the season seemed to be conspiring against my commute at nearly every turn: there was a stiff headwind on the way down, not to mention a path full of pedestrians an casual cyclists who weren't really paying a lot of attention to where they were going clogging up the path. On the south side there was some kind of walk against sickle-cell anemia that blocked the entire path several times; I actually had to dodge off the path into the grass at one point to avoid a huge group of people who were just standing there in the middle of the road at one point. And once I got in, my normal route to my building was completely blocked off by (a) cops and (b) a nearly endless line of U of C students who were graduating. Hrmph. (Said graduating students also caused me trouble a few hours later when I was starving to death but couldn''t find a place to eat anywhere that wasn't packed to the gills with grads and their parents.)

Then work: I added one more table to the database the psychologists wanted. My website gathered lots of information about people before the event and after the event, but the psychologists actually had people fill out forms during the event on paper as well, and after they made an excel spreadsheet of the data they had me turn it into another table in the relational database. Not a big deal. I also made an editing pass on what is now the Scheme Workshop paper, basically fixing everything the ICFP editors specifically said they didn't like.

On the way home, more clogged path. Fortunately the stiff headwind on my way in became a strong tailwind on my way back, so I was booking it at like 20mph the whole way. The whole way, that is, except on the half of the path that is remotely close to anything scenic. On those stretches I went like 10mph stuck behind hordes of people who were evidently high or something. Public service announcement: when you are on a bike path, you are on a road. Would you wander around in the middle of a road without paying attention to your surroundings at all? No. So don't do it on a bike path either. Thanks.

The last bit of the return trip was the worst, because I live close enough to Wrigley Field that I'm affected by Cubs traffic (both vehicular and, more problematically, pedestrian). I got home right around the end of today's game. Cubs fans are even worse than pedestrians on the bike path; they walk in giant herds, there are many many more of them, and they're often drunk. Thankfully that was brief, and there were only a couple near misses in the block and a half of heavy Cubs-fans traffic I had to avoid.