Six Corners and it’s shopping district is many things to many people. To me it is home. There is an association that is there for all of us who live in or have businesses here. Anne was my first contact. She was nice enough to consider me family. My next contact was with Ed Bannon who put many hours into helping our little family. Currently the person shepherding all of us is Kelli Wefenstette. On a recent afternoon after a doctors appointment and picking up Indian food for dinner she granted me some time in her busy schedule for an interview. Kelli comes to us after growing up in a small town in our state. She did her masters work at Loyola in community development and interned at one of our other government offices. We are lucky to have her. The constant theme as we spoke was family. family, family.
Kelli, Anne and Ed have all been instrumental in the recent recovery of our little area. Twenty five new businesses in the short few years is nothing to sneeze it. A few here are old enough to be nostalgic for the days when Six Corners was second only to the Loop as a shopping district. She loves the democratic process. People from the community are encouraged to participate in committee meetings to further the four themes for redevelopment of our area. Events is the one that interest me most though those involving economic redevelopment, art and the streetscape have occasionally piqued my interest.
I am hoping that many of you will be interested as well and that Kelli and the Six Corners Association will be called on by you to “provide assistance to our business community and engage our local residents, to transform Six Corners into a thriving commercial district.”
Art in entance to building
Artistic Logo on door
View at Table of Creativity
Nostalgia past and present
Art in the office
and the Art of Work
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So how does an old guy who loves Python open source programming write a bio? Very few people still living ever bread boarded a program so maybe we do not start there. Some folks may have seen an 028 or an 029 keypunch machine. Still ancient history. I guess this is where I put in that I tried Pre Vet Med at Texas A & M. I found out that I was not that smart. I hitch hiked to Puget Sound. Bought into and worked in a plywood mill. Joined the Air Force then later back to Houston. Knocked around as a cowboy in hippy land for a bit. A friend said "Randy, you ain't no dummy." So I went back to school at the University of Houston. I took hours there and elsewhere from about ten universities in whatever interested me. Those ranged from drama with the same docs who taught Randy and Dennis Quaid to theoretical mathematics. I settled in the Computer Science Department. I continue to be lifelong learner.
Maybe we start with my being 547 pounds from the problems sleeping an N24 schedule come with. Needing to be trained in using the RTA systems which include the CTA systems. The trainers not asking me if I was claustrophobic before putting me on a train that goes into a tunnel.
Perhaps we move on to having gastric bypass surgery, losing a lot of weight and moving to Chicago proper from Schaumburg where Caffeinated Connections was one of my favorite things. There I had spent five of my ten years repairing mobility devices as a field service rep for a major in that field.
We moved to where there is an official taxing and shopping district known as The Six Corners. There I needed to help my wife and her bad knees find ways to work that involved as few stairs as possible. That led to an understanding of the lack of information easily available for where and when there are working elevators or escalators. So trying to solve this led to an open source project to make travel and job search information easily available and first virtually then in RL for friends I have met along the way of many differing abilities so different perceptions of what accessible means.
So the plan is to try to find places and folks of interest locally and in that open government hacking areas and write blog post about them. Loving the intersection of 2nd Life and RL this will hopefully lead to our own Caffeinated Connections over by here.
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Art in entance to building
Artistic Logo on door
View at Table of Creativity
Nostalgia past and present
Art in the office
and the Art of Work