I did some stuff this year. Here it is, in listicle format or whatever

• Number of times I performed in front of people: At least 151 (My goal was 150 for the year)
• Number of times I’ve bombed so hard it made me want to quit: At least 10
• Number of shows I was happy about how I did: Three
• States I performed in: Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Wisconsin
• States I ate too much cheese in: Wisconsin
• Magicians performed with: One
• Number of times I went on tour: Two
• Number of times I self-booked those tours: One
• Strangers couches slept on: Four
• Original live talk shows I helped create, produce, write and perform in: One
• Number of people who attended seven productions of that show: 400ish
• Original live talk shows I only wrote for: One (for six months)
• Twitter followers gained: More than 1,000ish (like this really matters)
• Comedy festivals I performed in: One
• Months I ran an open mic: Nine
• Money I raised for charity by getting drunk and making comedy videos: $3400ish
• Writing classes taken: Three
• Number of times I was rejected by McSweeney’s: Five

***

My 2014 Comedy Goals

• Perform 200 times in front of people
• Get booked on 20 showcases
• Book two Midwestern tours
• Create some sort of regular audio thing that’s not just comedians interviewing comedians
• Create a new text-based funny online project
• Create a weird monthly comedy show
• Write and shoot eight sketches
• Perform in 10 states
• Be rejected by McSweeney’s 15 times
• Be rejected by The New Yorker five times
• Be rejected by other funny outlets 30 times
• Just pitch funny written things to lots of places on a weekly basis and get used to the rejection
• Find more ways to incorporate humor into my Real Job
• Finally learn how to be funny

Chicago Shootings Map

This was a hefty project. Our breaking news team had been keeping track of all the shootings in the city for reporting purposes in a big Google spreadsheet because the city wasn’t releasing the data in a way we wanted. I discuss the project more in detail here, but this is a Django app using PostGreSQL with PostGIS, an already existing Amazon AWS rig for Django apps, Fabric for automated deployment and Leaflet.js.

Chicago Homicides Map

For this project, I mostly just updated the existing homicide map, which a coworker had already built, and made it work similar to the shootings match (tool tips showing data, etc.). This is a Django app using redis to cache the data on an already existing Amazon AWS rig for Django apps, Fabric for automated deployment and Leaflet.js.

TribLocal User-Generated Content

Our user-generated content portal, which has, so far, brought in thousands of photos and articles from our users. A Django app, it interacts with the Chicago Tribune content management system’s API, storing the data as items in our CMS. This allows our producers to place them in actual spots on our website. This site also uses celery, which helps us to deal with any uploading issues. This was one of my first big projects at the Tribune, and I’m excited for what we’ll add to it in the new year.

Chicagoland Sirens iPhone and Android app

The most ambitious project I’ve ever worked on, this is some super full-stack development right here. It uses a Django backend as an API to import shooting events as well as breaking news incidents from another API. The frontend is all Backbone.js and Underscore.js, and we used Trigger.io to do the major lifting for the iPhone/Android app building. Still has more work to do in 2014, but this was a six-month project with me and a few awesome coworkers, so I’m glad it exists and is getting used regularly by the public.

Chicagoland Prep Sports

This sucker was a monster of engineering, as are most of our projects, and also happens to be one of the highest trafficked projects I’ve worked on at the Chicago Tribune (other than the site’s weather page, which is, I think, the highest traffic thing I’ve ever built). It’s a fully-responsive site (as is almost everything we build) that tracks high school sports in the Chicago area. It works off of Google docs that sports agate clerks fill out on a nightly basis, and then builds various flat html pages through a script that runs in a Flask app. We also store all of the individual data in JSON, just for safekeeping, which we may use someday. This is a super fancy app, and I’m quite proud of it.

Illinois Schools Report Card 

This was quite the app to work on. We were updating it with the latest data, which is always fun when the state decides to change the data format. Thankfully, I mostly worked on switching the maps over from Google’s to Leaflet.js, including updating the geocoding and a few other fun things. Overall, a hefty project that I’m proud to have done some work on.

Green Guide

I did some minor tinkering on this project. It’s a Django app using redis to cache all the data. Very slick. I helped add a few new categories and buttons, I think. Also some backend advertising/tracking code. Maybe.

Blue Sky

Again, my work on this was minimal. But it’s a nifty project and I wanna gloat and say I am somehow .01 percent involved in it.

RedEye Homicides

Made some basic edits to this homicide map after we encountered some strange Google map bug.

Divvy Bike Access

We built this app in one day. The maps and data-gathering were done earlier by my colleague, but the actual building and prototyping was all in one shift. It’s the fastest I’ve built a project like this, and it was quite frustrating on my part, as I wasn’t nearly as strong in JavaScript as I wanted to be. At one point, it was broken on my computer but working on my coworker’s and I was all, “COMMIT EVERYTHING TO THE REPO AND DON’T TOUCH ANYTHING.” And he somehow fixed it. Such joy. Also, part of a real great story.

Multivictim Shootings

For this project I only gathered the data and my wonderful colleagues mapped it all out. What’s crazy is we were discussing building something like this a few days before we had a news peg that required it to be built. I think it was done in a day. Again, another awesome project I’m glad I was a part of.

***

So, those are the projects I worked on. Now to the various talks I gave:

Feb. 11 — University of Wisconsin-Madison — Talked to various journalism classes, gave a hands-on tabletop.js class, sat and just let students pepper me with questions in an office for a few hours. Very enlightening.

Feb. 13 — DePaul University — Talked to Mike Reilly’s journalism class, gave a hands-on of tabletop.js, showed how to visualize some basic data, talked internet for a few hours.

March 4 — Society of Professional Journalists, Indianapolis — Made some videos, focusing on using tabletop.js, that teach folks how to do some basic web development. This video session was the last time I tucked my shirt for something professional, too.

March 6 — DePaul University — Talked to Lou Rutigliano’s class about online journalism, showed some work I’ve done, talked tabletop.js (notice a theme?), showed them basic Google docs fun, answered questions about the professional world.

Aug. 23 — Society of Professional Journalists Conference, Anaheim, Calif. — Did two talks, sat in on a six-hour chat, did some “office hours,” did not go to Disney, thankfully.

Sept. 16 – University of Nebraska-Lincoln — Skyped in to talk to Barney McCoy’s class, one of my old professors. Talked a bit about my career, what I do for my job and how students can be better prepared when they graduate.

Oct. 12 — National Association of Hispanic Journalists regional conference, Chicago — Did two talks on using data to tell stories.

Nov. 2 – JournCamp, Minneapolis — Gave a tabletop.js talk and general here’s-how-the-internet-works talk.

That was certainly a decent amount! I think I may be forgetting a few. I’m going to try and give a talk to a college or group at least once a month next year.

So, I had a busy 2013 in the journalism world. I worked on at least 11 awesome projects, I gave eight talks, wrote two company blog posts, 12 posts on my own blog about journalism/web development and I started an interview show for RedEye Chicago, which I will be discussing in my next post. All in all, a pretty productive year.

St. Louis is super rad, in case anyone’s wondering. We got into the city around 3 p.m. after eating at some very folksy diner in Peoria and reading their local newspaper. Lots of death and meth in the Peoria news. So basically it’s like most cities in the Midwest.

Collin turned me on to The Flop House podcast while we made our way to St. Louis. I am now a subscriber and will probably be a lifelong fan. Check it out, if you get a chance. I made him listen to Sklarbro County, and neither of us caught most of the sports references.

“Hey, there are the Arches,” Collin said at one point. Well, there they were. I kind of forgot about that part of St. Louis. Gateway to the West, and all. I wonder if St. Louis ever got mad that, like, Denver or another western city happened.

“But we were the first Gateway to the West!” says St. Louis.

Responds Denver: “Well, dude, they built roads through the mountains, so, how much of a gateway are you really?”

We ended up spending a few hours at a nice coffee shop and using their wifi. I did a bunch of research about St. Louis — I spent most of my time on Facebook and see if anyone from high school or college lived here that I could trick into coming to the show — and then we headed to the venue.

If you’ve never been to The Firebird, you should go sometime. It’s a real nice space, mostly geared toward punk rock bands and other music. But it was a wonderful size, with a great setup.

I decided I was going to set up my laptop and try and get people’s emails for some sort of mailing list. You know, because I’m a comedy professional. I also asked what people’s favorite animal was, and to choose between pizza or burritos.

Some answers to the former: “Dolphin, [sic] doge, elephant, Dragon, Kitty Cat.” Some answers to the latter: “Pizzarritos, burritoes, Burritoz, Pizza!!!”

One of the comics on tonight’s show, Kelsey McClure showed up with amazing barbecue. It saved my life. She also brought some macaroni and cheese, corn bread, white bread and various pickled things. Again, these all saved my life, and I’m a better man for having eaten it. Thank you, Kelsey, for being amazing.

Some folks trickled into the show, including the bartender’s dad. The bartender’s dad was on a date. That was fun to see and experience. Good job, dad of bartender. Oh, also, Miller High Life was $1 for performers. Again, did I mention how awesome The Firebird is? Because it’s awesome.

Awesome.

The show started with Kenny Kinds getting it going, but then Kelsey and Jon Venegoni showed up in luchador masks on stage and caused great terror while he tried to do his set, as part of a bit. It was mighty enjoyable. They went up after each comic and kept the show going. Marty DeRosa ended it last night, and he slayed.

The joke times were rad and then we headed to another place to tell some jokes in a basement. Geoff Tate had done a show earlier and we basically held a 30 minute open mic in the basement, hosted by him. A lady in a leopard-print shawl did not like me at first, but later I got her to smile by asking if her grandparents founded my hometown. Some St. Louis comedians went up and we all did our tight three and it was fun.

It was, by far, the nicest bar I’ve been inside of in a few years. The amount of wine they had on the wall, and the fact almost every man was wearing a tie, made me think maybe my sweet Nike shoes would get me kicked out. Thankfully, they let me in, and I ordered Budweisers, in honor of the biggest St. Louis export, which are Budweiser shirts.

After that, we grabbed some late night food somewhere at an awesome diner that had a dungeon for a basement. I don’t know what I ordered exactly, because I just pointed to someone’s food that had lots of biscuits and gravy on things. It saved my life, too.

Now we’re eating at a Burger King — on my request — and using their free wifi before we head to perform in Urbana at The Canopy Club tonight. And then on to home!

So I’m sitting in the house basement where I did a show last night, waiting for my tour mate to wake up so we can grab some breakfast. Last night was a blast, and I thought I’d write about it.

First off, I don’t normally write about comedy here. Since the start of the year, that’s been the purview of www.andyboyleisntfunny.com, which is where I’ve kept most of that stuff. In the next few weeks, I’m going to start moving that content over to this website and making a special area for it. So, in the meantime, if you’re coming to this blog for tech-y reasons, well, now you know I’m not only amazing at writing about programming, but I’m also mediocre at writing about comedy.

This three-day tour started because someone couldn’t make a few shows and I was the first to comment on a Facebook status update. That’s how fancy the comedy game is in Chicago, folks. I didn’t have anything planned for the weekend, other than probably sitting on my couch and eating burritos or aimlessly walking around Chicago while I listened to some podcast, so I thought visiting some cities I’ve either never been to or haven’t seen in awhile would be fun.

Also, I would get to tell jokes, which I’m a fan of.

So the tour started with Collin Bullock picking me up downtown from work. It took Collin at least two tries of passing me on Michigan Avenue before I was finally able to get into his car. Collin recently recorded an album and is touring to support it, so he’s headlining this tour. I get to play “tell jokes for 10-15 minutes” alongside him.

Collin hosts a showcase called Wonderbar Underground Comedy, which I helped out as an “intern” for about four months this year, trading moving chairs and tables for the occasional stage time. Alas, once I took over my open mic at Weeds Tavern, I couldn’t do it anymore.

Anywho, after picking me up, we drove for five hours, with two of those hours to move 15 miles outside Chicago. For dinner, I got two hot dogs from a gas station somewhere in Illinois, a part of the state where judging by the gas station clientele dentists are apparently hard to find. Fun fact: Most gas stations in my home state of Nebraska also contain dentists.

It was about 6 p.m., and someone had already lost their dinner on the floor in front of the men’s restroom. Whomever that was, I bet they’re totally living the comedy life, am I right? I don’t know if I am right, which is why I’m asking you.

After a sing-a-long in the car to Fall Out Boy and then forcing Collin to listen to The Lawrence Arms and Jawbreaker, we made it to Peoria. First we bought beer, because we are adults. Then we went to the house where the show was happening, and waited outside and drank beer until the people who lived there showed up. This freaked me out, and I was sitting there, really, really hoping we weren’t just drinking beer in some random person’s driveway.

Eventually, Collin’s buddy Trey, who lives there, showed up. Trey used to run some awesome shows — some that are still happening — in Chicago. And now in Peoria he runs this DIY punk venue in his basement. It was spacious, with cool rugs on the floor and a low ceiling, not to mention mood lighting. I wish when I was in terrible punk rock bands in high school we could’ve played this basement instead of the majority of venues we did play.

We started the show at about 11 p.m. after some 20 people crammed downstairs. Some local Peoria comics were also on the bill, one of whom was awesome at beatboxing. The host had the coolest first name ever — DRIFT — and I assume he’s aware he could be the first NASCAR comedian.

After the show, people hung outside, drank beers, smoked and were real cool. This one older gentleman with a sweet beard hopped on a super tall bike and rode away into the Peoria darkness, perhaps never to be seen again. Well, probably not really. He had on a reflective vest, so I’m assuming he was seen.

Now I’m waiting for Collin to wake up so we can go drive to St. Louis because we’re playing The Firebird tonight. I’m pretty stoked, as St. Louis has good barbecue, good people and good comedy. I always wake up early on the weekends, because I know my mom would be mad if she ever found out I didn’t, so hopefully soon we can find a diner in Peoria and read their newspaper, which has the same name as my college city’s newspaper. Their newspapers should get in a softball league, for dominance of the Journal Star name.

Here are some photos from last night. They aren’t the best photos, on account of my being in a basement and also Miller High Life:

Here’s our crowd in Peoria. Very comfortable couches. I would know: I slept on one.

Collin telling jokes in the dark. Also, Collin telling dark jokes.

This gentleman had a tall bike and told us he most definitely was not old enough to have served in Vietnam.

Now, off to St. Louis!

I’ve decided to retake the plunge and attempt to do some WordPress development for a friend’s website. Because I hate myself, apparently. My coworker and tall-person Ryan Nagle helped walk me through setting it up on my local machine without using MAMP. Because we’re ballers, shotcallers with 15-inch MacBook Pros.

This may be missing a few things, but it’s based on the notes I took when we were figuring things out. It’s meant for those running on Apple OSX, but I bet some of this will work for Linux-y things. Sorry, Windows people. Use xampp or whatever. First, download MySQL. I would suggest using Homebrew. Then download WordPress and install it where you put your code. For me, I put it in a folder called “sites” in my user’s directory under the directory “Code,” which is where I keep all of my projects. So I put it here: “/Users/andymboyle/code/sites”

Then let’s edit your /etc/hosts file. I use vim, so you’ll see my commands as such:

sudo vim /etc/hosts

On the bottom, add this (notice the single space):

127.0.0.1 test.dev

Next edit the following:

/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf

Make it look like this, putting the path to where you installed your WordPress components after DocumentRoot and Directory:

DocumentRoot /Users/andymboyle/code/sites
ServerName test.dev
<Directory "/Users/andymboyle/code/sites">
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
Allow from all

Then you’ll need to edit your /etc/apache2/httpd.conf file. First, uncomment (Delete the # in front of it):

Include /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf

Then make sure this is uncommented:

LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so

You’ll need to restart apache using the following command:

sudo apachectl restart

And now you’ll need to make your mysql server start:

mysql.server start

My notes are a bit fuzzy on the next things to do, but basically you need to add a root user and then give that user a password. As we’re running this locally, you can just make the user “root” and the password “root” as well. But I think the command to create a new user and give it a password was:

mysqladmin -u root password root

If that worked, next you need to log into into the MySQL prompt. When it asks you for a password, you will either use “root” (no quotes) or one that you added (way to not follow my instructions, you fancypants person):

mysql -uroot -p

You’re now in the MySQL prompt. You can do all sorts of fancy SQL things here, but what we’ll want to do is create a database for your new project.

create database wordpress_project;

It should say a database was created. Next, quit from the MySQL prompt:

\q

Now go to wherever you installed WordPress (in my case, it’s in code/sites) and edit the wp-config.php file. You’ll need to change the follow parts to reflect your database name, your database user, the database user password and the database host. So make it look like this:

// ** MySQL settings - You can get this info from your web host ** //
/** The name of the database for WordPress */
define('DB_NAME', 'wordpress_project');

/** MySQL database username */
define('DB_USER', 'root');

/** MySQL database password */
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'root');

/** MySQL hostname */
define('DB_HOST', '127.0.0.1');

Now in your browser go to http://test.dev and you should see the standard wordpress install configuration. Enter your information, and voila, as long as your MySQL is running — mysql.server start — you should have WordPress running locally! Good job! You deserve a cookie.

['blah1','blah2','blah'3]

To look like this:

"blah

blah2

blah3"

I wrote a send_error_email function for a script, which I will explain in a later post, that needs to turn that list into something more human readable. The solution? .join()

Here’s what I ended up doing:

msg = "\n\n".join(email_contents)

Voila. It’s now pretty, with a line separating each item in the list.

My project has a submodule called “tools” and I was trying to update it using:

git submodulate update --init --recursive

This was giving me the following error:

Submodule 'tools' () registered for path 'tools'

Well, that wasn’t good. I also don’t know what this means. I’m sure someone smarter than me can explain what it means, but I was just trying to update my submodules to pull in the latest changes a coworker had made.

I tried a lot of other various things, maybe just git submodule update –init ? Nope. Maybe git submodule –init ? Nope. Tried Googling. Nothing. And then I asked my coworkers and Ryan Nagle had a very simple solution:

rm -Rf tools

git submodule update --init --recursive

This deletes the tools directory and then just updates the submodules I’m supposed to have. Voila, I’ve got the new one! An easy solution to a quick problem. And as I don’t blog often enough, I’m going to try to start posting more of these solutions more often.

Safe to say, having a letter in your mailbox that says “National Security Agency” and your name on it is a bit jarring, especially if you forgot you filed a public records request.

In short, Pamela N. Phillips, the chief FOIA officer for the NSA, denied my request “because the fact of the existence or non-existence of responsive records is a currently and properly classified matter in accordance with Executive Order 13526, as set forth in Subparagraph (c) of Section 1.4.” And then it listed more legalese about the U.S. Code and other stuff I don’t understand.

It also explained what the USA PATRIOT Act and Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Courts allow them to do, after explaining “there has been considerable speculation about two NSA intelligence programs in the press/media.”

This was an also interesting bit:

“To the extent that your request seeks any metadata/call detail records on you and/or any telephone numbers provided in your request, or seeks intelligence information on you, we cannot acknowledge the existence or non-existence of such metadata or call detail records pertaining to the telephone numbers you provided or based on your name. Any positive or negative response on a request-by-request basis would allow our adversaries to accumulate information and draw conclusions about NSA’s technical capabilities, sources, and methods. Our adversaries are likely to evaluate all public responses to requests such as yours, our adversaries’ compilation of the information provided would reasonably be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security.”

It then gave me who to contact for an appeal of their rejection, as well as some information if they’ve misinterpreted by request and I’m someone who is affiliated with the NSA and looking for records who to properly contact. Pretty interesting, and looks quite similar to other responses.

Andy Boyle NSA FOIA Request Denial

More than two years ago I wrote a post about the salaries of some of the big names in American public radio, which I recently noticed still gets about 50 to 100 page views a day. So I thought it only fair that I attempt to find some new information and see where things are today.

As some back story, it appeared many public radio personalities I found in IRS 990 forms (which require non-profits to list at least their top five paid employees) took cuts during the same time our economy was having issues. “This American Life” host and general awesome public media dude Ira Glass took about a 26 percent paycut from the 2007-2008 year to the 2008-2009 year, going from $216,000 to $159,371.

In my original post, I only included salaries and not total compensation for most public radio hosts, and as I’m unable to access the original IRS 990 forms via guidestar.org, I can’t do a realistic comparison of their full compensation, so I won’t even try. But I thought it would still be neat to have an updated look at how well some of the best journalists in the nation get compensated.

Here’s how his and other “This American Life” employees salaries recently stacked up:

• Ira Glass, host and producer of “This American Life.” 2009-2010: $171,224, base salary of $127,871. 2010-2011: $170,190, base salary of $148,782.
• Alex Blumberg, producer of “This American Life,” cohost of the Planet Money podcast. 2009-2010: $154,801, base salary of $123,220. 2010-2011: $201,734, base salary of $134,400.
• Julie Snyder, senior producer of “This American Life.” 2009-2010: Not listed. 2010-2011: $156,153, base salary of $146,175.

As for NPR, here’s how it shakes out compared to the figures I last found:

• Steve Inskeep, co-host of NPR’s “Morning Edition.” 2009-2010: $361, 093, base salary of $319,370. 2010-2011: $373,097, base salary of $334,560.
• Renee Montagne, co-host of NPR’s “Morning Edition.” 2009-2010: $357,037, base salary of $328,117. 2010-2011: $369,552, base salary of  $321,919.
• Michele Norris, former co-host of “All Things Considered.” 2009-2010: $298,360, base salary of $264,9009. No 2010-2011 numbers listed.
• Robert Siegel, cohost of “All Things Considered.” 2009-2010: $362,687, with a base salary of $309,479. 2010-2011: $375,652, with a base salary of $321,860.

And here’s one more:

• Terry Gross, host of WHYY’s “Fresh Air.” 2009-2010: $254,933, base salary of $233,483. 2010-2011: $256,611, base salary of $233,483.

Couldn’t find Kai Ryssdal’s salary in updated 990s for American Public Media.

So, here’s your general mind-blowing takeaway: Great talent costs money. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. Also, many of the organizations listed showed much more than the required five top salaries, thus adding an extra layer of transparency that isn’t required by law.

Update July 26, 2013

After hearing about the resignation of Torey Malatia, the CEO Chicago Public Media, which is the parent company of WBEZ-FM and runs “This American Life,”, I thought I’d list his salary, too.

• Torey Malatia, cohost of “All Things Considered.” 2008-2009: $217,691, with a base salary of $195,559. 2009-2010: $201,717, with a base salary of $190,180. 2010-2011: $207,276, with a base salary of $195,754.

Follow me on Twitter. Image via Claire Asher.