Lonely Lion

Despite being repeatedly mistaken for a board game meetup that happened to be happening in the exact same Goose Island Location, RHS had a successful meeting last night, organized by Mr. John Melesky. As usual, no formal presentations occurred. Mostly, I just bored people with my current EVE obsession. John Melesky suggested we enter the ICFP contest next week, which seemed to be at least sort of interesting to a few people. We also spent a fair amount of time chatting up the Netflix Prize. All in all, a fun meeting.

I wrote askalibrarian@cpl.org about this whole Hering situation. They got back to me within a few hours. They have a bunch of documentation that says Hering conceived the Ship & Sanitary Canal plan in 1887. In 1889 the Chicago Municipal Sanitary District was formed, with Isham Randolph as their Chief Engineer.

From 1883 until 1886 Hering was working Philadelphia on their sewer system. In 1889 he was in New York doing the same. According to this US Army PDF, Hering was responsible for most the United States early sewers.

I’m going to go to the Harold Washington Library this week to look at some of their archives on the building of the canal. The Chicago Public Library is really impressing me today.

D’oh.

Turns out, the Chicago Public Library is incorrect. This page lists Rudolph Hering as the Chief Engineer on the Ship and Sanitary Canal which reversed the flow of the Chicago River. The Chicago Historical Society doesn’t agree.

Poor Rudolph Hering Society, totally incorrectly named. Good thing I registered ishamrandolphsociety.org.

I’m 30!

So, expect a lot more mature blogging now, instead of all this hot open source stuff I’ve been tossing out at you. Now that I’m an old man, I’m pretty sure I’ll be writing Java or C#, kicking back with my enterprise friends, chatting about the power of waterfall.

So long 20′s, I barely knew you.

The Rudolph Hering Society had its first meeting last night, at the Lincoln Lodge. Around 15 or so people showed up. The meeting went really well. It was pretty free-form, which I actually prefer to the sit down and watch a presentation style of meeting. Not that there’s anything necessarily wrong with having a projector and a laptop, but not having it is pretty freeing.

I’m really happy with how well the RHS concept has taken off. People are being really talky on mailing list, everyone is open to new ideas and learning from one another. Like Jason says, the idea of a non-language-specific Chicago group has been kicking around the after-user-group beer chats at ChiPy, ChiRb, and ChiCagoDotPm for a while now, it’s exciting that it finally happened, and clearly has an audience.