It's good to have photographs like this around to remind me why I left Chicago, twice. At times it seemed like Chicago was a giant black hole relentlessly sucking me in, even before I was living in America. I well remember the awful "Noo Joisey" accent of a recruiter calling me at two thirty in the morning as I and my family in New Zealand were trying to sleep; whether she did this out of ignorance or lack of respect I'll never know, but even then I knew enough about Chicago's climate not to want to live there. Nevertheless, after nine months in the country, and the first death of a high-tech company that I was working at, I landed work with Motorola in Chicagoland, that great expanse stretching from Gary in Indiana, all the way up to the Wisconsin border, and perhaps beyond. After 12 months I quit and headed to the gentler climes of New Jersey, only to land up in Chicago yet again, after the death of another company. Eighteen more months and another commercial entity's near-death experience, and I moved down to a new job in Evanston, which is where this photo of downtown Chicago was taken from. On the far right of the photo is the Sears Tower, in the center the John Hancock center, which I always thought was more attractive than the Sears Tower, and on the extreme left you can just make out one of Indiana's few remaining steel mills belching out steam and smoke.