Chicago

President-

For web designers, there are four keys to surviving bad economic times: do good work, charge a fair price, lower your overhead, and be sure you are communicating with your client. As a reader of 24 ways, you already do good work, so let’s focus on the rest.

I know something about surviving bad times, having started my agency, Happy Cog, at the dawn of the dot-com bust. Of course, the recession we’re in now may end up making the dot-com bust look like the years of bling and gravy. But the bust was rough enough at the time.

No, that's not a typo. There really is a CTA video game. It's called "Railfan" and it's a Japan-only release for the Playstation 3. After a bit of digging, we discovered the game is actually two years old and was one of the launch titles for Playstation 3 in the fall of 2006. As train simulators are apparently huge across the Pacific, it's no surprise that the game wasn't released here as...it's a train simulator.

Do you do "dibs?" Since we're smack dab in the eye of the storm, with 5 inches freshly dumped on us and up to double that coming tonight and tomorrow, we figured this would be an appropriate time to discuss "dibs."

So, who still wants the Olympics here? Show of hands? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller? Even with these rose-colored glasses on, we see an Illinois that has maybe filtered out a little bit of the pay-to-play 'How You Doin'" governmental interference by 2016.

Ald. Tom Allen (38) is on our good side (for now) after voicing what we (and you) have been complaining about for a while: that Mayor Daley's new plowing policy is a clusterfuck.

Image by John P. Glynn

The Atlas of True Names contains maps with very literal place names.

Called the "Atlas of True Names," the new map traces the etymological roots of European and global place names and then translates them into English. The "City of Boatmen" is also known as Paris. Should you travel to the Land of the Fire Keepers, you'd find yourself in Azerbaijan. And Italy comes from the Latin word vitulus, which means "calf."

The long and heated battle over the Wilson Yard development in Uptown continues as a group of residents sues the city, which they accuse of improperly dolling out $51 million in subsidies to the site’s developer.

A new study by radiologists reports on teenage girls embedding needles, glass, and other objects in their flesh. While subdermal implants are nothing new in the realm of extreme body modifications, the researchers at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio suggest that the increasing number cases they've seen are actually a form of self-injury similar to cutting.