Austin WiFi Access Points

Thursday, June 10, 2004

Mm. Frog legs.

Austin Chronicle readers, you’ve probably after this page: Free Wireless Internet Access Points in Austin, TX.

Thanks for visiting!

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Ronald Reagan

Monday, June 7, 2004

“A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.” - Ronald Reagan on Iran-Contra

This is almost as good as the Rumsfeld Deflection… (“Did you take out the trash?” “Do I think the trash should be taken out? Yes. Is not taking out the trash morally reprehensible? Indeed.”)

So next time I foul something up, expect something along the lines of:

“You told me I took a crap in the sink again. My heart and best intentions tell me that’s not true, but the facts and the evidence tells me it is.”

While we must respect the life and death of a man, let’s not forget that Reagan was — by nearly any metric besides popularity — an awful president. And we should remember that when we fail to elect a qualified person to the highest office in our government, it doesn’t reflect nearly as badly on them as it does on us…

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Pause at El Arroyo

Monday, June 7, 2004

Across the tabletop at Ararat.

I’m sitting at El Arroyo — in one of the booths outside, right alongside the eponymous arroyo — finishing up a plate of fish tacos and a Dr. Pepper. One of the youngish waitresses came over a minute ago to ask about the photos I was flipping through on iPhoto: Zane’s bachelor party photos. Of course I’m too socially retarded to participate in a conversation with a stranger without having a couple of hours to research them on the web first. I just mumbled a couple of sentences about my camera like a nerd. Left it at that. A few months ago a waitress here gave me the phone number of one of the other waitresses whose eye I had inadvertently caught some afternoon. If something like that were to occur again I’d have to move across the street and take all of my meals here: The only plausible explanation would be that something buried deep in the earth underneath the restaurant was creating strange localized magnetic fields that make the girls crave tall guys who come around regularly for quiet, romantic dinners alone with their laptops.

Yeah, so last night Zane had his bachelor party. I met him and about a dozen other people — including Coté, Jaylon, Chris Graf, and a handful of BMC employees I see at work — at Ararat. We sat out back underneath the “gazebo” in the backyard and ate middle eastern cuisine and drank some wine we brought and had little arabic coffees with turkish delights on the side afterwards. They cook excellent food over at Ararat. I had never been out there in full daylight before. And I must say: The building looks like a barely-standing house of cards made of corrugated steel and plywood. And the backyard looks kind of like the yard behind the New Guild student co-op: Splotches of grass, elderly lawn furniture, a few lit tiki torches scattered about… Inside, of course, Ararat’s quite nice and cozy. But from the outside you could sort of fool yourself into thinking that you’re really approaching a restaurant in some second-world country or other. But the food is excellent. I had a stuffed green pepper dolmah and mixed grilled veggies.

After we finished there, we headed down to Club de Ville in the bus Zane had rented for the night. Apparently Jaylon’s brother-in-law Conrad works for Austin Duck Adventures — that company that offers amphibious vehicle (amphibiously vehicular?) tours of Austin and Austin waterways. If you have seen the episode of Dave Attell’s Insomniac filmed in Austin, you’ve seen Dave riding one into Lake Austin at the very end of the show (after getting rowdy with the Austin Rollergirls, hanging out with the Austin Robot Group, and having a drink with the Latin Kings). Anyway, Austin Duck Adventures is located right across the street from El Arroyo — where I am right now — and El Arroyo has a big party bus (read: a grade-school bus covered in lots of spray paint and with a stereo system). So we ended up with the El Arroyo party bus for the night. Zane rented it for a few hundred bucks and Conrad drove us around and played P-Funk and the soundtracks from Office Space and Deliverance on the stereo.

So we took the bus down to Club de Ville and sat in the back corner of the building and had a few more drinks and carried on. And then walked down to 6th for a little while to look around. Because, you see, this weekend the yearly biker’s convention was happening (bringing enough Harleys to literally pack 6th street and several other streets with parked bikes — insane) and the Gay Pride March on Congress. So all of the bars on 6th were packed to obnoxious levels. Bursting. As if there were simply too many people downtown to even legally fit inside of all of the bars. Our group accidentally got split up and a few of us had to wait in line for fifteen minutes at some random bar just to get in to see that the others weren’t there. That annoyed me a bit. (And when did 6th street get filled up with bars named things like “Chuggin’ Monkey” and “Dizzy Rooster?”) We got reconnected and lost a few participants to other groups of friends who were downtown (which I found to be kind of rude considering we were supposedly there to help Zane celebrate), got back in the bus and drove back to Zane’s house up north to play the new Super Mario Cart on the Nintendo Gamecube for a while and watch Kung Pow: Enter the Fist. Which Jaylon had brought.

So that was the big event of the weekend. Otherwise I say around and watched a few movies (Saving Private Ryan and Monster) and went for a run yesterday afternoon. And slept late today. And now I’m at El Arroyo.

And the circle of life is complete.

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Houston WiFi Access Points

Tuesday, June 1, 2004

Visitors from the Houston Chronicle: You are probably looking for this page: Free Wireless Internet (WiFi) Access Points in Houston.

Thanks for visiting!

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Fixing News Breaks

Wednesday, May 26, 2004

One of the best ideas I’ve come across in a while is the suggestion that newspapers should begin including bibliographic information for their articles. Nothing huge, but at the end of each article a couple of lines should appear listing the resources from which the information in the article came. Even if just to say, “Interview with Mr. Xyz on July 14th, 2003” or “Saw it with my own eyes.”

One of the fundamental problems with journalism right now is that no one knows whom to trust. And. It turns out that several well-known “journalists” have some serious fact-checking problems. If you could read an article that had some amazing news and then have resources to double-check a few details or just dig further into the information — how great would that be? And after-the-fact, years later, if a source turns out to have been clearly unreliable, it might be much easier to trace and account for the bad information.

The journalistic world right now is full of half-wits and snake-oil salesmen. And something needs to start changing.

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The Encroaching Deconstruction

Tuesday, May 25, 2004

So the part of Enfield Road that runs through my neighborhood has been torn up since I moved back into the area last August. Back then, though, you could still drive both ways on Enfield — they just limited it to one lane each. Fine.

Then they reduced it to just one lane. One way. Heading east.

Then they torn up Enfield all the way out to Exposition and down to Lamar.

Then they tore up Lamar, blocking off most of the lanes between the river and 24th street, making driving on Lamar any time of the day or night — even 2AM — feel like driving in stop-and-go rush hour traffic.

Then they tore up 5th Street from Lamar a couple of blocks west. And a few other streets coming off of Lamar between 5th and 12th.

Then they started blocking off intersections along Enfield so you couldn’t turn into the side neighborhoods (like where I live now). These open and close, now, kind of randomly. Today: closed.

For a while the entire intersection at Enfield and West Lynn was blocked.

Now they’re coming up Woodlawn into my new neighborhood. And they’ve blocked off the access road leading from Enfield to Mo-Pac north.

Today they busted a water line and we had no water when I woke up. For things like shower and toothbrushing.

And we had no water when I went back home over lunch to shower.

And somehow, whenever I drive by, I see one guy doing something and, like, six guys standing around smoking or — better yet — holding the lame little “SLOW” sign-on-a-stick.

Holy fucking christ. They have better roads in Baghdad.

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Oscillate Night 2

Monday, May 24, 2004

New frontiers in camera tomfoolery.

The first Oscillate Night (on April 10th) went really well, so I’m doing it again. May 29th. With Mr. Projectile and Proem (and local openers). More info here. You should come.

In related news, KUT radio (the local NPR affiliate) will be airing a blurb about the event featuring my track “Absense of Trust” at various times on Friday. You can listen to it in advance here.

Awesome.

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New Stuffs

Wednesday, May 19, 2004

Last Friday night, playing a show at Club de Ville.

I took the above photo last Friday at the TeleportDoor show. The event had been scheduled to take place at the Caucus Club — but Caucus Club don’t seeem to have their act together and triple booked the night, so the event went off at Club de Ville instead.

Anyway. Good time. Had an afterparty — complete with champagne and tiramisu — up in one of the lofts at the Doubletree Hotel overlooking the Capitol Building. We even got thrown out by security for making too much noise. My jokes about how we should order up a live chicken and skeletonize it or violate a minor with a live shark probably got old after the third repetition…

That’s not the point, though.

Here’s the point: I have three new things up on my site, now, which you’re welcomed to check out…

• Euro’04 — I’ve got about half of my vacation photos up, now. They’re not boring. Many actually turned out really well. Check ‘em out.

• Oscillate Night 2 @ Gallery Lombardi — We’re having another one. Details at Frescher.com…

• A New Blog — Just a little thing that I can toss crap up into without much thought. I’ll save the Auscillate.com main page, here, for more developed thought. Also, I got all excited by the release of the new Blogger and decided I wanted a Blogger blog again.

That is all.

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