Texans for Truthful Textbooks rally

My lady went out of town last weekend, so I was going to take the boys to see some politics in action! After a bit of explaining to a nine-year-old and five-year-old about us having rights to assembly and free speech, our Constitution, and other countries, I told them about a rally on the Capitol steps where some groups were proposing changes to textbooks based on their agendas. My youngest cut to the chase:

“Is this rally going to be cool?”

Ouch.

Needless to say, a hot day plus political speakers makes for a time that no amount of climbing on cannons will make fun. They tolerated being there, but couldn’t stand more than one speaker due to “dying of hunger and boredom.”

 

On the way back to the car we got sidetracked by the Capitol – all of a sudden energy levels were high enough to run up the stairs and look down the rotunda!

Technorati Tags: Austin,TX,textbooks,rally,Texans,Truthful,Textbooks,American,Atheists,Ed Buckner,revisionism

Peek-a-boo!

My family and I are driving down Lamar on the way to a combo Anthropologie/Book People run. Just a normal day, right? I guess we happened to be at the right place at the right time.

So the first time we passed this brave soul I saw him and pointed him out to my wife just as we passed him. We had to turn around and check him out a second time. Of course by this time I need to take a picture for my blog, so we go by him a third time, but the picture didn't turn out. We ended up parking so we could get a good shot the fourth time he passed us, the cheeky bastard.

Allow me to ask you a question, gentle reader. When wearing a thong and flip-flops, where would one carry their keys? Observant readers may have picked up on this guy's ingenuity.

Keys? Check. The wallet, though....

Technorati Tags: Thong,Austin,TX

Movie updates

We don't get to see many movies, so when we make it to the theater, it's a bigger deal than normally. So, in order of appearance...

Wolverine

A buddy and I saw it on opening night at Alamo Drafthouse. Hugh Jackman IS Wolverine, but Liev Schrieber is the better actor, but both of these guys are good. Sabertooth is MUCH better and more accurate to the comics in this movie than the original X-Men. Daddy likes!

Star Trek

I convinced our managers to take us to Alamo Drafthouse for our quarterly offsite to see Star Trek in opening week. I figured I would like it going in, and it didn't disappoint. Space being actually silent and ships not all aligned on z-axis made up for any questionable parts about drilling to a planet's actual core, and creating a black hole at said core rather than just near the planet. I heard a lot about the lens flares on the bridge, but I didn't notice them in a negative sense.

Angels & Demons

My wife and I had a date and this time, she just wouldn't go for seeing Terminator: Salvation, so we saw Angels & Demons...at Alamo Drafthouse. Entertaining and interesting, and I thought I had it figured out but it got me.

Up

We saw Up in 3D at a local theater, strangely not the Alamo. We all really enjoyed it. I saw some 3D movie content earlier, and this time the glasses were smaller and not obviously red-green like the Dolby ones. I'll have to do some research to find out the differences - this was our first 3D movie experience, and four adults, two eight-year-olds, and two four-year-olds managed to keep the glasses on, which I thought was quite a feat for the kids.

The 3D was really well done, and I had no eye problems/headaches wearing these glasses over my prescription glasses. A lot of the kids were trying to grab stuff coming out of the screen. They had bins to recycle the glasses upon exit, but we kept ours. Pics to follow.

Technorati Tags: Movies,3D,Alamo Drafthouse,Wolverine,Star Trek,Angels & Demons,Up

One hundred pushups

A friend of mine and I have started the workout plan from hundredpushups.com.

It's a program that in six weeks or so hopes to have you completing one hundred consecutive pushups. The program is three days a week, and very simple and straightforward.

We're still in the first week, but I'll be updating my progress. My initial test netted me 20, so we'll see how it goes from there.

Technorati Tags: Exercise,working out,pushups,hundredpushups.com

The Lonely Island

I'm an occasional SNL watcher, and I like all the SNL Digital Shorts, like this one:

I did some looking around, and the guys that do the Digital Shorts are the guys from The Lonely Island.

They have an album out called Incredibad, and it is amazing. It's one of those albums that you and like-minded-individuals can quote all the time. My wife can't stand it!

They have made videos of some of their songs from the album, and a few of these have made their way onto SNL, and while Andy Samberg is on SNL, the other two dudes (Akiva Schaffer, Jorma Taccone) work behind the scenes as writers.

Technorati Tags: Incredibad,The Lonely Island,Saturday Night Live,SNL Digital Shorts

Pandora and the Music Genome Project

I know what your thinking, and no, that's not the name of my latest story.

I've heard about the web music app Pandora for a long time, but never checked it out. Recently I remembered it and pulled it up. Going to the website presents a front end that lets you specify an artist (or a song) that you like, and Pandora starts playing something by that artist.

 

Pandora builds a queue of music based off of your initial selection and the Music Genome Project. Basically, it analyzes your selection and assigns the song certain attributes that it matches against songs in its database. Subsequent songs are automatically queued up and played.

I've started with various musicians I like and also tried some obscure ones. The vast majority of times I've enjoyed what I've heard, with some obvious matching selections but also some bands that are new to me. It's great for parties or just hanging around if you are tired of your current media selection or don't want to create a custom playlist (or are too lazy to hit Shuffle).

There is also a Pandora app for mobile devices, but I'm not sure how great this is due to it always being on and streaming data/music. I could see your battery draining due to the Pandora app, but as I don't have a phone with that kind of capability I'm basically talking out of my Napster. I'm sure it works - why offer it otherwise.

Technorati Tags: Pandora,Music Genome Project,MP3,streaming music

Slumdog Millionaire

We had a rare double-date night a few days ago and ended up (as planned) at the (two) dollar show to see Slumdog Millionaire.

I loved it. The actors were great, the music was great, the story was great. I had heard a lot of high praise for the movie, and I'm glad I was able to finally see it in the theater.

Oh yeah, Space Chimps sucks.

Technorati Tags: Slumdog Millionaire,Space Chimps

Interesting recommendation from Netflix

So we use Netflix, and we love it. With kids and a full schedule, it's nice to cut out an errand whenever possible. I check the mail every day on my commute, so it's win-win. Commercial over.

We are pretty slow in our movie-watching, though, as we are on the two-movie-at-a-time plan, and one of the movies is always earmarked for Friday's movie night. One grown-up movie at a time and you can see why our queue is 285 movies long.

Anyway, somewhat recently I added Hancock (Peter Berg + Jason Bateman FTW)to our queue, and Netflix has a handy feature that shows you a list of movies that, based on you just clicking Movie A, here are Movies B - G that you also might enjoy due to their similarity. I'm not exactly sure about this one, though.

Hmm....Hancock is a superhero. Fantastic Four and Spiderman 3? Check. I Am Legend? Obvious. Uh, Brokeback Mountain?

We saw Brokeback Mountain, and it is a really good movie. I don't recall superheroes in it, though. No Will Smith connection either.

Am I missing an obvious connection? Are cowboys really that super? Is there some submessage in Hancock? Is it just and unfortunate naming mismatch?

Technorati Tags: Netflix,Hancock,Brokeback Mountain

Sweet tools for the impending Zombie Apocalypse

I'm behind in catching up with my RSS feeds, so I just saw this thing from CoolTools:

For all the firefighters out there that read my blog, this is nothing new. Just your standard multipurpose tool for prying. And chopping. And slicing. And wedging. And busting various things open.

I guess if you have to have the very best to kill zombies, spring for the titanium version at $550. Your children's children will thank you for it.

Technorati Tags: CoolTools,Halligan bar,zombies

We watched the Watchmen

My wife and I had some time to ourselves the other day so we figured we would catch Slumdog Millionaire at the Alamo Drafthouse.

It was a great plan, except everyone else had the same idea. It was sold out almost an hour before showtime. Oh well. How about Gran Torino? Sold out. There was only one alternative.

I thought it was great. I loved the intro credits, the fighting, the gore, and the story. My wife thought it was good, but long. Favorite character? Rorschach (no surprise) hands down.

Why Alamo Drafthouse? Fried pickles - they really know how to make them there. I also tried the Drafthouse Amber beer. Pretty good! I can't remember what the entree was called, but we shared the fish and chips special, and it was fantastic.

Technorati Tags: Alamo Drafthouse,Watchmen

Sudden hailstorm

After assuring my wife it was too warm to hail (what do you mean hail comes from the atmosphere...which is colder...), we had a freak hailstorm for about five minutes last night. It was coming down pretty hard, and the largest segment dumped pieces sized between a quarter and a golf ball.

Luckily there seems to be no major damage except for some window pane gasket things, but I'm sure we'll have someone out to inspect our roof.

After it stopped the accumulated hailstones looked more like snow.

Technorati Tags: hail,Leander,Hill Country

Feed the Pod!

So I've got a fairly long commute...about thirty minutes one way. Long for me, that is. I don't like much on the radio, so I've started just MP3'ing it, or listening to audiobooks.

Lately, I've been checking out a lot of podcasts, and one I've been thoroughly enjoying is Pseudopod - a horror fiction podcast.

It has some really good stories, and various people have stepped in to read the stories, from authors to other podcast hosts to the site's own Ben and Alistair, my favorite narrators.

The authors are supported by donations - the aforementioned "Feed the Pod."

What I really like is the variety of the stories - some mainstream horror from faithful genres (zombie, vampire (my favorite), Cthulhu, etc), but it also has plenty of surprises waiting for the gentle listener.

Spurling's Virus was my first, and I was hooked since then.

Pseudopod is the horror branch of a trifecta of podcasts, the others being Escape Pod (science fiction) and Podcastle (fantasy).

Check 'em out!

Technorati Tags: Pseudopod,horror,podcast,audiobook,Escape Pod,Podcastle,vampire,cthulhu

A new year...

...and I've missed the first four hours of 24? Crapola! At least they have the full episodes on their website, and I'll try their "new player" to see no stuttering and no buffering.

I've got a lot of catching up to do, so grab your mantyhose and let's go!

NaNoWriMo kickoff

Midnight on Halloween was the NaNoWriMo kick-off, what's called a Midnight Write. It was held at Dragon's Lair, and when I got there about 11:30pm, there were about 25-30 people already there at tables set up with laptops at the ready.

By the way, Dragon's Lair is a great games/gaming/comic book/book store. Very family-friendly, and a large selection. Nice people too!

Anyway, the Midnight Write was also a potluck, and I was planning on bringing some cookies but other Halloween stuff loomed over our horizon. There was quite a bit of food, though.

Luckily someone had set up both a donation pot as well as a coffee pot.

So here I am in Central Nerdistan, among my people of course, and at five minutes to midnight we get warned about a whistle that will shake us to our very foundations. I mean, it's supposed to be THAT loud.

We gird our loins.

Fifteen seconds until midnight, and the countdown begins. We think we hear a faint whistling sound, but nobody in the back (wargame table) room is certain if that was the Whistle of Doom or one of the store cats meowed. We spend a few seconds looking at each other, and then one of the moderators comes in and lets us know that, indeed, that was the whistle.

We write!

The store can only stay open until 2am, so at roughly 1:40am I break away from my keyboard, an almost wordless husk. Sort of. 50,000 words over 30 days is roughly 1667 words a day. I hit just over that number, which was my goal.

So how was the Mini 9? Basically, it was great. The only problem I had was with the placement of the apostrophe. It is on the row under the home row, so I usually hit enter instead of apostrophe when I was writing contractions. This led to a lot of "did nots" instead of "didn'ts," etc, which is a bonus when you are counting words!

The machine was much more solid than I expected, and at first I was hesitant about the screen size and resolution, but in practice I had no problems with it while using it.

It was getting a lot of attention though, and I probably could have sold a few had I had a box of them that night.

Back to word count, unfortunately I'm just over 2300 now, and the server is down so both my NaNoWriMo word count widget is down as well as the ability to upload my word count. Such is life! I'm pretty far behind both where I should be and where I wanted to be, but I'm not giving up yet.

Technorati Tags: Dell,Mini 9,Inspiron,NanoWriMo,Dragon's Lair,Austin

Dell Inspiron Mini 9 and NaNoWriMo

My good friends at Dell hooked me up with an Inspiron Mini 9 laptop/netbook to use for participating in and blogging about the National Novel Writing Month. It is a pretty sweet, tiny machine.

My wife wants to use it all the time! I'm going to have to distract her somehow during November. She seriously is crazy about it. It came with Ubuntu Linux on it, but I swapped out the 4GB flash disk for the 16GB flash disk that comes with the high-end XP Pro config. I also factory-installed XP and loaded Word. Nothing against Linux, per se, but I want to use Word for this project.

The Mini 9 is sturdier than I expected, and I like the fit and finish. It comes in black and white, and this one is white, which looks pretty nice.

The drawback? I'm a touch-typist, and I'm a little concerned about the keyboard. To get everything in a package that small, some of the keys had to be reduced. This may not be a problem for many, but I am using it in what amounts to a typing contest (of wills), and my large hands and I will soldier on and report back how it goes.

After a week of configuring it, hooking it up to wireless, browsing, and email, I like it. It feels solid and the keyboard is sturdy, albeit cramped on the sides. It is the smallest laptop I've ever used. Actually, I love that it is so small when I'm carrying it around, and I can use something other than my huge XPS backpack.

Technorati Tags: Dell,Inspiron,Mini 9,netbook,XP,Ubuntu,NaNoWriMo

RSS Feed for comments

I'm not sure how I can merge these two feeds, if it's even possible, but by clicking here you can subscribe to my blog's comments feed.

If anybody has done this with blogspot, let me know.

Technorati Tags: Blogspot,comments,RSS Feed

Behind the scenes Autodesk meeting

So Autodesk buying Softimage is already old news. What everybody wants to know is how they came to that decision. My secret sources have delivered!

The subtitles are great, and I loved every joke. This video has seen its share of resubtitling, too. The scene is from the movie Downfall.

Technorati Tags: Softimage,Autodesk,3D Studio MAX,Untergang,Downfall

Autodesk acquires Softimage??????

I'm browsing around some random graphics sites, when I see a news item. It seems fake, but I follow it, look around, and it looks legit!

Autodesk Signs Agreement with Avid Technology to Acquire Softimage

Whoa! This may not be a big deal to you, but it is crazy in the 3D Graphics world.

In October 2005, Autodesk, home of AutoCAD and more important to this discussion, 3D Studio MAX (a 3D graphics package) acquired it's biggest competitor, Maya.

Now it looks like one more competitor is being pulled under the Autodesk umbrella - Softimage.

Who is left to compete against Autodesk products now? Newtek Lightwave? Luxology modo? Maxon Cinema 4D? Side Effects Houdini? Anybody?

I'll have to try and track down some people to talk to about this - it's crazy!

Technorati Tags: Autodesk,Softimage,3D Studio MAX,Maya

Krause Springs

We've been trying to go camping now that the weather has gotten colder, and our first choice was Inks Lake State Park, as we've gone there for day trips and my parents have taken me there as a child.

As luck had it, Inks Lake was booked through the rest of the year! At least, campsites with a fire ring on the lake side were booked. If we wanted to hike in ~1.5 miles schlepping our gear to a primitive site, there were a few openings.

No thanks.

We had heard about Krause Springs and had wanted to check out the place just as a swimming hole, and found out they had campsites. I called them up and spoke with Elton Krause himself, and when I asked him about reservations, he said just come up, drive around until you find a spot you like and pitch your tent!

Sold!

We left later than we planned, and had to make a few stops on the way, and got to the campsite a few minutes before dark. We used our headlights to help us set the tent (thanks Erika and Ty!) up and managed to drain our battery. Some nice neighbors help us jump it the next day.

Our first night went without a hitch and we woke up to masses of Monarch butterflies gathered in the trees right over our heads.

One of the other campers mentioned that they were migrating, and I wasn't sure about this (but I had no reasonable explanation otherwise - I guess it is the skeptic in me), so when we returned, I  consulted my pal Google. Armed with the knowledge that Spicewood, TX, is roughly at Latitude 30, I consulted this migration schedule. Zut alors! The time matched!

My wife found a Coleman cooking stove thing at a garage sale for $5 (normally ~$50) and it worked like a charm! It uses a small thermos-sized canister of propane, and we had a blast cooking outside. I had to go the instant coffee route, as I didn't have a chance to look around for a suitable camp coffeepot or get my French Press action going, but roughing it is roughing it!

Krause Springs has some amazing natural rock formations, with grottos, waterfalls, rockwalls teeming with squirrels, HUGE cypress trees, a natural spring that feeds into a lagoon/swimming hole, etc. We went exploring and ran out of space on our 1GB photo card.

I also took a panoramic shot of where we camped. We were in the middle spot - under the RV hookups and above the primitive area.

The right-most spot in the panorama was filled with Cub Scouts from Saturday to Sunday. We were there the weekend of the Red River Shootout (Texas vs OU) and one guy was camping in our area I noticed what I thought was football sounds coming from his area. I investigated and he had stretched over 200 feet of extension cord from a table outside his tent to a power outlet in the RV hookup area to watch the game. Roughing it indeed!

They also have a butterfly garden with some wind chimes bigger than I am, plus a swimming pool that is fed directly from the spring. Let me tell you - it was cold! I eased in to my waist before I took the plunge, but my wife was brave enough to dive in. It's brisk!

We had a fantastic time, and will definitely go back. In fact, we are trying to work out a November camp date. The kids loved it, we loved it, and it's cheaper and closer than Inks Lake. Win-win!

Technorati Tags: Spicewood,Austin,camping,Krause Springs,Monarch butterflies,panoramic

Speaking of gaming....

You know what I like about gaming around Halloween?

Once the box of decorations come out, miniatures abound! I'm leading my son through an adventure, and when the goblins aren't around, he doesn't mind hacking and slashing through some seasonal creepy-crawlies.

Technorati Tags: Dungeons and Dragons,miniatures,Halloween