End of Silence

Yep, we’ve done a great job. Things are definitely much better now in Iraq. Thank you, Mr. Bush. You can go back to Crawford now and take Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith and Perle with you. Please?

Over the last couple of days, I’ve been attempting to upgrade some things on the site, but my test server and Internet connection aren’t cooperating. Busy yourselves with a bit of humor at the president’s expense.

Our internet access came back as mysteriously as it left. We’re still scheduled for a visit from a tech tomorrow. I’m going to wait and see if it lasts before I decide to cancel it.
Time Warner’s not the only large service provider screwing up lately. We switched to SBC from MCI at the end of [...]

Our Internet access is on the fritz as of sometime yesterday. It’s unclear if it’s the cable modem itself or a problem somewhere in the line between it and Time Warner. The end result is that it’s not maintaining a signal (the sync and ready lights won’t stay lit). In calling for support, I [...]

I posted my complaints about the state of online music vendors late last year. Cory Doctorow, sci-fi author and EFF spokesperson, recently gave a really good talk about some of the issues surrounding this at Microsoft. He explains the background and issues very clearly, I think. I decided to post this as the discussion [...]

Austin seems to be a favorite test market for companies, mostly food and beverage operations. For a while there, it seemed like I was offered free samples from a different energy drink company every week and there’s always those cigarette people trolling the bars for new lung cancer victims.
Now, it looks like Wendy’s has decided [...]

Ever since missing Tony Bourdain’s book signings at Bookpeople , I’ve been somewhat obsessive about checking their event calendar. I’ve made it to a few book signings lately and The Wife and I tag-teamed David Sedaris’s appearance this evening.
She went early to get a line number as it was projected that the turnout would be [...]

We’ve long speculated that our 20-month-old, aka The La, is an alien observer from another planet. She’s been known to make other babies cry by staring at them unflinchingly for inhuman amounts of time with no show of emotion on her face. She also seems to pick up behaviors (both desirable and undesirable, the latter [...]

The deed is done. Yesterday, we signed the loan papers and took delivery of a Dark Red 2002 Honda Odyssey EX-L sans DVD player or navigation system. Going by Edmunds it looks like we got a pretty good deal. The price fell substantially below their dealer retail and even a little below their private party [...]

We went to see Hidden Fortress last night at the Paramount as part of their annual Summer Film Series. It was good. I hadn’t ever seen it before and always enjoy seeing old films for the first time at this series. I’ve seen War of the Worlds, The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Magnificent [...]