End of Silence

The reviews of this year’s ACL Festival are appearing on the blogs of various friends. I’ll have a more proper review with a picture or two up tonight along with some shots of the kids in the login required section of the site.

The common complaint this year seems to be that there were just too many people. One side effect of the number of people, estimated at about 70,000 each day of the three day festival, was that it was virtually impossible to call another person at the festival via cell phone. I tried several times only to get a busy signal or a voice mail message that was never delivered. Frustrated that I couldn’t contact friends to meet up at a particular location, I switched to text or SMS messaging and discovered what thousands of japanese schoolgirls already know. Text messaging is fairly easy with a T9 phone and pretty damn reliable. I was able to text back and forth and meet up with R. several times throughout the weekend. People in the U.S. don’t seem to have gotten the hang of this feature that’s generally included with most phones and phone plans these days. So, my message to the ACL 2005 Festival-goers: Text, baby! Text!

Of course, I did run into some problems of my own. The Wife supposedly has text messaging enabled for her phone, but she wasn’t able to send at the festival and I tested sending messages from her phone to mine back at the house on Saturday without any luck. Guess I’ll be calling AT&T sometime this week to get it sorted out along with why she doesn’t get a indicator when she has voicemail.

I read about this somewhere earlier today, but I can’t remember where and I just got the e-mail from Alamo to confirm it.

There’s a screening of Fahrenheit 9/11 in Crawford tomorrow night with Michael Moore in attendance and he’s invited G.W. who’ll be in town. You can get all of the details here. If I were single and had some time on my hands, I’d be so there. There’s got to be an Austin blogger with the time and inclination to participate. C’mon. Let me live vicariously through you. Please?

To those exiting Quarry Oaks to Braker Ln:

The red, octagonal shape with the white writing on it is called a stop sign. If I’m not mistaken, in order to get your driver’s license, you learned that sign means that you need to stop in front of it and check traffic before proceeding. Stop signs are generally there for a reason. In this case, cars entering the office complex from busy Braker Lane need to be able to proceed unimpeded into the complex so that cars don’t back up into the road, possibly causing an accident. By not stopping, you are introducing the possibility of a second accident with those entering who are under the apparently mistaken assumption that their fellow drivers will obey the most common and basic traffic signs.

I apologize in advance to the next person who fails to obey the stop sign and might not have had a chance to read this letter. I’m probably not going to be very polite to you. See what you get for not reading my web site?

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 to test locations without dining rooms and we’ve got one. It’s on the northbound frontage road of I-35 between 6th and 7th. I noticed it a few weeks ago while taking The Boy to school. I guess it’s a reasonable idea to intersperse locations with dining rooms with those that don’t, but I don’t think it’d be wise to switch over entirely. You can have a smaller staff and it probably saves on air conditioning costs by virtue of the smaller space. Since people don’t generally stay and spend more money at a fast food restaurant anyway, it doesn’t make much sense to offer an atmosphere that would encourage them to hang around, a strategy that works well at coffee places.

McDonald’s seems to have the opposite strategy. They’re adding things like wireless access (provided by local company Wayport), a move which seems odd to me since no one really wants to hang out a McDonald’s except kids under 12. It might work well at the locations with playgrounds, but otherwise it’s a waste of time and effort.

Thundercloud Subs has had that drive-thru location on S. Lamar for quite some time. I wonder how its revenues compare with other locations.

For those locals who missed him last night, I just saw that Bruce Sterling will be on TechTV’s The Screen Savers tonight. He flew to San Francisco early this morning after doing the book signing here last night. It airs locally on channel 239 at 6pm, 11pm and again tomorrow morning at 7am.