Damn you Microsoft!

Why on God’s green Earth would MS change the location of display settings when it created Vista?!?! “hmmm, you know – display settings just seemed too logical. Let’s rename it Personalization just to confuse the hell out of everyone.”

Holy Crap, Morrissey sucks.

At a coffee shop (still Thunderbird), and they’re playing Morrissey.  I can hear it through my earplugs.  Shoot me now.

unfortunate coffee house.

before we found our current digs in allendale, we were looking across burnet at the crestview neighborhood.  i think overall it fits in more w/ our type of vibe.  i was psyched on it as a new coffeehouse, thunderbird coffee, opened up on w. koenig – right in the heart of the neighborhood.  it seemed cool, eclectic – the type of hipster place that has become stereotypical of coffee places where people set up shop w/ their laptops, headphones.  i’d basically spent the majority of my grad school career in a variety of coffeehouses around austin defined by such clientele, albeit the student variety, so i figured this would be a good fit.  i only managed to hang out there once or twice before my daughter was born, and since she’s been born – well, let’s say that my kitchen and dining room table now define my coffee spot.

anyway, now that i’m no longer at work and exploring some other options (and most especially since my internet is down while it’s being upgraded to 6mbps dsl) i figured i’d spend the rest of the morning here.  i won’t spend any more time here after today, though.  this place sucks.

let me back off a sec to say that the decor is fine, the food is good, the coffee is good, the people hanging out fit the picture.  i’m not too keen on the staff.  not sure what i expected really, maybe i’m just in another stage of my life now, but the hipster douche attitude i received when ordering my food kind of ticked me off.  whatever, that’s the way it is i guess.  i sit down at my table to find it’s dirty as all get out.  well, maybe the last person at this table was just dirty – surely they clean here nightly.  the flies hanging out at the adjacent window told me how wrong i was.  i went to plug my computer into the outlet in the corner – there are big fat bread crumbs and other assorted debris on the floor behind the corner table.  there is a fine layer of dust and dirt covering the entire floor, in fact.  now that i look closer all of the tables are dirty.  my chair is broken, too.  this place sucks.  it sucks and it’s dirty.  hopefully they’ll get their act together, and hopefully this loud bastard at the next table will pipe down soon.

happy friday!

to those who use cloth diapers on their babies:

never, under any circumstances, let dirty diapers sit for a day or longer.  3 words:  stench.  of.  ammonia.

this bike “parking product” is stupid

CapMetro here in Austin is testing out a new bike ‘parking product’ that shelters bikes from weather, theft, and vandalism.  it is entirely stupid.

Let’s start with the positives:

• it is made of recycled plastic and steel (in what percentages?  post-industrial or post-consumer?);
• it protects the bike from weather – something every other bike rack is sorely lacking;
• it acts as the bike lock and protects the entire bike, not just the frame and perhaps a single wheel

ok, great.  now here’s why it’s stupid:

• look at the footprint.  it takes up the same amount of space for one of these ‘parking’ spots as it does for at least 2, maybe 3 bikes.
• it is hideously ugly.  it looks like a public restroom door partition.
• it’s cumbersome.  basically that whole thing pivots on the steel frame at the bottom.  so you, the user, will have to swing that thing up off your bike when you’re ready to go.  now imagine a bunch of those next to each other – you’re going to have to space them out a bit.  that means even less overall bike storage than the already low ‘parking product’ to standard bike rack ratio.

one good alternative already comes to mind – a pavilion.   just like a bus stop, some sort of an overhanging roof is really all that is needed to protect from most weather.  it keeps the sun and most of the rain off the bikes.  you can pack more bike parking spots into the same amount of space w/ standard bike racks under a roof than you can w/ these upside down plastic  bowls.  standard locks and good lighting remain as theft deterrents.  i mean, if the ‘parking product’ above is free to use, as CapMetro says it is, that means that you’re somehow locking it down w/ your own lock.  that means that as a theft deterrent, all this thing does is physically cover your bike and secure it w/ the same lock you would already be using anyway.

tornadoes and trailer parks

i’m sure this topic has been expounded upon numerous times, but why is it that tornadoes seem to mostly target trailer parks?  Apparently, tornadoes hate the economically less fortunate.

copycats

http://www.theindychannel.com/news/18620871/detail.html

following:

http://www.kvue.com/news/top/stories/012809kvuesign-bkm.12a922f4.html

Good Morning

I hope all is well with you. I am writing to inform you that only seven days remain until it is no longer painful to listen to the President of the United States speak. We are all excited, and hope that you will join us in celebrating what will surely be a memorable and momentous occassion.

test

ipod request: the exact opposite of volume limit

i listen to my music w/ shure headphones – essentially ear buds w/ built-in ear plugs.  that means that it blocks out pretty much all noise that isn’t coming from my ipod.  that also means that i end up turning the volume down much lower than where people would normally keep their volume levels set at.  waaaaay lower.  like the absolute lowest possible volume setting before the ipod goes to mute.  and that’s not low enough. while it’s great that apple has incorporated a volume limit so that people can stop themselves from blasting out their ear drums, it would be a nice feature if you could lower the ‘low’ volume threshold on the ipod/iphone (or any device for that matter) so that you can listen to your music as low as you want to go..