I’m in Austin! The bad news is I’m kinda lost :). I’ve been wandering around aimlessly looking for a wireless signal and I’ve just found a good one. Now it’s time to get on Mapquest and find how the hell to get where I’m going. Of course first I have to figure out where I am…
Category Archives: Travel
Heading out!
And so it begins. I’m showered, the car is washed, everything I need (I hope) is in the car, and I’m ready to roll. It’s not a short drive though, so it’s a good thing I love driving! See everyone in Austin.
Getting Started
Well I slept a little late but now that I’m awake I’m going to get the last few things ready before I head up to Austin. I’m planning to blog everything this weekend so this should be a good opportunity to start. Most of the major stuff is done, I’m just waiting on an important letter (read: check) in the mail before I leave. I can’t dawdle for too long though, as tonight at 6 I “Break Bread with Brad“. But for now I’m running late, and need to get my rear in gear.
Prepare
Just getting things ready to head up to Austin. Laundry and money. What else do you need? (Besides this cool bag of course.)
SxSW Interactive
So, is anyone else going to South by Southwest Interactive next week? This will be my first time and I’m incredibly excited, but also a little bit anxious since I have no idea what it’s going to be like. I’m going to be staying in Pflugerville with my wonderful sister but I suspect I’m going to spend most of my time in town.
If you’ve been before, I’d love to hear whatever tidbits of advice you have. If you’re going, definitely let me know and hopefully we can meet up. I’d love to start putting some non-Houston faces with the domain names :).
Because They’re Watching
This is just post to let everyone know that you can now browse PhotoMatt securely. The secure site is functionally equivalent except it doesn’t display the Wanderlust code because it will pop an annoying error since it’s loading remotely. It uses a self-signed 1024 bit SSL certificate which will pop up as not being from a trusted authority the first time you visit but if you add it to your trusted certificates (usually just a button click away) it won’t bug you anymore. Why do this? Because I can.
This will appeal to exactly 2 people.
Why Houston?
It started this morning while on my way to meet with Eli (whose website is almost ready) there were about 30 people on horses at the place where I like to eat breakfast. I thought to myself, “Only in Houston.”
Fast forward to this afternoon as I’m trying to take a “shortcut” on Memorial, but instead I get stuck behind a trail ride going who knows where at 5 miles per hour. Whose bright idea was that?! Let’s put someone on a busy street in rush hour and see how much we can mess things up. Since when were horses even allowed on streets and such? Isn’t traffic bad enough? Bah. This is why people think in Houston we ride horses to school and have cattle. (I’m not making that up.)
Keys Locked
Tonight was the second time I’ve come to Austin and locked my keys in the car. Luckily this time it was easier to get them out, and was free thanks to AAA. They have saved my butt so many times, it’s worth every penny. (Of course I don’t pay, but if I did it would be worth all the pennies.)
Murphy Schmurphy
“Today looks like it’s going to be a long day.” Oh Fate! Such a cruel and fickle force. It started shortly after the last post when I missed the shuttle to transport me across the UH campus to my car. Because of some sort of irregularity in the bus schedule, or perhaps just horrid management, instead of having a bus come by say every 7 or 8 minutes, they have two come every 15 minutes. Of course that is just for the Blue route, the other three routes just happened to have their buses come at the same time, so it takes forever for everyone to load up. The loading was made even longer by the fact that we had to load a wheelchair up too. Now I’m not complaining about that, as no one can help that situation, but I’m just pointing out that it is an amazing set of circumstances.
So I make it to my car. I can’t write the rest of the story, because it’s too painful. Too make a painful story short, I stopped to pick something up, left, left my wallet, went back, and when I started to leave for the second time my car would not start. So here I sit awaiting the white trucks of AAA to pick me up and tow me home. The timing couldn’t be better either, I have two important appointments this afternoon and I was planning to go to Austin tomorrow.Times like this I try my best to see the bright side of things, try to find of ray of light in this gloomy day. I guess things could be worse, but I don’t want to tempt Fate, or Murphy, again.
Update: Ray of light — it was just a minor battery problem.
Weather or Not
I can’t win! Several days ago I made a remark to the fickleness of weather, and she has not given me a break since. I dress warm, we have a semi-tropical day in humid Houston; I dress light, and a cold front comes in that has me shivering all day. Some days you just roll with it. Today looks like it’s going to be a long day.
Five Dollar Suits
A little Tuesday humor from Mike:
Bubba and Billy Ray are from Arkansas visiting a relative in Texas. Walking along Sam Houston Street, they see a sign which reads, “Suits $5.00 each, shirts $2.00 each, trousers $2.50 per pair.”
Bubba says to his pal, “Billy Ray, Look! We could buy a whole lot of those, and when we get back to Arkansas, we could make a fortune. Now when we go into the shop, you be quiet, okay? Just let me do all the talking cause if they hear our accent,they might not serve us. I’ll speak in my best Texas drawl.”
They go in and Bubba says, “I’ll take 50 suits at $5.00 each, 100 shirts at $2.00 each and 50 pairs of trousers at $2.50 each. I’ll back up my pickup and …..”
The owner of the shop interrupts, “You’re from Arkansas, aren’t you?”
“Oh, yes,” says a surprised Bubba. “How come you know that?”
The owner says, “This is a dry-cleaners.”
NT Stands for…
Just saw this interesting snippet:
During a trip to Microsoft’s Redmond campus this week, I had the opportunity to meet with Mark Lucovsky, one of the original architects of Windows NT. We had a long discussion about NT’s development and evolution; one of the more fascinating tidbits he revealed was that NT doesn’t, in fact, stand for New Technology, as documented in books such as “Showstoppers” and “Inside Windows NT” (Microsoft Press, 1992). Instead, the name comes from the earliest days of the product’s development, when Microsoft designed NT to use the Intel i860, a RISC processor. In those days, Intel’s chip was behind schedule, so Microsoft had to use an i860 emulator called the N10. NT was so named because it worked on the “N-Ten.”
X-Files Mark
Out of the blue, my Mom asked me what was that strange mark on my neck, and I had no clue. A quick trip to the mirror revealed what looks like a large bite right on my adam’s apple, which is quite conspicious. Mom examined it, and said it looked like a spider bite or something similar. Great. Is this sweet revenge on the part of spiders? When did this spider bite me? Why didn’t I notice? Will it make me buff? So many unanswered questions.
H-Town Blogs New Site
I’m happy to see we have a beautiful new site designed by the wonderful Christine with the header picture by Elaine. Elaine takes great photos and you should check out the ones on her site, also the last time I was at Kaveh Kanes they had a couple of hers on display.
I just had a kinda-cool idea for the site: what if the top image rotated with different pictures that the author felt characterized Houston. For a perfect example of what I mean see Typographica, which has different headers rotate that link to the font and the designer of the header image. It occurred to me when I was looking at the site and thinking “What a nice picture of downtown” and then I noticed the street and the lamps and I started thinking of where Elaine was when she took that picture. My mind wandered to the cool pictures Christine posted the other day and how it was a totally different view of downtown. My mind continued to wander (it does that a lot) to how when people think of Houston, they tend to think of either the Rodeo or the postcard view of downtown, when in fact there is so much more than that. Anyway, just an idea.
The Birthday Post
One more day!!!
Several people have said to me, “Matt, you live in Houston and I’m way over in [insert place], and I don’t have any money, so what can I do for you for your birthday?” Well, I’ve thought about it, and recognition is always nice. I spend a lot of time on this site, tweaking things, adding quotes, pictures, and I think overall it’s pretty dandy. Not to mention, nominations for the Bloggies are now open. Now I know what you’re thinking, who is this guy to try and be nominated for a Blogggie. Who am I? Exactly! There’s a category just for people like me called “Best-Kept-Secret Weblog.” It just takes a minute to fill out and it would be a great present to be nominated for something.
If you’re still in a voting mood after that, I can highly recommend checking out PhotoBlogs.org where photoblog sites are ranked like based on voting. For a while I was in the top 50 but lately I’ve fallen completely off the front page, but if you like any of the more than four thousand pictures in the photolog please leave me a positive vote (click the plus icon in the top right). Thank you!
If feel so dirty. Maybe I should do BlogWhore 2 ;).
Productive Day
I’ve been working with Becca at Kaveh Kanes for a while now, and I feel like a lot has been accomplished. Almost done with a new website, and I haven’t done one from scratch in a while so it’s felt good. Of course now I have to go and take my laptop which they never fixed back to Best Buy. What a drag! Hopefully they’ll be more helpful this time. Laptops are more trouble then they’re worth. Except this one.
Meetings…
The Houston Palm Users Group meeting went very well, with Chris giving an interesting presentation on networking using your Palm, which I enjoyed. Afterwords I drifted over to the Web Tech SIG where they had food, and I ended up winning Microsoft Visual Interdev 6, and a Microsoft t-shirt, and a “security pack.” Oh the irony!! Not going to Galveston tonight like planned, but we’ll see what happens. Tonight actually might be a great opportunity to catch up on some work.
Catching Up
I’ve been basically totally preoccupied the past week, so I have a ton of catching up to do online. Most importantly Friday was Elaine’s birthday! Go send her some birthday love if you haven’t already. While your at it Kymberlie sounds like she had a wonderful anniversary, and that’s wonderful to hear. I finally got my blogroll working again, and took the opportunity to add some links that have been missing for a while. Zeldman has had more good writing lately then I can keep up with. So much content, so little time! Follow every link on his site. The Houston Wireless list has had some goings-on lately, and it should be interesting to see how things pan out. Joe Clark’s Slashdot interview is the longest I’ve seen yet, probably about 54k of text. That guy never ceases to amaze me.
People are coming into town from all over, and I am free as a bird till January, so this should be a lot of fun. Tonight I’m spending the night in Galveston, just because. Yay for Christmas break! It’s really my favorite time of the year. The music, the food, the weather—it’s just perfect. I hope everyone is having a happy holidays.
I know that as soon as I get used to this laptop I’m going to have to take it back. *sigh*
Getting Colder
Well I think it’s appropriate that Winter has finally deemed to visit Houston, after flirting for so long. Monday was hot and I dressed in kind, apparently so much so that Alex remarked to me that “Summer is over!” However the next day when I headed out in my shorts and short sleeve shirt, I was blasted at the door by cold cold air. Even colder than was in my house, which is saying a lot. Today is similarly cold an it’s forcing me to dig out all my cold-weather clothes that haven’t seen the light of day since early January last year, when it got hot again. I absolutely love cold weather and the month we have it here is usually my favorite part of the year. Don’t tell anyone, but I’m a sucker for Christmas music too.
The other day as I topped out the first hill getting on to the freeway my car died, and I managed to roll to the shoulder to await a tow back home. My car is in the good hands of the mechanic right now, so hopefully I’ll be back in the Mattmobile any day now.
Houston, We Have a Problem
Well, who would have thought that installing a keyboard and mouse could be so difficult. After my first few words, and using the mouse just long enough to start to really like it, everything has crashed and burned. One of the questions burning in my mind was if I could use the keyboard a,nd mouse with my existing Bluetooth dongle, partly because I don’t want to have to carry anything extra around and mostly because the “laptop adapter” for the Microsoft Bluetooth receiver sticks out from the laptop at least 4 inches. I plugged my old dongle in, and nothing special happened. Not surprisingly, the Bluetooth keyboard and mouse stopped working. I went into the Bluetooth software that came with the dongle to see if I could “discover” them and pair them somehow so they would work. The good news is that it was able to detect both the keyboard and the mouse. The bad news is it had no idea what to do with them. Any attempt to discover their services turned up blank.
I should have known that the operative word when dealing with Microsoft is “proprietary.” I wasn’t entirely dismayed though, I was ready to stomach carrying around the ridiculously long MS Bluetooth dongle just to be able to use the very cool Explorer Mouse; I like buttons and this mouse had them in buckets. But being able to dial up to the internet through my cell phone (T68) using Bluetooth is even more of a must, so I decided to try that with the ugly Microsoft Bluetooth adapter. It worked, beautifully. Many times when dealing with the current Bluetooth software implementations I’ve felt like it was back to the old Windows 3 days, when the interfaces were clunky, buggy, unresponsive, and ugly. The wizard that set the phone up was elegant and felt like a real part of the operating system. In fact it was apparently, but we’ll get to that in a minute.
Anyway the phone works just fine with the MS adapter, however I couldn’t get it to talk to either the mouse or keyboard now. I thought maybe this is just a software glitch, so I went through all the regular motions. Reboot, retry, un-install, reboot, reinstall, reboot, try again, uninstall other Bluetooth software, reboot, try again, reinstall, smash mouse to smithereens against head. Okay, I made that last one up, but I did all of the others, perhaps more than listed. At this point I was thinking it must be a simple hardware issue, so I changed the batteries in both devices to fresh ones that I was sure worked, and tried again. Still no go, it simply wouldn’t detect either of the devices.
Having isolated nearly every variable I could think of, I decided to try it all out on my desktop. So I went through the first step of installing the software, and it tells me that for it to work it has to have Windows XP Service Pack 1 installed. Life is too short.
As a last ditch attempt, I decided to try and pair either of the devices with my phone. I think the keyboard might have paired, even though it probably wouldn’t have worked anyway, but I’ll never know because of the proprietary and non-standard way which the keyboard and mouse pair works only with the Microsoft software. Which only works on Windows. The latest version. With the latest Service Pack. (Did I mention it un-installed the special software for my touchpad on the laptop?)
What I suspect happened is something about the way the old non-Microsoft Bluetooth adapter tried to interface with the devices messed something up, and that is what’s causing them to not work. But at this point I really don’t care.
Maybe Logitech will come out with something nice to counter this, and maybe then I’ll try it, but right now I can only think of disadvantages to using Bluetooth HIDs, such as no current BIOS supports it, it tricky, it takes up two of your seven possible Bluetooth devices, doesn’t offer anything extra, the range isn’t worth it. Also on the range note with my Logitech Cordless mouse (the original model) I was able to walk all the way across the house into the garage, and it would still move the mouse on the screen, but I think that may have been an anomaly. Still, how far do you need to go?
So I have packed everything up from the batteries to the cruddy documentation, and tomorrow I will attempt to get store credit and buy something that actually works. Oh joy.