March 19, 2009

SXSW Roadtrip day 9

Visited the Cathedral of Junk in Austin. Spent the early afternoon with friends who moved to Austin. Went to Lockhart, the BBQ capital of texas. My first stop, Kruez, was my favorite. Wonderful BBQ. Next I went to Blacks. I found their meat too greasy for my taste, but it’s a popular spot, and really nice folks. Finally stopped by Smitty’s, but they closed at 6, and it was 7ish at this point.

March 16, 2009

SXSW Roadtrip day 5-8

SXSW! Met lots of interesting folks, many events, lots of interesting discussiions, good talks, and some movie premiers! Musical highlight, meeting and hearing Pinetop Perkins, a 95 year old Blues Pianist.

March 14, 2009

SXSW Road Trip day 4

Winny Texas to Austin Texas. Drove straight through today. Very foggy as I left, then the rain started, rained light-to-medium the entire 4 hour drive. Fredricksburg is wall-to-wall people. No pictures today given the drive to get to Austin, and the nasty weather. Got to the room, really cute, but 40ish and kinda chilly. Couldn’t enjoy the patio.

March 13, 2009

SXSW Road Trip day 3

Blah breakfast at hotel, mucked about in Bisbee for the morning and got some gifts. There was an elder tour in town, so the shops were pretty crowded, even though town wasn’t, so I didn’t spend a lot of time shopping with the crowds. Bisbee’s a very cool town, interesting architecture, and built on a hill, very interesting to get around. Next, started the long drive to Austin. A lunch stop in Douglas for a good TexMex lunch, Mole was a little too sweet for my tastes, saw the Mexican Border for the first time ever.

March 12, 2009

SXSW Road Trip day 2

Headed out for Oatman first thing, knew nothing would be open, but figured I’d take some pictures, and wasn’t interested in buying stuff anyway. An interesting turn of the century town, much seemed original, slightly touristed up, looks like it’s quite the town during tourist season, a fake gun fight kinda town.Made me think of a much smaller and less remodeled Tombstone. Clarke Gable and Carole Lombard stayed at the Oatman hotel on their wedding night, and visited on occasion.

March 11, 2009

SXSW Road Trip day 1

Was going to go to SXSW, but had time on my hands being between jobs right now. I decided I’d combine heading to SXSW with one of my favorite things to do on my own, take a road trip. I had one place I wanted to visit again, since on a prior road trip, I only got to visit a short time, Bisbee, AZ. Headed off about 7:30am after coffee and some cold pizza (breakfast of champions) with my wife, @rabbitroodle.

March 3, 2009

Testing new blog software

Trying out new blogging software for my travel eeePC. Now trying Zoundry’s Raven beta, tried some others, they had various issues, and ended up not publishing. Wanted a blog client since I will be doing a mult8-week roadtrip to sxsw and back, and wanted to blog on the road, but, I won’t have full-time internet connectivity, so I wanted a client that would save up blog posts, then let me upload a batch.

January 28, 2009

Up and running again

Had some intermittent database issues, and was running an old wordpress, also had swapped some domain hosting around, and never got around to fixing it up nicely. Pretty easy this time, took an hour because “fantastico” was doing some weird stuff with base directories, made it more difficult than I wanted to get things placed. Still don’t like the subdirectory setup, but not worth the time vs. reward to change it, since in general I’m keeping pretty close to stock default installs so I don’t spend too much time administrating.

October 6, 2008

Long time no blog

Just a short one. Work’s been all-absorbing, sold and bought a house we’re getting some basic “post buying” work done on, and with all that, just didn’t haven’t been getting the inspiration to blog new semi-coherent rants. Got a few I’d like to do, quick review of a new Roku, experiences meeting several twitter friends in meat space, and they’re now actual acquaintances, a saga of Apple products I owned failing one after the other.

August 4, 2008

Soundmatters, great customer service

With my share of poor customer service experiences (most recent is my upcoming cancelling my BofA credit card next month, but won’t both going into that one, just more “we don’t need you as a customer” behavior), I had another exceptional story to tell. This time with Soundmatters. I’d had a Soundmatters MAINstage HD for a couple years (Jan ’06). It worked great, nice unobtrusive companion to my plasma, good sound, especially nice with the subwoofer as movies actually had some bass impact.