Seventy-five bands/musicians are represented in this image.

I’ve been bound and determined to write something at least slightly positive on the site lately, but the Bush Administration has been ruining that plan. However, on a local level the city looks ready to approve the updated citywide design rules. This is a very cool development, that will hopefully stem the onslaught of the Big Box stores on our area, or at least help them look a little cooler.

“Everyone has talked about having more mixed use on those transit corridors like South Lamar, but the city code hasn’t kept up,” Planning Commission Chairman Chris Riley said. “This will help create stretches of pedestrian-oriented developments. It’s just a whole different approach.”

Drive-throughs will have be tucked behind restaurants, and car-related businesses will not be allowed on corner lots unless trees obscure them. Shielded lighting will replace glaring pools of light. “

Austin is also the first city to pass a ban on ‘coal tar sealants’, a asphault sealant that has been causing problems with the water supply and the cleanliness of Barton Springs.

Go us. Glad we have a nice place to live that hasn’t completely sold out.

Mr. Vance and i have set out on a mission: to build a medieval siege engine, a Trebuchet, capable of flinging biodegradable ammo up to 600 ft across a field, for no very good reason.
We are dumb.

But it will be fun.Initial Sketch is here, and if anyone has a Carbon steel axle we could use please give us a holler. More updates after our first construction day this sunday.

A couple of months back, Austin’s KUT was a sounding board for NPR’s ‘revival’ of theThis I Believe series. To be honest I was fairly underwhelmed. It was nothing too thrilling till the other morning when I was making the 5-mile/30 minute slog to work. Of all people Penn Jillete submitted an essay on why he doesn’t he believes there is no god. In addition to the clever bending of the rules i was floored by his statements, which paralleled my interactions with a highly conservative small town, in which all my friends went to church and I did not.

…I’m saying, “This I believe: I believe there is no God.”

Having taken that step, it informs every moment of my life. I’m not greedy. I have love, blue skies, rainbows and Hallmark cards, and that has to be enough. It has to be enough, but it’s everything in the world and everything in the world is plenty for me. It seems just rude to beg the invisible for more. Just the love of my family that raised me and the family I’m raising now is enough that I don’t need heaven. I won the huge genetic lottery and I get joy every day.

Believing there’s no God means I can’t really be forgiven except by kindness and faulty memories. That’s good; it makes me want to be more thoughtful. I have to try to treat people right the first time around.

Man, that is one very interesting and well adjusted magician. Kind of ( hopefully, at least) gives your average self righteous american a little to chew on. I’m not entirely sure that I agree with him entirely, but none the less, good stuff.

Texas AG Greg Abbott is filing a law suit against sony over the copy-protected CD’s that do the spyware thing. For once I have no sarcastic comment to follow.

Sony has apparently bowed to public pressure and is recalling all of its rootkit installing CD’s. This is good, but they’re still on my ‘very evil’ list.

I’m making a concerted effort to regulalry add content to the photo section. Each weekday should bring a new shot.

For a long time, I’ve tried to make this site be a lot of things: portfolio, photoblog, personal rant space, etc. The real kicker is, if this is supposed to be a professional portfolio site then how do I justify posting a political rant ? Or starting another blog talking abou the music I’m currently listening to ? Or a page about our trebuchet project. It’s fun, but it looks unprofessional, and I’ve become keenly aware lately of how impportant it is to leave your politics out of your work life.

Therefore, a few things will be happening. First of all I’ve launched an independent portfolio site:
wadetreichler.com. This is a site for my design work only.

Next, there will be some changes going on around here. The code for the site is seriously sketchy, and I’m going to attempt to bring it all up to date. We’ll also be adding some new sections, like the music blog, changing the navigation around and (signifigant probably only to me) dropping ‘portfolio’ from the title.

Finaly the, climbing photo section. This was one of the main reason’s i launched the site in the first place, and i’ve really hated having it as a subset of the exisitng photo section, its bulky, non-intuitive and dumb. I’m revamping it, and more importantly, sorting through the hundreds of crap photos, and repostng the couple of decent ones underr the appropriate section.

So that’s it. hopefully the site will reamin realtiovely stable through all this, and in the end the 6 people who look at it on a regular basis will have a better user experience.

Good times.