Bears in Schools
Apparently, according to the bible, we need bears in our schools to keep the children in line.
Big Lego
5000 Piece Lego Set of the Millennium Falcon.
Adobe Customer Service
Recently, I purchased a very shinny new MacPro for the office. I called up, told apple what I wanted, a week later Brown Santa brought me an early Christmas present. Apparently though, Adobe is not Apple. I’ve spent at least an hour on hold today, on what I believe is my fifth or sixth call in the past three months attempting to purchase a $600 software license for Creative Suite 3, thereby being a good, up-standing citizen. Let me be clear: I want to give them money. For their product. Like that whole commerce thing. And they won’t let me. It’s gone something like this:
Call Number Four–
Me: Look, can I just by this from a store ?
Adobe Rep: No Sir, not with a cross-platform upgrade.
Me: So I can’t buy it from them, and I can’t buy it from you either?
AR: Sir, We’re working to correct a problem in our purchasing system. You could always just buy the windows version, and dual boot your Intel Mac….
(Wade sets phone on fire, walks away)
Call number five took the cake today. After twenty minutes of some really bitchin soft-rock hold music, Adobe-helper-dude comes back on the line –
“Ok, I think we’ve got….” Click. Dial tone.
(Uses old Dell laptop/paperweight to smash melted phone)
Call number six –
AR: Sir, I will call you back in thirty minutes and you WILL be able to make your purchase…
(Melted former-phone/laptop creature becomes Ad-hoc soccer ball)
That was four hours ago. And they wonder why people pirate their software?
Manly Turkey
Apparently something like 90% of Thanksgiving fires are caused by the deep-fried turkey thing. That’s we’re were safe about it – we have a fire extinguisher. And we wear sandals.
Travel on thanksgiving
What a bad idea. The fact that I can post to the website from the road ought to be indicitive of the traffic near and around the Austin airport.
Baptists Are Friendly
Everyone’s favorite neighborhood mega-church, Hyde Park Baptist, is making headlines today for evicting an interfaith Thanksgiving feast that included Muslims from a property they own. My understanding is this isn’t even a holy space, just a church gymnasium on the north side of town (although those baptists get pretty animated…maybe there’s some jump-shot-hallelujah-communion-maneuver I haven’t heard about).
Quoth the Statesman:
The [interfaith] group learned Wednesday that the rental space at the church-owned Quarries property in North Austin was no longer available because Hyde Park leaders had discovered that non-Christians, Muslims in particular, would be practicing their faith there. The event, now in its 23rd year, invites Jews, Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Bahais and others to worship together.
Way to make headlines guys. Kind of like how you made so many friends by building your five-story parking garage in the middle of Hyde Park, except this time, in addition to a distinct lack of community-building, you managed to serve up a thanksgiving-sized portion of religious intolerance to boot. Nice use of that short work week.
A Reddit Commentor sums it up better than i could, in a letter to the church:
Do you [HPBC] really believe that doing and saying these things is very Christ like? Do you really think that Jesus, a man who broke bread with prostitutes and tax collectors, would shun people of different faiths?
Constellation Program
My generation’s JFK moment, the odd joiner-event that most people remember where they were or what they were doing, was when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded on lift-off some twenty-plus years ago. I was in second grade, and if memory serves my bat-shit-crazy teacher proceeded to tell us that the astronauts were going to live with the angels. And that the communists were some how to blame because they didn’t go to church and ate babies while sharpening their devil-horns. Yeah, my primary school education was awesome, no wonder I can’t do mental math or spell.
Fast forward and NASA seems to trying to recapture the golden years of Apollo with the Constellation program, a new model of rocket and a colossal amount of cash spent on, as far as I can tell, very pretty artists renderings (you could probably rebuild five ninth-ward houses in New Orleans for what they’ve spent on flash work on their site…and you could also probably rebuild an entire city with what they’ll spend on actually getting us to Mars). A good PR effort to distance themselves from two lost shuttles and the unfortunate incident with the adult diapers.
It’s hard not be interested though. To get inspired by spacecrafts named after greek gods again. We could use something like this on our national psyche, something besides suicide car-bombers on the news (when did something that awful become common-place) – a little hope and, not to be cheesy, but a little adventure. We used to be a nation of explorers, now we have handrails on sidewalks that drop off more than a foot, a childhood obesity problem and reality TV (the ultimate contradiction in terms). Used to be, seven people would risk their lives to hop in a spacecraft with a bazillion-and-a-half moving parts (designed in the 70’s built and by the lowest-bidding-sub-contractor to boot) just to push out a little farther, to explore a little more. Maybe its worth the money, maybe that’s why the Challenger was such an important event for us. We could use a little inspiration.
Realted
Charile Stross on the economics of Colonization
Buzz Aldrin Punches People
The Space Elevator Challenges
CARMA
A mashup of Google maps and pollution data. No wonder i had asthma as a kid.
In Danish
really there’s only one button you can push (via swissmiss).
Derby
The most fun you can have in Austin on a Tuesday night (with your clothes on). The dirt derby gets down to dusty business.