Lego Deathstar
Not sure how i missed this – Lego Deathstar Diorama, yours for only $399. Still not as cool as the Millenium Falcon.
Vote Early and Often
Today is the last day to vote early in Texas. Accordding to CNN, almost 2 million people have already cast ballots, more than 28% of active voters in the state. If you’re looking for endorsements check out the League of Women Voters of Texas who presents each side’s platform as equally as possible. Or there’s the Chronicle’s left-wing-hippy agenda that I usually follow.
Velociraptors
Could you take one with a crowbar? I got a 45% – but I lied on the question about what I would do when it tore my arm off.
Seven
A first look at the new windows. Looks as if they dropped OS X and Ubuntu into a blender and made a really bad-looking smothie with really poor font management/rendering.
Senator Stevens
It’s no longer a series of tubes for Ted Stevens.
Livestrong '08
Apparently, the hardest part for me about the Livestrong ride is getting up so damn early. 4:30am is not prime-time-wade-time. But just the same, Sunday morning at 5am I find myself hanging out at the intersection of 5th and Red River, with a couple of meth-heads and one dude who swears he just needs a couple bucks for gas. Good and interesting times, particularly given my lack of coffee. I figure if i stay on my bike, even really fast cracked-out bums will have a hard time catching me. I meet up with the Ridges (the whole point of being down there in the first place), and we load the bikes and take off for Dripping Springs.
The Livestrong ride unleashes about 3,000 riders onto the hills near Dripping Springs. Everybody from pro cyclists like Lance to folks who’ve never touched a bike before, so it’s worth a lot of misery, including being chased around downtown by homeless people. This is the second year I’ve done this ride – last year’s was more about facing down a big challenge like a 100 miles on a bike, than about the actual cause. This years was different, as previously mentioned. Does pushing a bike around central Texas for 5 hours, bring anybody back, or make you empathize with their suffering. Not at all. But it’s one of those primal acts of effort and endurance that just might make you come to terms with grief a little bit more. A cathartic act of physical exertion the ends with some acceptance and some hope.
Grander philosophies aside, the ride is awesome. We’re old, so we checked in for the 65-miler as opposed to 100 this year. It’s an interesting mix of beautiful sweeping roads, and incredibly bad pavement. TxDOT, in their desire to pave every last scrap of Texas, neglected to take into account the size of the state and so has only been able to slap a thin smear of asphalt on some of these roads since the were cut through in the late 40’s.
Nerve damage in my wrist aside, we survived. Towards the end, Brian and I got separated from Jeremy and Steph and inexplicably tried to sprint the last five miles or so, I guess to catch up with them (or maybe just to be done). While it was fun passing everybody, it has also led to me taking the elevator at work, and having to stop about halfway up the steps to my apartment for a quick breather. Maybe not the best plan on our part.
Most importantly the ride raised $3.6 million for LAF’s efforts. Not a bad use of a sunday afternoon. Thank you so much to all of you that contributed to my fundraising effort. It was greatly appreciated and exceeded my expectations.
Site Updates
Some typography updates to the site, nothing drastic. If you’re viewing this in IE, sorry I haven’t got to that yet. Might be a little screwy, so you should probably just go download Firefox.
The Undecided
I look at these people and can’t quite believe that they exist. Are they professional actors? I wonder. Or are they simply laymen who want a lot of attention? To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it? To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.”
– Author David Sedaris, on undecided voters
Apple Keyboards
Going back to a standard keyboard (with big, ugly, noisy buttons) after using the fancy apple one for a year…well i kind of kills your soul a bit.
WPA
Making the case for a new Works Project Administration.
During the Depression, President Roosevelt poured $11.4 billion (about $175 billion in 2008 dollars, by our estimate) into the Works Progress Administration. The agency spent nearly $4 billion on highway and road projects and more than $2 billion on public buildings and utilities. All told, the WPA put 8.5 million people to work between 1935 and 1943. Together those people built 651,087 miles of roadway, built or improved 124,031 bridges, erected 125,110 public buildings and laid 853 airport runways. Not bad at a time when the unemployment approached 25 percent.
Beyond providing jobs — analysts say every $1 billion spent on transportation projects creates 35,000 jobs — a modern-day WPA would produce lasting benefits. “China is spending 9 percent of its GDP on infrastructure, and we’re spending something like one or two percent,” says Allen D. Biehler, Pennsylvania’s transportation secretary. “A sustained investment would not only create jobs that have a strong multiplier effect on the larger economy, but would prevent us from falling behind other nations.”