After an extended leave of absence, Barton Creek has returned. The normal crossings I’ve used all summer have 15′ of water over them.

This November marks ten years since the stack collapsed on the polo fields, and also would’ve marked the 100th year of the on campus bonfire tradition. Texas Monthly has put together a helluva oral history from former Ags, including the previously mentioned remarks by our governor, which given the full article, seem incredibly out-of-touch and insenstive.

I will never forget Tim Kerlee. He was up on stack, trapped under a pile of logs, but every time one of us approached him to help, he would turn us away. He would say, “I can see so-and-so over there. Go help him. He needs the help. Don’t worry about me.”

From a seventeen-year-old, no less. Given the time frame, and the number of students who’ve passed through the school since that day it’s pretty easy to minimize the loss that day. Some of my cousins and friends, who graduated four or five years after me have talked about the off-campus student bonfire as something awesome that should return to the school in an official capacity.  To me it’s insulting. No I didn’t go to cut, no I didn’t know any of these kids, but I do know that none of them got to graduate, get married or celebrate the birth of a child. Those of us who were there, and remember seeing fellow students place their senior boots and Aggie rings at the impromptu memorial in front of the academic building, remember the wreaths and crosses pined to chairs in classrooms where the twelve students had sat, most of them would tell you that sometimes it’s best to let something fade away.

What’s really masterful about this piece is, through the words of the interviewees, they’ve given an outsider a bit of a glimpse into A&M’s true identity: A giant, well-intentioned contradiction.

I (believe it or not) own several copies of the AP Style Guide and regularly use it for light reading, so I feel like I can say with authority that this fake version, posted through twitter, has an extremely high awesomeness content. Catch it while you can, before the AP sues to have it shut down.

The guide is very current, too. For example, be sure that you “Refer to him as ‘President Obama’ when he first appears in an article, ‘Soul Brother Number 1‘ in subsequent mentions.”

More on Wired

An interesting take on what almost crashed the financial system.

Two things happened. One is that the amount of money that could be made on Wall Street with hedge fund and private equity operations became just mind-blowing. At the same time, college was getting so expensive that people from reasonably prosperous families were graduating with huge debts. So even the smart guys went to Wall Street, maybe telling themselves that in a few years they’d have so much money they could then become professors or legal-services lawyers or whatever they’d wanted to be in the first place. That’s when you started reading stories about the percentage of the graduating class of Harvard College who planned to go into the financial industry or go to business school so they could then go into the financial industry. That’s when you started reading about these geniuses from M.I.T. and Caltech who instead of going to graduate school in physics went to Wall Street to calculate arbitrage odds.”

“But you still haven’t told me how that brought on the financial crisis.”

“Did you ever hear the word ‘derivatives’?” he said. “Do you think our guys could have invented, say, credit default swaps? Give me a break. They couldn’t have done the math.”

More…

Should the supposed #3 team in the country really be this excited about squeaking by my #20 team, playing their freshman backup quarterback? Really? Yup, this BCS ranking stuff really makes sense.

On our way to our third jobless recovery. Maybe we need reevaluate when a recession is actually over?

Once again proving that no news is good news. Just for once, I’d like to hear something positive about my school.

Blogging is dead. This shouldn’t come as a surprise really – it only took three years, but with no election, 90% of the blogosphere has finally run out of shit to complain about. When folks at my office are-just-oh-gosh, super-excited-about-our-new-blog, you can be sure that a social media format is deader than disco, Lincoln, yard darts, or maybe some odd combination of the three. Henceforth, this site will no longer be a known as a blog (if it ever was), but as a non-blog place on the web for me to post cool stuff. Apparently there’s a difference. Who knows maybe I’ll start a Zine.  This is all no excuse however, for the decidedly low traffic on the site of late, but damn, we’ve been busy. In the past three months, we’ve either launched or heavily tweaked three separate websites, and been hard at work on quite a  few more. You can take a look at some of theses in the projects section of the navigation if you are truly bored, but this also explains the heavy reliance on Twitter of late. I’d really like to think Twitter is making us all smarter by forcing people to be witty in a brief, 140 characters, but the while the latter is strictly enforced by coding, the founders of twitter have yet to be able to force people to be witty, making 90% of the twit-verse pure bacon-related drivel. Seriously I like bacon but the current obsession if over the line. At some point, someone, somewhere is going to build a social platform with meaningful content, but I’ve yet to see it.

And while we’re talking platforms, I’d like to take a moment to give a big, fat middle finger to Adobe Systems. The quick and certain response to this (by one Matthew Badowski in particular) will certainly be, why don’t you just use an open-source solution. I’ve been using Photoshop, and InDesign (it’s fore runner PageMaker) since 1994. Certain habits are hard to break, and honestly it’s a great damn system. When it works. And here in lies the rub. Truly appalling customer service aside, the recent releases (when paired with the current OS X upgrades) are so unstable as to cause me to loose work, a lot of work, and nothing pisses me off more than someone wasting my time. You guys charge anywhere from $600-1000 for you upgrades – would you at least make sure the damn thing won’t crash every time i save a file, before greedily swiping my card? It’s almost becoming a point of honor for me to go procure the next three versions of your software via nefarious channels in order to make up the difference.

But hey, it’s Friday, the weather is supposed to be fantastic for the first time in 6 months, OU is playing (and hopefully beating) Texas this weekend,  so the nation of wade is going to unplug and go get on a bike – something tells me that all this nonsense will still be available to worry about on Monday.