You know you’ve arrived when you go to Starbucks and they add a free espresso shot to your coffee everytime. I am finally someone.

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Some people,” writes Howard Schultz, Starbucks Corp. founder and Chairman, “even call our stores sterile, cookie cutter, no longer reflecting the passion our partners feel about our coffee.”

Cookie cutter ? You guys ? No way, I mean, all your stores have such a unique flavor.
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The database that drives the content for this site seems to have eaten itself, hence the recent slowness. Thus I’m going to go through one of my ‘design rethinks.’

Keep your fingers crossed that this is like the smooth fall 2006 redesign, and not the debacle of June 2005, of which we will never speak of again.

I’ve made no secret of the utter craptasticness of my week. I’ve had blown deadlines, migraines and a web site that’s supposed to launch in three hours that’s still non-functional. This is naturally problematic to my sense of calm.
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I’ll pontificate further, after I finish going jobsite (that means yelling at people over the phone, for those of you that don’t speak badowski) on some people.I’ve come to the conclusion that PR firms are kind of like the mafia. Except the mafia has better customer service/satisfaction rates.

Give me 95 and sunny any day over this.

The entire city is shutdown for a bit of ice and snow. The weathermen are all having aneurysms, they’re so excited and the statesman is, of course, calling this the end times.

People in the northeast are laughing at us similar to the way we laugh at their ‘heat waves.’ An amusing anecdote to Texas is that nobody can drive in ice, snow or really anything slippery. We do many things well here, but not that. Hence the metropolitan lockdown.

A bike ride would be pretty cool though…

South Austin is one of those special places in the world. If you’ve never been here you probably don’t understand. Take some old hippies, some new hippies, some Mexican culture, a good music scene that runs the gamut between country to punk, mix them all up with some great food to be found in some fantastically crusty dives, and you’ve got a close approximation.

Artz Rib House is a great example. Serious BBQ, live music, and one of the top five sketchiest bathrooms on South Lamar. Last night they sat our party of four at at six-top in the main room where the music was happening. Soon enough our spare seats were taken by two Old-Austin-Type-Folks. These are the ones who’ve been here since the mid 70’s when there were more prostitutes than musicians and frat boys on 6th street. They’ve been the music scene and presumably they all personally knew Stevie Ray Vaughn.

So J.B. and MariBeth. They plop down at our table, absolutely taken aback that the hostess would try and seat them anywhere other than directly in front of the weee stage, so would we mind sharing our table ? He’s got the long grey hair and leather motorcycle vest thing going on. Dimes to Dollars he’s seen some interesting days in this town and others. A musician, a pianist classically trained. They know and introduce us to members of the band. They know Art, proprietor, slinger of excellent BBQ and sides and introduce us. Orbits and trajectories that would have remained mutually exclusive are smashed together by the inexorable force of gravity that is South Austin. That’s why we love it here.

At the end of dinner, brow perspiring from the excessive meal, I scrape the last resisting remnant of the baked potato through the detritus of a half rack of baby back ribs and sausage. J.B. regards the wreckage of my plate, finished in record time and says, “Son, I’m proud to know you.”

You too man.

Frontier Airlines Rep: No Sir, you can’t cancel your flight for refund, but we can re-book you to anywhere we fly.

Me: Right, but all your flights connect through Denver, right ?

FAR: Well..yes…

Me: And aren’t they looking at closing the airport tomorrow..? Like what happened last week ?

FAR: Well.. yes…

Me: So…

FAR: Sir, you can’t cancel your flight for a refund, but we can re-book you to anywhere we fly.

Wow. This is what I get for flying an airline with pictures of cute fuzziness on the tails of their planes.

So I had a bunch of really great posts planned for this week…. I was actually going to start one on Sunday night at the Green Muse. How trendy and emo of me to be posting a thoughtful entry to my website while sipping wine on the porch of a coffee shop.

Or not. Apparently I’ve pissed off some computer god, because my ibook that I just spent two bills getting back into working order, decided I really hadn’t spent enough money on it yet. I open the screen and all i get is this strange screen burn image (like what you see in scary movies when satan is about to jump out of the monitor), followed by vertical lines in pretty colors.

Awesome.

So, I am sans computer for another 7-10 working days, while Apple replaces the positronic brain, hopefully exercising whatever demonic influences are living in the screen. Hence the lack of activity on the site.

Interestingly enough there’s a petition out for extending the G3 logic Board replacement program to my model of computer (I have a G4 and it’s not covered). Over 1,400 people have had this problem, or at least have signed the petition. I wonder how many busted macs it takes for Apple to take notice.

Because if you don’t, you’ll have no justification for yelling at the TV for the next two years. Find your precinct headquarters in Travis county here.

Karl Rove is not Aleister Crowley, Severus Snape, Darth Vader or Satan. You can kill him by ensuring your vote is counted and being vigilant at your polling station.”

From Warren Ellis’s BAD SIGNAL mailing list: (via boing boing)

Update (aka the ‘morning after’ the long dark political hell, that the last 6+ years have been): It’s like a political Christmas, and Santa keeps throwing presents our way…

Somebody (not me) mucked up the mySQL setup, casuing about 18 hours of downtime for the site. Fatwade is displeased.

Yup. I’ve got freakin’ spaceships on my page. Because I’m awesome.
Leave a comment and let me know what you think…