The ongoing love story between a 20% gay Blogebrity named Dave and a Texan named Wayne. Not exactly BlogBack Mountain, there still is an instance of Dave doing a striptease. And drinking.

And at least one soft piece that’s sure to bring a tear to your eye.

Happy

There are many things that cause happiness to swell inside me.  Here is one of those things:

Dave from Blogography is going to have an Austin Event!  Now I gotta get prepared.  My list so far includes, in no particular order:

• a ton of butter
• pulled pork
• good supply of Pez Candy
• Golden Oreos
• A trip to our local Apple store (yes, Austin has one!)
• Coke w/Lime
• Lego Star Wars I & II
• Finding the nearest Johnny Rockets
• Suggesting potential meeting spots: The Oasis, Iguana Grill, Eddie V’s, Freda’s seafood grill, Baby A’s, Hula Hut, Trudy’s
• A special “proselyte to Wayne about Macintosh” session
• Making sure my camera is fixed by then so I can do a special DITL (”Dave In The Life”)
• Obtain a Psychlo uniform so I can dress up as Terl (as played by John Travolta) in Battlefield Earth.

Not Happy

Then there are the things that DO NOT cause me to swell up with happiness.

One of those things are insane required sexual harassment courses that assume everyone reads at a 3rd grade level

The thing is blinking in red at me and YELLING (do you see the exclamation mark, or is that just my imagination?) to slow down because I took 56 minutes doing what would be optimal to do in 60 minutes.

So us speed readers end up writing blog entries on the side in between slides. This causes me to appear more “normal” to the training-bot.

Whew. 

Question: why doesn’t it berate me for being SLOWER than Optimal?  Why are the overachievers the only one who get the negative feedback?

Someday it’s going to use the embedded camera in the computer and notice me rolling my eyes, yawning and calling my coworkers my beyotch (especially the HOT chick down the hall) and then flash a picture of some nice boobs at me, and the camera will notice my eyes looking at the picture, and then automatically file a complaint electronically.  Isn’t technology grand?

I’ve participated in an online Guitar Hero tournament once, but I’ve never done a REAL Guitar Hero tournament.  Tonight is my chance.

They take entries for levels in Medium, Hard and Expert - I’m competing in the Hard category.  Winner of Expert gets an iPhone, Hard gets an Apple Touch and Medium gets an iPod.  Since the game is GH3, which I’ve played MAYBE a total of 3-4 hours since I got it, I’m not comfortable playing Expert. If it was GH2, I might consider it.  Having the iPhone as bait doesn’t help my decision, but I’m just not there yet on GH3.

Wish me luck!

Interesting tidbits about the tournament:

• The first few rounds are random selections from all songs, setlist and bonus tracks
• The semi-finals and championship songs will be selected by event staff (I predict crowd-pleasers such Stevie Ray Vaughn, Aerosmith, Metallica, Eric Johnson instead of the mostly-unknown crap that’s on GH3)
• It’s sponsored by a church
• The event staff can bump people up or down a level to prevent sandbagging (I’m hoping this doesn’t happen to me because some of these songs I can nail 99% but others I can barely get through)
• Caitlin (my 13yr old) and I are extremely disappointed that only 21 and over is allowed - I’m sure she can wipe most of the folks who would be there.  She’s spent a LOT of time with GH3 and has already finished expert on it, even getting 100% on a few of them (yeah, I know!)
• I’m very glad that they do not require costumes.

I really, and I mean REALLY like light traffic days.

Today marked the re-beginning of the school year, so it’s time to get the kids up early and, when possible, take Caitlin to school.  Jaden rides the bus to and from, and Caitlin can also, but she highly prefers to get to school 1 to 1.5 hours early to do her middle school stuff - who knows.  Friends, Band, some extra credit with the teachers - it’s her time, and I’m glad she has it.

But man oh man the drive actually, the drive isn’t so bad but it’s the traffic.

The blue line indicates my normal commute.  If I’m feeling especially frisky, I might take the toll road because although it’s longer, it’s always empty and I can go super freaky fast.

The red line indicates the drive to work when taking Caitlin to school.  It’s about 26 miles for the full trip.

Now to the point - on normal traffic days, I leave the house around 7:10 after Jaden gets on the bus.  If I take Caitlin to school I don’t get to work until 8:30 or 8:45.

Today, I got to work before 8.

And when I got to work and looked at my blackberry and saw the time, I could only think - “man, that’s 30-45 minutes of my day gone, every time I do this, due to traffic.” 

While I do maximize and enjoy the drive time for the most part - be it listening to talk radio, or an audiobook, or making phone calls and getting started on the day, checking voicemail, etc - it’s still half an hour.  Nonetheless, Caitlin says she really enjoys the time at school, plus we get that 20-25 mins together in the car on the way, and while we don’t solve world hunger or discover the cure for cancer, we get our alone time and that’s always important for a dad of a teenage daughter.

One really nice recent change is the location of the crosswalk in front of their school.  Take a look at this anatomically correct diagram:

The blue line is me driving to the school, as indicated by the yellow arrows.  The line that we used to have on the first yellow arrow (under the letters “ff” in traffic) was easily 20-30 cars deep every day for turning right.  Then I drop off Caitlin and have to come back and then turn left, and again waiting in about 20-30 cars worth of traffic.

The crossing guard USED to be where the #1 red line is shown.  Yes, that meant that all this traffic had to stop every other minute for all the kiddos crossing the street.  And then we had to stop AGAIN when we turned left out of the area.

Somebody was smart and moved the crosswalk to where the #2 red line is shown.  There is probably 5% as much traffic on this part of the intersection, but all the people can still walk where they need to go.  This seemed to cut down on 10 minutes of waiting just by itself.

I want to do a Miller commercial.  “Thank you, Mr Crosswalk Location Planning Guy.  You save a ton of people a few minutes a day, and someday you’ll get it back and be able to spend it retiring in Jamaica.”

Voting is on my mind because, well, I voted yesterday (yay me!).  So today I hear about these red-light cameras that our City Council is going to be considering.

Argh.  Red Light Cameras coming to Austin.  At least, they probably are.

Now, THIS is something that should be put to the public as a vote.  There is absolutely no incentive for the City Council to do what “the people” want.  In fact, as far as they’re concerned, the red light cameras mean the following things:

• More revenue for the City
• No impact to them personally (I’m sure they’re exempt from the tickets, or there’s some system that would stop them from getting it)
• More control
• Nobody votes, really, so it’s not like people will actually remember this the next time their term comes up.

Since when do politicians NOT choose something that gives them more money and more control?

From my perspective, this move means the following TO ME:

• A platform for more control by the Government later on.

Sure, NOW they just want to do speeding tickets.  But don’t you think more intrusions are going to come, maybe 5, 7 years down the road?  What’s to stop them from doing the following?

• Excuse me, is that a beer you’re drinking?
• Your inspection sticker is expired, maybe we should fine you now since we have you on camera. 
• Hey, that looks like a joint you’re smoking!
• That car seat doesn’t look buckled in…
• Your car has been spotted with 13 Mexicans, so we’ll assume they’re all illegal. 
• Your seat belt isn’t on, MISTER!
• Hmm, you’re normally across town at this time of day, but here you are downtown.  Why is that?  And who is that you’re with?  We’ve never logged you with that person before.
• You look stressed, like maybe you killed your wife.  We haven’t seen her on any cameras for the last 3 days.  Where is she?  Is everything ok?

Why isn’t this up for a vote?

Did you know that Austin’s bloggers rock? 

I set twitter to “track austin” which means it’ll notify me of any “tweets” that contain the word “Austin”.  It’s another one of those cool things twitter can do - keep up to date on specific topics, cities, things, people, etc.  I choose to get it sent to my AIM client instead of a ton of SMS messages, so it’s pretty passive.

I’ve seen some interesting stuff so far.  Here’s a little screenshot of what it looks like from AIM (Trillian)

As you can see from the topmost tweet - one of the items that popped up was a blog entry posting about Austin’s bloggers from a local blogger named Alex Jones.  (Note to self: check out twitterwhere… that sounds cool)

The article points to a Wired article about a new report from Scarborough about how Austin leads the pack in terms of percentage of people who read or write blogs.  We’re #1!  With 15% of residents either writing or commenting on blogs, Austin shows it’s got the technologically-enabled folks.  That number really does seem high when I think about it - that’s 1 in 6, right?  I would have thought half of that as the maximum to expect, so I’m pleasantly surprised.

I wish the report gave more detail on how many people they surveyed, what the responses were like, what the questions were, etc.  I just inherently distrust surveys that don’t disclose EVERYTHING.  Anything can be twisted and would rather have the facts so I can twist them myself.

Pop Quiz - What do these three things have in common?

I’ll let you mull it over a little.

*sips pepsi*

Ok, times up.  Here’s what they have in common:

Rockwell had it right when he pined out about people watching him.  I don’t know if I can even call them “people”.  (pun alert: Rock! Well, HAL Hitler!”

So, get this.  This morning on talk radio I heard about one of the radio’s employees having received a “survey” from TXDOT in the mail.  In this survey, it basically said

(paraphrase)

Our cameras caught you on I-10, west of San Antonio, within the last two weeks.  We want to know where you started, where you were going, what you were doing, who was with you, and how often you make this trip.

Whoa.

A few more callers called in and one reported that they saw the “camera crew”, with a van parked on an overpass and looked like they were monitoring three orange barrior barrels with holes cut out and cameras in them.

This “monitoring” is taxpayer-funded.  The Alliance Transportation Group (the company that TXDOT outsourced to for the survey) refuses to disclose who owns them.  $9 million is being spent on TXDOT counter-legislature advertising.  Who knows how much was spent on the cameras, crew, surveys, etc (and who they paid - I wonder if they’re “friends” of TXDOT or not). 

Austin is already full of cameras, as indicated by all the colored paths on this map:

You can click on the map and get digital snapshots. 

It won’t be long before you can see a live updated map, with GPS-enabled feeds of all the cars you own, and RSS-like alerts so you can see where your spouse is, your kids, your employees, your friends, your enemies.  But you can rest assured that our elected officials will be exempt from the tracking, because, um, that would thwart our national security. 

Hint: anything that Congress or our elected officials deem necessary for YOU but not for THEM (ie, taxes, speeding tickets, parking fees) is probably something you should be wary of.

Question of the day: what do YOU think about this survey?

If you ever need to take kids on a train in the Austin area, I’d recommend Austin Steam Train.  They always have something going on, from 2hr Storybook train rides for the young’ns to Murder Mysteries to full Hill country excursions with lunch and shopping rides to Burnet.

Jaden’s 5th birthday is coming up this Thursday, so his “party” was aboard one of these trains, where they read “The Little Engine That Could.”  They also had balloon clowns roaming the coach and lounge cars making aliens, spidermans, swords and all sorts of plastic magic for the kids.  Their schedule boasts a Harry Potter special later in the year, and of course they do a Polar Express special near Christmas.  I hear the XMAS Light special is a wonderful trip to see all sorts of great Christmas lights.