I’m starting a little hosting business on the side. If you sign up for an account now, you’ll get free setup with your second month free. In all honesty, it’s a good deal. Check out everything here. Also, check out the site and tell me if everything is working okay.
Personal
20
Jun 04
Austin’s Diner
Jody and I met Sab this morning for brunch at Austin’s Diner, formerly Laura’s Bluebonnet Kitchen over on Burnet Road near the Arby’s. It was a great, cheap breakfast, and the hipster element was in full bloom: bedhead, vintage t-shirts, and tattoos everywhere. They had the place decorated nicely with old appliances and dishes. One wall had old chrome toasters hanging on the wall and there was a rolling pin hanging near the cash register.
The food was great. I had biscuits and sausage gravy with a sausage, potato, and egg breakfast taco on the side. All topped off with a cup of diner-style coffee; watery and acidic but I cut it with copious amounts of sugar and cream from the silver flappy cup. Ting.
Everything was nice and peppery, just like homemade. I had some of Jody’s homefries which she reported as tasting just like the ones her grandpa used to cook up, buttery and not cooked too much or too little. Everything was served on diner china from many different patterns.
The best part? The price. All this tasty food set us back to the tune of eighteen bucks for three people. It’s the flea’s eyebrows.
13
Jun 04
Went to Mozart’s
Today after sleeping off and on until 5pm (not feeling it) I went to Mozart’s Coffee House over on Lake Austin to suck up the coffee and free WiFi while I worked on the materials for my interview this week for a ‘world-building’ position on the design team for one of our games at work. There is a lot of competition. Almost everyone in my department applied for the position, although it is not clear how many received the go ahead for the interview process. I am told not everyone who submitted a resume will be interviewed, but luckily I made it to the next round. Somehow I seem to have enough talent to usually make it past the weedout rounds. Such was the case at UT, although I obviously did not get the job there that I had hoped for. I imagine one out of every three to four people who applied will be interviewed. This is just a guess. Hopefully, it will not result in any bad blood. The important thing is to stay confident and work my ass off to show them I have the drive and capability to do the job. I will have to channel the rainmaker. Hopefully, I will have some good news later this week or next week.
13
Jun 04
Maybe it’s time to leave Austin
Are there cities where everyone is old? Driving down near campus and realizing that all the skinny young college kids are almost ten years younger than you is just plain cruel. By the way, as if there were any doubt, I’m totally out of touch. The 70’s and 80’s have been completely resurrected culture-wise. Why does pop culture have to be so derivative? (Exhibit A.) That seems to be another torture devised for anyone over 25.
On an unrelated note, Are you ghettofabulous or not? via Gawker.
12
Jun 04
Brown-out
This old place is plagued by brown-outs. Any time it’s just the least bit nasty outside the power hiccups for a split-second and down go all the clocks and computers, all appliances flashing midnight. During the last bout a few hours ago I was in the middle of writing down another one of my navel-gazing, micro-epiphanies for this humble website. Losing everything I wrote didn’t bug me so much since I was writing on a subject I’ve almost got beat to death…me, and how I fit into the universe. It was specifically about fear, security, and habit. It’s not that what I was writing was bad or boring, just that I knew I didn’t have to worry about covering the same ground again later.
The thing that is bothering me is that my computer doesn’t want to boot up completely. It gets to a certain point and seems to just black out again. That’s frustrating, but I don’t have time to dick around with it now.
I’ve been reading The Prince of Tides off and on all day today. When I have a book that grabs me I will keep a vigil of reading until I finish it. I did finish it, twenty minutes ago. When I finished reading, I closed the book and sat there for a while feeling all the emotions and people I had experienced in some small way, feeling also a mixture of happiness and longing. When you get involved in a story that touches you down deep, a part of you hopes that the story and characters are somehow real because then everything can live on even after the small part you shared has been played out. Realizing that the story was created by another person diminishes its magic.
This may sound arrogant and overly exhuberant, but I think this is the book the more talented version of myself would write. So many feelings about childhood, love, and family rang true. This is the kind of book I would give to someone who wanted to understand me better. I have rarely felt so much like an author has captured so much of the person I am. In many places I felt like it would be impossible for the author to fabricate these experiences he was describing because they reminded me so perfectly of insights and experiences from my own life. So much so that I would have been able to detect the slightest hint of artifice. It’s amazing to me that powerful books have this knack of coming along just when you needed them.
11
Jun 04
Hotlink protection
I changed a little something in my server settings so that now those Dutch people who keep hotlinking my images for their forum avatars will get a gay porn image instead. I made sure to heavily pixelate the naughty bits, but you can still tell what’s going on. I added a message as well. “HOTLINKING SUCKS STOP STEALING MY BANDWIDTH”.
Basically, if anyone tries to link to my images remotely (hotlink) so that it is using my bandwidth to decorate their page they will be redirected to this other image. If anyone notices anything weird caused by this please let me know. It should only disallow direct linking to my images in IMG tags from domains other than this one. People can still save anything I use here, but if they want to use it on their website they should save a copy to their server.
11
Jun 04
Nearby wireless access points
There is Seattle’s Best Coffee on Bee Caves where I’m at now. It’s a Starbucks pretender, but their main color is red instead of the Starbucks green. See, that’s how opposite they are.
The WiFi is free and the coffee is so-so. This particular location is way too small without enough wall outlets to leech electricity off of.
11
Jun 04
Unfilled notebooks
I buy a number of things based solely on my intentions for them. Today I bought a small, pocket-sized, quadrille-lined notebook, Moleskine (Mol-skin-a), to write down ideas and keep track of things. This is despite the fact that I have at least 2-3 other half-filled pocket sized notebooks. The Moleskine has some features that make it different: an elastic band to keep the book closed, a cloth ribbon to mark your place, and a hidden pocket on the back inside cover. They run about 10$ for the pocket sized ones, and you can buy them at most book stores. See the different styles here.
11
Jun 04
Backwards, forwards, and remember, the middle spot is a freebie
It’s amazing what you can do in one night if you don’t try. After work Jody and I went to eat at Rosie’s Tamale House for dinner. Afterward we didn’t have any plans until she suggested Bingo and being the stick in the mud I am I had to let the idea sink in a while before I wanted to do it since I have a difficult time trying new things. Now you know I had played the game Bingo when I was a kid, but I had never been to a Bingo hall. I had a blast even though we only got there in time for two games. There were all kinds of people there, of all races, classes, ages, and types. Little old ladies with ziplocs full of ink dobbers, sun-darkened guys with blurred tattoos smoking and looking tired, groups of college kids drinking Coors Light from a case they brought, people who looked like they just came from work, just a cross-section of society though I’d imagine most of the people there were lower to lower-middle class.