It's been a while since I've been so completely and totally hardcore-ignored at a restaurant in Austin. I was picking up a motorcycle from my buddy's shop today, and decided to stop at Hill's Cafe on South Congress for lunch. It was after the lunch rush, so they weren't crazy busy, and were probably starting to go on breaks or whatever. But even the hostess seemed kind of hacked at me for some reason. She seemed miffed that it was only me that wanted to eat today. She sat me in the frontish area with the small booths, and then I proceeded to remember that oh yeah, Hill's, for all of its good foods and Austin flavor, doesn't have anything remotely resembling a vegetarian anything, except their sides plate, 90% of which is probably AS bad or worse than a burger. That's okay, it's been a while since I had a big ole Tex-mex Burger from there. What the hell. After 5 minutes or so of reading the menu, and 10 minutes of trying to garner ANY passing waitstaff's attention, I finally had to get up and ask if there was anyone that was waiting on my table, to which they answered "I'm not sure, let me go check..." and they too promptly disappeared. After 5 more minutes, I gave up and left. Thought about complaining to someone, but all that was going to do was make me more angry, and I still wasn't going to get my food in time to get my bike and get back to my office.

I should have stopped at Opal's. At least people THERE like me enough to serve me still ;) Or at least they did... maybe I shouldn't test that theory today, since I obviously have my "No Service" karma turned on today. The lady at Wendy's was nice to me, even when I asked for a side salad instead of fries with my chicken thingy on a bun.

I just bound the very very very first edition of my book. It's just one of those springy binder things, but it's still kind of cool to see MY BOOK in something approaching book form. Will take it to bike night tonight and float it around and see if people like it.

Dear City of Austin:
I am sure that you are far wiser than I am, and understand a great many things about proper traffic flow, reasonable numbers of parking spaces, city ordinances, and all this manner of thing. However, I would like to take umbrage with your closing of city pools before August is even over. While I know that the children are returning to school, and that demand will drop significantly, it is still over 100 degrees out, and will continue to be over 90 well through September. It is shameful(and confusing) that even the large public pool near my house is still open, but only from 11:30am to 1:30pm, and then 5:30pm to 7:30pm for swim lessons. Oh, and suddenly you're going to charge me $2 for using a pool that is normally free for my use as a taxpayer? This seems very odd to me.

I would be a regular swim-patron at your other fine Municipal pools, but they cost $4 unless I want to get to Barton Springs before 9am, at which time, I am usually trying to get to work, not go swim.

- A Frustrated Swimmy Monkey

Imagine being an Iranian-onaut(one wonders what they'll be called, besides "The Late" something something). Iran officially announced their intentions to put a man in space in the next ten years, after sort of almost kinda making a rocket into orbit this week. And they PROMISE they are NOT planning to use any of this orbital guided rocket stuff to launch nuclear warheads at people. Riiiigght.

Now I understand why I've never learned Javascript(well, REALLY learned it). It's a COMPLETE pain in the ass, is tough to debug, and will never tell you when it's broken without a lot of third-party helper apps that will "take a guess" at whether something is right. Blech.

I keep reading stuff like all the recent "Javascript is finally ready" smarm on the blogosphere. Even with dojo and scriptaculous and whatnot, I'm still saying it's a scripting language in a tiny sandbox, and that there should be a MUCH better standard for Ajax-like behavior than Javascript. It's just terrible to deal with, and slows my productivity down.

Oh... my... gawd... these are TOTAL workplace safety GOLD! Check out some of these AWESOME-O stickers:
http://tinyurl.com/67asav

I use an application called Adium for my mac that basically assembles all of the blogs I like to read in one place, like Bloglines, or so many others. This is good, in many ways, because I don't have to wait for each page to refresh, or anything else, and I'm not generally bombarded by blinking/vibrating ads and such.

However, to the end of the blinky flashy advertisements, many blogs, especially big corporate ones, are going to a model where I get the headline, and maybe the first two or three lines of info or a summary, and then I have to go visit their site to get the rest.

This is better than sifting through each site individually, but still annoying. The whole point of an aggregator is that I don't have to leave my environment that I like. The whole point of rss feeds is to provide the data and the information, and now all it's doing is providing lures into their sites a lot of the time, which is almost ideal for them.

Grr.

I think my favorite mechanical pencil is dying. I've only had it since about 1992... and it's been continually repaired where it breaks at the joint of the grip and the body. A KOH-I-NOOR Rapidomatic 0.5mm. It's done a lot of physics homework, drawn a lot of electrical diagrams, and written a LOT of software schematics.

The new ones aren't as good. They're $10 when you can find them, but they made the grip less pleasing, and more slick. I suppose I could retrofit it onto a new one. There's an awfully nice Rotring 600 Series 1 0.5mm on ebay that has the style of grip that I like... it's unfortunately $90, which is a little silly, even though it solves the problem that my Koh has, which is a plastic body that cracks easily(the Rotring is brass).

*le sigh* So many toys...

So I'm driving to work this morning, North on Mopac, and just pass the 360 intersection. I notice a slow moving Prius in the left lane. I move to the right. He is passing an even SLOWER Prius. I move over. A THIRD EFFING PRIUS moves from the entrance ramp and proceeds to match the speed of the second Prius. For a moment, the entire highway was blocked by three different Priussesess(Prii?) in three different colors. That was a bit odd. Thankfully, they have absolutely NO drive from 60mph, so dropping two gears and blowing by them on the remainder of the entrance ramp was not an issue.

Am I the only one that's amused by the number of people who seem visibly embarrassed by the ringer on their phone? I was getting a breakfast taco this morning, and a meter maid was paying, and her ringer went off with some bad hip-hop song. Her hands were full, so she couldn't turn it off quickly, and it went on and on. I can't decide if it's like riding in elevators, where you "try" to appear not to be listening to anyone else's conversation, but always do with great intent, or what. Are we becoming socialized to the ways of people's annoying ringtones such that we won't turn them off/down, but we will look embarrassed instead?