Metroblogging will have a meetup during SXSWi this year.
Here’s the details:
Where: Rio Rita – 1308 East Sixth Street
When: Sunday, March 9th at 5pm
Authors from Austin and several of the other Metroblogging cities will be in attendance including Houston, Minneapolis, San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Hope to see you there.
That power outage in East Austin yesterday?
Yeah, some genius was trying to steal copper wire from an electrical substation and shocked himself so badly that he actually set himself on fire. They sent him to the renowned Brooke Army Medical Center burn unit in San Antonio. Things don’t look good for him. Darwin Award, anyone?
What’s up with this copper wiring craziness? My mother-in-law had an entire AC unit stolen from her house for the copper wiring. I realize that the price of copper has gone up, but geez.
Last year, The Wife and Kids got up extra early for a Cowboy Breakfast at Auditorium Shores. The Cowboy Breakfast is the traditional opener of the Star of Texas Fair and Rodeo. I opted to sleep in and miss it, but the reports from the family afterwords made me sorry I missed it. An Austin Chronicle article from 2005 does a pretty good job of describing it.
This year’s Cowboy Breakfast is this Friday from 6am to 9am. You can park at Palmer Events Center. I’ll see you there.
If you missed your chance last week, you’ll get another one tomorrow. 600 more SXSW Music wristbands will go on sale between 12pm and 7pm or until they sell out.
They’re $139.
Starbucks locations around the country will close today at 5:30pm local time and remain closed until 8:30pm to undergo some sort of barista re-training. There’s speculation that this may have something to do with the AT&T / iPhone deals that have been announced over the past year.
Though they claim to be doing it for other reasons, Dunkin Donuts is offering a 99 cent small latte, cappucino or espresso from 1pm to 10pm today as well. Since there’s only one Dunkin Donuts location in Austin (183 between Duval and McNeil on the south side of 183, 258-6560) and eleventy bazillion Starbucks locations (well, 40 or so), I’m guessing not too many people will take advantage of this….and you’re an outright caffeine fiend if you’re craving a latte between 5:30 and 8:30 in the evening, but who am I to judge?
On a somewhat related note, I caught the Sundance Channel show, Iconoclasts, for the first time a couple of weeks ago and it happened to feature Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz with Norman Lear. They pair two celebrities and draw parallels between their careers. The show is currently in its third season. Some of the pairings are downright strange.
Now where’s my coffee cup?
The Austin Music Awards this year will be on March 12th at the Austin Music Hall. The big news, at least as far as I’m concerned, is that it’ll feature the reunited Judy’s. Tickets went on sale this past Tuesday at Waterloo Records ($15 advance, $20 the day of the show). If I wasn’t already playing that night, I’d be at this show.
Washarama was a staple of the first few years of high school in the mid-80s along with The Big Boys’ Where’s My Towel. We loved them because they were awesome and they were from Texas, dammit.
Scott Heim’s third novel, We Disappear, will be released this Tuesday. I met Scott at KGB in NYC just after his first novel, Mysterious Skin was published and we’ve kept up a correspondence over the years. His novels have always included some autobiographical elements, but We Disappear, a novel he’s been working on for the past ten years, morphed into a kind of fictionalization of the rougher spots of that time period including a bout with crystal meth and the death of his mother. Scott’s linked a couple of reviews on his blog. If you order from Amazon before it’s released, you get an extra 5% discount. So get going!
[tags]scottheim, book, wedisappear, harpercollins, fiction, novel[/tags]
After the pilot program of two red light cameras on the I-35 frontage road last year, the Austin City Council gave the go ahead for red light cameras.
Today, they announced nine intersections that will have red light cameras installed in April and will be functional by May 1.
The nine intersections are:
Personally, I only ever pass through #1, 2, 3 and sometimes 5. #1’s always a mess, but I don’t see very many people running it and I’ve never seen an accident there. #2 and 3 have accidents. I know I’m sometimes coming westbound off Ben White to northbound Lamar and cross three lanes to get to the right merge lane to head north. It’s always fun to beat the northbound Lamar traffic. I never go through #8 and 9, but that intersection’s a nightmare.
Cameras aren’t the answer, but they need to do something about the Braker, Mopac, 360 clusterfsck in the evenings. There are accidents on Braker between Mopac and 183 all the time, mostly the westbound traffic.
Here’s part three of the transcript along with some photos I took along the way.
Here’s part two of the transcript and another photo (the candidates and the President of UT). I’ll have photos from the media room later tonight.