Jun 262002
 

A couple of random notes:

What’s with all of these accounting scandals lately? It seems like the dot-com insanity has had an effect on accounting practices in other booming industries from the same time period. With all the emphasis on stock performance, it looks like Worldcom decided not to report several billion dollars in expenses. Oops. I wonder if I should be worried about my long distance service? We contracted Worldcom to get us T1 service when I was at Furnitureshow. After the nightmare that we went through with that, I’m not at all surprised that the company was being run poorly. I wonder how many more of these are going to come out. It’s really a shame. Thousands more are going to get laid off because of this. You trust that the execs are doing their job and then they screw you.

On a happier note, barring any unforeseen changes in opinion, I think we’ve come up with a name for our impending arrival. Are you ready? Here it is:

Lily Yayeri Trentham

What do you think? We’ve gotten pretty good feedback so far. Lily is just a name we both like. It doesn’t have any family significance. I’m also not sure if that’s the spelling that we’re going with (Lili, perhaps?). Also not definite that it’s going to be the shortened form, perhaps it’ll be Lillian and we’ll just use the shortened version. The middle name isn’t set in stone yet either. Yayeri was The Wife’s middle name before we were married. She now has her maiden name as her middle name. It’s also her grandmother’s name. I like the idea because it keeps up the tradition that started with The Boy of having a Ugandan middle name. I’m sure you’ll all have your own opinions…

 Posted by on June 26, 2002 at 6:39 pm
Jun 212002
 

I was just having lunch at Cafe Mia on Far West and happened to see Calan Thurow there. (For the blissfully unaware, Cistercian is the name of my high school.) He was with some other guy with glasses, long hair and a wispy goatee, looked like a programmer. I spared both of us the awkward small talk and didn’t say anything to him. I don’t think he recognized me anyway. I can’t even remember if he was two years behind me or three.

He’s put on some weight (not that I’ve avoided that myself) and the baldness fairy has been considerably less kind to him than to me. I never really knew him in school, but I’ll remain forever grateful to his dad. His joke of a government class saved me from two mind-numbingly boring semesters of government at UT.

For those of you that didn’t know, I played in a band with Jason Temple for most of ’96 and part of ’97. Other than that, I haven’t had too much contact with Cistercianers since graduating from UT, even my own classmates. Funny how you grow apart over time. Might be an interesting exercise to have some sort of alum meeting place here on thechunk.com, even if it’s just my class. Something to consider…

 Posted by on June 21, 2002 at 10:44 pm
Jun 202002
 

I managed to get decent tickets to the Tool/Tomahawk show ($43 apiece, ouch), although they aren’t nearly as good as the ones we got through Ticketmaster for the show in San Antonio last year. The only thing that I have to say about the experience is that TexasBoxOffice.com and the site that they use for transactions need to upgrade their service. It couldn’t handle the rabid Tool fans trying to get tickets Saturday morning. I had to wait minutes for pages to come up and was often greeted with “Server not available” and various other error messages.

There’s a lot of news this week on deep linking. For those of you that are unfamiliar, this is the practice of linking past the home page of a site. The Dallas Morning News has claimed that it violates their policy. (I might add that in getting the links for this, I was assaulted by the most annoying popup ad yet. When you shift focus to it, it moves around the screen, making it difficult to close it. It eventually settles in the middle of the page. After making the point in this posting, I’ll never link to their site again. If they’re going to keep that up, they won’t have to worry about people deep linking them anymore.) More shockingly, it came out yesterday that N P R has a policy of requiring you to ask permission before linking to them. Of course, policies like those of the Dallas Morning News and N P R are utterly silly and have already been struck down when legally challenged. As an avid listener to N P R, I’m appalled.

In other news, allow me to point you to this article on evolution vs. creationism.

 Posted by on June 20, 2002 at 6:12 pm
Jun 142002
 

I’m bummed. I just got word that Paul Tatara will no longer be writing movie reviews for the foreseeable future. He’s calling it quits with CNN. Go check out his farewell letter on his page. He’ll write two more reviews and that’s it. This really sucks as he is my favorite movie critic.

On the other hand, Tool is coming to Austin with Tomahawk. I’ve already seen both bands in the past year, but I’m not passing up this chance. If you’re in the area (or they’re coming to your town), you shouldn’t either. Tickets go on sale this Saturday.

 Posted by on June 14, 2002 at 1:53 am
May 292002
 

Today, I offer up two articles out of New York.

The first is a truly engrossing account from the NY Times (free registration required) of what went on in the World Trade Center before and during the plane crashes on 09.11. It’s emotionally difficult to read at times, but it really gives a more human face to the events that are slowly fading from all our minds. It definitely made it much more real for me.

The second is a more light-hearted story from the Village Voice. It highlights some of the more ridiculous laws in Texas. I’m waiting for a more rebellious Austinite to re-fit one of the ubiquitous pickup shotgun racks to hold the apparently much more illicit (at least according to Texas state law) devices mentioned in the article. Now that would be amusing…

 Posted by on May 29, 2002 at 10:31 pm
May 292002
 

Here’s a pretty interesting article on why we like the books that we do. The article seems to lose focus part of the way through, but he does bring up some interesting points. I can’t get through “The Sound and the Fury” and I found “Turn of the Screw” excruciating, although I did actually finish it.

 Posted by on May 29, 2002 at 2:02 am
May 162002
 

Well, it’s started again and the reviews are pouring in. This is a perfect segue to get you to check out the Paul Tatara movie review page that I’ve set up. There’s now a recent reviews section that includes a link to his review of AoTC. There’s also an interesting article in today’s Austin American Statesman (imagine that!) about the Star Wars saga in general. I tend to agree with the guy. Since I probably won’t see it for a few more weeks (I’m just getting to see Spider-Man tonight), I’ve given up all hope of avoiding spoilers.

 Posted by on May 16, 2002 at 11:10 pm