End of Silence

I posted a couple of weeks ago that I’d lost one of the little marvels of technology that brightened my day when the Austin Public Library upgraded to a new online catalog.

Last night, I tried to access the catalog to double-check the due date on my latest read. Attempts to login to my account resulted in a “Unable to create socket: errno = 24”. After e-mailing the library about this, they translated the error from computer to english. Apparently, it meant

The catalog was down from 9:00 pm last night until almost 8:00 am this morning. It was necessary to run a full back up of the system because of changes to the server done over the weekend. Please try again today.
We regret the inconvenience.

That’s cool, although figuring out a way to have that message displayed on the site as opposed to the one I got would be even cooler. Since I was e-mailing them anyway, I offhandedly mentioned the broken Library Lookup and pointed them to a couple of links, asking if they could perhaps fix it?

I was pleasantly surprised this morning to get an e-mail from Carlos, APL Web Developer Extraordinaire. He’s fixed what I couldn’t pull off on my own (I was missing an extra “/x” in my attempt.) and I’m very happy to report that the LibraryLookup is functioning again. He even created a page for it with some instructions on the APL site. How cool is that?

Carlos, I’m telling Toby Futrell here and now that you deserve a raise. You rock.

Last night at 8pm, there was a pillow fight at Auditorium Shores. These have been popping up in other cities over the past year or so. Austinist links to the recap with some cool footage from the Statesman of people smacking each other with pillows backlit by the lightning from the storm that passed through around the same time. Sadly, I had band practice, so I missed out.

P.S. Our own, wae got a shot of the storm.

UT professor, Eric R. Pianka, and the Texas Academy of Science have apparently become targets of the unhinged.

Pianka was named 2006 Distiguished Scientist by the Academy last month at their annual meeting in Beaumont. He gave a speech as part of that conference, Forrest Mims “reported” parts of the speech, and it’s touched off a frenzy on the Internets. Pianka, as part of his lectures on ecology dating at least as far back as 1998, mentions that people are destroying the earth’s ecology and that a particularly effective solution to this problem might be releasing Ebola Reston to wipe out 90% of the world’s population.

I checked this out yesterday via Armadillo Podcast and blew it off after reading a few links, including this post. Not surprisingly, the poor girl who wrote is has come under attack herself in the comments. DKos reports on some nasty e-mails and death threats going to academy members. The Seguin Gazette has a decent report on the controversy. I’ll note that they had to change the URL to accommodate the number of hits they’re getting. It’s even more interesting that they’ve named the page “drudge”. I’ll assume in reference to Drudge Report.

I’ve got a problem with Mims because he’s the one who set this in motion. He’s claiming to be “reporting” on the speech and yet he’s clearly biased. He refers to e-mail exchanges with Pianka, but doesn’t supply the e-mails.
KXAN has more on the story. It’d be nice to have a transcript of the speech, but it’s clear that this isn’t a new topic for Pianka. It’s just been subjected to wider scrutiny. Do I believe that his ideas are a theoretical exercise taken to the extreme? Yes. Do I think he’s advocating it for real and worry that someone in his lectures may act on it? No. I’m glad to see UT is standing behind him.

Update (5:30PM CDT): This story continues to generate a lot of posting and it all appears to be framing itself out in a creationist vs. evolutionist feud. Sheesh.

Andrew Sullivan weighs in without a leg to stand on and is subsequently corrected. More from here and, of course, Pharyngula is all over it.

All the national press last week about the TABC crackdown in bars is following the inevitable progression. Of course, the bars, restaurants and tourism boards went running to the Lege as they saw dollars exiting Texas for more permissive pastures. We can’t have any irresponsible drinking in bars unless it affects the tourism dollars and tax base, so I guess it’s ok again. There’s a hearing between TABC and The House Licensing and Administrative Procedures Committee on April 17th about the issue. The question now is what the TABC will decide to do next with that extra funding and people that it got last summer, but now probably can’t use cracking down on people in bars. I’m sure they’ll find some other parade to rain on.

I didn’t link it last time, but Kelso had a mildly amusing take on the whole thing.

You’ll want to avoid South Congress between Town Lake and Oltorf this weekend unless you’re attending the Lone Star Rod & Kustom Round-Up. Steve Wertheimer’s Contintental Club will be ground zero. Trophy’s has got a good looking show tonight with Grady and Honky for $10 as part of the festivities. I’d point you to their site, but it appears to be offline. The Google cached version has my band as the last night listed back in November. I swear we didn’t have anything to do with it.

Speaking of my band, I’ll shamelessly plug our in-store performance at End of an Ear tomorrow at 6pm in celebration of the release of our new CD on Mortville Records. If anything, it’s not on South Congress, but I’ll probably head over that way afterwards to check out the Bloody Tears and Red Light Burlesque at Continental Club. We played a part in the festivities at FlyRite Choppers last year.