Following on my StoryCorps post, KUT reported this morning that the first half of the slots for the Austin booth filled up in nine minutes yesterday, which is apparently the fastest any of the booths has been booked. I was a dumbass and forgot to do it. If you forgot too, another set of slots will open up on April 7th at 10am. You’d better be fast though.
If you listen to 101X at all, you’ve been hearing promos from the relatively new program director, Lawless. They had a poll on their home page up until today asking for music preferences and other input. I filled it out, but since I lamely waited until today tp post about it, you can’t see for yourself. I was going to give them shit for asking a question that expected a single response, but allowed multiple (side effect of being a geek who worked at a market research firm), but I missed my chance. They do still have a link on the site to call or e-mail, so I included it as well.
I’ve been spending more time than usual with them this week because it was fund drive week on KUT and we all know how much fun that is. 101X seems to be paying attention to it or at least making an attempt. I heard “God Save the Queen” on either Monday or Tuesday morning and then “Losing My Religion” was on Tuesday morning. I know it’s not that much of a stretch, but at least it’s not playing Fall Out Boy over and over again. Lawless was at KNAC KNNC, arguably KROX’s predecessor from the early 90’s. He replaced Melody Lee, who also worked at KNAC KNNC and took off at the end of last year for greener pastures.
StoryCorps is coming to Austin for a stay from 4/6 – 4/30. It’s a partnership between NPR and the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. The idea is to preserve oral histories of Americans through interviews recorded in the booths. There’s a suggested donation of $10. You take an hour to record an interview with someone whose story you’d like to preserve. At the end, you get a CD for yourself and the interview will be added to all of the other StoryCorps interviews and archived at the Library of Congress.
This is the perfect opportunity to get stories out of your grandparents and get them on record. Very cool. I really regret not having done this with my grandparents. I wish the few remaining relatives that I do have from the WW II generation lived locally because I’d have them over there in a heartbeat. As it is, I’m signing up for something anyway.
You can reserve a spot to record your own interview starting tomorrow morning at 10am.
You can’t just want to sit on the dais to satisfy your ego. It takes a lot of strength, and it will take a lot out of you. You need to mean business. But now is the perfect time for me to do this and be of service, as a leader, to the city I love. My methodology, my way of doing business, is exactly what Austin needs right now.
Or not.
As any colleagues in the business can tell you, keeping a restaurant as successful as ours for 27 years is hard, but we have done it. The problem was with my poor financial dealings.
The Austin School Board met last night to determine the fate of Becker Elementary. The result? A tie. The board voted on one of several plans last night. The tie vote was on the plan to close Becker and keep Oak Springs open. I’m not sure how they decided on which plan to vote for in the end. I’d check the meeting minutes, but they appear to be about three months behind on posting them.
The tie vote gives the Becker parents and the Bouldin Creek Neighborhood Association more time to plead their case to keep Becker open. According to the Statesman, there’ll be another vote, but it’s not clear when that will occur. Apparently, turning Becker into an in-district charter school has also been suggested.
We currently live in the neighborhood of an underperforming, overcrowded AISD elementary school and have spent the last few years trying out charter schools as an alternative with mixed results. We were in the process of examining several schools in AISD as transfer options, including Becker, when the announcement of the possible closings removed it from our short list of candidates for next year. My wife was very impressed with the principal. We think we’ve settled on a viable alternative, but it shouldn’t be this hard. We should be able to just send our kid to the local school and not have to worry about whether or not that school is substandard. How can we expect people to move into the center of the city if we’re not going to offer them an attractive option for educating their kids?
My parents sent me to private schools for elementary, middle and high school in Dallas and my wife is used to a much higher standard coming from Virginia public schools around the Washington DC area. Not paying any attention to all the school finance reform talk in the legislature? Well, maybe you should. This isn’t just an issue for those who currently have kids either. All you UT students who think Austin is a great place to live and might consider settling here? I’m you in 10 years. If you get started now, maybe it won’t suck so bad when your kid is ready to attend school.
Here’s a roundup of articles from the Chronicle, including the cover story from February:
Here’s an earlier posting from M.J.L Kellogg on the school shuffle.
I noted my annoyance at the old online catalog for APL earlier this year. The catalog no longer keeps banker’s hours, which is nice, but the new catalog breaks my LibraryLookup bookmarklet and the extensive research (10 minutes) that I spent trying to see if I could get it to work were for naught. Anybody else tried getting Jon Udell’s glorious hack to work with this particular brand of online catalog? Am I going to have to go back to doing searches by hand? The horror. I wish I’d realized that this was broken last week as I had a meeting that included the librarian for my local branch of APL. I need to send her an e-mail anyway, now I have two reasons.
P.S. My research led me to the interesting little tidbit that Jon Udell was a panellist at SXSW 2004 on the merits of his cool little hack. I’m sorry I missed out on that one.
I saw this yesterday, had a post all ready to go on it and then dropped it. Well, it’s shown up all over the place today, so I guess I should’ve posted it after all.
Continue reading »
I was making the usual rounds on my feeds today and a local software company started popping up over and over again.
I checked out their web site and, lo and behold, we’re neighbors! I strolled by during lunch and took a shot of their sign. They’ve got better deck chairs on their balcony than we do. Now I guess I know why.
Update: TPM comes up with a list of investors.
Saturday consisted of trying to meet some friends at Japanese Night at Elysium. You’d think I would’ve learned my lesson after seeing Dir En Grey the night before, but I guess I’m a glutton for punishment. This time, though, I was pleasantly surprised even though I never did find the people I was trying to meet.
I walked in on PE’Z, a japanese jazz band who call themselves “samurai jazz”. They were really good. Their style was in a hard bop vein and they were very tight. The band is a quintet with trumpet, sax, upright bass, drums and keyboard. The keyboard player was the most interesting member of the bunch. He was dressed in a tracksuit and hat that made him look like a small and thin LL Cool J. On the more frenetic pieces, he’d hunch low over the keyboard and go nuts with his fingers. He stood the entire set and would straighten up on the slower parts. They were great and I’m regretting not picking up one of their CDs while I was there. They were the discovery of the weekend from all that I saw over SXSW. An article I found on the japanese bands at SXSW says many of the bands from Japan Night are touring other parts of the country for the rest of the month. I definitely recommend checking out PE’Z although I’m still not sure how to pronounce their name.
I headed over to Emo’s after that to see Hellacopters. Since I wasn’t sure how difficult it would be to get in, I went pretty early. I had to wait roughly ten minutes before I was admitted, even with a badge. I got in just in time to see the Riverboat Gamblers do their last two songs. Good stuff. Lots of stage-diving and energy. No big deal missing that performance as you can see them pretty easily here in Austin. The place cleared out considerably once they finished, so I could’ve waited ten minutes somewhere else and just waltzed in. Riverboat Gamblers were followed by Nebula, who apparently have one of the ex-members of Fu Manchu in their ranks. They were ok, but I wasn’t all that impressed. Hellacopters were up after them. I noticed David Fricke from Rolling Stone come in with Raoul Hernandez from the Chronicle a little before the Hellacopters. Hellacopters were pretty good. They didn’t blow me away or anything. One song, “Better Than You”, stood out from the set that I heard. It had an amazing dual guitar solo. I left a few songs before they finished.