November 16, 2009
The largest graffiti in the world, courtesy the MTA Crew, is no more. It ran most of the length along the river "bank" between the 1st St. and 4th St. bridges. [more inside]
October 27, 2009
July 21, 2009
Are you ready for the Highball? Imagine that the Alamo Drafthouse expanded outside of movie related events. What else would the do? Bowling? Stand-alone food and drink? Karaoke? Pool and skeeball? A music venue? It seems they are doing just that. All of them. [more inside]
April 11, 2009
Infochimps.org a finalist in SxSW Pepsi Pitch Contest - Infochimps.org is a finalist for the Pepsi "What's Your Pitch?" contest! Pepsi is giving $4,500 to "a business idea that can be financially viable, and more importantly, also leave a positive impact on the world."
Please take a second to vote for our idea (make sure Infochimps is on the page and click the blue "Vote" button at the lower right). And then spam all of your friends to vote too.
[more inside]
February 16, 2009
Please tell me this was one of you guys.... If it was spelled Zmobie, I would have been SURE it was one of you guys.
January 20, 2009
I removed the Bush out of office countdown - it stopped working today. (Or maybe it finally worked. Not sure.) Also, twitter was slow. Was something going on?
December 11, 2008
Bookmarklet to re-request a journal article thru the UT Proxy
Apologies in advance to Non-UT people: if you don't have a current UT EID this is of no use to you. If you are at home and get the no yuo on a journal article, rather than do the the go-to-library-site-log-in-look-up-journal-in-catalog-find-again-on-journal-site dance, you can just paste
https://ezproxy.lib.utexas.edu/login?qurl=
in front of the URL and it generally does the Right Thing.
Here, because I love you, is a bookmarklet to do that (it also encodes the url, improving your chances of success):
UT Proxy
Drag that link to your bookmarks toolbar and then practice:
* dictionary.oed.com
* nature.com
Appending .ezproxy.lib.utexas.edu to the domain name often works too but I've found the query one above to be more robust.
November 11, 2008
ObLink | I made a few tiny site changes; you shouldn't notice any of them, and so if you do please let me know. The only major change is to the RSS Feed structure: the URL intro now shows, the title is more descriptive, and you may optionally include comments. (Comments are on by default -- resubscribe or complain if that fails to please.) The new toy I made for you is a per-user feed, for ease of stalking or more generally for piping into your facebooks.
Links to the site feed and to your personal feed are in the sidebar (under 'Syndicate', main page), and a link to any user's feed appears on their profile page. Those who know what "URL" means can just edit any of the following to suit:
- Specific user, posts only
- Specific user, posts + comments
- All users, posts only
- All users, posts + comments
October 04, 2008
MonoMetrorail
- Hell to the Yeah. I bet you think this is for commuters or people who want to save gas or something. You are wrong. It is for me to start bike rides from outside the city.
August 18, 2008
Yearbook Yourself - absolutely brilliant. See what your yearbook photo would have looked like in 1952, 1968, .... [via kottke] [more inside]
July 08, 2008
Kiva, Heifer -- following on the discussion of Bill Gates' philanthropy, it's worth noting that the long tail of piggy bank philanthropy well outweighs what the plutocrats plump in. I highly recommend Nick Kristof's article last week recounting the remarkable cascade effect direct giving to a well-chosen charity can have. Even if you aren't in a position to donate money, though, you're probably in a position to loan it (see inside).
The most appalling thing I saw while I was in Africa was the rice distribution center in Ethiopia [pic after the jump]. About a hundred people wait around for hours until the trucks come by to unload food; the cycle repeats. We're doing it all wrong -- these infantilizing handouts deter local food production, feed corruption and bureaucracy as much as they feed the indigent, incentivize (as you see) standing around for food rather than earning it, and gift food at a sustenance level but skills at a starvation level. It's the development equivalent of feeding tubes for a persistent vegetative state.
Continued... [more inside]
June 08, 2008
Arsonist sets fire to TX Governor's mansion - large parts of downtown blocked off. You can see the roof buckling in the article's photo. [more inside]
June 03, 2008
Austin PD wants to know what you think about traffic problems in Austin. [more inside]
May 29, 2008
May 24, 2008
Welcome to the World's Least User-Friendly Tumblog, author: we. The officially unofficial AE tradition for the "Mildly hmmmworthy but I don't want to make it a front-page post" has been to necromance some tangentially-related old thread with a comment at the bottom. As an experiment, here is a second option. We've stickied this post ("Quick Hits") for you to dump anything you'd like noted in passing below. Continue to front page post anything you want, and to keep doing the tangential-reply thing if there's a good match, but post here if you're too lazy or too nonlinear to find one. [more inside]
May 09, 2008
Google's Proposal for new Alkaline Earth topic categories - from their corporate "Web Security" app, a list of categories that can be blocked and/or logged. Other than 'Food' and 'Science', all of our current categories are on the list.
March 30, 2008
Google Maps' Street View comes to Austin
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Let the hunt for examples of Austin Weird-Keeping begin.
March 07, 2008
Infochimps.org - free redistributable datasets.
Exploring rich data is fun, but inding it, formatting it, tagging it with metadata is drudge work barely fit for a trained chimp. We need a site where you can find a century of hourly weather, every major league baseball game, decades of stock prices, or every US patent filing -- and where you can share back data you gather or enrich.
So here's infochimps.org, a community to assemble and interconnect a giant free almanac with tables on everything you can put in a table. Built by data nerds, used by data nerds, come find the information you need.
(This is the site I've been building the last few months. If the servers fling poo or you otherwise see something horribly broken please email me or post.) yay!
February 12, 2008
In anticipation, here's a thanks. Andy and I would love to move back to Austin and we've been looking for jobs. We were wondering if any of you Austin folks had any ideas on job opportunities or head hunters that could help us with the job search. I have some info on our skills inside. [more inside]
February 07, 2008
Our recent marathon "Insane Politics" thread got me wondering whether that had become our most-commented post yet. While waiting for some code to finish I jumped in and SQL'ed up the answer... [more inside]
What Chinese New Year is like in actual China. Yowza.
February 05, 2008
Vote for new Texas standard license plates. There are four new designs up for vote or you can choose the current design. New plates will be available in 2009.
January 23, 2008
I've been really enjoying this cleverly-named blog, "Little Trouble in Big China" -- the adventures of a brave young lady who has moved to China, mostly for the adventure of it. She reports on issues like "can I watch Terps basketball in my apartment" (yes) and "Things You Don't See Every Day (But I Might)" (mittened scooters, 20 foot flagpoles transported by bike)