March 19th, 2009, No Comments »
Today we drove into Wimberley, Texas for lunch. On the way there, we spotted what appeared to be a freshly killed deer on the side of the road. A group of turkey vultures had begun to have a lunch of their own.
About two hours later we returned on the same road (Wimberley was lovely, incidentally), and I snapped this photo (click for super-sized bird action):
I was surprised that, in the ensuing two hours, they hadn’t made a bigger visible dent in the remains.
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March 19th, 2009, 3 Comments »
We’re spending a couple of nights out in rural Texas–the so-called Hill Country–at the Inn Above Onion Creek. It’s this charming country inn with about eight rooms on 100 acres of rolling country. I went for a really nice walk this morning with the very spry three-legged dog that lives here. Part of it passed through a deciduous forest, which is a rare site for a west coaster like myself.
The Inn itself is comprised of a couple of large buildings and some outlying cabins. To the uneducated eye, they look like they’ve been on the property for at least a hundred years. In fact, it’s fairly new, but uses a tremendous amount of reclaimed materials. The doors, floorboards, fixtures and furniture all appear to date back to the early part of the century or earlier.
Here’s an unflattering photo of our room. It doesn’t convey any of the space’s charms. I find it hard to take good, truthful photos of interior spaces–but you can see that it’s full of period detail:
I wouldn’t claim that it’s a heritage building, but the aesthetic does kind of beg the question ‘what makes a house old?’ How much of a house must be ‘original’ for us to, informally, declare it a heritage building?
I’m reminded of the building that houses the Victoria Art Gallery, which is an odd chimera of a 19th century mansion, a modernist expansion in the fifties and a renovation a few years ago. Is still an old house?
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March 11th, 2009, 1 Comment »
We’re shortly off to South by Southwest, the big interactive, film and music conference in Austin, Texas. We’re there for eight or nine days, though we’re taking a little side trip into the countryside for a few days. I’ve never been to SXSW or Texas before, so there should be lots to discover.
The scope of the event is a bit daunting–more than 10,000 attendees, 108 film screenings, and hundreds of musical performances, panel discussions and parties. I’ve been paying attention to an unofficial SXSW blog and the Twitter search for ‘SXSWtip’ to try to get a handle on things. I’ve also been using this excellent web app from SCHED to assemble a schedule of what I plan to attend.
Posting may be light over the next week–we’ll see how it goes.
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January 18th, 2008, 10 Comments »
Plenty of American geeks are in a tizzy over Time-Warner Cable’s recent announcement to test usage-based billing for bandwidth in Texas. Like, say, water or electricity, you’ll pay based on how many gigabytes you use per month. This seems pretty reasonable, actually–I’m not sure why everyone’s got their panties in a twist. Mark Evans has some reasonable commentary on the topic.
Plenty of bandwidth goes unused each month. Wouldn’t it be cool if big downloaders could, like polluters buying carbon credits, buy unused bandwidth from people who weren’t using it? It could be automated, based on some kind of auction model. Maybe such a system already exists?
I expect there would be some technical barriers, as well as some very disinterested cable companies. Still, I like the model. If we’re going to treat bandwidth like a resource or utility with scarcity, then there ought to be a marketplace for it.
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