Other: May 2009 Archives

If you've ever been caught in traffic caused by weekend road closures around town, then you'll want to take a look at the latest online offering from the city of Austin: a site dedicated to providing a one-stop resource for special events and related street closure information.

Satch died in my arms yesterday. Today is the seventy-ninth anniversary of my father’s birth. And while I have already written beyond extensively about my father’s life—namely our horrible relationship—and my oldest dog’s life (and waiting for his death), I’m not quite finished with all that yet. Living with Satch was, at times, like living with my father. There were vast differences, of course—for one, Satch was slavishly dedicated to me, eager for my time and attention, at the ready with a wag far more often than not. And yet, like my father, Satch was difficult, randomly aggressive, tenacious to a fault, not interested in putting things down, and extremely bossy with the rest of the pack. He snapped unpredictably, and in the end that snapping extended to me—twice in the past few weeks he came close to biting me.

Kevin Durant will be returning to the hardwood of the Frank Erwin Center this October, this time as a member of the Oklahoma City Thunder. The former Longhorn All-American and Naismith Player of the Year will lead the Thunder against Tim Duncan, Tony Parker and the San Antonio Spurs in an NBA preseason game.

A pair of Austin companies have received investments from the state's Emerging Technology Fund. RFMicron, a developer of RFID (radio frequency identifier) microchips, received $675,000, while Agile Planet, creators of operating software to facilitate safe human-robot collaboration, received $250,000 from the fund.

The Texas baseball team has been selected as the No. 1 seed in the NCAA baseball tournament. After winning the Big 12 tournament title on Sunday, The Longhorns will host one of 16 regional tournaments that begin Friday.

My friend Mike and I were recently reminiscing about the awesome way Cap’n Crunch shreds the roof of your mouth, leaving all those little strips of irresistible-to-your-tongue skin hanging down, like some beaded curtain in a 1950’s French bistro. Mike, not even knowing that I had recently discovered a knock-off “healthy” organic version of peanut butter Cap’n Cruch, was excitedly telling me that he had just discovered a “healthy” organic version of the regular stuff. This prompted an animated swapping of childhood cereal memories, not unlike the scar-sharing scene in Jaws. Stud that he is, Mike was proud to announce that, having been lactose intolerant as a child, he didn’t just slice up his roof mouth like the rest of us who at least soaked our C’nC in milk for a few seconds before scarfing it down. Oh no, for him the experience was like shaving without the benefit of shaving cream. And he was delighted to revisit the sensation now that Kashi makes Honey Sunshine, the cereal with the name of a stripper, so that he can do so and still claim to be nourishing his body.

Dell's new netbook is geared toward kids in the classroom with five vivid colors, a rubber casing, and 10.1-inch screen.

As summer storm season approaches, you can now track local power outages online with the Austin Energy Storm Center.

The Texas women's golf team is headed to the NCAA Championships for the second straight year after a fourth-place finish in the West Regionals. Coach Martha Richards has now taken her team to the national finals in each of her two years with the program.

A legal battle over Dell's involvement in security camera purchases by the city of New Orleans just got messier for the company after a New Orleans judge ordered CEO Michael Dell to give a sworn deposition in the case.

A friend of mine sometimes has what she calls the temporary suicide fantasy. Along the lines of the Jesus/Easter thing, this fantasy involves offing yourself for a few days but then getting to come back, all refreshed, and start again. I like this notion—it ranks up there with the recurring escape fantasy I was mentioning last week, the one that most recently revisited me when my hard drive crashed. In essence: I ditch everything, head West with the dogs, and nobody ever hears from me again, at least not until I can quiet my mind and empty my calendar which is always so full that I actually think it’s heavier than when I bought it, courtesy of all those inked in appointments. Mercury is in Retrograde right now, which, if you’re superstitious like me, you buy into the notion that for three weeks your best bet is to just stop talking. To everyone. Because MR means, among other things, that communication goes haywire. In my own life, call it self-fulfilling prophecy, but of late I unintentionally (but nonetheless very seriously) upset a beloved friend, got into it big time with my kid (on Mother’s Day!), and almost got into a fistfight with one of my Dick Monologues’ cast mates.

Our colleagues over at Houstonist have taken Roger Clemens up on his offer to answer reader questions. Since Clemens is a former Longhorn, we figured there wasn't any harm in inviting Austinist readers to join in as well.

As city officials take time to review their options for the new city web site, a local grassroots effort has sprung up to offer a helping hand. OpenAustin is a "community-based effort to crowdsource the requirements and development" of the city's web site.

Although Time Warner Cable has shelved a proposed broadband bandwidth metering trial that was set for Austin this fall, the city's telecommunication commission is preparing possible responses in case the issue rises again.

Every weekday morning we'll be featuring a photo (or two) from our readers. Please feel free to submit your photos (min 600px width) by adding them to the Austinist Flickr Group.

In 1919, T.E. Lawrence, the dude who wrote the autobiography upon which the movie Lawrence of Arabia is based, was riding on a train in England. With him when he got on the train: his first manuscript for the tome— about 250,000 words worth of detailed recollections of his life as a British soldier working “with rebel forces during the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Turks of 1916 to 1918.” Not with him when he switched trains: The same manuscript. He lost it, and it was never to be found again. Bigger bummer still? He’d burned all of his notes and had to start from scratch. Ninety years later—just last week in fact—Spike Gillespie got up one morning and, as she typically does seven days per week, set to work on her beloved MacBook. She was chugging along, taking one of her frequent research breaks to post something VERY IMPORTANT on Facebook, when her hard drive crashed. Gillespie, though she had backed up her computer a few months prior, had been woefully lacksidasical about archiving her novel-in-progress (47 pages at that point) and the notes for a history book she’s writing.

Like its existing counterparts, the new Birds location features an oversized mural, only this one's in 3-D. Local artist Luther Himes (who, coincidentally, did the artwork for the big summer boat party that we co-sponsored last year) is behind the new retro-inspired work, which needs special blue- and red-tinted glasses to properly view.