Setting Plans

Austin City Council to spend $4.1 million to convince residents to vote on yet another failed rail system. Not that it takes much to get the typical Austinite to vote to spend money on wasted efforts to look more like Portland or Seattle or San Francisco or whichever left-coast city is the current "new hotness".

I see that my next city council vote is going to look a lot like my last few - vote the incumbents out.

It's All Relative

From my iTunes library...

Mother (26 songs):

Mother - The Police
Mother - Pink Floyd
Mother - Danzig
Mother and Child - Porcupine Tree
Mother and Child Reunion - Paul Simon
Mother Focus - Focus
Mother Nature's Son - The Beatles
Mother Popcorn - James Brown
Mother's Daughter - Santana
Mother's Little Helper - The Rolling Stones
Atom Heart Mother - Pink Floyd
No Sugar Tonight / New Mother Nature - The Guess Who
That Was Your Mother - Paul Simon
Your Mother Should Know - The Beatles
Mama - Genesis
Mama Kin - Aerosmith
Mama Tried - Merle Haggard
Boboom / Mama Said - The Vaughan Brothers
Crazy Mama - The Rolling Stones
Lawdy Mama - Cream
Mean Little Mama - Roy Orbison & The Teen Kings
Party At Your Mama's House - Widespread Panic
Red Hot Mama / Worry - Widespread Panic
Red Light Mama, Red Hot - Humble Pie
Shine On Mama - Agents of Good Roots
That's All Right (Mama) - Elvis Presley

Sister (8 songs):

Sister Christian - Night Ranger
Sister Golden Hair - America
Sister Lost Soul - Alejandro Escovedo
Babylon Sisters - Steely Dan
Dance Little Sister - The Rolling Stones
Look At Little Sister - Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble
Sweet Soul Sister - The Cult
Your Sister Can't Twist (But She Can Rock And Roll) - Elton John

Son (7 songs):

Son of a Son of a Sailor - Jimmy Buffett
Son of Neckbone - Beastie Boys
Carry On Wayward Son - Kansas
Mean Son of a Gun - Kitty, Daisy & Lewis
Mother Nature's Son - The Beatles
Sacrificed Sons - Dream Theater
Seventh Son of a Seventh Son - Iron Maiden

Father (5 songs);

Daddy Don't Live In That New York City No More - Steely Dan
Can't You Hear Your Daddy's Heartbeat - The Steve Miller Band
Dreams Of Our Fathers - The Dave Matthews Band
Honor Thy Father - Dream Theater
Song For My Father - Victor Wooten

Daughter (3 songs):

Devil & Daughter - Black Sabbath
Madonna's Daughter - David Knopfler
Mother's Daughter - Santana

Brother (3 songs):

Brothers - The Vaughan Brothers
Brothers In Arms - Dire Straits
Sin's A Good Man's Brother - Grand Funk Railroad

Uncle (3 songs):

Uncle Albert / Admiral Halsey - Paul McCartney
Uncle John's Band - Grateful Dead
Uncle Walley - Unphrey's McGee

Aunt (2 songs):

Aunt Avis - Widespread Panic
Gigolo Aunt - Syd Barrett


Cousin (1 song):

Cousin Dupree - Steely Dan

Grandfather (1 song):

Grandfather's Waltz - Bill Evans

Sorry, Grandma - no songs for you.

Technology At The Speed Of Government

I got a message on one of my bloglists that the hearing to decide one of the last remaining races from the 2010 elections, for Texas House District 48, was going to be streaming on-line. This is a local race here in Austin, featuring Republican Dan Neil trying to overcome a 12-vote margin against Donna Howard. As usual for Democrat races, military ballots are at issue.

I was pretty surprised to see that there would be streaming for a relatively small sub-committee, so I headed over to the page to see what was there. I was even more surprised to see this:

The RealPlayer or RealOne Player software from Real Networks is required to access video/audio broadcasts.

There's someone in the world still using RealPlayer? I didn't even know it still existed, but I guess it still does. With all the drama over embedded video standards in HTML5, I'll have to admit I haven't heard anybody wondering (or caring) if .ram files would be supported.

State Government - rocking the Internet like it's 1998!

Microsoft OneNote for the iPhone - First Impressions

I see that Microsoft has now released a version of OneNote for the iPhone. Being an avid user of what I consider the single best piece of software to come out of Redmond, I quickly downloaded a copy. First impressions:

• It requires a Microsoft Live ID to use, as it stores all of the documents "in the cloud". I wonder if Microsoft will release any numbers about how many new IDs are generated by this app?
• Once logged on, sure enough, my existing notebooks dutifully appeared...after a while. Syncing up initially was a pretty slow process, considering I don't have many notebooks stored on Microsoft's web drive (is it still called SkyDrive? I don't remember).
• Opening a fairly large workspace was also relatively slow to do. I'll have to see how well incremental syncs in the future perform.
• Formatting appears to be mostly lost in this view. No bold-face or italics, and sadly, no tables. The fairly easy freeform table creation is one of my favorite parts of OneNote, but in the iPhone version, the tables are only represented by "[table]".
• Oddly enough, some graphics (mostly screenshots) were displayed and others were not, with not even a placeholder present in the doc for the missing ones. Tapping an image displayed it in a separate page, where it could be rotated, pinch-zoomed, etc. The main document as a whole can be rotated, but pinch-zoom doesn't appear to work.
• It has buttons to add images, bullet lists and check boxes, but not any other formatting that I could see. I don't know if it supports image capture through the camera since I am testing on an iPod touch 3GS which has no camera.

So, on the whole, for me I can see this as a moderately useful viewer app for (parts of ) my stored notebooks, and maybe for jotting down quick notes that I would like to access from other cloud clients. But I'm not particularly a "power user" of OneNote, and even for me there are gaps that prevent this from acting as a first-class client (table support being the main gap).

However, it's only version one - Microsoft never gets it usable until version three. Suffice it to say, I'll be looking forward for the next two releases more than this one.

Not A Good Start

Good News: Having January 3rd off as a holiday.

Bad News: Forgetting about that fact until you get back in the office on the 3rd.

It Is Still Government Motors

Just heard a mind-bogglingly stupid news report on KLBJ-AM at the bottom of the hour. It was embedded in a stock market update, where it was mentioned that the new GM stock was trading up at around $35/share, compared to under $1/share when it previously went bankrupt.

Brilliant.

As if the old price could in any way be compared to the new price. This makes it sound somehow as if GM is suddenly 35 times more valuable than it was before. The crisis is over! But wait...how about a few questions, like: how many shares exist now, compared to back then? What is the market cap now, compared to back then? What assets does the company possess now, as opposed to back then?

So many morons on the Democrat line of C-SPAN's Cavalcade Of Idiots, er, Washington Journal believed somehow that because an IPO had gone out, somehow that meant that we had recouped the GM bail-out money. Misleading reports like this just serve to reinforce that incorrect belief.

DVD Spending Tab III

An early Black Friday-type sale at Walmart yielded a couple of Blu-Ray 2-packs:

Rambo/First Blood (Blu-Ray) - $10

Terminator 2: Judgment Day/Total Recall (Blu-Ray) - $10

There's also a 2-pack out there that includes The Forbidden Kingdom, if I can find it.

Yearly total: 7 movies, $32.59 total, $4.66/movie