I ran into Gordon Walton recently. You might have heard of him, he’s kind of a big-deal guy around town, especially in my circles.

We asked each other how things were going. We’re both busy, though him arguably far more than me. Not much to complain about.

He asked if I was still writing.

I said, not really.

He said, “At least I know I’m not missing anything.”

Totally happened.

Coming soon. Yeah, I want to see it, don’t you? Stephen Colbert’s in it! There’s also a Facebook page for it.

Haven’t seen this much news about square footage in a long time. So Vigil Games, owned by THQ, the latter flush with cash for selling one of their studios and firing 200-some people just four months ago, is going to move into a new 33,000-square-foot office space in Austin, in somewhere called Four Points Centre. (Austin Business Journal had the official word on Friday, not that I noticed.)

What the gaming sites have yet to point out is that Four Points Centre is barely what anyone would call “Austin,” at least not counting suburban sprawl. Its own location map advertises the fact that it’s way out in the sticks, and if anyone would care to check the Google Maps version, you might get double-checks their estimates on drive times.

I’d call it “out by Lake Travis”. Or, “about seven miles from Hippie Hollow“.

Edit: In all fairness, I’m not (officially) making a qualitative statement about suburban sprawl, just that while the developers most likely expect that the area will build up and become a growth center in the next few years, it isn’t much of one now, and while a 15-minute drive to anywhere might seem fine to anyone from, say, L.A., Texans would call it ‘livin’ in the country.”

But, in truth, the place where I go to work, out on Loop 360, was just hills and trees less than 30 years ago. ‘Course, back then they thought it’d be made into a freeway. Didn’t quite happen that way, and it’s still pretty nice country out there.

Reasons why Austin is awesome and I love living here and please don’t move here unless you are at least benign if not awesome yourself, No. eleventy quantum quintillion:

I just saw a middle school stage production of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, and the whole cast was girls.

It was awesome in a bottle.

Continue reading Friday Night with Dr. Horrible…

Talking about Wizard 101 and how it’s all kid-friendly and stuff. EXTREME CLOSEUPS.

You’ve come a long way, baby. I might update later when I actually watch it all the way through.

Pour out your favorite beverage. It’ll all be over soon.

My monthly bill before calling to cancel: $46.20

My May bill: $26.40

Oh look, here’s a mailer from AT&T U-Verse for a package deal with home phone service that I don’t really want. Decisions, decisions.

So, after reading the news this week about Time Warner Cable in Austin playing with the idea of enforcing bandwidth caps on their Internet service, and friends of mine feeling rather emphatic about it, I called customer service to cancel.

The guy who answered the phone asked why I wanted to cancel, and right away, he said Time Warner was not planning to impose bandwidth caps. But to keep me as a customer, would I accept a $10 discount on my service?

You can understand my surprise when he went on to say that AT&T had supposedly been making the plans to impose the caps instead. Was he looking at where my browser was pointed? I ended up telling him that the BusinessWeek article was a day old, yes it was online, you could put “Texas Time Warner Businessweek” into any search engine and find it, and here are some choice quotes including one from your CEO.

He insisted it wasn’t true, the caps were for business service only, yada yada.

I hadn’t wanted to cancel service right away, and knowing full well the guy could have been talking out his ass, I accepted the discount.

On word alone, and I don’t know the guy’s name.

I guess someone here knows how to do customer service, and it possibly isn’t me.

We’ll see what my bill’s like at the end of the month.

Edit: Scott’s got a new post about the matter, and several other prominent Austinites have weighed in, including mayoral candidate and City Councilman Brewster McCracken. Bottom line: “It is not good for Austin. It is bad for the principle of an open Internet. It undermines the public interest.”

One night only at Austin’s ZACH Theatre, it’s Richard Garriott LIVE. Only $65 per seat.

Just before I went to watch Rodney Gibbs test-drive his latest speech about creative productivity at ACC, I looked at my phone and noticed my dad had called me. My dad, who has a Facebook account now (one I’m really using a whole lot more than this site, just so everyone knows,) wanted to know my thoughts about Election Day and the upcoming presidency of Barack Obama.

So I told him. What follows is not exactly what I said, but it’s close.

Continue reading It happened in Kansas…