Austin

It should have been a very good night. But it wasn't. Thanks to the management at Antone's, I ended up sick and convinced that Austin really does need to expand its no-smoking ordinance.

Last fall, Time-Warner announced that premium channels such as HBO would move off their analog network. The local monopoly daily newspaper (which is too lame to put their archives online) published an article about this on November 23. A lot of people, particularly in the local newsgroups, were upset by the announcement. I promised to investigate.

Austin Blog Day is now over. During this time, many Austin Bloggers posted their ideas about what to do with Four Spare Hours in Austin.

The Blog Day topic is What to do with Four Spare Hours in Austin. For me, this is not a theoretical issue. I had quite a bit of downtime this past weekend. My recommendation is to use the spare time to drink.

Links: The Year the Music Died (News 8 Austin), Rent Party Blues (Austin Chronicle)

Those who cared have always winced when the cliché Live Music Capital of the World was bandied about, but nobody disputed the fact that Austin has been home to a remarkable live music club scene. Starting with venues like The 'Dillo and Threadgill's, and pioneering genres such as Outlaw Country and Modern Texas Blues, Austin has been an outstanding place for musicians and fans to call home.

Thing are getting so desperate in Austin that the city boosters are resorting to spam.

To: chris sherman <chris [at] greateraustin [dot] com>
From: "chris sherman @ GreaterAustin" <chris [at] GreaterAustin [dot] com>
Subject: Invite: Austin Small Business Growth Conference this Tuesday Feb 18
Date: Tue, 11 Feb 2003 18:52:05 -0600

Hi,

The Greater Austin Business Growth Conference takes place this coming Tuesday, February 18 at the Austin Convention Center. The conference is a one-day event for small business owners, founders and operators in Central Texas looking to grow and expand their businesses.
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Featured speakers at the spammer's conference include city councilmember Will Wynn and ice cream mogul Amy Simmons. How unfortunate to see these people aligning themselves with spammers.

My pal Freddie Steady Krc is booked for a regular gig down at The Saxon Pub. Freddie Steady's Midnight Howl will be playing the midnight show Tuesdays through February. Freddie has toured with folks ranging from Jerry Jeff Walker to Roky Erickson. He's currently fronting The Shakin' Apostles.

The Howl will feature Freddie along with Bill Browder and Layton DePenning from Demin, and fellow Apostlite Waco Jack McVey. Awooooo!

A bunch of us Austin bloggers have banded together. So far we've formed a mailing list and set a date for our first get-together dinner.

One of our more interesting projects is a meta-blog, that aggregates postings about Austin. Adina Levin prototyped the original over at The Internet Topic Exchange. Later, I contributed a web server and some tools to host it locally.

Toward that end, I developed a utilty that runs as a CGI, receives a trackback ping and posts a synopsis to a Movable Type weblog. It's in Python. Drop me a note if you'd like a copy.

Link: Austin-Bloggers Mailing List Info

Attention Austin-area webloggers: we're forming a mailing list! The Austin-Bloggers list is open to all local folks interested in weblogging. This grew out of the ongoing Meetup gatherings. We desire more interactivity than meetup.com provides, so that we can hatch some of our evil schemes for world domination.

If you are a local weblogger, won't you consider joining us? You can signup at our listinfo page, or austin-bloggers-request [at] soaustin [dot] net (subject: subscribe) (send an email) to austin-bloggers-request [at] soaustin [dot] net with the word subscribe in the message subject or body.

Link: Max for Mayor

This may be a case of premature blogulation, because although there is a web site here, it isn't Max's. But Max has tossed his hat into the ring, so one would expect to see a campaign web site before too long.

Max is an Austin institution. He's had jobs ranging from street-corner flower salesman to councilmember and mayor pro tem. I last met up with Max back in 1997, when he last ran for mayor. I was active in his campaign, and it was a delight to work with him.