“Austin is like the oasis in zombie movies.”

There’s more to it, of course. The overall unreality of life in Austin (and also the heat) over time wears on smarter people, it seems. I know it wears on me. I’ve seen a lot of very capable programmers leave town in the three years we’ve been here and I don’t expect the outward flow to stop. Austin is a small town and has a lot to offer, especially if you like to have mindless fun. Over time, though, ambition is a liability here and the ambitious seem to recognize that.

U by Kotex Inspiration Series: Anne Emond from E.J. McLeavey-Fisher on Vimeo.

Her Tumblr and a MetaFilter thread about her.

When it came to the notorious split infinitive (e.g., “to boldly go where no man . . .”), [Fowler] observed that those English speakers who neither know nor care about them “are to be envied” by the unhappy few who do.

- H. W. Fowler, the King of English

Certainly, any grammatical advice that goes up against Star Trek deserves what it gets. Somehow Fowler understood that, decades before anyone met Captain Pike, never mind Kirk.

I have an iPhone, and I hate AT&T… but I repeat myself. I use a Mac, and I hate Microsoft… but I repeat myself again. And now I learn that AT&T and Microsoft are going to team up to bring me television? Well, It’s really lucky that television is such a stable and uncomplicated business these days. Otherwise, I might worry that AT&T and Microsoft would be the worst possible team to make a consumer-friendly combination of hardware and TV. Oh, wait…

Hecuba “Suffering” [Official Video] HD from Hecuba on Vimeo.

We saw Hecuba open for Bat For Lashes in Portland a few days ago. They’re a two person band, and the lady-half of the band is hardly even in this song or video (you can see her wiggle a little sitting on a car in the second half of the video). This is possibly the least representative song of their actual sound, but it’s an awesome video and song anyway.

Letters To Cleo live at The Parish in Austin

After about 14 years since the last time I saw them, I got to see Letters To Cleo last Friday. That’s almost half my lifetime, which has got to be a record for time between shows for me, probably never to be broken. I’m hoping they head out on more frequent reunion tours for the next few decades, as I’d be happy to see them every few years for the rest of my life.

We also got a great picture with Kay Hanley and a signed poster for the show. I feel like every show we see in Austin is better than the last, and Letters was no exception.

There’s a ton of text, among other things, on the web today and that has given rise to new cultural forms in order to deal with it. Linkblogs, del.icio.us, RSS, Google Reader, etc. have all come about as guides and tools for dealing with all the content on the web and they are now just great unto themselves. I like to share what I read and comment on it. I like to read what other people had to say about things on the web. It’s a huge value to be able to read within a community. Filtering, commentary, and participation in general are all part of reading now. And the Kindle is completely cut off from all that, basically because of DRM.

That said, the Kindle is still probably the best way to read a book today. But it’s not the best way to read text today and it is probably not going to be the best way to read books someday soon, at least not unless the Kindle becomes radically different. I can’t wait for the day when I can read books through some sort of a general-reader version of O’Reilly Safari on an iPhone-like Mac Tablet. I don’t mind paying for content, but I do mind being cut off from the web and community.

First, I actually read more now. The Kindle is really fun to read, compared to the average book. The text is clear (and can be adjusted to be larger or smaller), the book selection is ok, and I can let it sit on my lap without having to hold it open.

Second, it obviously saves an awful lot of space. I must have bought at least a shelf’s worth of books for the device, but it remains tiny. I haven’t had to think about where to put a single one of the books I bought, because they are all stored either on my Kindle or in the cloud by Amazon.

Those two things combined actually made a difference in how we approached buying our next house. We didn’t need to be overly concerned with having tons of room for bookshelves, as we default to buying books on the Kindles when they’re available. An unexpected change was that we’re considering going without a TV altogether, as we spend so much more time reading that the cost of a TV, and the space it would require, are on the edge of not being worth it. As a result, we could shop for a smaller house, relative to what we would have wanted if we were going to fill the house with books and a TV.

The Kindle is fairly expensive, but it may have saved my wife and I hundreds of thousands of dollars in a house.

I do have one criticism of the Kindle, which they are already addressing. The book selection is still nowhere near what I would need for a complete replacement for paper books. Lots of old books are missing, and even some recently released books don’t go on the Kindle (such as Nixonland, which I bought in hardcover recently). When I got my Kindle I think Amazon was advertising that they had over 90K books on the Kindle and it is now over 120K, which is great progress. But I don’t think I’ll be really happy with it until it hits several multiples of where it is now.