Most people are not hipsters

Ed Wendler Jr., a developer, noted that most apartment and condominium units are smaller than most families prefer. And influential neighborhood activists, worried about bearing the brunt of growth, could make even those difficult to build along the city-core thoroughfares such as North Lamar Boulevard, South Congress Avenue and Springdale Road, as envisioned in the plan.

That would leave the city’s fringes as the logical place for most growth to happen, Wendler said.

“Families will not stop wanting that lifestyle,” he said. “All (Imagine Austin) is going to do is push families out to Round Rock, Pflugerville, Manor, Kyle, Buda or the unincorporated areas around Austin. There is a lot of reality that will get in the way of this vision.”

- New Austin blueprint envisions new direction for growth

Most folks are still looking for a suburban style place to live. Frankly, even my neighborhood in central Austin is in some ways less dense than the Boston suburb I grew up in which was 20+ miles from downtown. If Austin is going to try to stop suburban style growth and encourage more “urban” development, then San Antonio, Dallas, and Houston should send the Austin city government a thank you note. You can’t make people want condos, townhouses, and apartments just because that’s the only housing you’ll allow to be built. Folks can always move somewhere else.

Another person leaving Austin

Amelia Gray is an interesting writer. She lives in Austin, but is leaving town at the end of the month. Why?

“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.

Lightening my school load

In the CS department at UT, we have lots of servers we can log into to do our work. Each machine’s load is listed on a public website, so we can make sure we log into a machine with some capacity to spare. The routine is check the page, pick a machine, and ssh into it.

Checking a webpage when what I want to do is ssh into a server is kind of a bummer, so I wrote up a quick ruby script to grab that status page, nokogiri it up, sort the 32-bit servers, and then send me on my way. I assume that at some point the script will stop working and I’ll have to do a better job, but in the meantime I’ll enjoy not touching a browser when I do my school work.