Barton Creek Two Days Later

Here's an album of photos from along Barton Creek at my end of the greenbelt. There were obvious signs that the water was 6' deeper than it is now in the narrow parts of the creek bed. I wish I could have witnessed that, but I'm not sure what vantage point would make that possible.

Tropical Storm Hermine

There was a lot of rain the last couple of days here in Austin. It rained a few times on Labor Day, then on the real first day of the storm, Tuesday, it got quite windy. I didn't have to get out my yellow slicker suit and shrimp boots though. I just walked to work with my 20 year old Georgia Tech umbrella, lightweight rain coat, jeans and wedge heeled shoes to keep my feet out of the water. I only got wet from the knees down. I heard more sirens than usual on the highway so I was glad I didn't have to get in the car in that mess.

Tuesday night there was a lot of thunder and lightning and more rain. If you look at the map of real time stream data you can see the line of black dots that shows where they storm was concentrated in a line from San Antonio up through Austin.

Here's the gage data for the place where I took these pictures. You can see the height peaked the night before and was on the way down when I shot this video on my lunchbreak from work on Wednesday.

Un-suck it

I found a website that translates terrible business jargon into English. Here's an example taken from work. Our executive assistant hates this word, particularly since she looked it up and found out it means illegal, as in the authorities can take action against you if you do something actionable.

Actionable

Her feedback didn’t relate to anything actionable.

Unsucked:

Doable or achievable.

• twitter this
• e-mail the douchebag who used it

The douchebag who said this probably also said End-to-End, Go Forward Plan, orTable This.

I browsed some of their terms and was surprised to see bandwidth. I use that all the time! I didn't know it was douchey! I think I should get special dispensation since I used to design cable equipment and really know exactly what it means. And I never use bandwidth to mean time and people. If I say I don't have the bandwidth for dating right now it means my mind is occupied with work and renovations and I don't have any brain power left to try to coddle some man's ego. I will talk to somebody if they have ideas for how to hang two kayaks on the wall, but if they aren't fault tolerant to my occasionally missing packets then they can just wait until I shut down one of these processes and HAVE MORE BANDWIDTH!

Surprise

I clicked this video link from Felicia Day's brother's Twitter feed. I wonder if I seem like a cyber stalker? Can I help it he keeps putting interesting stuff on the internet?!

Anyway, this movie ending genuinely surprised me. Made me realize how long it's been.

Live Metaphor in the Apple Store

A graphic artist in Portland saw a real live metaphor in the Apple store.

I guess not everybody is familiar with the complete stable of assistance animals. Helper horses are like seeing eye dogs. It's not appropriate to make a big deal over them, just like you aren't supposed to pat somebody's Labrador retriever when they're on the job. My friend in Jacksonville says he gets horses in the Batteries Plus all the time. Just the same, Frank Chimero makes it into a sweet anecdote and metaphor.

I went to the Apple store in Austin this week and got a Magic Trackpad to use with my iMac when I'm lounging in bed using it like a TV. The only tiny pony I encountered was the usual grace of having the helper Apple employee use an iPhone in a special case to scan the item, swipe my card, and automatically email me my receipt because I use that same debit card every time. I like that about the Apple store. Even if there isn't a tiny horse in the mall that day it seems like a metaphor for success in trying new things.