USA and Italy played to a 1-1 tie in the World Cup today. The American players, unfamiliar with World Cup rules, believed they could win the game on a tiebreaker by beating the crap out of the Italian team. They didn’t win the tiebreaker, but did collect two red cards.

Dwight Silverman, blog guru and technology columnist at the Houston Chronicle has asked me to guest-blog his TechBlog while he’s away on a two-week unplugged vacation. TechBlog is one of the Chronicle’s most popular weblogs, so for the next two weeks my words will appear before more eyeballs than ever before. I don’t know what […]

I started listening to the informative and very funny show Car Talk in 1990 when I spent six months working a contract in Boston. I’d never heard Car Talk before, because it didn’t air in Houston, but I was quickly hooked. Fortunately, our local NPR station discovered Car Talk shortly after I returned and started […]

The Chronicle has a great article this morning: Longtime resident remembers Pearland as ‘a honky-tonk town’. Here’s a snapshot of Our Fair City in 1940:

Rice fields outnumbered homes and businesses and the city had fewer than 500 residents. There was a caution light at Texas 35 and FM 518. There were two service stations, two […]

How do you give up a goal in the first five minutes? Isn’t that like allowing a touchdown run on the first play from scrimmage?

Photos from the first BarCamp Houston. More photos at Flickr.
(These are not my photos, by the way… other people took them and posted them to Flickr.)

The Buddha Lounge, a nice little conference center where BarCamp Houston was held.

Erica, one of the BarCamp Houston organizers.
Whurley, one of the interesting people I met at BarCamp Houston. Whurley […]

I’m spending this morning and early afternoon at an “unconference” called BarCamp Houston. I brought my laptop because the camp has a 54mbps wifi connection. I’m not going to try to provide a continuous running commentary, but I’ll be posting a few things during the day.
We’re holding the first session right now on “How to […]

Last night I went with a group organized by Eric Berger of the Houston Chronicle to see Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth. It was an interesting movie, and I came away from it with some things to think about and even research. I’m not going to go into it in detail right now, but […]

It was twenty years ago today, a Saturday, that I walked across the stage at Beard-Eaves Memorial Coliseum, shook the Auburn University president’s hand, told him to keep in touch, and accepted a scrap of paper reading “Bachelor of Electrical Engineering”. I worked hard, and Dad spent a lot of money (thanks, Dad!) to get […]

Eric Berger, science writer and blogger at the Houston Chronicle, has written a nice article for hurricane season: Four hurricane lessons we should have learned. His top two items align well with my observations of the Rita evacuation: traffic planning was horrendous, and gas supplies woefully inadequate. I exchanged blog comments and email with Eric […]

Most people around the nation will naturally remember the 2005 hurricane season for Katrina; after all, it all but destroyed one of our nation’s most historic cities. For those of us on the Texas gulf coast, the 2005 season will remembered as much for Rita as for Katrina. I won’t pretend that what we went […]