An Aussie geek stuck in Texas

I can’t believe the police over here have the nerve to book pedestrians for jaywalking at an intersection that only gives a walk signal every other time and it is a long wait between light changes (Main and Dallas) but at the same time totally ignore it when vehicles drive straight through pedestrian crossings even when they turn onto the road while you are part way across it.

So Texans please think outside your consumer level tanks and show a little respect y’all!

I keep tabs on some of my popular search key phrases and the search results have long since annoyed me but I have only now gotten around to doing something about it, firstly I’ve gotten rid of the jasonbainbridge.com – Blog Archive – prefix when viewing individual articles as that just wasn’t attracting people to click, plus I setup the meta description tag to only be used on the home page so the search snippet was useful on Google plus to make it more MSN friendly I moved the Previous / Next links to the bottom of individual posts.

Hopefully that gets me a little more traffic because on MSN my site ranks pretty highly on most key phrases that my site uses.

To celebrate Megan getting her first professional architecture job after getting her degree we went out to dinner at Mark’s American Cuisine last night, I had been there once before for lunch with work so I knew it was good but they take things to a whole other level with dinner! If you want both great service and fanrtastic food then Mark’s can’t be beaten!

We were promptly seated, asked what we would like to drink, champagne of course to celebrate and then they let us soak in the atmosphere within th gorgeous building that used to be a church without forcing menu’s on us to detract from the moment as lets face it as soon as you get a menu you become a little dinner hermit and if anything only make small talk about what you are going to order so not ahving the menu’s there was a nice change!

Then we got the menu’s and the wine list, decided on a nice 2002 Zinfandel and promptly had that presented and poured for us, we also got a great description of the chef’s specials with the server obviously intimately knowing the dishes, which is something I always like to see in a restaurant, there is nothing worse than asking something about the menu and having your server have to go ask someone. Dinner was amazing and just after they served it the server again demonstrated his knowledge by describing each part of the meal (I know this might sound a little intrusive but it wasn’t at all and was actually quite refreshing). Dinner was followed by an even better dessert and all in all it was a great evening so I highly recommend Mark’s!

Well UPN over the last two weeks somehow popped up the website for the new series (I thought they were still casting or is that for cycle 6?), you can visit it here. The big news is the series premieres with a 2 hour extravaganza on September 21st!

But don’t you think Kim looks a little boyish?

We just got back from Austin this afternoon (stay tuned for the associated torrid tales) only to discover that our air conditioner had been leaking some in our bathroom and of course as the afternoon went by it got much worse so we had to shut it down, mop up (well actually Megan did most of that, thanks babe!) and call maintenance but of course it is a Sunday and a faulty air conditioner doesn’t quite qualify as an emergency for them to rush out to fix it so it has to wait till Monday.

The other morning I woke up feeling really crook so I went back to bed and decided to call in sick when it was closer to office hours but just as I fell back asleep a co-worker rang me up telling me about a small puppy that she had found on the side of the freeway with no collar or tags in the middle of nowhere so she was obviously dumped.

She knew we had been thinking about getting a small dog in addition to the 60 pound one we already have so she asked if we were interested and how could we resist? So that day was spent cleaning up pee and poop plus shopping at PetSmart and Target for all the essentials & plenty of the non-essential spoilage stuff as well!

How could anyone dump that little cute puppy? Some people just make me sick…

To PHP 5 or not to PHP 5? That is the question… I guess what I mainly need to do is check compatibility with WHM and cPanel as they would also be affected, from what I’ve heard Wordpress runs fine and the other software I want to play with should do as well.

Well it took a while to get things setup right for the new VPS, especially as I didn’t realize you had to register your new nameservers so I think the DNS is still propagating here & there but it all seems to be working fine now, at first PHP wasn’t compiled with libcurl so the del.icio.us stuff wasn’t working but I upgraded PHP to 4.4 and aded libcurl support in so it all looks sweet so far!

I don’t really need it at the moment but I just signed up for a VPS plan at A Small Orange, I had been eyeing the plans for a while now as I’d like to have that flexibility there to install things that I wouldn’t be able to on a shared server, nothing bad just things like Trac that require a wide range of things to be installed plus having root access to a real server on the net just seems really cool!

Once it is setup I will transfer jasonbainbridge.com over pretty quickly but wiki.kde.org will have to be planned and co-ordinated so that will take more effort and hence stay on MR Lazy’s TO-DO list for a while. 

Okay so silly me went and thought seeing how the Metro light rail in Houston went right by Six Flags Astroworld that it would be a good option to get there so I looked it up on Google Maps and mapped out the route in my head, which seemed easy enough.

You can guess it didn’t turn out that way though! First we went my mapped out way, which was quite a walk in itself only to get to the entrance of Astroworld to find out that you can only enter via the overhead pedestrian bridge that went across the massive freeway that was next door, so we turn around walk all the way back to the closest way under the freeway, loop back to where we were, then have to enter a CAR PARK to get to the pedestrian footbridge and then finally we were there.

Come on Houston! You just built the damn light rail, didn’t anyone think about planning where people are going to want to actually go on it? I swear this city must be run by imbeciles given the number of bad planning decisions that are made here! Now I’m kind of hesitant to take the light rail to a football match like I had been planning to as on our walks it didn’t look terribly conveinent even to get to Reliant Stadium, which is just retarded from a planning point of view especially if Houston ever wants a hope in hell of hosting the Olympics like I’ve heard a few rumors about.