I just popped in after not logging in here in ages, and I see that a few of my lj friends are still posting. Anyhow, I thought I should mention here that I started a new blog on dreamwidth, where I might post once in a great while, although I think of it as a place to post observations, rather than catalog my personal life.

The following is adapted from a post I sent to our neighborhood association list in response to a CapMetro rep being on the agenda for our next meeting, to promote the urban rail plan. Tl;dr version: I don't think that enough people will ride it to ( Read more... )

Tonight I spoke at a City Council meeting, for the first time. This post is not going to be an in-depth analysis of the Austin transit planning done so far--there are much better places to go for that--but I wanted to write down what I said to City Council, as best I can replicate it, although there will probably be a closed caption record of it ( Read more... )

A week ago, I went to the GNOME Montreal summit. Much thanks to the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring me. Here's a brief summary of my trip:

• Friday: Got maybe an hour of sleep; left home at 3am for a 6am flight. I hate flying. Got to Montreal at around 1:30. Took a cab to the hotel. Took a nap. Finished drafting an email to discuss some AT-SPI ( Read more... )

Back in 1988, when I was in the 3rd grade, I had an Apple IIE equipped with an Echo II speech synthesizer that I used in the classroom at school. When other students were writing at their desks, I would type on the computer. It was easier than using a Braille writer would have been, both for me (because it was faster) and for my Teacher of the ( Read more... )

Last night I went to a panel discussion on land use hosted by Imagine Austin. The city is planning to revise/rewrite our zoning/land use regulations now that we've adopted a comprehensive plan. There were panelists from Raleigh, Denver, Madison, and Dallas. Here are the general themes that I remember coming up:

Codes get added onto and become ( Read more... )

It's supposedly 82 degrees out, but I don't feel like it's July. Is this really what a typical summer day used to feel like when I lived in MA?
Of course, it's supposed to go below freezing Monday night.

You can make mistakes that have drastic consequences that you can't reverse, and then, in real life, you need to accept that you can't change the past. You can make less-than-ideal decisions that you didn't really need to make because you didn't realize that you had other options and/or didn't understand the way things work.

For a while now, I've been struggling to figure out why my filter in libatspi wasn't seeing NameOwnerChanged signals from D-Bus, even though in theory I'd added a match rule for them, and then suddenly it came to me while I was eating lunch. At-spi2-core and at-spi2-atk share a D-Bus connection, at-spi2-atk also listens for nameOwnerChanged signals ( Read more... )

I was trying to do something and having trouble figuring out how to get things to work. Then I realized that I could do it another way, and, at around the same time, I remembered a former boss saying that "there's more than one way to skin a cat." For a second, I wondered if remembering that comment helped me figure out that there was another way ( Read more... )