just a general comment that I find it very amusing that some people have gone from saying ( Read more... )

wow.  I know Bush-bashing is like shooting fish in a barrel, but I would love to see a comprehensive comparison of the state of the nation between the Clinton:Dubya transition, and the Bush:Obama transition.  A quick start....

Bush stepped into:
huge budget surplus
0 wars
warm foreign relations

Obama gets:
financial system in crumbles
Dow at lowest in ???
( Read more... )

1. Looks like prickish Republicans in DC and the TX legislature are getting put in check (by their own party)....for which I give them credit.
http://austin.bizjournals.com/austin/stories/2009/01/05/daily12.html?surround=lfn

2. I would ( Read more... )

I am pretty proud of the Obama transition team and the LBJ School.

After being on the short list for National Security Advisor, the Dean of the LBJ School was appointed to be Deputy Secretary of State.  That should be a very interesting position considering he will be working directly under Hillary Clinton in trying to clean up the state of ( Read more... )

Amount spent each year in Europe and the United States on pet food:  $17 billion
Cost per year to achieve basic health and nutrition for the entire world:  $13 billion
Amount spent on perfumes each year:  $12 billion
Clean water for all the world:  $9 billion

Amount spent on cosmetics in the US:  $8 billion
Basic education for the world’s children ( Read more... )

The closest thing our agency has to a CIO has been asked to present the first version of a pretty big ($750K) open source application development project I helped manage, etc at an EPA conference this week.  Since my school semester ended last week, I decided to try and get out of town to psuedo-celebrate the end of a pretty interesting management/ ( Read more... )

anyone interested or have recommendations?

http://www.eastaustinstudiotour.com/

I was hoping to at least go see Jacob Villanueva at Super! Alright!, but it may be fun to tool around and check some other art, too.

I think the vast majority of the world is as excited as I am about the potential for the next 4 years ( Read more... )

I know I have posted / bitched in person about the stupidity and frustration I have incurred due to the State of Texas HB1516 that outsourced the management of the datacenters (servers) owned by the vast majority of state agencies to IBM Global Services.  This almost $1Billion contract was supposed to save the state money over 7 years, but has been ( Read more... )

this is what I will be tapping my foot to, or dancing in line to, if I have to wait in line for early voting tomorrow....

www.cnn.com/video/?JSONLINK=/video/politics/2008/10/24/von.ga.kids.political.rap.cnn