The Web Guy

End of "The Computer Show"

What a bummer to start my weekend.  I pop on the radio every Saturday morning to 1360 KKTX to listen to Lago and the Saturday Hardwired Magazine.   Well this morning the first thing Lago says that today would be the last computer show.

He boss is giving him Saturday's off.  As someone who works a six day a week schedule, I can understand the excitement of having weekends off. But I'm truly saddened that my Saturday morning ritual will have to change.

I'm pretty good with the computer, but most every week I learned something new from Blake Farenthold, who was just a wizard when it comes to figuring out someone's computer problems.  It was also fun to listen to him talk about the newest gadgets (I don't think he got an iPhone though).  Dobson was also a great computer resource especially when it comes to the MAC.

I'm glad that I had the opportunity to call in to the show on several occasions, thought I never was able to get that in studio guest spot to talk about community journalism, blogging, MySpace and the like.

So I'll miss the show, but it's good to know Lago and Blake will have some well deserved Saturday mornings off.

Now I only hope that KKTX brings At Home w/ Gary Sullivan back to the local airwaves.

Back from vacation - Part II

Now onto the daily saga of "As the Mall Turns"… I'm kind of happy that the council passed the tax insensitive package for the Crosstown Commons.  I'm only kinda happy, because I'm not really sure what the hell happened in the late hours of Tuesday's council meeting. But I think both projects can survive.

On my vacation, I had the chance to visit two fairly new "Lifestyle Malls".  The first, was The Town Center at Levis Commons.  It's located in suburan Toledo, Ohio.  The second mall was Westfield Franklin Park. Three years ago, they tore down an empty anchor store and built a new wing and 16 streen theater. We were very impressed with the final product.

Anyway a few stores overalpped at both Toledo malls, but for the most part the tenants were different. I think the Crosstown Commons would work well with a Super Target as an anchor... it would give the WM Supercenter a run for their money.

The Padre Staples folks have made a lot of noise about this deal.  I have to say they brought a lot of it upon themselves. When I first came to Corpus Christi for my interview, the airline lost my luggage.  I went to the mall to whip up something to wear to my interview.

As we walked around the mall, my wife and I were very unimpressed with what we saw.  We were looking for some food, but as we all know the food court just sucked. It was easily to tell the concourses hadn't been updated in years. It was one of the few negatives we had in our reasons to move or not to move to Corpus Christi.

I'm glad to see that Padre Staples is making an effor to update the mall's appearance.  I would think they would double their efforts to keep their anchor tenants and make their location the signature place in town.  (Note to Padre Staples folks ... GET A WEB SITE!)

I guess we'll just sit back and wait for tomorrow's episode of "As the Mall Turns".

Back from vacation - Part I

Aah... 10 days of not so R&R in the great Buckeye State.  One of the things about living 1,500 miles from the family is we don't get there often enough.  But we still had a good time.  My wife and I did take a few days to have some fun.

We visited former 6 News reporter Shaun Hegarty and his wife, who now live in Toledo, Ohio.  It's ironic that he works across the street from my old station.  His new house has a basement ... I'm so jealous.

It's amazing how much can change in three years.  I got a fresh perspective on several things that have been hot topics here in Corpus Christi.

First ... Corpus Christi has to truly have some of the WORST roads in the county. I always joked that Ohio had much worse roads than the Coastal Bend.  The key difference is they actually fix them. I can say we literally travelled over 100 miles of freshly paved roads.

My hometown of Mansfield, Ohio has probably one of the best plans to keep city streets maintained. Back in the 1970's the city was in financial trouble and the roads were in really bad shape.  The city's main drag - Park Ave. West was in such bad shape, signs were posted along the road warning drivers to drive at their own risk.

The city proposed a tax that would go exclusively to repave roads.  I can't remember if it's a sales, income or property tax.  But I do remember it was a very small amount to the taxpayer.  A community oversight committee selects which roads get paved and they make sure to spread the resurfacing projects evenly across the city.

A prime example, I grew up in an inner city neighborhood.  My little side street was resurfaced twice while I was growing up.  Compared to a Corpus Christi road it didn't need the work, but it had several patch jobs and so it was slated to be resurfaced.

When I was home last week, I counted about ten different streets that were in some stage of repair. Some had their surfaces grated others had received their first or second coats of blacktop. I know we're maxed out on our ability to levy sales taxes, but I would hope city council can work on a plan to develop something that would guarantee our street repairs.

It's getting hot in here....

We'll it's the 3rd quarter and the Spurs are up 7.  I really don't care at this point.  About a half-hour ago, we noticed it was getting warm in the living room.   The thermostat said it was 81.  That's never good.

So I went up into the utility closet and was greeted with a soaking wet floor.   The air exchanger appears to have frozen up.  Well it was full of ice and was melting down thru the filters and all over the floor.  I'm no Dave Matthews, but I knew that wasn't good.

Anyway the wife's now really cranky because there's no air... It's going to be a long night.

***Update ... The maintenance guys were able to come over around midnight and pump some freon into the system.  So it turned out to be a cool night after all.

Earthlink says thanks for my $3.95

Call me spoiled, but I got used to the free wi-fi here in Corpus Christi.  I knew it wasn't going to last forever, and this afternoon I gave my first $3.95 to Earthlink. 

I was getting a tire plugged over at my neighborhood tire shop.  I had about an hour to kill so I pulled out my laptop and fired up the wi-fi.  I was close to a node so I had no problem getting a signal.  Despite the concerns that I wouldn't have a fast connection, it couldn't be further from the truth.

I was able to easily use my Slingbox and watch a little coverage from Cleveland on the Cavs arriving in San Antonio (Go Cavs - Rise Up!).  I never once had a buffering issue the whole hour while I was online.  Oh I also was reading e-mail, surfing the net and even watched some video clips.   If I can have that quality of service all the time ... it's going to be a good system.   Now if I can only get the station to pay for that access.  You never know when news is going to break. ;-)

Tough day for a great blogger...

One of the big challenges I face everyday is to work to engage our viewers.  In a high tech city like Seattle, San Francisco it's not all that hard.  Nashville's WKRN-TV has been the model for engaging their viewers.  They launched a web site a couple years ago called Nashville is Talking. (NiT)  In it's basic form, the site aggregates local blogs and the site has become the citizen voice of Nashville.

WRKN hired a local blogger Brittney Gilbert to write for NiT.  She reads what's others are writing and features those posts on the main page of NiT.  She's done it for two years, until today.   In a post on NiT this afternoon, she announced she was resigning.  It's sad for a web guy like me who's admired her work for sometime now...