“I owe the city birthday cake, and thank you cards are due”(1)

It’s been nearly 18-months since I moved to Austin, and many things are making it seem like home, places, faces, events and more. Some events are more memorable than others, good and bad.

One of the surprise things I did last year, and will be repeating this year, is bike to work day. Last year I headed from South Austin up north to work. I do this often, but only in the quickest, shortest, most direct route, it’s an 25-mile round-trip and not particularly memorable if you discount racing the buses, and sometime breakdowns, getting caught in a true Texas downpour,and the occasional car drivers’ abusive hand signals. Mostly though, I’d say the car drivers here are better than most other cities I’ve cycled in!

Bike to work day last year was much more fun than the normal ride to work! I rode the shoulder on 360, up Great Hills Trail to Jollyville Rd and finally coming to rest at Bucks Bikes. Donuts and a quick chat with some other bike to workers including one of Austins tireless(no pun intended) Volunteers @anetmarie, and I was off to work.

This year there is an even longer list of places providing a “free” breakfast for cyclists and the weather is looking good. I’m going to venture a bit further, in fact all the way up to Music City Cycles on W Parmer, where this year @anetmarie is a co-host.

In fact, checking the current list of breakfast stops, if I plan my route carefully, I could end up in a calorie surplus, there goes the waist line!

Bike to work day is part of Bike Month, the Austin Cycling Association usually have a calendar online, but as of writing it’s gone AWOL. Hopefully it will be back in shape soon. In the meantime, the current list of breakfast stations includes the following and official hours are 7-9am:

•Whole Foods, Sixth & Lamar
•City Hall Plaza, 301 W. Second (sponsored by city of Austin employees)
•Texas One Center, 505 Barton Springs Rd. (also sponsored by city of Austin employees)
•Texas Bicycle Coalition, 1902 E. Sixth
•Mellow Johnny’s, Fourth & Nueces
•Wheatsville Co-op, 3101 Guadalupe
•Bicycle Sport Shop, 517 S. Lamar
•Shoal Creek Boulevard at the Far West Bridge
•Music City Cycles, 6301 W. Parmer #504
•Jo’s Coffee, 1300 S. Congress
•Freewheeling Bicycles, 24th & San Gabriel

If you see a big guy cycling on 360 on Friday with a bag over-flowing with donuts, that will be me, make a wide pass please!

(1) Lyrics (c) Steven O’Reilly, Tammany Hall NYC, Ceilings in the sky.

Guanabee (via Austin Soundcheck) is starting a rumor that Prince might be playing ACL this year based on his recent addition to the Coachella lineup and that they claim to hear Prince in the Car Stereo (Wars) teaser mashup of ACL artists that was released earlier this week. I can hear Gnarls Barkley, Silversun Pickups and Raconteurs in there among others, but nothing jumps out at me as a Prince track. Just because The Purple One is playing one major festival this summer doesn’t mean he’s playing others.

However, I’ll add that Prince has had locals Groupo Fantasma as his backing band on more than one occasion and he did play a private party at The Belmont last year, so he’s got Austin ties these days. Maybe it’s not so far fetched. We only have to wait 5 more days to find out for sure.

Austin’s Andy Langer singles out the Jimmy Reed classic “Hush Hush” as recorded by Omar Kent Dykes and Jimmie Vaughan for On the Jimmy Reed Highway, listing it first among “The 8 Best Songs You Probably Didn’t Hear This Year” (Esquire magazine, December issue, pag 46). >>> Austin start-up Debix garnered a two-paragraph tout in a half-page article entitled “In ID Theft, Some Victims See Opportunity” (NYT, 11/16/07, byline Brad Stone). As the article describes it, the Debix concept is an interesting and promising approach. >>> And from the “Domain” feature in yesterday’s NYT, we learn that Jimmy Wales, of Wikipedia fame, reports that his favorite band is the Gourds, described as “a band from Austin, Tex., that does an alternative country cover of a Snoop Dogg song.”

Wave at those kids riding in the cars in between! I promise they’ll wave back at you.

This is the Thomas the Tank Engine effigy moving backward, drawn by the real locomotive at the other end of the train. You’ve been hearing the whistle for this downtown all week long, and tomorrow’s the last day for these brief excursions.

I’m guessing that for the most part, the rides themselves may be sold out, but this is a great sight for those young and old who love things railroad. The Austin Steam Train people do report that a limited number of walk-up tickets will be sold each day. It’s neat to see a flagman out there.

The four-day Texas Relays track and field meet begins today. The partying and socializing were already unofficially under way last weekend when early arrivals went for a head start on the fun. Texas Relays events at their core are the athletic events, but each year more and more social events accompany this big get-together.

Capital Metro detours will be in effect on Saturday downtown from 3 pm until 6 am Sunday morning. Thousands of vehicles will be on IH-35 and converging on downtown this weekend, but it has been announced that various exit ramps will be closed between 8 pm on Friday and 6 am Saturday morning and again between 7 pm on Saturday and 6 am Sunday morning. Here’s the TxDot list of exits to be closed, along with a map:

MLK lower-deck exit ramp, south-bound;
12th to 11th Streets exit ramp, south-bound;
8th to 6th Streets exit ramp, south-bound;
Cesar Chavez (1st Street) exit ramp, south-bound;
6th Street exit ramp, north-bound; and
the turn-around under IH 35 at 5th Street (south-bound frontage to north-bound frontage)

The idea, evidently, is to force local traffic headed for Sixth Street onto the frontage roads and permit through traffic to flow better.

There are many lists of parties and other events (including the Urban Music Festival); TexasRelays.com usually has the most complete one. Other places to check are SoulCiti Austin and Urban512. Mitche’s Gallery will have a booth at the Urban Music Fest on Friday and Saturday. At the Web site of the Urban Music Fest is an extensive list of dining establishments under African-American ownership. I hope this stays up after the festival’s over. It’ll be interesting to see how and whether attendance is affected by the proximity of Easter.

Only having managed a day pass for Monday, I had to get creative with my participation in this year’s SXSW Interactive. I decided to hit Austin Rock N Romp, relocated to Mohawk from the usual Ruta Maya, with my two kids. Page Maguire, who organizes Rock N Romp and also writes for Austinist, has a recap on her blog. Neal Pollack, who read from his new book Alternadad, elaborated on the audience participation of my eldest.
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A guerrilla marketing campaign for Adult Swim and Aqua Teen Hunger Force has gone awry in Boston, touching off the same overreaction that the birds caused us earlier this month.

I’ve linked the first post on the Boston Metblog, but there have been several since that one. I’m not sure if they’re still up, but there were a few billboards here in town similar to the LED ads in Boston (fashioned along the same lines as those geekerrific LED throwies). Our own Austin Swim has a lot more. You’ll recall that they got in trouble for some banners advertising Adult Swim on local overpasses.

Fuzzy has more in Chicago, where they seem to be able to distinguish between suspicious and just plain strange.

Update (Friday, 02.02.07 08:39 CST): The Statesman is reporting that 20 of the LED signs were placed around town yesterday here as well, but they were quickly collected by those who placed them once all hell broke loose in Boston. Anybody see one before it got collected or know who was placing them locally? I’d love to get my hands on one.

Update 2 (Friday, 02.02.07 09:21 CST): Security demigod Bruce Schneier has an awesome post on this.

Photo from cjabest on Flickr

Just a few days ago, I bragged about why Lance Armstrong is Austin’s gift to the world. Today he brought some gifts of his own to multitudes of bicycle aficionados and needy kids in Austin. The Bicycle Sports Shop and Mix 94.7 hosted Lance, Johan Bruyneel, Ivan Basso, and Levi Leipheimer of the Discovery Pro Cycling Team for an autograph session that had fans lining up along South Lamar well in advance of the 8:15 start time.

In addition to enabling the perfect gift for the cycle-ista in your life, the signing event also promoted the slightly higher goal of funding the 10th annual Bikes for Kids charity drive. Mix 94.7 and its sponsors, including Bicycle Sport Shop and Trek Bicycles, intend to bring bikes, helmets and locks to 750 under-privledged children for the holidays. So even if you missed out on having the entire Discovery Channel team autograph your soiled biking shorts, you can still ring in some holiday cheer by donating cash or nominating a needy child through the Mix 94.7 website.

Bicycles will be distributed on December 15th at the BSS on South Lamar from 6-10 am.

photo courtesy of bog_marsh

From November 26th to December 2nd, many of the 50 Metroblogging sites around the globe began unveiling seven gifts their cities can share with the world - one gift a day for seven days. You can find a summary of all of the cities’ gifts over at Metroblogging Los Angeles. Additionally, Metroblogging Best Of will be highlighting particular cities over the next week or so.

Here’s a recap of Austin’s 7 Gifts in case you missed any of them:

7th Gift: Stevie Ray Vaughn
6th Gift: Lance Armstrong
5th Gift: Gaming
4th Gift: SXSW
3rd Gift: Alamo Drafthouse
2nd Gift: Whole Foods
1st Gift: Slacker

We didn’t rank ours in any particular order and obviously, this is a subjective endeavor. How’d we do? What would you have added to the list? Would you like to see more of this on Metroblogging Austin or across the entire network of 50 cities?

Also, check out Chip and Jette’s Holidailies 2006. Every year in the month of December, they host a blogapalooza of daily postings. It takes quite a bit of stamina to post every day for a month. See who’s up to the challenge.

I present to you, Austin’s fifth gift to the world: Gaming.

Austin was home to two well known gaming franchises in the early 1980’s. Richard Garriott, aka Lord British, founded Origin Systems here in Austin and produced the Ultima titles and the Wing Commander series. Origin was bought by Electronic Arts in 1992, one of many local gaming companies to be acquired in the last 10 years. Digital Anvil, an Origin spinoff, was acquired by Microsoft in 2000. The Austin Chronicle’s Marc Savlov wrote a great round-up article on the Austin game development scene in November of 2004.

Steve Jackson Games was founded in Austin in 1980. They’re famous for their role playing and strategy games like Car Wars and current hit, Munchkin. The company started a support BBS (that’s Bulletin Board Service for all you kids out there) for their games in 1986, which eventually morphed into one of Austin’s early internet service providers. A secret service raid on the aforementioned service in 1990 was a catalyst for the formation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Those buying modern gaming systems from Alienware now have a connection to Austin since Dell acquired them. You might have heard of Dell. They’re in a neck-and-neck battle with HP for bragging rights as the largest computer vendor in the world. They’ve cooled off a bit in the last several years, but they were on fire on the 90’s. AMD, the computer chip maker, also has a major presence here in Austin.

Lastly, an IBM processor design team here in Austin played a major role in designing the cell processor that’s currently shipping in the new Playstation 3 console that’s so desirable, people are willing to shoot each other for the privilege of paying $600 for it.

Austin’s also home to the Austin Game Conference, which was recently acquired by CMP Media.

When you unwrap that new game this holiday season, there’s a pretty good chance that it somehow has ties to Austin’s gaming and technology industry.

4th Gift: SXSW
3rd Gift: Alamo Drafthouse
2nd Gift: Whole Foods
1st Gift: Slacker

Tags: Metblogs7Gifts 7Gifts Metroblogging7Gifts