My department in Vignette, Professional Services, just had its annual meeting this last week. I gave a presentation on Web Technology (Web standards, Search engine optimization and accessibility) on Thursday with good reception. Also on Thursday we had an awards dinner and I got the Initiative Award. Had a lot of fun and met a lot of people from all over the world.

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Also I realize I haven’t updated since I moved here. I’ve actually come up with a list of things weird/significant to Texas/Austin while I’ve been here:

• Breakfast tacos wherever you go
• Giant sewer drains that you could easily fall into on the sides of the street
• Curbs all over parking lots. Back in Illinois you could drive freely through a parking lot from one side to the other and rarely worry about a curb or median. Here in Austin you may find yourself walking a mile just to get around a curb and get back to your car.
• Everyone at stores puts their carts on the curbs. There are few of those cart corral things available and the few that are available are left empty because everyone props the carts up and parks them on the curb.
• Massive traffic. I-35 sucks.
• Ron Paul signs, bumperstickers and supporters everywhere.
• Lane doesn’t mean small road down here. Back in Illinois you can often count on “Lane” or “LN” to mean a small, narrow street.. likely one that ends pretty quickly. Here in Texas you can count on the exact opposite. Lanes are abbreviatied “LA” down here and they’re the next most massive roads to highway/interstate. You can see on a map that lanes are the big ones. Notice the somewhat East-West running roads Howard, Parmer, Braker, Yaeger, Rundberg, etc.