Category: Dallas/Fort Worth

  • April Rain

    Wow… this brings back memories. Though Time has created enough space that the emotions no longer overwhelm, memories of teenage years and April rains are still fresh in mind. I miss that old blue GAP button up sweater I used to wear. I never cared that it got wet. I can almost smell the smells that came with being outdoors in the rain.
    I love Las Colinas. Las Colinas in the spring makes me feel that anything is possible, and that everything happens for a reason.

    Hmm….. yeah…… I’m hungry…..what’s for lunch?

    Added at 9:56pm:

    Scratch all that warm fuzzy stuff. Some areas of Denton County have received at least 7.4 inches of rain throughout today and tonight. That’s record setting for the past 30 years. Flash flooding in Denton has made it necessary to close roads and evacuate a retirement home.

    My wife and I just spent a good ten minutes in the bathroom, keeping her, the baby, and the kitty protected. The sirens are off now. No hail around here this time, though a week or two ago we had larger than golf ball sized hail dent our cars, crack a car windshield and damage our roof.

    Winds of 50-60 mph have been reported. Where we live, they announced 50mph+ winds moving in two different directions.

    We’re just grateful for no more property damage. Let’s hope that this is a sign that the North Texas drought is over.


  • My Crazy Week

    I wish it were over, but even at 7pm on a Friday evening, it isn’t even close. Heather is in our home office as I type, working on our taxes.

    A couple crazy things happened this week. First, I was pulled over by a police officer on Wednesday evening. He informed me that not only are my license plates expired, but they belong to a Mazda. The problem with that is that my car isn’t a Mazda. He was kind enough to explain to me what I needed to do to get my plates changed, and then proceeded to write me a ticket. Thanks a lot, buddy.

    So I drive to the county subcourthouse the following morning and get my new license plates – no biggie. Then I stop by the city municipal complex to pay my ticket, only to find out that I didn’t wait long enough. Apparently, I have to wait three business days before attempting to pay for a ticket. Huh! That’s what I get for being prompt.

    Now it’s Friday, and a severe thunderstorm just passed through our area. We had golfball to baseball sized hail outside the house. I didn’t expect it to actually hail that badly, so I didn’t have either car in the garage. Now we have a cracked windshield and holes in our hot tub cover and our outdoor umbrella. I’ll have to check the roof tomorrow. At least one tornado touched down in Fort Worth and the storm is now east of Dallas.

    Here’s hoping the weekend goes better.


  • Family Moving Back to Texas

    It’s official! My family is moving back to North Texas. There’s nothing like the DFW area. It marks the soul. The only thing greater would be to be rich and travel to exotic places and relax on tropical beaches. I say that now, but summer’s coming and I’ll be ready to go arctic.

    We can’t wait to have my family back in the area. We’re hoping to have monthly, if not weekly, Shabbat dinners in our home with family and let our parents help us out with babysitting when the first kid comes along.

    Please keep my family in your prayers. They are still looking for work.

    Have a great one!


  • COBOL Programming Jobs are Scarce

    I hadn’t realized the state of the union (in Texas, at least), but North Texas apparently never recovered from Y2K job bubble. Programmers flocked to this area to cash in on the Y2K scare. But when it was all said and done, we had a plethora of programmers and too few positions. There are computer geeks who have been unemployed for a year or more. The time comes when you learn a new or updated trade if nothing swings your way.

    Seven years later, the situation doesn’t seem to have changed much. Database programming jobs do come available, but they’re descended upon by a pack of ravenous wolves. Of course, if it’s what you love, you try for each and every job. But if it’s not, you send your resume out, but you also come to the point when you have to branch out… learn something new, take a few courses, work part-time, etc.

    If you have the inside track on a job opening for a COBOL programmer in the Dallas / Fort Worth area, contact me and I will only recommend the best people.


  • Moon Over Addison Rocks with Affordable Wi-Fi

    While there are more free wi-fi access points in Addison than most cities, I’ve found that you are still likely to find huge gaps that don’t. Have no fear. You can still get unlimited wi-fi access throughout Addison for a better price than T-Mobile, Sprint, or Verizon.

    MoonOverAddison.com offers unlimited wi-fi access throughout the city for $16.95 per month, $9.95 per day, or $5.95 per hour. If I were spending more than half an hour online, I would have paid the fees. As it stands, though, I’m typing this blog in Word and will post it when I get back home (or Panera Bread). I had the wi-fi access on my smartphone once upon a time, but it was too expensive and I didn’t use it very often (I really don’t care to view the Internet from a 2” wide screen).

    I just thought it was cool that there is a city-wide solution to Internet access. Addison is the coolest city around by far. All the coolest restaurants are nearby. They have plenty of coffee shops, cafes, and bars. It’s the business Mecca of DFW. The Galleria Shopping Mall is nearby. Addison has free movie and concert nights during the summer. And to top it all off, they have their own wi-fi network. If more cities put this much thought into their identities, we’d have a much cooler metroplex.


  • Pegasus News: The Coolest Thing to Hit Local Dallas News

    If you haven’t jumped on the Pegasus bandwagon, you’re likely to be one of those poor, pitiful souls who wishes they had. For anyone interested in local news, this is your one-stop shop. But don’t just read! Write!

    Pegasus News is the future of local news. It is largely user generated content, which means that you submit the stories, and you can learn from those in the know what is happening near you.

    And after reabsorbing EPpy Award winning Texasgigs.com, Pegasus News is now a major player in the local arts and culture scene. And then there’s me, of course! While not an official member of the Pegasus News team, you will start to see more of me around the site with comments, stories, etc. What else could you ask for?

    Pegasus News has the potential of becoming THE Dallas / Fort Worth website. It all depends on how they sell it, whether you buy it, and how often you contribute to it. Do you realize that you can become the leading expert on your neighborhood? Or your company? Or you school? Or your coffee shop? You can be the fair and biased voice of reason (like our beloved friend, Mr. Randy Galloway) in your community.

    That’s the hook. The influence. The power of influence will draw people every time. Just sell it right, Pegasus News, and they will come. You’ve already built it… now give them a reason to use it.


  • Pegasus News Coming Soon

    Pegasus Logo

    Well, it’s coming soon. I don’t know what that means yet, but it’s going to happen. Pegasus News is going to launch their news website, and we’ll finally get to see if their idea is a bang or a dud.

    Honestly, I think it could go either way. They’ve been advertising like mad cows on CraigsList for at least the past 6 months, looking for interns willing to work for nothing but to say they have experience with a company that hasn’t even officially launched. The first time I read their ads, I was irritated. “Be on the ground floor of something big!”

    Maybe. They have eyes as big as saucers over at Pegasus News. Their goal is to cover news from the regional level all the way down to the neighborhood level. To do what they’ve envisioned will require both extensive involvement from everyday people across the metroplex and enough public interest to read whatever is posted. Seriously, the neighborhood level is too microscopic in my opinion. If I can’t find out what’s happening in my neighborhood without a computer and an internet connection, I don’t deserve to know. City news I can understand, even though I have my doubts as to how many people will come to read about what’s going on in their city.

    The only way I see to draw the people in is to pull off a very successful and expensive marketing campaign – i think a radio blitz would do, if you cover the major stations like 106.1, 105.3, 102.1, 102.9, 97.9, 101.1, 107.5, 106.7, and whichever non-dance Hispanic station is currently most popular. KISS FM is, of course, the most important station because it is by far the most popular in the Dallas / Fort Worth Metroplex. I think Classical 101.1 or The EDGE come next in importance because one covers the ultra-wealthy and high cultural folks and the other covers the local band scene.

    But in the radio campaign, they’ll have to hit their restaurant review and info section hard in order to draw enough people. Food is the number one thing that everyone in the Metroplex has in common. Tell people where the cheap places, the happening places, the trendy places, the ultra-modern places, the world fusion places, the mom and pop shops, the hole in the walls… I mean everything. They’ve got to play it up and have the info to back up the ads. They’ve got to know the best foods, the happy hours, the live music, the busiest and least busy nights, the ambiance, everything.

    Do that, Pegasus News, and you may be able to keep enough people relying upon your website that they will eventually visit the rest. Then you’ll have to give people ids like MySpace – only their profile is used to help both the editors remember who writes and sends in good material and also gives the contributors a sense of pride and ownership to what they write.

    It’s going to be a complicated mess. I wish them the best. Hell, I’d even consider writing for them if they got their stuff together and started hiring copywriters.

    Mark my words. Pegasus News is the company to watch. They’ll either boom hard or bust hard. Because I like the concept they’re going after, I hope it works. I’ll let you know when they officially launch their news website.