Mess With Texas

It's trial time, baby.

Coming to you live from Austin, Texas...or more accurately, the one block radius between the Stephen F. Austin hotel and an office in downtown Austin.

Gotta love trials. All expense paid trips to exotic locales, yet every waking minute is spent in a climate-controlled environment that could be located anywhere.

I suppose it's common practice. A couple years back, I was at a trial in West Palm Beach, Florida during the winter where we stayed at a 5-star resort for 2 months. I'm told that this resort had a beach, but I never managed to come home with sufficient daylight to confirm this. That said, the families on vacation that I saw at the coffee shop every morning seemed to really be enjoying the place.

Austin seems nice enough. If one believes the signs in the Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, however, Austin cares about only two things: Texas football and the Austin City Limits Music Festival. Avoiding the Texas-Ohio State debacle by a week, we managed to time our trip to arrive just before Austin City Limits. Unfortunately we still missed out on all the acts because, well, this is a business trip.

I'm not a big indie music guy. I know what I like and I basically listen one station on my XM Radio (that would be Ethel for the folks keeping score at home). Every now-and-then though, I'll hear a song and I'll have to head over to ITunes to give Steve Jobs more money. One of the recent songs that stuck was by a guy who was playing at Austin City Limits (see, ramblings can come full circle).

For those of you not named Shaffner, you should head over to his blog and read up on Jose Gonzelez. He's behind the music to this sweet Sony Bravia commercial...



In case you're wondering, they didn't use CGI...that's really 250,000 bouncy balls launched down a SanFran street. If you don't believe me, here's the making of video. Impressive.

Unfortunately, I don't have much time to blog these days, so my threat to Shaffner's dominance in the blogsphere isn't too great at this point. In fact, while I'm down here messing with Texas, why don't you just follow along on his "exciting" trip to Buffalo.

Veritas99