Blackstone to Hampden-Sydney to New Orleans to San Antonio to Houston. And Back
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Seriously, that was the question I had to ask myself today when I took a wrong turn in Lake Jackson while I was on my way to go surfing.
I was told to yield at the corner of This Way and That Way. Huh?
Are they letting hippies name streets again?
I had never flown with Southwest Airlines until I moved to Texas four years ago, but these days they are my airline of choice. I’ve had so many great experiences with them that at this point that I’d easily forgive a bad experience, but that hasn’t happened yet. But tonight they topped everything so far, all by empowering the people on the front lines to do what is best for their customers.
It all started when I logged into southwest.com tonight to purchase a ticket to Las Vegas. After completing my purchase I noticed a sidebar on my account page telling me that I had 8 credits, and that I needed to accrue 8 more by August of next year to receive my Rapid Rewards free ticket. Sandy and I just flew via Southwest to Harlingen last weekend, so I figured I could claim those 2 flights as well. When I entered my confirmation number it went through just fine, but when I entered Sandy’s it told me that I couldn’t redeem a credit for that flight since my name wasn’t on the ticket (even though I paid for it). This was mildly annoying, but I’ve always had good luck calling Southwest’s customer support, so I thought I would give that a try.
I spoke with a nice woman named Cheryle, who told me that although I was the purchaser of the ticket, it wouldn’t be possible for me to claim the rewards credits for it. Never one to be discouraged, I began telling her how much I loved Southwest and that I really wanted to get enough credits by next August so I could claim my free ticket. Cheryle told me that she loved Southwest too, and that she loved her job, and then said “well, let me see what I can do.”
Although I didn’t know what she was doing at first, Cheryle began searching the Southwest ticket database for every ticket ever belonging to “Cory Wright”, and adding the credits for those flights to my account. This took her about 10 minutes, and when she was done not only did I have enough credits for a free ticket, but I had enough for two free tickets! I went from having 8 credits to 33 credits, all with flights that I hadn’t claimed! (before I knew about Rapid Rewards)
Needless to say, I was thrilled. When Cheryle asked if there was anything else she could do, I asked to speak to her supervisor so I could give her the credit she deserved.
I love Southwest Airlines, and as long as they continue to give people like Cheryle the ability to make their customers happy, I am certain they’ll be my airline of choice for a long time.
Saturday night I was finally able to see one of my favorite musicians at one of my favorite venues: Terry Allen at McGonigel’s Mucky Duck. I’ve been waiting years to see Terry Allen perform like this.
Nearly two years ago I flew out to Los Angeles to meet up with Chris B. to see Terry perform his play/musical/something-else-entirely “Dugout” at the California Institute of the Arts. It was one of the most interesting performances that I think I’ll ever see, and worth the trip for sure. Since then I’ve been watching his schedule and waiting for the opportunity to see him again. Unfortunately, Terry doesn’t perform very often, typically only 5-10 shows a year (at least for the past couple years), so when I discovered three months ago that he would be playing at the Mucky Duck (which is 1.6 miles from my apartment) I bought tickets right away.
The show was absolutely wonderful, and he played some of my favorite songs of his including “Amarillo Highway”, “Flatland Boogie” and “Gimme A Ride To Heaven Boy.” Terry was joined on stage by fiddler/mandolin player Richard Bowden, and accordian player Bukka Allen (Terry’s son). I was also hoping Lloyd Maines would show up, but that didn’t happen. Bukka’s wife Sally Allen also came on stage for a couple songs, including a beautiful duet performed with Bukka, as well as a bluesy song of her own which was quite good. Afterwards she continued to sing backup on a few of Terry’s songs, and sounded just as good as Lucinda Williams did in the original versions.
I was able to record a few songs on my camera, and I’ve uploaded them to the YouTube on the Internets. But instead of going to the Google to find them, I’ll just link them right here (in the order performed):
We also had the pleasure of sharing a table with a really nice couple from the U.K. (hi Grahan and Gill!) who are big fans of Texas music and had traveled all the way here for their vacation. Now that’s dedication. I can’t say that I’ve ever flown to another continent to see my favorite musicians perform. Fortunately, I just have to make a left turn, a right turn, and another left turn and then I’m there. 
When I was a kid I had several movies that I watched over and over and over, such as “Back to the Future”, “The Karate Kid”, and so on. But one of my favorites was a movie called “My Science Project.” I remember watching this with my cousins a lot, and thinking it was the coolest movie ever. “My Science Project” was released in August of 1985, which means it probably made its way to Blackstone in late 1986 or early 1987, which would have been when I was around 7 or 8.
The scene that has stuck in my head all these years is when the main character, “Motorhead Mike” is racing his red GTO against an electrical current that is passing from electrical tower to tower. Mike has to get ahead of the current so that he can destroy a tower down the line and prevent it from… well, doing something, I’m not quite sure. Mike is neck and neck with the electrical current when he hits the nitrous and roars past it and reaches the tower in time to blow it up and end the chain. Motorhead Mike was cool because his souped up car saved the town!
This scene was really inspiring to me as a kid as it showed that humans are amazing because we can build machines that can do anything, even outrun electricity (in the movies). Twenty years after I stopped watching this movie, I still remembered that scene.
Last week I finally watched it again, and I realized something. “My Science Project” is an absolutely terrible movie. I don’t watch many movies, and I can hardly claim to be a good critic, but I am just glad that movies like this aren’t being made anymore. (or are they?) It was so cheesy that I could barely stand watching it all the way through, even though I really wanted to see it again. I was happy when it was over.
But, as I was thinking about this more, I realized something about kids. Even with all the crap in this movie, the part I remembered was the part that I found most inspiring. As a kid I was able to find something meaningful in this really dumb teen sci-fi thriller. So I wonder if kids are better at seeing through the crap and finding something of value.
There was one other movie that I remember from a kid, but I can’t figure out what the name of it was. I thought it was named “Quest” or something similar, but my searches for movies with that name haven’t turned up much. So, I ask the LazyWeb for help. Here’s what I remember:
I imagine the movie came out in the mid 1980′s as well. Anyone have any suggestions?
They opened with the theme from Napoleon Dynamite
Right now he is streaming the waiting music over DNS to Winamp
When I first started blogging about two and a half years ago I would write about just about anything, including the mundane details of every day. It didn’t take long for me to realize that this was almost always boring, and probably only of interest to me. These days I reserve blog posts for when I actually have something to say, like when I’ve visited some new place, seen a new band, or found something interesting on the Internet. But, there are often times that I want to post other things on the web that aren’t always worth a blog post.
Over the past couple of years several sites have emerged on the Internet that allow people to post different types of content to the web. For example, Flickr provides a really simple way to post photos to the web. YouTube created an easy way for anyone to share their home videos with the world. Twitter popularized the concept of “microblogging,” which is basically a single sentence or statement without much (if any) context. Del.icio.us made it easy for people to “share” their bookmarks with everyone on the Internet. MySpace became the site for people (teenagers and college kids, mostly) to post their “profile” pages on the web for everyone to see. The pages could even be decorated to be as gaudy as only a 14 year old redneck teenager could imagine.
These sites essentially became publication houses for content on the web. You publish your photos on Flickr (or Photobucket). You publish your videos on YouTube. You publish your random one-liner thoughts on Twitter (or Jaiku). You publish your bookmarks on Del.icio.us. You publish your personal data on MySpace (and/or Facebook, etc, etc, etc). And of course, you publish your blog on LiveJournal, Blogger, WordPress, TypePad or even MySpace. Everyone is publishing everything everywhere!
Of course, the point of publishing things is for other people to see them. Sure, I am interested in reading what my friends are blogging, and I like to see the pictures they are taking as well, but do I really want to check all of their pages every day to see if they have updated anything? As more of these “publication” type sites pop up on the web, it’s getting more and more difficult to follow everything my friends are doing online. Fortunately, I think I may have found a solution: Natuba.
Natuba is described as a way to “give your friends a single place to follow everything happening in your online life.” With Natuba a person can continue publishing their blog posts, photos, microblogs, bookmarks, etc in the same ways that they always have, and everything they publish gets pulled into a single place for all their friends to see. Instead of telling people 5 or 6 urls, a Natuba user only has to give a single url to everyone. For example, my Natuba page features content from this blog, my Flickr photos, my Twitter microblog, my gallery, and my YouTube videos.
Natuba was created by these three really cool guys, apparent saviors here to rescue us all from the dizzying swarm of web 2.0 sites emerging from the depths of this great ocean we call the Internet. Ok, so maybe that was a little over the top, but we have worked pretty hard building Natuba, and although there is still a lot we want to do to with it, we think it is ready for the world to play with.
Natuba accounts are available via invitation at this point, so if you would like to try it out just shoot me an email or leave a message in the comments of this post. I know a guy who knows a guy who can get you in.
I’ve updated the sidebar links on my blog here to point to my Natuba page, which is at http://natuba.com/cwright/. There are feeds available for the page as well, so if you are into that sort of thing then you can subscribe to my Natuba feed to follow everything I am posting on the Internet.
Anyone who has spent time with me in the past 22 years should know that I suffer from migraine headaches. I’ve been getting them since I was 5 years old, typically 1-2 per week, sometimes more and sometimes less. It is quite an understatement to say that migraines have been the bane of my existence.
To make things worse, almost nobody (except my parents) understood how awful these headaches were. People who simply didn’t know any better were always suggesting that I try some new over the counter headache medicine that had worked for them. What they couldn’t understand is that the worst headache that they had ever had was still better than anything I could hope for. In my opinion, these people didn’t really even have headaches, because I could see them continuing to function. When I had a headache, I simply could not function.
Until I was 14 or thereabouts there wasn’t even any medicine that I could take to relieve the pain. The only thing I could do is lie down in a dark, quiet room and try very hard to go to sleep, which was difficult because I would almost always be nauseated. My condition was the worst during my fifth grade year of school, when I missed several days each week from these headaches. Also, I seemed to get headaches any time there was a school field trip that I was excited about (I would get all worked up and anxious and give myself headaches).
Finally, a medicine became available that actually could stop a headache cold. It was unbelievable, and seemed like a miracle drug. When Imitrex was first introduced it was only available as an injection, and from the local doctor’s office. Whenever the headache seemed bad enough, my parents would take me to the doctor and I would get an injection in my arm of Imitrex, and immediately I would feel better. Not “immediately” as in 10 minutes later, “immediately” as in 30-60 seconds later. And then I would always want McDonald’s french fries. I wasn’t 100% better, as physically I would be really weak, but mentally I felt much, much better and could actually stand to be awake. As great as it was, it was still really inconvenient to have to drive to the doctor’s office.
A year or two later, a tablet form of Imitrex was introduced, and I could finally take a pill if I got a headache. The pills were incredibly expensive, and insurance would only pay for 9 per month, but they worked. Not as fast as the injection of course, but in about 20-30 minutes the pill would take affect and soon thereafter I would begin feeling better. At least now I had something I could take with me on trips, or to school, for when I got a headache (not if, but when). At some point they also introduced prescription Imitrex injections, which I also have for emergencies when I can’t keep the pills down.
So, for the past 10-12 years this is how it has been. I have been taking a preventative medicine all this time, but I couldn’t really tell whether it worked or not. When I moved to Houston in September I started having more headaches, and it was becoming a real nuisance. I needed to focus more on work, but the more I focused the more headaches I would get. At the urging of a friend I finally made an appointment with a neurologist here in Houston. On a somewhat related note, I also scheduled an appointment with an oral surgeon to have my wisdom teeth finally removed 4 days before my appointment with the neurologist.
Where am I going with this? Well, it has now been two months since I saw the neurologist (who prescribed new preventative medication for me), and also had my wisdom teeth removed, and I have not had any normal migraines. I have had 3 headaches that I caused myself (being out in the Texas heat in the middle of the day, etc), but not a single headache like I used to get. For the past 22 years I have been getting 1-2 of these crippling headaches a week, and in the past 2 months I have not had any! I can’t even begin to say how thrilled I am about this!
And it couldn’t have happened at a better time. The week before my appointment with the neurologist I was informed that my insurance company had changed it’s policy and would now only pay for 4 Imitrex pills per month. The other irony is that the patent on Imitrex just expired 3 weeks ago, which hopefully means that there will be cheaper generic versions of it. (Imitrex is around $25-$30 per pill).
At any rate, life has never been better for me now that I am headache free.
