Greg

Goodbye LiveJournal, hello WordPress!

2017-01-15T20:49:57Z

After reading about some shady things LJ has been doing (the worst of which is disabling HTTPS everywhere - very sketchy!) I've decided to move on to WordPress. You can find my new blog at

gregstoll.wordpress.com

where I've imported all of my LJ posts. (after writing a handy script to do so :-) )

It's exciting, but sad! My first post was almost exactly 12 years ago and while I've been writing less lately (and just posting links), maybe this will turn things around.

See you on the other side!

My 2016 in review

2017-01-02T22:57:21Z

Well, globally 2016 was pretty terrible, between Trump getting elected, all the celebrity deaths (Carrie Fisher, Prince, David Bowie, George Michael, Leonard Cohen, Muhammed Ali, Alan Rickman, John Glenn, Ron Glass, and many more...), and Brexit.

But personally it was a pretty good year. Here are some highlights:
- After announcing that we were expecting, our daughter Vanessa was born in September, with all the life upheaval that you would expect! She's great, even as she's having a cranky day as I post this. Both of my sisters also had children, so now Vanessa has even more cousins :-)
- As a babymoon we took a short vacation to Universal Studios and Disneyland!
- Because the time when we could easily do such things was running short, David and I did a bunch of escape rooms around Austin. Some of them were really good!
- I went back to India for work for two weeks with a day layover in London. This time I see an insanely exciting cricket match in person!
- My baseball win expectancy finder got mentioned in an article in the Washington Post!
- I got promoted at work to Principal Software Engineer!
- I released Know Your States for Windows 10. It's a good app if you desire to know your states :-) It also got featured by a few Windows app sites.
- I released Airport Guides for Windows 10, and later for Android. (they're free apps, check them out if you travel!)
- I also released Bridge Scorer for Windows 10.
- I went on a bit of a React kick this year, updating my floating point to hex calculator to use it (and show a nifty visualization of what the bits do!) as well as my Clue(TM) solver.
- I opined about why I don't like Uber.

Here's to 2017!

The Winter Fortress: The Epic Mission to Sabotage Hitler’s Atomic Bomb review

2016-12-31T20:56:14Z

The Winter Fortress: The Epic Mission to Sabotage Hitler’s Atomic Bomb by Neal Bascomb
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a very well researched and interesting book! I thought I was going to have trouble keeping up with all the Norwegian names, and...well, I did, but it was still a very enjoyable read.

It also got me to thinking about how tough it must have been to be an undercover agent after the Nazis took Norway. They knew they were on the side of right, but they also knew they could be captured, tortured, and killed, and they were also putting their families and friends at risk. (the Nazis would retaliate if they found saboteurs) They also knew that they were probably going to kill civilians who had done nothing wrong but were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Yet it was still the justified thing to do, as Hitler getting the atomic bomb would have been catastrophic.

Anyway, for some reason it made it hit home about how they really had to be strong and brave to do the right thing and not collaborate with the occupying Nazis.

(I am desperately hoping this does not have any lessons for the coming years...)

View all my reviews

Airport Guides is now available for Android!

2016-12-30T16:37:33Z

I'm happy to announce that Airport Guides (now with terminal maps for over 90 airports worldwide) is now available as a free app for Android! (the Windows 10 version is still available, too!)

Now that Xamarin is included for free with Visual Studio, I thought it would be fun to try it out. Xamarin lets you make apps for Windows/Android/iOS by writing code in C#. Usually you have to then design your UI in the appropriate language (Java for Android, Objective-C/Swift for iOS), but with Xamarin.Forms you can even write a cross-platform UI in C#!

Since most of the work in the Airport Guides app is maintaining the maps themselves, the app is pretty small so I thought it would be a good candidate for porting as opposed to something like Bridge Scorer which has a ton of custom UI. The experience was pretty good - writing the UI in Xamarin.Forms is a lot like writing it in UWP for Windows 10, except all the keywords are different :-)

I did run into some frustrations along the way. One was not realizing that you can't test in-app purchase stuff without a real device. (although in retrospect the documentation does mention this...somehow I missed it) Another was that while the Android emulator for Visual Studio is literally 10x faster than the default emulator, there's at least one bug that doesn't show up in the real emulator. For the record, it was fetching a particular web page that would always timeout...I still never figured out why! Pinch/zoom was also tricky to get working until someone pointed me to MR.Gestures (which I always pronounce "Mr. Gestures" in my head :-) ), but I still am disappointed that every platform doesn't have an easy builtin way to make pinch/zoom on an image work. Shoutout to Alan Clark from Xamarin for helping me through some of these!

merry Christmas linked list: squashing trolls, Prince, Google Translate

2016-12-22T20:57:46Z

- What GitHub did to kill its trolls - see, it is possible to deal with trolls! You just need the will to do so...

- Prince’s Closest Friends Share Their Best Prince Stories - these are pretty good. If you haven't seen it, his part in the performance of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is pretty amazing (and here's an explanation why!)

- The Great A.I. Awakening - impressive work by Google on Google Translate, and the article has a pretty good description of neural networks, too!

- Uber said it protects you from spying. Security sources say otherwise - wait, are you telling me Uber isn't trustworthy ? *drops monocle in surprise*

- Now you can fact-check Trump’s tweets — in the tweets themselves - this is cool, although I doubt the people who will install the extension are the ones who need it. (maybe a good idea to install it on your relative's computers?)

- Trump Isolates Himself with C.I.A. Attack - yay, I guess, although the CIA is apparently eager to please sitting presidents so this may not last long. (thanks David!)

- 99 Reasons 2016 Was a Good Year - hooray!

- Devious Ransomware Frees You if You Infect Two Other People - you got chain letters in my ransomware!

- Alabama Prosecutor Sets the Penalties and Fills the Coffers - wow, that is shady. Glad the guy is on his way out, but still... (thanks Adam!)

- How the Twinkie Made the Superrich Even Richer - man, I understand people losing their jobs to automation, but there is still something seriously wrong here. I'm going to go with the whole company going into bankruptcy -> private group buys it for cheap then doesn't have to pay preexisting pensions.

- DARE: The Anti-Drug Program That Never Actually Worked - whatever, I went through DARE and didn't use drugs. Science!

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Parts 1 & 2 review

2016-12-16T02:54:02Z

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Parts 1 & 2 by John Tiffany
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

(really more like 3.5 stars)

All in all, it was pretty good. There were parts of it that felt a bit fan-fictiony to me, and I feel like the author of the play (who was not JK Rowling, I guess she wrote the story it was based on?) didn't quite nail the characters. But maybe that's because it's set 19 years in the future and I'm being too harsh.

Also, it has this line of dialog which made me laugh out loud

Your solidarity is admirable, but it doesn't make your negligence negligible

Which, two things:
- No one talks like this. Not even witches and wizards from England.
- "negligence negligible" - seriously? Google results for this phrase only turn up dictionaries and this play.

It's 300 pages but it's literally the script to a play so it's a fast read. Also, I kind of want to see how they stage this thing - there are lots of descriptions of people doing magic, and how would that work?!

View all my reviews

Stardust review

2016-12-13T20:46:04Z

Stardust by Neil Gaiman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Probably because I was tired all the time, but it took me a while to get into this book. I ended up liking it decently enough, but it confirmed my theory that I'm really just not that into fantasy books...

View all my reviews

friday linked list: Democracy isn't losing much support, Daft Punk + Strongbad, normalizing Trump

2016-12-09T15:33:15Z

- That viral graph about millennials’ declining support for democracy? It’s very misleading. - wow, I saw the original article and it was incredibly misleading, like How to Lie With Statistics bad. Boo!

- Random Access Fhqwhgads - if you like Strongbad (and especially if you also like Daft Punk!) stop what you're doing and take a listen! So good. Definitely worth $1!

- 52 things I learned in 2016 - a bunch of random interesting stuff!

- The case for normalizing Trump: Foreign populists have been beaten by talking issues, not personality - kind of depressing but if talking about issues is the way to beat Trump, I'm on board!

- Inside Jobs is a project from The Atlantic where they interviewed a bunch of Americans about their job. I love hearing about people's jobs!

- If Waffle House Is Closed, It’s Time To Panic - I've read about the Waffle House Index before, but this had some details I hadn't seen before.

- Republicans suddenly discover that Obamacare repeal might not be so awesome, after all - Kind of disappointing that the Republicans haven't figured this out in the 6 years since Obamacare passed...

- Simmons vs. Gladwell: The Future of Football - very looooong read, but they think concussions/other NFL problems are becoming a Big Deal(TM)

friday linked list: Moana, depressing Trump links, space race

2016-12-02T21:40:56Z

- The controversy behind Disney's groundbreaking new princess (Moana) - the "controversy" here is that one woman thinks that Moana is fat (she is not - look at the pictures!) and:

I think it tells girls that they don’t have to be fit. I think it’s setting up girls for unhealthy lives in the future and also for disappointing romantic lives.

which is so amazingly stupid I just can't even. Anyway, Moana is a good movie and you should see it!

- Depressing Trump links: these are important, but maybe don't read them all one after another? Trump: The Choice We Face, Coping with Chaos in the White House (thanks Andrew!), and Twenty lessons in how to deal with authoritarianism.

- The Time an Engineer Accidentally Started the Space Race and Changed the Course of History - interesting, I didn't realize the space race took such cajoling to get started!

- Seattle Minimum Wage Experiment is Over - they raised their minimum wage to $15/hour and unemployment is down!

- How to Talk to Someone You Hate - some good advice here (thanks David!)

- The Real Reason Women Quit Tech (and How to Address It) - sigh, but at least there are ways to address this (thanks Adam!)

- Quantum physics offers new way to factor numbers - interesting! (thanks Stephen!)

- See Incredible Basketball Shot Set New World Record - impressive!

happy Thanksgiving linked list: charter schools, prisons, grover on Twitter, robot armies

2016-11-23T16:58:58Z

- It seems like there's evidence that some charter schools can work. (although the ballot measure described in the article was defeated by a wide margin...)

- If Prisoners Ran Prisons: Five Texas inmates say what they’d do differently - good idea, and ones pulled out in the article all seem pretty reasonable to me!

- Grover from Sesame Street had a near meltdown on Twitter - happy to see Sesame Street expanding its horizons. Also, hah!

- Who Will Command The Robot Armies? - another great talk by Maciej Ceglowski, also known as the founder of Pinboard. (I also really like the format of text on one side with the accompanying slides on the other!)

- NASA’s analysis of seemingly impossible engine: it works - extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and we're not there yet, but the EM Drive is pretty exciting!

How to stand up against a registry of Muslims in the US

2016-11-20T19:30:20Z

During the campaign, President-Elect Trump (yeah, I know) had called for requiring Muslims in the US to register with the government. This is not unlike what the Nazi's did to the Jews in the late 1930s, before the Holocaust. Obviously one doesn't necessarily lead to the other, but this is pretty terrifying to me.

Is he going to follow through? Who knows, but this week a pro-Trump SuperPAC spokesman pointed to the precedent of Japanese internment during World War II, so it's still being talked about.

So today I pledged to stand together with Muslims if such a registry is created and sign up myself. I don't take this step lightly, but I strongly feel that it's the right thing to do to stand up against this very un-American idea.

some thoughts about President Trump

2016-11-10T15:53:41Z

- Well, that was the worst election party ever...

- Take some time for yourself. It's OK to be sad and feel despair for a little while. Do what makes you happy: read a book, watch a movie, hug your family, go for a walk. I worked on an app last night, because creating makes me feel better. I'd advise against reading more about politics/the election for a bit. Come back when you feel ready.

- Don't lose too much faith in humanity. Hillary got more votes than Trump. And just because someone voted for Trump doesn't mean they're racist, misogynist, etc...although it does mean they're OK with having a president like that, but it's not the same thing.

- There are a lot of ugly things going on out there. I wish I could say that things are going to be OK, but honestly I have no idea. What's important is that we stand up for each other, no matter our race, religion, or country of origin.

- Get involved. If you didn't vote (and lots of people didn't!), take a long, hard look in the mirror. Worried about civil liberties? Donate to the ACLU. Worried about hate groups? Give to the SPLC.

- I found Bernie Sanders' statement to be pretty inspiring. The fight isn't over!

non-election-related linked list: Obamacare lowering uninsured rate, boo Wells Fargo

2016-11-06T16:44:47Z

My gift to you - links that are not election-related. (but don't forget to vote!)

- The Impact of Obamacare, in Four Maps - a reminder that although there are some growing pains with Obamacare, it has dramatically lowered the number of people that don't have health insurance.

(hey, I said "election-related", not "politics-related"!)

- Workers Say Wells Fargo Unfairly Scarred Their Careers - I listened to a recent Planet Money podcast about this, and it made me angry. Glad we don't bank there!

OK, fun video time!

- Omni-directional conveyor belts are fun to watch - that they are!

- This video of Cubs fans singing "Go Cubs Go" after Game 5 at Wrigley Field was surprisingly touching. I think I have a thing for large singing crowds (like "Sweet Caroline" at Red Sox games) Keep in mind that after this game they were still down 3-2 in the World Series, and everyone still looks pretty darn happy :-)

- They're coming with a Hamilton mixtamp, and this cover of "It's Quiet Uptown" by Kelly Clarkson is pretty haunting. (for non-Hamiltonphiles, this is after Hamilton's son dies)

A little math problem about baseball

2016-10-30T21:40:27Z

Since the baseball season is almost over, I wrote up a little math problem based on FiveThirtyEight's MLB predictions. Check it out!

It's a two-party system, and why that should make you feel better

2016-10-30T03:32:29Z

Sometimes I get depressed that, even though he's likely to lose, 44% or so of voters are going to vote for Donald Trump.

But! That doesn't mean that 44% of people agree with everything he does. Although we do have third parties, even people who vote for them realize that they're voting on principle (or as a protest), and either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump is going to be president. People who vote for him probably like some things about him and dislike other things about him. It doesn't mean that 44% of people approve of sexually assaulting women, or building a wall between the US and Mexico, or think that the election is "rigged", etc., etc., etc.

(I admit there's some wishful thinking in here!)

thursday linked list: implicit bias, paying Walmart employees more works!, Twitter and harassment

2016-10-27T18:37:19Z

- We’re All a Little Biased, Even if We Don’t Know It - implicit bias is a thing, but being aware of it can help you counter it (although more research is needed).

- How Did Walmart Get Cleaner Stores and Higher Sales? It Paid Its People More - nice to see that doing the right thing can pay off...

- “A Honeypot For Assholes”: Inside Twitter’s 10-Year Failure To Stop Harassment - I really like using Twitter, but the harassment problem is pretty terrible there. (of course I don't get harassed because I'm not a woman) As others have noted, it's ironic that Twitter was cowardly about fixing the problem because they didn't want to scare users away, and now that they're trying to sell the company nobody wants to buy them because of their image problem...

- Remember how Columbia made a peace deal with the FARC? Turns out Columbian voters narrowly rejected the deal. I haven't been following the story so I'm not sure what's happened since then, but that seems sad :-(

- Hyperpartisan Facebook Pages Are Publishing False And Misleading Information At An Alarming Rate - if you're surprised by this then I'm guessing you aren't on Facebook. I guess it's good that the left-wing pages only wrote 20% false posts compared to the 38% false posts on the right-wing pages, but that's still not great!

- Safety Net Cut Poverty Nearly in Half Last Year - just a reminder that Social Security, food stamps, etc. are effective in lifting people out of poverty

- Lessons in the Delicate Art of Confronting Offensive Speech - changing the subject is a good strategy!

- In the Chicago Police Department, If the Bosses Say It Didn’t Happen, It Didn’t Happen - good investigation of a drug ring operating inside the police department *sigh*

- Full(er) House: Exposing high-end poker cheating devices - wow, this sounds like something out of a Bond movie, but it can be yours for the low price of $5000!

- Voices From Wells Fargo: "I Thought I Was Having a Heart Attack" - yikes

- Civilization 6 is out! I haven't played much, but here's a handy district cheat sheet.

Vote early, Texas!

2016-10-23T22:43:34Z

Early voting begins tomorrow! Here's what you need to know in Travis County:

- You can get a sample ballot by entering your name and date of birth here.
- Here's where you can look up early voting locations - our favorite is the Randall's at Braker and 183, as it's usually not too busy if you don't wait until the last day.
- Not sure how you're going to vote in local elections? No problem! Here's the nonpartisan League of Women Voters guide (PDF). For a bit more color here's the endorsements from the Austin Chronicle. Presumably the Austin American-Statesman has some endorsements somewhere but I can never find them :-/

Updated floating point to hex calculator!

2016-10-22T20:19:20Z

I finished updating my floating point to hex calculator - here's the new version! It looks a bit nicer and also shows a neat breakdown of where the bits go in IEEE 754 floating-point format. Check it out!

Man, Javascript is still kind of dumb

2016-10-11T03:00:07Z

I'm working on rewriting my floating point to hex converter with React. This time I thought I'd do it "right" and use all the nifty Javascript tools that everyone complains about instead of just putting a bunch of inline Javascript/JSX in an HTML file, even though that works well enough. Long term, I'd like to rewrite the marriage map with React and D3.js, so I thought this would be a good dry run.

But, maaaaan:
- I literally had to buy a React+d3.js ebook to figure out how to get all this crap set up. (the book is pretty good, by the by)
- The book recommends starting from a particular git repository. To clone that on my linux machine I had to set up some SSH key stuff, which seemed like overkill. (why do I need to do that for anonymous access?)
- To set it up, it downloads something on the order of 300 packages through npm. I wish I were exaggerating.
- Building it (even without minifying the source!) takes a solid 6 seconds on my desktop machine. This is for a ~100 line javascript file. The non-minified version is more than 2 MB of Javascript! Even the minified one is ~180K, which seems like way too much.
- React now recommends you use ES6 instead of calling React.createClass(), and there are some niceties there. But there also some stupid gotchas, like the fact that you have to call .bind(this) on every method for it to be able to access this, because Javascript is the worst.
- For some reason I'm not able to debug with Firefox's debugging tools. (luckily Edge seems to work well)
- I wasted an hour because the new fancy fetch standard (not supported in some versions of IE so you need a polyfill) has a method called text() that returns the text of the response. Wait, no, it actually returns a promise that has the text of the response. I never realized how much I liked C#'s standard of ending asynchronous methods with "Async" before...

Anyway, I think I'm past all this crap, but I'm starting to remember why Javascript is terrible!

days are meaningless linked list: hospital algorithms, books reduce recidivism, dining as a couple

2016-10-03T01:32:56Z

- This Algorithm Accidentally Predicted Which Hospital Patients Were Most Likely To Die - neat! (thanks Dan!)

- To reduce recidivism rates, give prisoners more books - win-win!

- The Economics of Dining as a Couple - funny, and the best part is the standard disclaimer at the bottom: "This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners." For the record, David and I are somewhere between options 2 and 3.

- A theory of creepiness - a little more philosophical than I usually like, but I found it interesting.

- Blame BP for Deepwater Horizon. But Direct Your Outrage to the Actual Mistake. - yeah, many of these types of failures are systemic and build up over a long period of time.

- Texas Put Under Court Supervision After Lying to Voters About Illegal ID Rules - sigh

- How the Maker of the EpiPen Made Government Its Ally - yeah, this is the problem with...lobbyists, I guess? Something is wrong here.

- More than a hundred Star Trek cast and crew sign off on anti-Trump letter - random, but neat I guess!

- Firefox is eating your SSD – here is how to fix it

what day is it again? linked list: framed, tech firms' bias against women, snowden

2016-09-19T00:59:00Z

- Framed: A Mystery in Six Parts - this is excellent investigative work by the LA Times and one heck of a story! Straight out of a Lifetime original movie or something...

- When tech firms judge on skills alone, women land more job interviews - blind auditions are a great idea. The fact that that changed the number of women selected for an interview from 5% to 54% is about as clear a sign you can get that there's (conscious or unconscious) bias.

- The Leaky Myths of Snowden: Oliver Stone’s new movie about Edward Snowden is a fairy tale and a bore - pretty harsh, but he makes a good point that Snowden released a ton of info that had nothing to do with domestic surveillance.

- 11 Secrets to Staying Productive and in Control - I clicked on this link with low expectations because, come on, look at that title! But I actually enjoyed it. I think forgiving yourself is really hard, but important - instead of getting mad at myself I try to figure out how to not make that mistake in the future.

- How Did G.M. Create Tesla’s Dream Car First? - I didn't realize the Bolt was so competitive with the Model 3!

- What I Learned From Executing Two Men - a powerful editorial

- How to get people who installed a leaked build to stop using that build? - a funny story from Raymond Chen

- Can Teenage Defiance Be Manipulated for Good? - yes it can!

- What Can Hitters Actually See Out of a Pitcher’s Hand? - when you think about it it's pretty impressive that anyone is good at hitting off of a major league pitcher...

- Myst creator Rand Miller on his favorite puzzle that everybody hates - his new game, Obduction, is out now!

- SpaceX Is Cribbing From Boeing's 1920s Playbook - neat parallel!

The Last Policeman series reviews

2016-09-15T23:42:33Z

The Last Policeman by Ben H. Winters
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Countdown City by Ben H. Winters
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

World of Trouble by Ben H. Winters
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is my favorite kind of scifi - what if the world was like it is now except for one big difference? In The Last Policeman series, the big difference is that an asteroid is coming to destroy all human life on Earth, and everyone knows exactly when it's going to hit.

The books are pretty interesting mysteries, but what I really enjoyed was the look at society breaking down and how different kinds of people reacted to knowing about the asteroid.

View all my reviews

baby linked list! Uber in Japan, booo Takata, math is apparently hard

2016-09-05T03:46:59Z

We had a baby! Check Facebook for details and pictures.

(from this point on the links are non-baby related)

- How Uber’s Failure in Japan Can Help Startups Everywhere - interesting look at the cultural differences in Japan that sunk Uber there.

- A Cheaper Airbag, and Takata’s Road to a Deadly Crisis - sigh. Also, sounds like there may have been some fraud a la Volkswagen...

- A surprisingly simple test to check research papers for errors - wow, seriously?? Over half the papers they looked at had a simple math error that is easily detectable! (thanks David!)

- A Powerful Russian Weapon: The Spread of False Stories - you guys, I'm starting to think Russia might not be friendly?

- Edgar Allan Poe Had a Time Machine and I Can Prove It - the title is dumb, but that is some weird stuff! (thanks David!)

- Keeping Kids From Toy Guns: How One Mother Changed Her Mind - interesting!

- 'Mystery Shoppers' Help U.S. Regulators Fight Racial Discrimination At Banks - sad that this is necessary, but I'm glad the CFPB is doing it! (thanks David!)

- At Least 110 Republican Leaders Won’t Vote for Donald Trump. Here’s When They Reached Their Breaking Point. - nothing really new here, but it's a nice visualization.

- Colombia’s Milestone in World Peace - yay!

- New Virus Breaks The Rules Of Infection - weird!

- Should you take Tylenol, Advil, or aspirin for pain? Here's what the evidence says. - weird, I usually take Tylenol for headaches and it works well for me. Advil for tooth pain is excellent though!

Austin escape rooms - my reviews

2016-08-31T18:13:50Z

We've done a lot of these lately, because it's going to be much harder once we have a kid :-) But here are my ratings for the ones we've done, in descending order:

Austin Maze Rooms
The room we did was set in the '70s, and the "apartment" was decorated realistically and authentically. The Maze Room claims to specialize in "gadgets", and after doing the room I 100% agree - some of the puzzles blew me away! Even the puzzles that didn't make sense at the time made sense in retrospect after we looked again at the clues we ignored.

There's only one room there now, but they're opening up a new one this fall and I'm hoping we can try it out.
Would recommend: Yes!!
Rooms done: Spy Safe House

The Escape Game Austin
The room was very nicely decorated, and the system for getting clues was higher-tech than at other places. (we could yell for help, and a clue would show up on a monitor) When we were there, they had made a mistake in setting up the room, but they realized it pretty quickly and came in to rectify the situation. There were also some neat gadgets/types of puzzles here, although a minor complaint was that they used the same "puzzle" multiple times, which is a little unusual for these sorts of room.

There are four rooms there, and I'd definitely be interested in trying some of the other ones!
Would recommend: Yes!
Rooms done: Classified! (I mean, the room is Classified!, not that it's classified which room we did)

Austin Panic Room (although it's now a branch of the Texas Panic Room, I guess?)
This will always hold a special place in my heart, as it was the first escape room we did. Although in retrospect, the first room we did (Museum Heist) had interesting puzzles but they weren't particularly themed to the room. This got better in the later rooms we did, where there tended to be a few very nice puzzles. Generally lower-budget than the first two places on the list, but we still had a good time and would go back. Their number of people limits on their rooms are a bit generous. (we did the Museum Heist room with 10, which is really a lot of people for any escape room) The location is clearly a repurposed old house, which is neat!

Right now there are five rooms going on there.
Would recommend: Yes
Rooms done: Museum Heist, Abandoned School, Prison Break

Mystery Room
We happened to walk by this place at the Domain, so we thought we'd give it a shot. The location is partitioned up into six (or eight?) rooms, and the walls don't even go up to the ceiling so it's the opposite of immersive. (they have white noise playing to drown out the sound of other rooms, which is both annoying and doesn't really work) The room we were in was pretty sparsely decorated, and the only puzzles we had trouble with were confusing, not clever. Most rooms let you configure how hard it is, which seemed like a cool idea until we escaped with some clues left unused and two locks, and were told "Yeah, you only need those on the harder difficulty", which is pretty disappointing.

There are eight rooms available there.
Would recommend: Not really
Rooms done: Pharoah's Tomb

Here's a Austin Chronicle piece where they review these and some others I'd like to try!

why you should vote, and why your vote does matter

2016-08-30T16:26:30Z

This is (to put it mildly) a weird election. Even Texas has had a few close polls. There's a lot of uncertainty this year, so you're more likely to be living in a closeish state this year than in other years.
It's your civic duty. Seriously, I don't want to get all emotional here, but democracy doesn't work if people don't vote. (not that our democracy doesn't have other problems! But this is one of them) Especially if you're a woman, or non-white, or non-land-owning: people fought for your right to vote. (and if you're a white land-owning male, well, that's what the American Revolution was about!)
If you think there's "no difference" between Hillary and Trump...I don't even know where to begin. The Democratic and Republican party platforms are remarkably different. Hillary wants to raise the minimum wage, Trump wants to build a wall and ban Muslim immigrants (maybe? I can't keep up...), they differ on taxes, etc., etc., etc.
More seriously, even if your state is deep red or dark blue, people pay attention to the popular vote margin. I want Trump to lose by the widest margin possible to send a message that we the people reject his anti-immigrant, authoritarian candidacy.

Go make sure you're registered! Check on when your state allows early voting! Plan on voting!