Barton's Blog » texas

Our trip to Wimberley, Texas

Barton George — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 03:05:24 +0000

Today we felt like day trippin’ so I got out our central Texas guide book and picked a destination: Wimberley. This town of ~5,000 is about an hour south of Austin and is made up of an interesting mix of artists and ranchers. We had no idea what to expect but were pleasantly surprised by the lush river trail and the cute town center.

Here are a few pics from our adventure:

The three monkeys in the lead as we start off on the river trail.

Pretty lush for central texas during one of the worst droughts in decades.

KInda felt like we were down on the Bayou.

Yes, the walls of this house are made of bottles.

No room at the old Salty Chicken.

Pau for now…

The Lights of Johnson City

Barton George — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 03:14:25 +0000

The day after Christmas, the whole multi-generational family made the trek out to Fredericksburg, a little slice of Deutschland in the middle of the Lone Star state, for some yummy beer and schnitzel. We had a great time, particularly with the 80 degree weather, but the real sights appeared on the way home.

As we made our way back, we passed through Johnson City, birthplace of LBJ and named after a distant relative of his. Much to our surprise, we stumbled upon an amazing display of lights (which I later learned is the Hill Country Christmas Lights). Here are my favorite pics from the night.

It would be awesome to take a carriage ride next year.

Pau for now…

Happy Thanksgiving from Austin, TX

Barton George — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 03:03:03 +0000

When our kids get older, we’re looking forward to having traditional Thanksgiving dinners like we remember. At this point, however, given their attention span and energy (one being short, the other seemingly infinite) we decided to go out to a family friendly restaurant that comes with an outdoor area for the kids to romp around before the meal.

Below is a summary of our day in four pictures.

1) Checking out the mini-herd of longhorns about a mile from our house

2) Going to the park with Grandma and Grandpa

3) Threadgills for our Thanksgiving feast (notice the armadillos coming out from under the eaves)

4) The sunset on the ride home

All in all, a great day.

Pau for now…

Splitting the Cloud in Three

Barton George — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 22:10:37 +0000

Last week I attended the Rackspace Customer Event (Lombardi Blueprint is hosted at Rackspace) down on the Riverwalk in San Antonio. It was a great event and I sat in on some cool talks as well as grabbed some time with several of the Rackspace execs.

Later this week and/or early next week I will be posting the podcasts I did with CEO Lanham Napier, CTO John Engates as well as Mosso co-founder Jonathan Bryce.

The Riverwalk at dusk.

One of the talks I sat in on was CTO John Engates’ Cloud Computing presentation. You can check out the whole presentation here, but the section I wanted to call out was the one that dealt with “The Categories of Cloud Computing.” While not an original construct, it helped me to see it laid out like this:

Application Clouds (SaaS)

Ease of use: Low complexity
Flexibility: Minimal control
Typical Consumers: End users
Examples: Mail Trust, Salesfore.com, Blueprint, TurboTax Online, Microsoft Online Services

Platform Clouds (PaaS*)

Ease of use: Medium complexity
Flexibility: Medium control
Typical Consumers: Developers
Examples: Rackspace/Mosso Hosting Cloud, Google AppEngine, Force.com, Azure

Infrastructure Clouds (IaaS)

Ease of use: High complexity
Flexibility: Maximum control
Typical Customers: Developers, System Administrators
Examples: Rackspace/Mosso Cloud Files, EC2, S3, Microsoft SSDS, FlexiScale, GoGrid

*Not to be confused with PAAS.

While I find these categories helpful now, I’m sure it won’t be long until these divisions go the way of “intranet,” “extranet,” and “internet,” and there’s just one big happy cloud.

Where it all began“The Original Cloud” TM.

Pau for now…

Goats in the Trees

Barton George — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 16:11:32 +0000

On Saturday we took the kids to the Sweet Berry Farm pumpkin patch in Marble Falls, about an hour outside of Austin.

When we checked out the petting zoo we were quite surprised to find the goats hanging out in the trees. I thought I’d share this rare glimpse of the species goatis-tree-dwellis.

This guy even has his own tree house.

Pau for now…