This post is going to be just a mishmash of random stuff. Hopefully I can get back to normal posting later this week.

First off, Allkpop.com has an internet radio station now. You can check it our here. They haven’t yet played a good song that isn’t already in my iTunes library. So we’ll have to see if it is worth bookmarking, but it is good music nevertheless.

Ever since it was released back in January, The Race for a New Game Machine has been on my queue of books to read. I finally bought it on my Kindle to beat the boredom while driving down to Austin with my family.  I think it might be the first DRMed media that I have purchased and if you ask me, it is well worth it. The book is a first hand account of an IBM engineer that managed a team producing the Cell Processor for the PS3 and also the processor for the XBox 360. I didn’t realize the amount of politics and drama that goes on behind closed doors at big chip design firms like IBM. This book is well worth reading if you are into technology or management.

I picked up Options in the bargain bin at a bookstore in Austin. It was a steal at $5 new. The book was written by Daniel Lyons AKA Fake Steve Jobs. Lyons used to write a blog called the Secret Diary of Steve Jobs from 2006 to 2008. If you aren’t familiar, here is the wikipedia article. The book is basically a parody of Steve Jobs in 1st person view. I don’t know how it is since I haven’t read it yet. So, I won’t recommend it to anyone yet. But even if it does suck, at least it has a cool shiny cover!

Now here is the cool part of the post. I said earlier that I went to Austin with my family. Well, before coming back to Plano last night, we sat under the Congress bridge to watch the famous bridge bats come out to feed. If you haven’t heard of them you can read about them here, here and here. Basically, millions of bats from mexico live under the congress bridge in Austin for the summer. Every night at sundown, all the bats come out as a group to feed on all the pesky bugs and critters outside. It is a truly spectacular sight. Naturally, I brought my 30D along to take some pictures.

Here is my family (with my sister pretending that she is some celebrity that can’t be photographed or something).

The crowd wasn’t too bad while there was still light. Down on the path in front of the grass, there were some jugglers and people selling I <bat>  Austin shirts.

This dog stood like this for a good 10 minutes. He didn’t seem to concerned that there was a 4 foot drop to his right and a 3 story drop to his left.

By the time it was getting dark, the grass and the bridge were filling up with spectators.

Here you can see the bats as blurs across the sky. The were really fast and for some reason seemed to only come as a steady stream from one small section of the bridge.

Here are two pictures I took from on the bridge. I really wish I had my 430EX external flash with me. The built-in flash only lets me sync to 1/250th of a second and those bats were a little too fast for that.