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cottonmather0

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Everything posted by cottonmather0

  1. It's always like that, especially on Thursday and Saturday nights. It's one of the nicer places to go in town, I think. Lots of options. The problem is that it's hard to get in and out and that the parking lot is way too small.
  2. Naw, it was just off of the South Loop near the Astrodome. I think they tore it down a few years ago.
  3. Reggae Hut is great and I second Katie on the Raven Grill/Picnic. Neither is necessarily within reasonable walking distance of any of the museums, though. There is also plenty of stuff in the Village, but that too isn't really in the "Museum District" either.
  4. Do the residents in this area "know people who can get things done" as do the Ashby high rise opponents? LOL
  5. I was working over there yesterday trying it out and will likely be at the party tomorrow night - will probably even pay for a drop-in membership or a desk at this point. At this point there are a whole lot of people working over there right now. BTW - Brent's desk is much more moved in now than the picture he posted from two weeks ago, he's even got pictures on the wall.
  6. Went over and checked it out today and met with Matthew, one of the owners. The June 1 opening date is going to be a very soft opening - they will have the desks ready and the wifi up and running but nothing much beyond that. This is all understandable, though, as they're paying everything out of their pockets as they go along. The floors are still bare and there appears to be a lot of construction and improvements left to do. Mrs Cottonmather0 and I were impressed with what they have planned and the vision they seem to have for it. Not sure if we're going to buy into it or not for our business, but they seem to be getting a lot of the space locked up early. I would also say that based on what Matthew shared with us, "collective" is a very descriptive word. The place is designed for a lot of collaboration and community between the tenants and not necessarily just as a cheap office space alternative. It will be cool - already for our own business we could see the synergies from being close to some of the other tenants he listed. If I had to list one thing that disappointed me, I would say that I would have hoped they had a more sophisticated technological plan - maybe a configurable telephone system, at least for the tenants leasing the actual offices, and actual wired networking ("ethernet") jacks, to name a couple of things. Right now they just plan on having a T1 line coming in from the ISP (not sure who that is) running to a wireless router (of undetermined speed) and that's it. Matthew said the plan was just to let tenants just set up their own VOIP (Vonage) type systems, but if they're paying for a T1 a truly integrated package wouldn't be that much more expensive. All in all though, I think it's a pretty neat idea and that they'll be successful. I don't know if they're far enough along for Mrs Cottonmather0 and I to be able to make a decision if we want to pay to join, but it definitely an option for us and it's an impressive thing they're trying to do.
  7. I am going to be self-employed soon and have been looking for an office solution outside of my house and away from the baby and nanny every morning. My wife sent me a link to this place this morning and it looks VERY cool. Going to schedule a tour and will report back after I check it out.
  8. Agreed. When all of this was going on last fall, all I could think was "hysteria" whenever I saw pictures of teachers being carted off on gurneys with oxygen masks and the like. It just seemed like all of the parents and teachers associated with that school were absolutely determined to believe that there was something wrong, even when the CDC and HISD said it was OK, or at least not nearly as bad as they were all insisting it to be.
  9. I don't remember one being there, but if there is now, then yes. Again, we quit going over there about two years ago when we got tired of the crowded parking lots and the punks. It very well could be a much different place than it used to be from that perspective.
  10. 1.) It's hard to get to (and the construction didn't help) 2.) They built the parking garage too late. It was REALLY crowded when it opened and I think a lot of people just kind of gave up. 3.) It's overrun with gang-bangers and troublemakers. Sure, there are a lot of teenagers at any mall, but this one feels seedier for some reason. When I used to go over there it felt really unsafe walking to my car. 3.) There is not one major department store or retailer and the whole place. And aside from the movies and Dave and Busters, it just feels kind of rinky-dink to me. I know that it's called "entertainment center" but still, some bigger name chain restaurants - or really nice one-off places - would have been nice.
  11. No, the OP. It seems like a pretty silly question if you drive down 288 at all with any regularity. There are ALWAYS cops everywhere.
  12. You must not drive much down southbound 288!
  13. All fair points and I can very much appreciate suspicion if someone is driving around taking pictures, but I wasn't taking pictures or even getting out of the car. Best I can tell, she got in her car and started following me when I passed by, which was just strange.
  14. Yeah, I figured it was probably out of the ordinary and bad luck on my part to run into her but I wanted to check. With regards to the reason we were there, the neighborhood is indeed very very beautiful. All of the houses have an original feel to them and most of the large lots are landscaped beautifully, too. Not to mention the rolling terrain which is quite unusual for Houston, and the green areas over the drainage easements. I was very impressed with it all.
  15. My wife and I were driving home from a function at Hermann Park yesterday when I suggested a detour down MacGregor and through Riverside Terrace as I have always read about the neighborhood here on HAIF but had never actually seen it for myself. So we did and we drove around a bit and I was quite impressed by some of the terrain and landscaping and some of the big beautiful houses over there. After about 15 minutes we turned a corner onto Parkwood Drive and came up on an older black lady standing next to her car (a beat up late 80's Nissan Z, it looked like, with old faded Lee Brown bumper stickers on it) in the street talking to a letter carrier. We drove around them and kept driving, kind of slow to check out the scenery, and then about 3-4 blocks after we passed the lady and the mail carrier, I pulled over at the side of the road to look at my key map to figure out how to get out and back to the freeway. When I looked up again, I realized that the lady in the Nissan had pulled up beside me and pinned my pickup in behind a parked car and was sitting there with her window down. I rolled down my window and asked, "Can I help you?" "Can I help YOU?" "Um, no. We're just driving around admiring the houses and the neighborhood." "If you're driving, then home come you're stopped?" "Uh, because I'm looking at a map?" (I flashed her my key map) "How come you're driving through this neighborhood?" (by this time I realized that she wasn't being friendly) "Because I've always heard this was a pretty neighborhood?" "How about I show you the way out?" "No thanks." (and I rolled up my window) She sat there for a while with her window down, then she pulled forward and drove slowly before she pulled over and started following me again. She followed us about two more blocks until we came to Bowling Green, where we could see MacGregor on the right, and my wife was sufficiently freaked out enough to beg me to go back to the freeway, so we did. And yes, I'm sure this topic will generate the obligatory, "how does it feel to be reverse-racially profiled?" responses and I suppose that's fair, but for the life of me I can't figure out what she would have thought we were doing at 2:00 on a Saturday afternoon with my wife and kid in his car seat in the car with me and clearly visible to her. Jeez. I am self-aware enough to guess that she figured a large white man in a pickup must be suspicious, but with my wife and kid in the car? What are we going to do, throw a dirty diaper onto someone's lawn?
  16. Yeah, this is a great point. More passengers overall and more passengers just waiting and waiting at the gate.
  17. They were actually quite forward thinking at the time but when those things were built in the 1960's the designers had absolutely no concept of the volume of travelers and planes that would pass through the airport 40 years later. Those "banjos" are somewhat efficient in getting passengers to the planes and fitting the planes into the space around the terminal, but there is very little space inside the little pod for passengers to sit and wait. And speaking as someone who travels often on Continental Express, it can get miserably crowded in there really fast. I welcome these changes as it will make Terminal B (and the real estate around it) a lot more efficient and passenger-friendly...Although I guess the parking situation over there is going to get a lot worse now with more passengers moving through. One other thing about these particular banjos is that they are really small compared to other airports - maybe room for five 737's - they probably would have survived had they been bigger like these: Newark Charles De Gaulle (technically satellite terminals since the banjo necks are underground, I know)
  18. I agree, but that's too close to the existing location if they ever did build a second. I would expect Clear Lake/Pearland, the Woodlands, Cinco Ranch, and/or Sugar Land to be more likely choices for a second CM than anything inside the Beltway right now.
  19. I remember an episode of "Dallas" once where Pam went to a conference of some sort in Port Aransas and when she got there it looked like Miami or San Diego: palm trees, luxury hotel, yachts. It was obvious that the writers/producers/directors/whoever had just pulled out a map and picked a random town on the coast and had no idea what the real Port Aransas looked like. I suspect that Galveston in a movie would get very similar treatment as there is nowhere on the Texas Coast that anyone could consider reasonably consider "beautiful" in the strictest Hollywood sense.
  20. It was better when it was the Confederate House, but political correctness fixed that a few years ago. Bring on the high rise.
  21. I noticed yesterday that it was being torn down. I was hopeful that it was for a new building and am now disappointed that it's just going to be a crappy old lot. Bleh.
  22. I agree. There's not a damn thing freaky with that intersection. The freeway is straight and there are at least three thru-lanes alongside three exit lanes. The problem during rush hour (or most other times, 5am on Sunday not being one of them) is that a**holes decide that they're too good or in too big of a hurry to wait their turn in line, so they cut. Most times they can pull it off, but with the large traffic volumes through there, something bad is bound to happen sooner or later. Either a.) the cutter misjudges the speed of the exit lane and hits somebody in that lane, or b.) the cutter just decides to park in a thru-lane with his blinker on until he can squeeze into the front of the exit lane line. In any case, people deciding to bypass the end of the line just make the line worse and encourage more people to try and cut, too. It's a vicious circle and it has nothing to do with the design of the intersection. It's just a busy intersection with a lot of traffic and people are too impatient to wait their turn. Period. (Yes, I know that sometimes people unfamiliar with the freeway will not realize that the backup is as large as it is and then try to cut when they do, but I doubt that's a large proportion of drivers during rush hour. Rush hour is full of commuters on a regular route and they know good and well what they're doing when they cut.) With regards to the bus crash, there wasn't any traffic. On the news last night they showed a picture of the accident report with the cops' drawing of the accident and it sure looks to me that he was driving too fast and swerved in one way or the other at the last second. Either he was in the exit lane and didn't intend to be (more likely since he was driving back to San Antonio and wouldn't take 59) or he was in the main lanes and swerved to make the exit (which doesn't make much sense). Can't find any pics online yet, but I'll keep trying. Either way, the accident doesn't prove that intersection is "freaky" in the slightest. This is just poor-quality Houston news reporting rearing its head again.
  23. I love this church! Glad to find a thread about it here, but how come no one has mentioned what it looks like at night? The whole building glows different colors.
  24. I have been inside the bubble and there is no grass in there; it's all fake turf. The material is not transparent and the bubble isn't easily disassembled. . It literally is a bubble: the whole thing works by being inflated at a higher pressure inside than the air outside - you have to go through an airlock to get inside. It's a permanent structure that, for the surface area it covers, is cheaper than building a rigid structure. But I agree, it's filthy and needs to be cleaned. Much like the roof of Minute Maid Park a couple of years ago.
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