Comment by ubermonkey | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ubermonkey | Hacker News Reader

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7 million people appear to disagree with you about Houston. I've lived here -- by choice! -- for 28 years. It's true we have no scenic vistas, and our summers are notoriously hot and muggy, but

- You can afford to live here. Real estate is attainable, even fairly close in.

- The arts here are on par with our status as the 4th largest city in the country.

- The people are awesome -- friendly, helpful, and generally from all over the damn place. That leads to ...

- The food is RIDICULOUS. There's a great meal to be had in this town at any price point you care to name.

- It's immensely un-snooty. Unlike lots of nerds, I don't mind putting on a suit, but in Houston there's almost nowhere that polices dress codes beyond "no jeans, collared shirt". And even that's rare. Superficial snobbiness is just not much of a Thing here (vs., say, big parts of Dallas, or Atlanta).

- The flip side of the summer is that it's almost NEVER cold enough to deter outdoor activities. You don't store your bike for the winter here. You just keep riding.

- Finally, if you're a traveling sort of person, being centrally located makes hitting either coast possible pretty quickly. This has been handy for me in both business and personal contexts for sure.

So yeah, step off. Houston's awesome. It might not've been YOUR favorite place, but maybe crapping all over it in your post about a roach wasn't the best move.

Thanks for your insight. I actually agree with a lot of it.

I didn't come by my assessment by reading about Houston and latching onto someone else's observations. I lived in Houston, west of HWY6 for 5 years before buying a place out northwest on 290 and commuting from there for 5 more years.

Then, after moving up near FtWorth and just when I thought I was done with it for good, I ended up commuting weekly to Houston for 18 more years. I saw and had the opportunity to enjoy all the interstate construction on I-10, 45 towards Galveston, 59, 610 loop, Grand Parkway, Beltway 8, and finally 290. It has been in a state of constant change down there. Some changes improved things, others appear to be boondoggles.

I totally agree on the people and the food. I'm in the O&G industry so I had the opportunity to work with people from every continent including a guy who spent a season in Antarctica. Culture, arts, like you say is first class.

Since I watched many of those subdivisions being built, especially on the southwest to northwest side of the city, I am less impressed by the housing. My family has been in the building business since the Depression and I grew up on job sites. I would be pretty persnickety about what and where I bought. When I first moved there, and likely when you did too, the Katy Prairie was a nesting area for migratory geese and ducks. Now they have lost all that so that developers could build huge subdivisions in the old rice paddies and interrupt rainwater drainage that formerly prevented a large part of the major flooding in Houston proper. I spent days down there after Harvey trying to help people who had lost all their stuff.

Basically, I come by my overall negative impression of Houston honestly. We don't have to agree about everything and indeed we don't. That won't change my assessment though since that is based entirely on my own experiences and observations.

To be fair, slapdash spec builds from developers and overbuilding in wetlands and prairies are not a uniquely Houston phenomenon.

I've never lived in the suburbs here - I'm in Montrose - but yeah, a lot of the new stuff is badly built, but it's the same anywhere. The part that WAS uniquely Houston is that they literally built on the flood plain, and many people bought there and weren't aware of the risk.

It's true we needn't agree, but it's also true that beginning your post by describing a city as "northwest of the asshole of the universe", and ending it by calling it a "sweltering bunghole," is needlessly derogatory, inflammatory, and pointlessly rude.

Montrose had some of the best of Houston's jewels in those Victorian homes. It also had an active night life that attracted people from all over the area. I hated to see those developers buying up the Victorians and tearing them down so they could build a near-zero lot line mansion box. I understand that property values at the time encouraged owners to sell into a boom.

I agree that Houston has no monopoly on wanton destruction of nice places.

I'm a visual person and appearances help me navigate the world that I live in.

In real life, have you ever seen anything that looks more like a wrinkly anus than the network of roads radiating from downtown Houston? Add to that the stinking, petrochemical soup of the Ship Channel and I think you may see why I feel the way I do about the place.

I guess, given the choice of language here, that there's no common ground to be found with you, so I'll bow out here.

I too have a love/hate relationship with Houston. I hated it when I lived there and miss it now that I don’t. It’s fun to visit but I also quickly remember all the reasons I hated living there and not sure I could do it again.

This is close to how I really feel about Houston - love/hate. There is a lot to love but there is also a lot to dislike. It took me several years of driving freeways around DFW where traffic is a lot less stressful to unlearn all the aggressive driving habits that I picked up as survival skills on Houston freeways.

If I needed to live there again I would carefully scout everything so that I had an easy way in and out and to and from work. That more than anything would help make like in Houston manageable.

If you’re on HN and on the O&G industry we should probably chat.

I'm a geophysicist by experience and training. I see your company is heavily into steerable tools. I spent a bit of time with a blue company as an MWD engineer once. The whole signal formation and transmission environment presents a lot of challenges for successful decoding of the toolface info for BHA orientation and location. I always struggled to see how unschooled field engineers decoding toolfaces from deviated boreholes were allowed to serve as and to present downhole borehole orientation information to state agencies certifying those as accurate, effectively serving as surveyors but with no prior training to understand maps, boundaries - especially as it applied to mineral ownership issues, etc.

Knowing from experience the many things that can go wrong on a downhole survey leaves me wondering why the survey data from those past generation of tools was taken as acceptably accurate. It was not standard practice at the time to take a multishot to verify hole geometry and once it all went horizontal you had to trust the MWD/LWD. In many cases that was fine but in some situations that was dicey. Some of those MWDs were notoriously bad as engineers pushed them past the limits of signal decoding in order to avoid being charged for the trip to retrieve, especially the one I worked with.

That's how I remember it all anyway. Email is in profile if you want to chat. Good luck in your endeavors!

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