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I was just thinking today that MySQL's SET datatype has to be the most underused feature of MySQL, and how I could implement a multiple category system for my ebooks using it, when I got the MySQL AB Newsletter and lo and behold, it has an article on using SET.

I love fun coincidences like that.

We got an email this evening from a friend, one of those types of emails that has been forwarded something like 5 times or more, warning of a serial killer that lures women out of their houses by playing a recording of a crying baby. Something about the way it was written made me think "urban legend," so I dug around a little bit on the Web.

It is an urban legend; the Snopes page debunking it is here. I think it's the first time I've seen an urban legend so new that it's practically gestating; interestingly, the text of the email we received has some slight variations on the one posted by Snopes. Urban legend evolution?

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Am I just cynical? Holiday Inn is declaring today Towel Amnesty Day in which anyone who has ever stolen a towel (or anything else, I imagine) from a hotel can tell their story, and Holiday Inn will donate $1.00 to charity (plus 25 lucky people will "win" a souvenir towel). You know what I see when I look at this? A "Towel Information Awareness" (take that, TIA!) database that Holiday Inn can then use to red-flag future customers. "Even stolen a towel? They did? Charge them an extra $10 for this room."

Don't think so? Why else would their entry form ask for your full name, address, phone number and email?

Cynical, indeed.

I always (usually) (sometimes) take notice when someone mentions some of our fine local beers; so my attention was grabbed when I read that Tim Bray enjoyed a Black Butte Porter while waiting for a flight home today. Good choice, Tim.

Black Butte Porter is not only the flagship beer from Deschutes Brewery, but also I think of Bend. It's definitely one of the things we're known for in some circles. In fact, if you ever visit Bend, you must go to the Deschutes Brewery and your first beer must be a Black Butte Porter, it's that good (especially on tap at the source). Should you do so, let me know and I'll join you. I might even buy the first round.

Saw S.W.A.T. on Saturday, and it's a pretty good movie. Most surprisingly, to me, was that it was directed by Clark Johnson, an old "Homicide" alum (who also has a small part in the movie, along with another ex-Homicider, Reed Diamond).

("Homicide" was one of those rare gems of a television show that, when I got into it, I would go out of my way to watch. When it was good, it was the best show on TV, period.)

I had already recognized Clark Johnson (he plays LL Cool J's partner early on), but was totally surprised to find out he had directed the movie; I had no idea he'd jumped to the big leagues. That's cool.

A little while back (a month, maybe two), the "Furball Asian Mart" opened up on the south end of Bend, near the corner of 97 and Brosterhous/Division.

Yeah. "Furball Asian Mart." You're thinking the same thing I did.

Apparently, somebody else thought so, too: Friday when I passed it going home from work, they had covered up the "Furball" so that it's now simply the "Asian Mart."

I just watched the QuickTime trailer for the latest Quentin Tarantino movie, "Kill Bill". Wow, I don't even know how to describe it, other than damn.

Thanks to Scoble for the link.

The big news around here is that George W. Bush came to town. Ironically, he came to talk about healthy forests and programs to help cut down the forest fire danger, but was pre-empted from Camp Sherman to Redmond because of forest fires.

Here are some links:

• Local story on Bend.com
• The CNN story
• One from the San Francisco Chronicle (!), detailing more about the fires
• Story from KOIN, the CBS affiliate in Portland

And Jake over on UtterlyBoring has blogged a bit about it, too, both here and here.

Yikes. For the past, oh, 6 hours or so, I've had this error killing the site entirely:

(Of course, if you tried to connect during that time, you'll know what "/path/to" really is. It's probably already cached in Google, damn it all.)

I'd forgotten the all-important semi-colon at the end of line 394. This comes about because I'd been making changes today, and like an idiot forgot to test the last upload I'd made before heading home. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Just saw the movie version of Chicago this evening, and I just have to say: eh.

I'm sure this will make me popular with those who loved the movie (even my wife loved it, and she normally hates musicals), but I honestly do not see the big deal with this movie, and I certainly don't see why it garnered so many award nominations... unless it's just because it has the label "musical" slapped on it. I'm sorry, but it was just a bit too tedious for me.

Of course, it doesn't help that I don't really like René Zellweger, or that Richard Gere pretty much proved he can't sing his way out of a paper bag. Those aside, it was simply a mediocre plot and thin storyline heavily padded with music and dance numbers.

(I couldn't sit through all of Moulin Rouge either.)

Yep, back from our excellent adventures in camping. It was a good weekend, sunny and hot, the nights not too cold. I was a little nervous about how the kids would do sleeping in the tent this year, but for nothing: they slept better than the adults did.

The campground itself was a bit primitive—no plumbing. Restroom facilities were outhouses, and the only water was from an old-fashioned pump. I didn't mind so much, but others did. Next year's family reunion will be held somewhere slightly more modern. But overall, Cold Springs Campground is a nice rustic little campground, and we had a great time.

The Beach Boys concert on Sunday was cool, too, even though we were dead tired from camping. Free drinks, cigars, steak dinner. VIP indeed. The only drawback was that only the serving areas were tented; all the tables were right out in the hot hot hot sun and we all sat roasting for awhile before some of us figured out we could sit out behind the main tent in the shade and the breeze to cool off before the concert actually started. After that, it was a perfect evening.

Back on the 11th I blogged about the PHP Cruise and quoted the price for 2 as $1199.99 plus $819.99. I wanted to clarify that I was talking about the Full Suite pricing, which is the most expensive (and would also be the nicest for traveling with my wife). Marco from php|architect commented to point out the better deal price of $799.99, for the Inside Cabin fare. Details here. He's absolutely right; re-reading my entry made it sound like it was more expensive that it is. So get on it! $800 is a pretty good price for a cruise in the Bahamas.

I'm going offline this weekend, starting today at noon. We're going to the annual family reunion, and camping out at Cold Springs Campground just outside of Sisters. And then Sunday when we get back, we have the Beach Boys concert. Full weekend. I may be back online Sunday night. Maybe.

More on the California governor race. In order to be fair, federal rules dictate that all candidates have to have equal air time on television, and since there's a huge disparity between the screen time someone like, say, Arnold Schwarzenegger has and someone like, say, Larry Flynt has, cable TV networks have made the decision to pull Arnold's movies. There's a story about it here.

As you might imagine, I have several thoughts on this.

First of all, nationwide cable TV networks are pulling Arnold's movies? Seems unfair to punish the rest of the nation for the consequences of California's governor race. I wonder how long it will take for some litigation-happy idiot outside of California to try to sue the SciFi Channel for this.

But then, wouldn't it be much more amusing (and California-like) if instead of pulling Arnold's movies, they gave equal amounts of screen time to the other candidates? Then there would be nothing on California TV except candidates... imagine the horror:

• Hours and hours of Diff'rent Strokes for Gary Coleman;
• For Larry Flynt, there'd either have to be a Hustler Channel (is there one already?), or just show The People vs. Larry Flynt over and over again—though no doubt some Californians would vote for him thinking they were electing Woody Harrelson;
• Arianna Huffington would be on the air flaming all the other candidates and progressively moving closer to a "gang audit" (in the immortal words of Dennis Miller) by various government agencies;
• Porn. Courtesy of Mary Carey. This might not be so horrible.

If you're interested, the certified list of candidates is here (PDF). All 135 of them.

Here's an interesting tidbit: Google now has a built-in calculator. This is a cool feature to be sure, but AlltheWeb has been doing this for a while now (as an undocumented feature), since at least April 14, 2003. Try it and see.

Here's a first: php|architect is organizing a PHP cruise. I'd heard of the geek cruises before, but I certainly never expected to see one exclusively for PHP. Interesting and slightly off-kilter at the same time.

Prices put it out of my reach, however. $1199.99 plus $819.99 is just more than I could afford. It might be fun, though...

Okay, I've enabled user comments and I'm crossing my fingers. You should now be able to post comments to entries, starting with this very entry, if you're so inclined. Hopefully nothing major will break! :)

Very tired tonight. We had a garage sale today—or more accurately, my wife had a garage sale, I had to work. Only I spent the night before doing heavy lifting to get things ready for it, and spent a good portion of tonight doing heavy lifting again to bring the big stuff back indoors. (And it goes outside again tomorrow.)

The big things? A queen bed set, with headboard. A dishwasher. A lawnmower.

Very tired.

Warning: technical entry. Feel free to skip if you're so inclined. Today I'm talking about RSS.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and it's essentially a format for delivering data and content in an XML (read: structured) format. What kind of content? Well, any kind, really. Right now, the types of content you'll most likely see RSS being used for are weblog entries and news stories (although some might argue that those are essentially the same thing). The important thing is that if you follow the appropriate standards and set up your RSS file accordingly, then any program designed to read/parse/process RSS can deal with it.

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My day at work was certainly a tech support nightmare. Get this: as soon as I walk in, I'm told the server is down. Thinking (hoping) they meant the connection to the internet is down, I clarified the issue.

Nope. The server. Damn.

This is the main file/print server that everyone in the office uses to store their work on. Excel, Word, Publisher, QuickBooks, you name it, it's there. Plus, it houses the intranet I developed (and the MySQL database that backs it), Microsoft Mail server (which thankfully no one much uses anymore), and the Intuit Master Builder server software the company relies on.

(I know, I know, words of caution about putting all your eggs in one basket, I know.)

There had been a power outage the night before, and now the server was completely dead, no power at all; but the server had been plugged into a UPS, which was still on and working. Odd. Tried plugging it into several other outlets, nothing. Tried a different power cord, nothing. At this point I deduce it's the power supply, and that's hopeful because if that's all it is, nothing's lost except some productivity time.

Unfortunately, I don't have a spare, so I have to wait til the local computer store (who originally built the server, so we have an account with them) opens at 9am to get one. Luckily, I get through to someone in the store at about 8:40 when I'm calling to leave a message, and they're sending the tech right over with a new power supply.

And guess what? I was right—the power supply died, and everything else was intact and fine. We got the server up and running again by 9:10 tops.

Talk about sweating bullets. Even though we had a full backup of everything important made the night before, there's still nothing quite like that head-pounding, sweat-behind-the-eyeballs, bowel-clenching feeling that you get when something like this happens.

I suppose most everyone has heard by now, but Arnold Schwarzenegger has announced that he'll run for governor of California. What a great day for American politics.

Hey, I'm serious; I drank a beer in honor of Jesse Ventura's election to governor of Minnesota. Colorful personalities like this certainly revive interest in politics, whatever people may think.

A quick note to correct a misconception I propagated in my entry on blogs the other day. I said that a blogroll was a "Fancy name for a list of links to other blog sites" and I was only partially right. While a blogroll is a list of links to other blog sites, it is a list that is managed remotely (by BlogRolling, and there may be others) that you can dynamically insert into your site by including a snippet JavaScript or PHP code.

The neat thing is, they've put together a neat little JavaScript trick that allows you to sort of drag-and-drop a blog site to your blogroll list. They also do a few other neat things, including reporting on who's linking to your own site on their blogrolls. So, a blogroll is definitely more than just a list of links.

It pays to know the right people, I'm realizing.

Today we (my wife and I) got invited to The Beach Boys concert at the Les Schwab Amphitheater on August 17. But not just to the general admission—that would be too easy. No, we got invited to join some friends in one of the private VIP tents.

Let me just emphasize the words private and VIP here.

Plus, it's catered by Outback Steakhouse.

Plus, it's already paid for.

Pardon me while I gloat a bit. I don't get to do this very often.

Where did July go? For that matter, where did the first half of the year go? I'm not sure I like this concept of time passing more quickly the older you get, which is what my grandmother always said and that I take to be a general truism. When you're a child, time seems to pass so slowly, like when you're in school or you're waiting for Christmas... but then the older you get, the more quickly Christmas seems to come each year. And before you know it, you turn around and you're 30 and you have 2 kids.

And before you can react to that, 31 is just around the corner...

Having grown up and spent a significant part of my life here in Bend, I still tend to thing of it as a small town, even though it's growing by leaps and bounds. A such, I'm always amused at people's reactions (my own included) when big-name music comes to town—it's hard to imagine why bands would go out of their way to play our little logging town. Then I realize, not so little anymore.

Here's a list of some of the groups that have played here recently or will be soon:

• Smash Mouth
• Willie Nelson
• Bob Dylan
• Trisha Yearwood
• Sixpence None the Richer
• Jimmy Cliff
• Coldplay
• Charlie Daniels
• Lyle Lovett
• The Beach Boys

You get the idea. They may not be the biggest names in the industry, but they're sure a hell of a lot bigger than John Grant and the Rednecks.

(Yes, that's a real band. Or it used to be. I grew up next door to that guy.)