chuggnutt.com

Okay, this is fun. Our two-year old eMachine keeps periodically freezing up, typically at least once a day or more, and I was hoping someone might have some ideas as to what to do about it or what's causing it. I can't seem to ferret out the problem, but it often seems to freeze when doing something graphic- or sound-intensive (playing games—even Flash games, or using the scanner), or when using SpyBot, for instance (though other spyware killer software runs fine). It just freezes up, non responsive, nothing gets written to the event logs or anything like that. I've seen it do this in normal mode and safe mode. Often after a freeze, and a hard boot, it will freeze again while booting, right after the Windows XP splash screen and before the login screen—when the mouse pointer appears on a black background.

It's an eMachines C2160, running XP Home SP2, with an AMD Athlon XP 2100+ chip running at 1.72 GHz, and 256 MB RAM. Some thoughts I've had are problems with USB (the mouse was on USB, the scanner, printer, digital camera are all plugged in), or low power issues. Needless to say, I haven't had any luck.

Any ideas?

This article on Bend.com is interesting, about the occurence (and likelihood of) tsunamis off the coast of Oregon.

Some time between 9 and 10 p.m. on Jan. 26, 1700, a similar great earthquake, with the same estimated magnitude as the one in Asia, struck the Northwest, rocking the region with strong shaking for several minutes. The specific time can be told through a variety of evidence closely studied by scientists in recent years, such as land levels, sand deposits, the rings of ancient trees and historic records....

Geological evidence indicates that mega-quakes have occurred in the zone at least seven times over the past 3,500 years, meaning they happen, on average, every 400 to 600 years.

With a little digging, I found out this was the Cascadia Earthquake (thank you, Wikipedia), a magnitude 9 megathrust earthquake that slammed the Pacific Northwest. I also found this page which has a somewhat more consequential description:

The earthquake collapsed houses of the Cowichan people on Vancouver Island and caused numerous landslides. The shaking was so violent that people could not stand and so prolonged that it made them sick. On the west coast of Vancouver Island, the tsunami destroyed the winter village of the Pachena Bay people, leaving no survivors. These events are recorded in the oral traditions of the First Nations people on Vancouver Island.

Freaky. I knew the area was geologically active—volcanoes and such—but I had no idea it was this active.

Fortune magazine has a big article about blogging out (here, via Joi Ito), it's pretty good. There's a few quotes I really liked that I pulled for everyone's enjoyment:

• "If you fudge or lie on a blog, you are biting the karmic weenie" — quote from Steve Hayden of Ogilvy & Mather
• "Yes, for all its democratic trappings, there are hierarchies of influence in the blogging world."
• "E-mail is for old people, says Irving; kids prefer to communicate by phone and IM, and, now, by keeping blogs."
• "Our legal department loves the blogs, because it basically is a written-down, backed-up, permanent time-stamped version of the scientist's notebook. When you want to file a patent, you can now show in blogs where this idea happened." — quote from Marissa Mayer of Google

Email is for old people? What about if I use email to notify me when I get a blog comment? Hm.

The Google comment about timestamping ideas in blogs in especially interesting; I touched on similar issues and themes nearly a year ago in my RSS as Poor Man's Copyright post. (I don't know how patentable an idea from a blog might be, though.)

Over on php.net, they announced a full implementation of a search field suggestion box:

The function list suggestions we started to test a year ago seemed to be working better as some bugs were found and fixed, so it was time to make the result available on all php.net pages.

Whenever you type something into the search field, while having the function list search option selected, you will get a list of suggested functions starting with the letters you typed in. You can browse the list with the up/down keys, and you will be able to autocomplete the function name with the spacebar.

Couple things I find interesting about this. First, it predates Google Suggest by a year (prior art that everyone heralding Google Suggest seemed not to notice); did Google get the idea from the PHP site, or is this more common?

The second point is a bit more trivial, but I noticed when I was trying it out by typing in "date" that there are two additional PHP date functions that appeared in the list: date_sunrise() and date_sunset(). These are new to PHP 5. They take a timestamp, latitude, and longitude and return the respective time of day for sunrise or sunset. What's interesting is that they are remarkably similar to two functions I had written well before PHP 5 came out. ("Written" is subjective, more like "adapted," probably from a Java function somewhere.) However, from the looks of the manual, these new built-in functions only take a Unix timestamp, which limits the results to dates between 1970 and 2038, while my functions take any combination of month, day and year. The point? I just like to toot my own horn sometimes. :)

Last night on News Channel 21's (gack, Z21 to us locals) "Hometown Forum" program, I was surprised to see none other than Bend.com's own Barney Lerten as the guest! Did anyone else catch it? It was about the year in news, I think, but I was also finishing up dishes and enthralled in an exciting game of Chutes and Ladders with the kids, so I wasn't able to pay close attention.

Came off good, though. Go Barney! :)

Yes, this is the post where I detail what I got for Christmas, etc. I'll even throw my birthday gifts in there for good measure.

It was a good Christmas, too. (First Christmas in our new house.) After we got up and opened up presents, I made some giant French toast on my new griddle (got it for Christmas), wearing my new bathrobe (Christmas). I also got two cookbooks, Quicksilver, a fifth of Jagermeister, several bottles of McMenamins beer, a Jack Daniels gift set (whiskey plus playing cards and dice), a Barnes and Noble gift card, The Return of the King DVD, and A Charlie Brown Christmas (the book adapted from the original TV special).

For my birthday two days earlier, I received a Peanuts daily desk calendar, a photo Christmas tree ornament (with the kids' picture in it), an unusual sculpture/pen holder for my desk at work, several bottles of McMenamins beer (this was kind of a boozy holiday, I think) along with an Old St. Francis School pint glass, a gift certificate to Pegasus Books (the local comics shop), a personalized keychain, and cash. Cold, hard cash.

All in all, a nice haul.

Some Christmas Eve wishes for everyone. I likely won't be online much tomorrow, there's just too much fun to be had in realspace. So, Merry Christmas, and I hope Santa Claus brings everyone what they want!

Yeah, a straight-up ego/vanity post. I'm off from work today, the first day of a five-day weekend. How's everyone else's day going? :)

Okay, it's the holidays, who doesn't love eggnog? Of course you could buy all the eggnog you want from the store, but that's boring. Searching through the cookbooks we have, I found no fewer than three different eggnog recipes. The one that appeals to me the most is a combination of an egg custard and whipped cream; the others use uncooked eggs and while I know there's almost a zero chance of getting salmonella from properly handled and stored eggs, the thought of consuming anything that's mostly raw egg just doesn't sit well with me.

Here's the preferred recipe, from Betty Crocker's New Cookbook. It says it makes about 10 servings of ½ cup each.

Ingredients for the egg custard:

• 3 large eggs, slightly beaten
• ¹/₃ cup sugar
• Dash of salt
• 2½ cups milk
• 1 tsp. vanilla

Mix eggs, sugar and salt in heavy 2-quart saucepan. Gradually stir in milk. Cook over medium heat 10 to 15 minutes, stirring constantly, until mixture just coats a metal spoon; remove from heat. Stir in vanilla. Place saucepan in cold water until custard is cool. Cover and refrigerate at least 2 hours but no longer than 24 hours.

Ingredients for the whipped cream:

• 1 cup whipping cream
• 2 tbsp. powdered sugar
• ½ tsp. vanilla
• ½ cup rum (subsitute 1 tsp. vanilla for non-alcoholic)
• 1 to 2 drops yellow food color, if desired
• Ground nutmeg

Beat whipping cream, powdered sugar and vanilla in chilled medium bowl with electric mixer on high speed until stiff. Gently stir 1 cup of the whipped cream, the rum and the food color into custard. Pour custard mixture into small punch bowl. Drop remaining whipped cream in mounds onto custard mixture. Sprinkle with nutmeg. Serve immediately. Refrigerate any remaining eggnog.

Sounds pretty good to me. Now, here's an old recipe for a single serving of eggnog, from the 1956 Betty Crocker's Picture Cookbook:

• Beat together 1 well-beaten egg and 2 tbsp. sugar.
• Beat in 1 cup chilled rich milk and either ¼ tsp. vanilla or 1½ tsp. sherry flavoring and 1 tbsp. brandy or rum.
• Serve cold in a tall glass sprinkled lightly with nutmeg.

Yeah. Not sure about that. Anyway, that's one variation; the other, from The Joy of Cooking, calls for separating the yolks from the whites, beating the whites to stiff peaks and folding them back into the mixture:

• Beat until light 12 large egg yolks.
• Gradually beat in 1 pound powdered sugar.
• Add very slowly, beating constantly, 2 cups dark rum, brandy, bourbon or rye, or a combination.
• Let stand, covered, for 1 hour to dispel the eggy taste.
• Add, beating constantly, 2 to 4 cups chosen liquor(s) and 8 cups heavy cream.
• Refrigerate, covered, for 3 hours.
• In another large bowl beat until the peaks are stiff 12 large egg whites.
• Fold the egg whites gently into the other ingredients.

The recipe claims this makes 40 servings! My favorite part is the "dispel eggy taste." That just sounds nasty.

Otherwise, drink up! And if it tastes too eggy or you get salmonella, well, don't say I didn't warn you.

So Thursday evening the kids' daycare/preschool had their Christmas program, with each class performing two (or more) songs. Before the performances, Santa and his elves had arrived and all the kids waited in line to see them (although when you're talking about kids ranging in age from 1 to 5, "waiting in line" is relative), and there was a big table full of cookies and treats for everyone. The kids (ours especially) all did great jobs with their respective songs, and while this wasn't a "big" pageant or anything, it still kind of feels like you've "arrived" as a parent when your kids are in a school program on stage.

Friday (last night) was my company's holiday party. ("Holiday" as opposed to "Christmas" because we—as a company—didn't want to offend anyone who might not celebrate Christmas. Have we really gotten so PC and "sensitive" that...? Ah, but that's another rant.) It was a great party, lots of free beer and wine and excellent food and company. Everyone laughed a lot, and even though I didn't win any cool prizes like I did last year, that's all ancillary anyway; it's just as much fun to dress up for the night and go out.

Tonight was my wife's Moms Club Christmas party, so the kids and I had a "night out" of TV dinners (the kids love the frozen kids meals) and Shrek 2. I helped my wife make rum balls earlier in the week for tonight's party, so you know that sets the stage for a long night.

And while not quite like a party, all last week we did Secret Santa at work. That's always fun because getting free stuff is always a great distractor from work itself.

Next week, my birthday, along with Christmas Eve and Day. Oh, and I have a five-day weekend for it all, too. Gotta love this time of year!

A bunch of science links tonight. Kind of a year-end thing. First, as reported by the BBC, Science Magazine has compiled their list of ten key scientific advances of 2004. The top three are the Mars rovers finding evidence of water on mars, the discover of the Indonesian "hobbits," and the South Koreans announcing the cloning of human embryos.

The next link, via Slashdot, is this New Scientist article about Mt. St. Helens:

In late September 2004, a series of earthquakes signalled that the volcano was awakening. Since then, enough lava has oozed into the volcano's crater to build a dome the size of an aircraft carrier. The new dome, standing 275 metres off the crater floor at its highest point, is now taller than a nearby dome built by a previous set of eruptions over the course of six years.

"Something extraordinary is happening at Mount St Helens. We are scratching our heads about it," says Dan Dzurisin of US Geological Survey's Cascades Volcano Observatory (CVO) in Vancouver, Washington, US. The new dome has grown so quickly - almost four cubic metres every second - that it has bulldozed a 180-metres-thick glacier out of its way. If this rapid growth rate continues, there is a growing risk of a dome collapse which could trigger a major eruption, researchers warned at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.

Finally, via Boing Boing, The Top Cryptozoology Stories of 2004. These include the "hobbits" again, Ogopogo in Canada, and (good grief) Chupacabras.

I love Wikipedia and all, but sometimes I really have to shake my head in amusement/amazement when you compare the amount of content in something like the Doctor Who article (and supporting articles) to the amount in the esotropia article. One of those things that really highlights the weird imbalance of content that critics are always going on about.

At least according to this Newsweek article on the subject:

In order to crack into the upper strata, you have to post frequently to stay on the fickle radar of this ADD-infested crowd. You have to link prodigiously to other blogs, increasing your profile and increasing the chances for inbound links. And you must hold strong opinions about what you're writing about—passion is required in a good blog.

Heh.

Interesting article, if a little odd-sided and basic. More interesting to me is that it's an honest acknowledgement of the dichotomy between the "haves" and the "have-nots" of the blogging world: all too often I've seen many of these same A-listers deny there is any such hierarchy. That's bullshit, of course. I hardly need to point that out. I've never been able to figure out why they do that, though.

And what's up with this?

"If you're into blogs to make money, you're into it for the wrong reasons," says Searls. "Do you ask your back porch what its business plan is?"

Not only does this notion seem quaintly naive, I have to wonder why Doc Searls—of all people, given his background as one of the original Clutrain authors—is dictating the reasons for people to be blogging. Jeez, get off the high horse. If someone's into blogs to make money, that's as legitimate as someone who's blogging their lives for a few family and friends.

(And speaking of Cluetrain, I've got to get this off my chest: I recently read The Cluetrain Manifesto, and while I generally found the core ideas and first couple of essays to be good, mostly it's overrated. Blasphemy! Yes, overrated; one of the things that really bugged me about the last half is that none of it seemed relevant to, well, the real world, and instead just came off as another business book where the rich guys are preaching their brand of success to that percentage of the upper middle class who are office workers for some big corporation.)

Anyway, the article was via Scoble. Let's see if I get some link love! :).

Yes, I'm finally back posting. It's been a week.

The eye surgery went very well, as good as it could have gone, and except for red eyes, you wouldn't even know our son had surgery. The only real issue we've had is a bit of a struggle when we give him his eye medicine (topical ointment). Other than that, everything went through with flying colors.

Coming back from Portland Wednesday we ran into some snow and a short delay on the Santiam Pass. Right about at the summit, in the worst of the snow, traffic was backed up on a corner because somewhere up ahead (out of sight) a truck or snowplow or something had apparently spun out. Otherwise it was a fairly uneventful drive.

Thursday and Friday were catch-up days at work, and it didn't help that I had my employee review Thursday morning (nearly two hours shot) and the annual company meeting Friday (the entire first half of the day gone). So I'm still behind on some stuff and that won't go away as I have six more days off this month (three holiday days and three vacation days). Incidentally, my review went fine.

Did some Christmas shopping today. Picked up a few things, need to get more. We have "Secret Santa" at work next week and I have two of five gifts so far.

And to top it all off, my right wrist is hurting like a son-of-a-bitch. All going blind jokes aside, it's been sore all week and since yesterday it's just killing me; I don't know if it's onset carpal tunnel or a pinched nerve or what, but the source of the pain seems to be the base of the thumb joint at the wrist, and I can't make much of a fist nor grip anything with any strength. Nor is there really a full range of motion without it being painful. Typing is not terrible, but not great. Gah. Must be getting old.

This is cool yet random and kind of freaky at the same time: Skeletal Systems of Cartoon Characters.

Animation was the format of choice for children's television in the 1960s, a decade in which children's programming became almost entirely animated. Growing up in that period, I tended to take for granted the distortions and strange bodies of these entities.

I decided to take a select few of these popular characters and render their skeletal systems as I imagine they might resemble if one truly had eye sockets half the size of its head, or fingerless-hands, or feet comprising 60% of its body mass.

I like Charlie Brown's skeleton a lot, but nothing there is quite as alien and disturbing as Buttercup's (the Powerpuff Girl) skeleton. And this is cool: "Twenty-two of these are currently on show at Stumptown Coffee/Belmont in Portland, Oregon the month of December 2004." I wish I had time to see them since we're in Portland right now, but oh well.

Via Boing Boing.

Sitting in the Red Lion Inn at the Convention Center in Portland tonight; we'll be here for the next couple of days. Not a pleasure or casual visit, though; tomorrow our son (he's three) has corrective eye surgery for esotropia.

It'll be his second such surgery (our daughter, who's five, has also had two eye surgeries). It's simultaneously a minor and a major surgery; minor because there's nothing being transplanted, or amputated, or anything like that, and major because he will still be fully anesthetized and getting the full surgical "treatment."

The gory details? The lateral muscles of the eyes—those attached to the sides—are moved forwards or backwards on the wall of the eyeball to correct the respective alignment problem. Yes, this involves removing them from where they attach and sewing them onto a new location. Freaky? You bet, but at the same time utterly amazing at what can be accomplished in this day and age.

Anyway, that's the latest in case blogging gets light the next couple of days. (Though tonight I'm blogging a bit.)

So, re-watching Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer with the kids this last week, made me realize just how long it had been since I'd last seen this special: not long enough.

It's been 40 years since it came out, and this might be blasphemy to say, but it really hasn't aged well. The animation is terrible! And what a weird-ass story.

And disturbing. The Island of Misfit Toys was weird enough, but get a load of the talking gun. Or the way Yukon Cornelius licks his pick-axe to check for gold. Or Santa—I get the feeling this version of Santa Claus would have no problem dining on venison.

But the worst of all is how they deal with the Abominable Snow Monster. What I thought I remembered was that he was only mean because he had a bad tooth, and Hermie the Dental Elf fixed it for him. No! No, what really happens is Hermie pulls every one of his teeth out with pliers and then they all try to kill the newly-defanged Snow Monster. Holy shit!

I think I preferred my nostalgic version. At least it was messed up in a good way.

Now this is interesting... Robert Scoble announces he's writing a book on blogging... all on a blog. Well, to be fair, he's co-writing it, but his plans are, write the book online, on a blog, and then sell the publishing rights on ebay. Wow.

Q: Why should I buy the book if the entire thing is going to be done online?

A: Easy. You shouldn't. But you should tell your friends to buy it. We're figuring that for every blog reader there are three friends out there who don't know anything about blogs and don't want to read a book on a computer screen. So, if we give away 100,000 copies (not an unreasonable number because we had more that many show up on Channel 9 in just the first two days in business and Firefox has given away, what, seven million copies of Firefox so far in just a few weeks) that we'll get a few sales from your friends. So, the people who help us write the book and hype it up get it for free, but their friends have to pay. Plus, if the book is actually good maybe some of you will want it on your bookshelves to show you support good stuff.

I mentioned the other day that I'd post the fruitcake recipe I make each year, so I'm now getting around to it. What I like about this recipe is that there's a higher ratio of batter-to-fruit than you'll find in most modern recipes and commercial fruitcakes; they tend to be almost all candied fruit and nuts, loosely held together with the batter. Those are, in my opinion, too sickly sweet and more of a candy than a cake.

This recipe is much more of a cake consistency, with more of the spicy batter to offset the candy-sweet of the fruit. It's still quite dense, and despite what my wife will tell you, quite good.

Adapted from the 1956 Betty Crocker Cookbook.

Ingredients:

• 1 cup soft shortening
• 2 cups brown sugar (packed)
• 6 large eggs
• 3 cups flour
• 1 tsp. baking powder
• 1 tsp. salt
• ½ tsp. baking soda
• 1 tsp. cinnamon
• 1 tsp. nutmeg
• ½ tsp. mace
• ½ tsp. cloves
• ¾ cup strong coffee
• ½ cup tart jelly
• ½ cup molasses
• 1½ pounds candied fruit
• ½ pound seedless raisins
• ½ pound chopped dates
• ½ pound dried cranberries
• ½ pound of nuts
• grated rind and juice of 1 orange and 1 lemon

Directions: Sift together flour, baking powder, salt, baking soda, and spices in a bowl. Set aside. Combine coffee, jelly and molasses in another bowl and set that aside also. It's also helpful to zest and juice the lemon and the orange ahead of time.

Preheat the oven to 300°. Prepare three 3 loaf pans by lining them with foil (leave the edges longer than the sides of the pans, so it will be easier to remove the loaves) and spraying with non-stick spray.

Cream the shortening and brown sugar together until fluffy. Butter is good, though this year I tried Crisco vegetable shortening. Next, beat in the eggs. Then you will want to alternately stir in the powder and liquid mixtures to the main batter; I start with about a cup of the flour mixture (using an electric beater) and let that mix in, then about a half cup of the liquid. Continue until they're all mixed thoroughly.

Now add the fruits and nuts—be sure to use a big bowl and stir them in manually rather than trying to use an electric mixer. For the nuts, I used pecans, chopped coarsely. Finally, add the zest and juice from the lemon and orange (or, alternately, you could add them to the liquid mixture earlier).

This will look like a lot of batter, and it is, but trust me, it will all fit into the three loaf pans (these are standard size bread loaf pans). Fill them up equally, then bake them in the oven for 2½ to 3 hours, or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Mine were done after 2½. Cover them the last hour loosely with foil.

Out of the oven, you can remove them from the loaf pans to a rack to cool completely. Then, the magic: wrap them in brandy-soaked cheesecloth, then plastic wrap (waxed paper, I've noticed, tends to dissolve a bit with exposure to the alcohol; this is the first year I've used regular plastic wrap so I can't report on it substantively yet) and foil, and store in a cool, dry place. The brandy will keep the cakes moist as they mellow with age.

You could use other liquors, too, or even a strong wine (port might be very good). You'll want to choose something that will complement the dark, spicy, fruity taste.

A note about the candied fruits: I like to pick up the artificially colored stuff from the grocery store, just because it's so festive and cheesy and tasty. This is generally made from dried pineapple, dried papaya, maraschino cherries, and citron (candied peel from citrus fruits), dyed with bright green and red colors. There's nothing wrong with it, it's convenient and works great. However, this year I toyed with the idea of skipping this pre-made stuff and going to the source: bulk dried pineapple and papaya, and maraschino cherries (though I may still buy candied citron, because I'm not sure how to get it otherwise—if I use it at all) and chopping them up myself. I may do this next year.

And the other fruits I added—raisins, dates, and cranberries—can be varied, too. The original recipe called for currants, and I've seen recipes with blueberries, dried apricots, and dried cherries. Get creative, but stick with fruits that have low acidity and dry well. Dried apples, mango, figs, coconut, perhaps even cantaloupe could all be interesting.

And if you've read this far, a couple of links: Alton Brown's Free Range Fruitcake recipe from Food Network, and Wikipedia's Fruitcake article.

This is too insane not to link to: Ballooning into the Sky. This guy actually ties himself to a bunch of balloons and flies around. I smell a Darwin award!

Via Slashdot.

December is upon us already. Bust out your advent calendars (we did), hang your wreaths (we did), Christmas is a mere 24 days away. Was Thanksgiving really less than a week ago? Jeez, having this cold must be screwing with my sense of time.

I made my traditional fruitcakes over the weekend. Really! I (loosely) follow a recipe from an older Betty Crocker cookbook, it's better than most modern fruitcake recipes I've seen, and I wrap the fruitcakes in brandy-soaked cheesecloth to mellow for a month (or more, depending on when I make them). That's the secret, soaking in brandy and aging. I love my fruitcakes. You would, too. Maybe tomorrow I'll post the recipe I use.

Gotta gear up for more holiday baking, too. Gingersnaps, sugar cookies (shaped and cutouts), fudge, at least. I remember one thing my mom used to make for the holidays: dates stuffed with almonds and cream cheese and rolled in powdered sugar. Awesome! More work than I want to take on right now, though.

Mmmmmmmm, December.

So Ken Jennings finally gave up the ghost on Jeopardy today. Actually, to those of us who already knew about the rumors flying around the net and even listened to yesterday's spoiler audio clip from the show, it's no surprise. Of course, everybody will be—is!—speculating on whether he threw the game on purpose (out of boredom) or genuinely lost.

My own thoughts at first were in the threw-the-game camp, but after seeing the show I'm on the fence. It seemed like an obvious Final Jeopardy question to miss, so maybe his loss was a little bit of both factors? Only Ken Jennings knows for sure.

Is it just me, or is that Wikipedia page on Jennings that I linked to above totally insane in the amount of detail it has? Good lord, people need to get a life.

Myself included.

One last note, though. I should be on Jeopardy. I would totally kick ass. Especially against the kids!

monkeyinabox: "Mind you, this was back in the days before bottled water was all the rage. Water came from the tap, unless you bought gourmet water, Perrier, or whatever rich people drank. Growing up in a place with good tap water, it makes that kind of stuff seems pretty stupid."

Great bit on being a "soda pop junkie." I remember back in the days when I worked graveyard shift in Spokane doing (essentially) data processing, I'd take a 2-liter bottle of Mountain Dew to work and often finish it before I left.

And yeah, I never really got the bottled water thing, either. Growing up, we had a well, so our water was pretty pure and uncut.

Well, except for this one time in the cistern... that's a story that almost turned me off of water for good, but I think I'll save it for another day.

I hope everyone had a pleasant Thanksgiving this year. Ours was, except for the fact that I was sick. Nothing serious, I just came home from work early Wednesday totally drained, achy, throaty—all the usual signs of the flu. Went to bed for awhile, got up for dinner (soup), went to bed early. Took much medicine. Slept poorly, but fortunately it "merely" turned into a troublesome cold. (This is the latest I've been up since Tuesday, and I won't be up for much longer.)

We had a small group for Thanksgiving this year—just us and my mom. Despite that, we still had a 20 pound turkey to roast for some insane reason. That thing was a monster. It's still a monster, sitting in the fridge waiting to be carved... but it was delicious.

Okay, enough for tonight. Gotta go cough some more before bed.

I was thinking last night (during our blogger thing at McMenamins) that if McMenamins really wants to capture the feel of a school, they should fill the soap dispensers in the bathrooms with that pink powdered soap I remember using in grade school.

When I was reviewing the server logs, I kept wondering why there were occasional searches for "green bean casserole soda" leading here, which seemed totally random. I figured it out today; it's part of the new Jones Soda Holiday Pack, which is related to the Turkey Soda post I made last year around this time.

Holidays can be busy and down right stressful. How can you squeeze in eating when you have much more important tasks like shopping, decorating, and partying? Well the makers of last year's popular Turkey & Gravy Soda have come up with a solution: the complete holiday meal replacement set equipped with a square meal, a straw, and a toothpick.

Introducing 5 new, flavor filled, tasty holiday sodas:

• Turkey & Gravy Soda
• Cranberry Soda
• Mashed Potato & Butter
• Green Bean Casserole
• Fruitcake Soda

It's only $15.95 per case! I think I know what I want for Christmas...

I got to check out the Old St. Francis School after work for a bit today, and my capsule review is that it totally kicks ass! It's amazing, classic McMenamins, and I think—no, I know—it's going to be hugely popular. A giant win for them.

Since they're doing their "soft launch" right now, you can pretty much go wherever you like to check the place out. So I did: scoped out the restaurant and the pub, wandered through the Fireside Room (a cigar-friendly room with pool tables), gazed in awe at the Turkish-style soaking pool, checked out the theater, picked up a beer (a Hammerhead) at O'Kane's, the little brewhouse among the bungalows, one of which I toured. The guest house a bit rustic, I'd say; they're trying to preserve the feel of the 1950s to a large extent. Also strolled through the hotel wing and got to see one of the rooms (all of which were formerly classrooms). All very impressive—like I said, classic McMenamins.

The restaurant was packed. I didn't ask how long a wait there was, since I wasn't eating, but I picked up a menu (nothing radical on it though). And the guy who I talked to was really helpful in pointing out all the rooms and features to check out.

The only drawback? Popularity; it's going to be the hot place to go for a long time, and might be hard to get into (particularly if you want to sit down and eat).

But who cares? McMenamins is finally in Bend! This rocks!

Going through my site's logfiles, I figured it's about time for one of those navel-gazing site-analyzing posts. I've noticed some trends along the way, I think.

By far, the most search engine hits I get are from Google; over the past 30 days, I clocked 2,617 hits from Google, nearly four times more than Yahoo at 763 hits. In fact, the top ten search engines are:

I'm a little surprised by the amount of variation there.

The trends I've noticed are in the breakdown of what people are searching for from each site. Most of the Google searches are for free Palm ebooks, Matrix names, and variations on those themes; it seems that people are using Google to find specific types of information, knowing the parameters of what they're looking for—targeted. The other search engines, on the other hand, seem to better reflect pop cultural references and more general searching. Among Yahoo searches, for instance, I see such phrases as, "boba fett" (number one), "kermit the frog," "dell dude," "a-team movie," and so on. Same for the others.

So I'd guess that in Google searches, when they find me I'm near the top of the lists for what they're searching for and the users are looking for specific things. On Yahoo and the others, though, it looks like people are more into browsing on vaguer searches, and clicking through on links that look interesting, but may not be relevant. The conclusion I'd draw from this (not surprisingly) is that Google users are power users, and the search engine people go to who want to really find something and get the job done, whereas Yahoo users are more casual, not so worried about the results, but they'll do in a pinch.

And of course, the best part of this whole entry: listing some of the best/worst search phrases people have actually typed to get here. All verbatim.

• thongs in public
• what's your name
• purple flowers
• jones green bean casserole soda
• van helsing absinthe
• donner party cannibalism
• heroin
• green bean soda
• white trash sex
• pong is a violent game
• twas the night bush
• green bean casserole soda
• ugliest picture
• topless rotten
• skinsuits
• donkey brew
• if you had a male tiger what would you name it
• snoop dog fir shizzle
• frog master
• fett ass
• cracker ingredients
• beer mugs carved in pumpkins
• what is the proper way to charge cell and cordless phones
• on the sierra nevada summerfest beer label what mountains are featured
• is there a formula for figuring out when thanksgiving day will be
• how do i clean vomit from couch
• check out my wife
• turkey soda
• where is it snowing in the united states november 11, 2004
• donner party beer
• emachine turns it's self on
• halloween hooch drink

Looks like this Thursday the 18th will be the next Bend/Central Oregon Bloggers get-together, at the new McMenamins Grand Opening at the Old St. Francis School. We (my wife will be joining us this time) should be there sometime between six and seven o'clock, but I don't know where we'll be meeting anybody, as it might be kind of crazy.

You speak eloquently and have seemingly read every
book ever published. You are a fountain of
endless (sometimes useless) knowledge, and
never fail to impress at a party. What people love: You can answer almost any
question people ask, and have thus been
nicknamed Jeeves. What people hate: You constantly correct their
grammar and insult their paperbacks.

What Kind of Elitist Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

That sounds about right.

Warning: this post has no redeemable value, other than how it points to my potential for being a cyberstalker. And, it amuses me.

So anyway, one of the fun things about living in Central Oregon is watching the Z21 news (or NewsChannel 21, or whatever the hell they're calling it these days) and, well, making fun of the on-air talent, especially the ones that are just starting out.

See, our little local station here is pretty much bottom of the rung, as I understand it, for journalists who want to have a career on television. They typically get hired right out of college and Z21 becomes the training ground within which they learn the trade and work like dogs so that they can move up the ladder. And when a Z21 reporter gets their wings, they leave Z21 and pop up somewhere else, like Eugene.

Maybe you see where I'm going with this. At any rate, Libby Beaubien, one of said newscasters, recently disappeared from the news and I figured she'd moved on. Yep. She surfaced on KESQ News Channel 3 in Palm Springs, California, under the name Elizabeth Beaubien. Seems like it's a good move, though I wonder if the name "Libby" was too colloquial for the station. Anyway, the part of this that amuses me the most is comparing the KESQ highly-staged, over-colored photo with this much more down-to-earth candid one:

(Found via kasey and TextAmerica.)

Hey, it's all good. Just remember though, folks, the internet sees and remembers all.

I started brewing up a batch of my Pumpkin Ale this evening, the details of which I wrote up on The Brew Site.

What? You aren't reading The Brew Site? Why not? :)

Simply put, "The Incredibles" is a great movie. Fantastic. Probably the best movie I've seen this year—really! So here's my review, there may be spoilers, you've been warned.

More...

I'm pleased to report that Portland is still where it's supposed to be. Or at least, it was when we left on Sunday, I can't really speak for any time after that.

We stayed at the downtown Residence Inn over the weekend, which despite being located right next to I-5 is a rather nice hotel. Our room had been upgraded to a two-bedroom suite at no charge after my wife told them the sob story about our miserable night in Stockton next to the freeway, so we ended up with two full bathrooms, three TVs and a full kitchen. They have a very good breakfast for guests, beyond the typical continental breakfasts of juice and muffins you usually see. The only drawback (aside from the freeway) was that they have road work and construction of some kind going on literally all around the hotel, so getting in and out is a hassle and confusing at first.

No WiFi in the rooms, though. They do have high speed internet access, but it's ethernet-based and sadly, I don't have a card for that in the laptop. So be warned.

Oh, the other thing was that I forgot to take my own pillow with me; I can't stand hotel pillows and just have the hardest time getting a good night's sleep with them. I figure I must be getting old.

Took the kids to see "The Incredibles" and then to Chuck E. Cheese's on Saturday. "The Incredibles" was fantastic; my next entry will be about that. Chuck E. Cheese's, well, it's been awhile since I'd been there, so I'd forgotten just how crazy that place is. Like Vegas for kids, as my friend Justin said. I'll probably let another year or two or three pass before I take the kids again :).

Off to Portland this weekend. I may be online—we're taking the laptop with the wireless card—but may not be, either; sometimes it's nice to unplug.

Some people just have too much anger:

A woman has been arrested for digging up her dead boyfriend's ashes from a cemetery more than 10 years ago and drinking the beer that was buried with him, possibly out of spite for his family, authorities say....

Detective Jay Yerges said Stolzmann and Hendrickson were living together in the early 1990s, while they were both married to other people. The relationship was stormy, with a pattern of alcohol and domestic abuse, he said.

Stolzmann was present when Hendrickson shot himself in January 1992. Yerges said Hendrickson's family blamed her for his death and she was not invited to his services.

"I feel that her motive was spite," Yerges said.

No kidding.

Although, I have to wonder: why was he buried with beer in the first place, and what kind was it?

Via A Good Beer Blog.

I was disappointed to see both the Bend measures (establish a mass transportation district, more money for schools) fail, though not particulary surprised: you can pretty much guarantee that when a measure appears in Central Oregon that requires raising taxes, it will get shot down.

But hell, do kids have to be cannibalizing themselves in the schools before this town raises some money to help relieve the overcrowding and budget issues? And since the money was going to be raised by increasing property taxes, should only property owners be allowed to vote on these issues?

Personally, I think less than $100 per year is a small price to pay if it helps alleviate the Lord of the Flies problems my own kids will be facing within the next couple of years.

As to the mass transit issue, I'd love to see it here, and I supported it, but... Keep in mind this is the city that made national news when it proposed banning stinky people from riding the bus, so you'll understand if I express skepticism about the whole affair.

And this is the best election day story I heard: Tuesday morning my friend Kerry asked if I had a number two pencil to fill out his ballot—he didn't have any at home and that was what had hung him up on getting it mailed earlier (Oregon is entirely vote-by-mail, remember, but on the last day you can drop off your ballot at the designated locations since it's too late to mail it). Later, when he went to drop the ballot off, a Z21 news team interviewed him on why he waited until the last minute to turn his ballot in. He gave the honest response: he couldn't find a number two pencil! He said the guy running the camera was the new crazy weatherman (if you live in Central Oregon, you probably know who I mean) and the guy gave Kerry a big thumbs-up and shit-eating grin—my words, I'm paraphrasing :). I never did see if it made it on TV but we sure had a good laugh about that.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Just a braindump of some ideas I have that wouldn't really be considered very politically correct...

Like a series of books like the "For Dummies" books, only these would be "For Tards." They would be much more simplistic; with titles like "Keyboards for Tards" and "Books for Tards" I think they could really be successful...

Then there was this idea for a sitcom that I had—a homophobic ex-Marine, a flamboyantly gay man and the ex-Marine's mentally retarded brother are roommates sharing an apartment in a big city somewhere (maybe San Francisco). Man, that would write itself.

Did you vote yet? You can bet I did, mailed it in last week. (You gotta like the Oregon vote-by-mail system.) I've been spending the last hour and a half or so sitting here compulsively hitting refresh on the CNN and MSNBC sites to review the latest numbers, while catching up on Bloglines. It's close but right now looks like Bush is going to win. What I find interesting is that while NBC has projected Ohio going to Bush, as of this moment CNN is considering it too close to call and hasn't tallied those votes for him yet.

CNN has the better site for this, I think; not only can you drill-down from the national map to each state, but you can further drill-down into each state to see how each county is doing. And they're on top of the numbers. Very interesting.

As usual, it was as cold as a witch's tit last night for Halloween, but at least it wasn't snowing or anything; last year I wrote that it was in the teens. Fortunately this year it was "only" around 30 degrees.

Ah, but this year we live in a new neighborhood! One that's filled with houses, unlike our old one that we could hit maybe four or five when trick-or-treating. We took the kids up and down several blocks, amassing a small fortune in candy and revelling in the wonderment of people, before the cold finally drove us home. What's interesting is that our house sits at the end of a cul-de-sac in the new development, which only has four other houses with people in them... so our doorbell only rang perhaps three times because nobody wanted to wander off the beaten path down the dark street for only one house. So in that respect, it was very much like our old neighborhood.

Whatever, it was still a good Halloween; the best part is watching the kids enjoy it more as they get older and have a better grip of what's going on. Although my youngest needs to work on his timing: they'd ring the doorbell and he would immediately say "Trick or treat!" before anyone actually opened the door.

And Jake has the best Halloween story. I think I'm most glad I don't live in his neighborhood :).

Don't bother buying a Brother printer. I helped to set up a new one today and, get this, it didn't come with any type of interface cable. No USB, no parallel cable, nothing. It even says so on the quickstart instructions. WTF? Is that stupid or what?

Speaking of stupid, or perhaps just stubborn, AOL apparently doesn't get the hint that we don't need their service, and has called us several times. Of course, I brought this on myself—when we went to San Diego, I installed AOL (the free trial) on the laptop just in case we needed to get online and didn't have any other means of doing so. (Never needed it; we got a strong WiFi signal at my brother's place.) AOL is sure trying to master the hard sell. When I cancelled, the guy tried to resell me on AOL something like three times, even after I had explained that I didn't need it and already have broadband access. Must be following the "three NOs before you go" rule. They sure aren't gaining any favor at our house.

Via Slashdot tonight, this is totally amazing and cool: Grand Theftendo, a port of Grand Theft Auto III to the original Nintendo Entertainment System (an 8-bit machine!). ("Port" is a bit misleading; it's all original, from the graphics to the dialogue to the code—it's probably more of a tribute.) What's more, the guy is writing the thing in assembly. Using an assembler and compiler he wrote himself to do the job.

Did I mention this is just a hobby that he works on in his spare time?

I stand in awe, and am half-seriously considering giving up this computer thing to become a potato farmer or something.

Just looked out the window here at work and saw that it's snowing. As far as I know, this marks the first snow of the season for Bend.

I guess I'd better blog something before people think I'm dead. Well, not totally: I've been posting to The Brew Site, so it's not a total wash.

So let's see, what to blog about... this looks interesting: National Novel Writing Month. Write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. I've almost half toyed with the idea of doing this. Almost.

Quick post over! Nothing more to see here. Move on about your business...

I saw this headline from Reuters in Bloglines today: "FedEx to Build 2nd-Largest U.S. Private Solar System" and of course I immediately wondered if they were building a model of the Solar System and why that would matter to FedEx (and why would it be private?), before realizing what was meant was Solar Powerered System. Very odd alleys the mind wanders into some days.

Found on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents: The Ad Graveyard, via Boing Boing. Pretty much speaks for itself.

I'm very, very surprised this story isn't being picked up nationally (or if it has, I haven't seen it anywhere yet except locally): during Bush's visit to Medford, three schoolteachers were removed from the rally for wearing offensive T-shirts. How offensive? They read, "Protect Our Civil Liberties."

Via Jack Bog's Blog, this post points to the relevant Bend.com article:

President Bush taught three Oregon schoolteachers a new lesson in irony – or tragedy – Thursday night when his campaign removed them from a Bush speech and threatened them with arrest simply for wearing t-shirts that said "Protect Our Civil Liberties," the Democratic Party of Oregon reported.

The women were ticketed to the event, admitted into the event, and were then approached by event officials before the president's speech. They were asked to leave and to turn over their tickets – two of the three tickets were seized, but the third was saved when one of the teachers put it underneath an article of clothing....

Three Medford school teachers were threatened with arrest and escorted from the event after they showed up wearing T-shirts with the slogan "Protect our civil liberties." All three said they applied for and received valid tickets from Republican headquarters in Medford.

The women said they did not intend to protest. "I wanted to see if I would be able to make a statement that I feel is important, but not offensive, in a rally for my president," said Janet Voorhies, 48, a teacher in training.

"We chose this phrase specifically because we didn't think it would be offensive or degrading or obscene," said Tania Tong, 34, a special education teacher.

So, they show up to a rally to support the President, wearing T-shirts that are about as politically innocuous as they can be, and they get booted?

Hmmmmmmm.

Okay, here's a picture of the scariest dog I've ever seen—come to think of it, the entire picture is pretty freaky:

(Picture found on Strong Gundogs)

Holy shit, that looks like something that would come from Doom or something...

Apparently people breed dogs like these to hunt wild boar. Jeez...

Okay, this article on a living tissue jacket is just disturbing and yet darkly funny. Basically, some guys are literally growing a jacket from living tissue...

Grown using a combination of mouse and human cells, the jacket is currently quite tiny (about 2 inches high and 1.4 inches wide) and would just fit a mouse....

"One of the most common and somewhat surprising comments we heard was that people were disturbed by our ethics of using living cells to grow living fabric," said Zurr, "while the use of leather obtained from animals seems to be accepted without any concern for the well-being of the animals from which the skin has been removed."

Hey, I'll concede they have somewhat noble reasons for doing this, but hello? We're talking about wearing jackets made from living human flesh. Um... Hannibal Lecter? Skinsuits? This guy? Ringing any bells?

When we were in San Diego, we of course had to visit the beach. So on one of our "off" days we packed up a picnic lunch and headed over to Mission Beach.

It was a nice, sunny, hot day, pretty much what you'd expect for Southern California (even in late September), but you know what? The water was cold, which was a total surprise to me. Not Oregon beach cold, nothing quite like that, but much colder than I would have thought. Cold enough to shock you when you first hit it, and make your feet a little numb.

You get used to it, though, and the kids and I were having a great time playing in the water. There were some nice waves too—I wish I'd had a bodyboard or something to try out. Not that I'm all that surfer-inclined, you understand—I love the ocean but the Oregon Coast is no place for that kind of stuff. I've seen guys in full-body wetsuits trying to make a go of it, but well...

Interestingly, Mission Beach is also home to the Giant Dipper Roller Coaster, a wooden coaster built in 1925 that's still operating. Only "one of two original oceanfront roller coasters still operating on the west coast," according to the website. We didn't ride it, though; the kids are still too small. My brother swears that every time he's ridden the thing, he's seen bolts flying off. That's comforting.

After we cleaned up from the beach, we wandered around the shops a bit, and my wife and the kids got temporary tattoos from a corner shop on the boardwalk. We didn't stay long after that, as the kids were tired and cranky. But we had a good time.

Later, I told my brother we'd gone there, his response was, "Did you see anyone smoking crack?" Huh? My sister-in-law recommended the place; she reaffirmed that it wasn't that bad, but then my wife chimed in and mentioned she saw someone dig a chicken leg out of a garbage can and eat it.

Eh, whatever. It was a nice beach, no one hassled us or anything. I'd go there again. Might even ride the roller coaster of death. We'll see.

Part of owning a house means yardwork and landscaping, which I'm sure everybody by now knows I just love (*cough*). This weekend it was planting tulip bulbs in the ground, which should look pretty good come spring.

Unless, of course, they don't survive. Since we bought a new house, on recently developed land, a good majority of the soil we're sitting on is gravel and rocks and fill—basically just junk dirt that the excavation company used to push out and level the lot. It's basically the worst soil (if you can call it "soil") I've ever seen for planting—I pulled more rocks and gravel out of the ground than dirt, it seemed, when digging holes for the bulbs. So who really knows if they'll grow here.

On the other hand, the lawn is (mostly) doing okay, as are some of the plants put in by the landscapers...

I'm launching a new blog. Okay, well, a new blog on an old site—a site I've been "working on" for, like, four years now: The Brew Site.

My original goal for The Brew Site, when I "launched" back in 2000, was a comprehensive, be-all end-all directory/portal/guide to beer and brewing-related stuff online. Kind of like Yahoo for beer. However, I never really had the time to do this, so I'd work on it a little bit, then real life would intrude. So up to now it's been my spectacularly unfinished site. Kind of embarrassing, really.

So I figured I'd better do something with it, and since I've been thinking more about writing lately, and making money blogging, the natural conclusion was to turn it into a blog. And I'll try to make money on it with AdSense. So, it's my first real foray into blogging for money (aside from the AdSense I'm running here, which is simply a nice bonus).

Actually, the other motivation I had was that I emailed the guys at Weblogs, Inc. seeing if they were interested in a beer blog, and I figured, why wait? If they want me to write a blog for them, I'm there, and I'll offer them The Brew Site. If not, no worries, I'll just use this as the start of my own nanopublishing empire. ;)

So in the meantime start reading! Subscribe to the RSS too!

This is a mini-rant on PHP that can be safely avoided by non geek types.

This post over on PHP Everywhere caught my attention, vis-a-vis programming semantics and practice. Basically, inside a switch statement, someone placed the default block before the case blocks and was surprised when that default condition executed, and the "expected" case did not.

Some are calling this a bug; I do not. This is the exact behavior I expect switch and default to display, and I always place any default blocks last in the statement, because that makes the most sense semantically and logically. I expect this because that's how I learned it when learning C years ago; it's the way the switch construct works and why it's so fast.

Relevant snippage from the PHP manual:

The switch statement executes line by line (actually, statement by statement). In the beginning, no code is executed. Only when a case statement is found with a value that matches the value of the switch expression does PHP begin to execute the statements. PHP continues to execute the statements until the end of the switch block, or the first time it sees a break statement. If you don't write a break statement at the end of a case's statement list, PHP will go on executing the statements of the following case....

A special case is the default case. This case matches anything that wasn't matched by the other cases, and should be the last case statement.

Seems pretty clear to me. I would expect PHP to immediately execute the default block as soon as it encounters it, even if this "cuts off" remaining case blocks below it. So quit complaining and write cleaner code.

Okay, done ranting.

Just watching the new show "Hawaii" this evening (taped since I was out last night), and I was just thinking how cool it would be if the show did a crossover with "Magnum, P.I."

There's a couple of memes you probably never thought I'd hit you with.

We had a blogger get-together at the Cascade Lakes Brewery again this evening, it was a lot of fun and more of us showed up. I'm tired so there'll be a more detailed post later, but here's a short version: Simone brought Swiss chocolate. Dane wants a video game based on smashing Coke cans with a sledgehammer. Kasey can't read blogs at work. Jesse never played Donkey Kong before tonight.

Actually, there was a lot more going on. More later.

On our trip to San Diego we stayed in several hotels while on the road, and with my brother and his wife while there. Here's some thoughts on where to stay—or not stay—if you find yourself on the same or similar trip.

Avoid, at all costs, the Best Value Inn just off the freeway in Stockton (California). It's on our list as one of the top two worst hotels we've ever stayed at (the other was the Knight's Inn in Ashland), and is definitely the skungiest, dirtiest one: the carpet has sticky spots (like gum, I hope), there were some dead ants on the bathroom counter, the bathroom floor just felt wrong—in fact, most of the bathroom just gave an icky vibe. It's also right off the freeway, so you hear the traffic all night (no biggie for me, since I sleep just fine with white noise).

On the way back, we stayed in Fresno. The Quality Inn there on Shaw Avenue off Highway 99 was the best of the hotels we stayed at: very roomy, free WiFi, good continental breakfast. And relatively cheap.

The next night we stayed at the Railroad Park Resort in Dunsmuir, about 50 miles north of Redding. Neat little place, rather rustic, nestled up against Castle Crags State Park. Totally worth it for the kitsch factor, but you might want to avoid the restaurant they have there: I found the food to be entirely mediocre and a bit over-priced. You'd probably be better off finding something in Dunsmuir.

Of course, the notable news around here while we were away is that Mt. St. Helens started getting active again. Neat. What's more interesting to me, though, is that at the same time, while we were in California, there were a series of earthquakes near Parkfield, one of which hit 6.0 on the Richter scale.

Connected?

Yes, we're back from our vacation to SoCal. Actually, we got back yesterday and today was back to work and routine, but I just wasn't quite ready to "return" to the blog, as it were.

It was a good trip, but tiring. San Diego is a neat city, but in general I wouldn't want to live in Southern California; there's too many people and too much traffic and it's just too big... I'd go nuts. And it's too damn expensive. I'm glad to be back in Bend.

I'll dole out travel stories gradually, rather than writing everything up in one giant blog entry. It's easier on everybody that way :)

Vacation is about to start. Once I leave work, we're pretty much on the road, and while we're bringing a laptop, there's no guarantee I'll be online much, so this may be the last post for a while. Or not; I'll try to update from the road if I get the chance.

Au revoir!

From Tim Bray tonight comes this amazing fact:

There are five billion new lines of COBOL getting created every year, and there are (wait for it) 220 billion lines of COBOL in production. (Holy cow, now that I think about it, I bet I wrote ten or twenty thousand of them).

I got an email today from someone from the online magazine Preservation Online wanting to get a quote from me about the Crane Shed demolition, since I wrote a bunch about it. Cool. I wrote back letting them know I'd be happy to give a quote, or they could just quote my blog. Since I haven't heard back from them, I assume they'll quote my blog.

How's this for disturbing?

I was just at the Evergreen Village (Bellevue) Safeway this morning, doing my little shopping thing. I was late — I usually do it on the weekend. While wandering around getting my goods, I noticed that the shelves in the produce aisle were looking a bit empty. I didn't think much of it. I never come in on Mondays. Maybe this is what things look like after a weekend rush. Maybe they're expecting a delivery soon. Maybe they had taken all the little fruits and vegetables on a field trip (AHAHAHA).

Well, just heard on the news, the reason the shelves were empty was because they found (and I quote) "a pile of fecal matter was discovered on top of some produce" (from NWCN channel) on Sunday night between 7:30 and 10:30PM. Safeway immediately shut down the produce section, turfed out the produce, disinfected the shelves, and brought new produce in. They're also offering refunds on produce purchased last night.

Via Metroblogging Seattle.

We'll be on the road all next week—well, starting this week, really, since we're leaving Friday night—on our way to visit my brother in San Diego. Road trip!

From Bend, San Diego is about a 16 or 17 hour drive. Since the kids are little, we're spreading that over three days each way, taking it easier than just plowing on through. Of course, the portable DVD player we bought for the car should help out, too.

Needless to say, I'll be mostly offline for nine or ten days, starting Friday afternoon. I have a slightly older laptop computer that I'm taking, but I just got it and it doesn't have network access, either Ethernet or wireless (has the slots for them, though). I may be able to get it set up for network before we go, otherwise I'll just rely on the modem in a pinch.

Or not. We'll just see.

Some more on trackbacks. To my mind, they are simply another form of comment, so that's exactly how I'm treating them. You won't see a special "Trackback" down there next to the "Comments" link. Instead, they'll just be integrated with the comments in chronological order.

I think I saw Sam Ruby doing this first, and it makes much more sense to me to treat trackbacks this way.

I've finally bitten the bullet and implemented Trackback here—well, half of it, anyway. My site should now be able to handle Trackback pings from other sites. I even implemented the RDF autodiscovery crap, but added a bonus: a new meta tag like so:

<meta name="trackback.ping" content="Trackback URL for a particular entry">

So maybe I can influence client software development in some small way with this.

I haven't implemented outgoing Trackback pings yet—i.e., me pinging others' sites when I link to them. I'll get around to it at some point.

For a long time I've wanted to be a writer, and ultimately make a living writing. My biggest problem with that, however, is actually making myself write. I'm great at thinking about writing, though, and I've been doing a lot of thinking lately. Herewith some of my thoughts, in no particular format, just rambling (i.e., expect no conclusions).

More...

So I observe over on Ensight that Jeremy has basically sold his blog for something in the neighborhood of $15,000 (Canadian or USD?), and still got a sweetheart deal:

I am effectively considering bidding closed. I have a deal on the table. It's substantial, is from a longtime Ensight reader, allows me to keep editorial control and turns me into a paid blogger.

Right on! It's the blogging brass ring. I've been thinking lately of ways to make money doing this whole blogging/"nanopublishing" thing, and in addition to this highly apropos example, I've been poking around the Weblogs, Inc. sites to get a feel for what they're doing and how.

I'm not necessarily talking about writing in general—that's a whole different topic that I will actually address sometime soon—but rather how to leverage some of these trends and technologies in weblogs toward money. It seems to me that if you can't get someone to pay you to blog, then the best bet is to bootstrap yourself via advertising (Google's AdSense and/or other?), like what the Weblogs, Inc. guys (and guys like Nick Denton) are doing. And perhaps via the "tip jar" method: accepting PayPal donations and the like. And of course this doesn't even address RSS...

Not to say I'm ready to give up blogging if I can't make money at it; I'm not, of course, there's too much of the writing bug in me. But I've got some ideas in mind and I'm wondering, can it be done?

Thoughts?

Quick public service announcement: I've hacked together an RSS feed for the Bend Bulletin. It's a first-pass, I'm scraping their Local, Business and Sports pages and building a summary feed only. If I have time, I may go one step further and pull each article on those pages, and provide a full-text feed.

Either way, here's the RSS feed link. Enjoy!

I don't remember where I originally read this, but it was awhile ago, from a list of "life lessons" that someone had compiled. The only one that stuck out in my head is insanely funny to me:

Never lick a steak knife.

I discovered this site via Slashdot the other day, and given my current fixation on cooking geekery via Alton Brown, I find it pretty cool: Cooking For Engineers. I especially like the nifty recipe tables... very creative use of HTML tables.

In other odd-yet-apropos geek cooking news, Meg Hourihan, the co-founder of Blogger, is giving up the computer life to be a chef. Quite a leap.

Yikes, it would appear that I've taken a blogging hiatus. Not so. I guess time just sort of slipped away from me, and keeps slipping; I've got things to write about, I just always seem to be doing something else. So consider this the recap post for the past few days.

I've been playing with Bloglines as my primary newsreader/RSS aggregator, and I really, really like it. Very well done, the kind of web app that I'm totally envious of when I write web apps. The big plus is it's web-based, so I can comfortably read my RSS anywhere, not just on the one computer at home. Highly recommended.

Fall seems to have arrived a bit early here in Central Oregon. The weather forecast this evening indicated it would be in the mid 60s this week, and 54 degrees on Saturday. I have nothing against fall, but man, where'd the sunshine go?

Cold weather's not the only thing arriving; Simone saw a cockroach at Super Burrito in downtown Bend, Jake picked up the story and now everyone's anti-Super Burrito. Too bad, I liked eating there from time to time. Could be worse, though, we could all live back east or in the South where roaches are a way of life. We're pretty lucky overall.

The variety is amazing: here's a list of various agents, spiders and bots that I've culled from my chuggnutt.com logfiles over the last 30 days that have to do with RSS and/or blogs (specifically blogs, not just general purpose spiders like Google's). These are only the ones I know for sure are blog or RSS related; others in my logs might be also, but aren't obvious about it.

Geek types, note that these strings (with wildcards mostly) can be used as-is when identifying HTTP_USER_AGENT.

• Bloglines: The web-based feed reader/aggregator
• kinjabot: The (currently) beta bot for the Kinja weblog directory/guide
• Feedreader: Windows-based feed reader/aggregator
• PubSub.com RSS reader: Another searchable, web-based aggregator
• FeedDemon: Windows-based feed reader/aggregator
• fastbuzz.com: Fastbuzz News is another web-based aggregator that scans news and blogs
• ORblogs.com-bot and ORblogs-bot: The crawlers for ORBlogs which compile metadata and RSS for the aggregating site
• SharpReader: Windows-based feed reader/aggregator
• Technoratibot: Technorati's crawler
• UniversalFeedParser: Mark Pilgrim's liberal feed parser which is used in a variety of RSS software
• Feedster Crawler: Feedster's RSS spider
• BlogBot: I think this is Blogdex's crawler, but I'm not totally sure
• BlogPulse: Yet another blog/RSS crawler and indexer
• Slower, Friendlier Spiders (BlogShares V1.35): The spider for BlogShares, the fantasy share market for blogs
• NITLE Blog Spider: The National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education's spider for their blog census
• LocalfeedsPageCrawler
• NusEyeFeedCrawler

It was (another) small get-together tonight, with only myself, Simone and Dane. Lot of fun, though. And the Cascade Lakes Brewing Company's westside lodge just rocks! Upstairs is the game room, with a couple of pool tables, real dartboards, and... Donkey Kong.

Oh yeah, you know we were playin' that.

Back when I was a freshman in high school, and had an inadequate grasp of higher mathematics, I came up with an algebraic "proof" that I thought violated, well, something in math. I had "proved" that 0 = -1 using infinity. It was pretty basic. I don't know why I remembered this today, but I thought it would be amusing to post.

It's like this:

The symbol ∞ represents, well, infinity. So, you whittle infinity down to a simple variable and start with:

∞ = ∞

Nothing earth-shaking. But infinity being infinity, you could also say that infinity minus one (∞ - 1) is also infinity, since it still goes on forever. Then you'd have:

∞ = ∞ - 1

Then, following the rules, drop out the variable ∞ from the equation by subtracting it from both sides of the equation:

∞ - ∞ = ∞ - ∞ - 1

Which of course leaves you with:

0 = -1

Proof! :)

Then, of course, you could further apply various equality rules and come up with all sorts of non-zero results equalling zero.

I remember being pretty disappointed when it turned out to be appallingly wrong. Fortunately, I still went on to the Advanced Math and then Calculus courses...

Notice for the next Bend blogging get-together: Wednesday, September 8^th starting at six o'clock at the Cascade Lakes Brewing Company in Bend. That's on the westside, just off the Chandler/Colorado roundabout.

All the usual suspects will be there. And let's mix it up a little! New bloggers and out-of-town bloggers, come on down too!

I don't know why exactly, but for some reason I always think in terms of buying and owning a book when I want to read it. And if the money's not handy (it usually isn't), I resign myself to possibly getting the book as a gift for my birthday or Christmas. Ironically, I almost never think of the library, so it's always pleasant to "discover" how good and useful the library is.

Today I picked up I'm Just Here For the Food from the library, a book I've been coveting for some time now but (of course) hadn't been willing to shell out the $32.50 (ouch!) for. (I just started it but so far, it's a really good book. It already answered one of the main questions I have from Alton Brown's TV show—why does he use kosher salt all the time?) And since I rediscovered how nice the library is, I've already added 3 other books to my account to keep an eye on via the online interface.

Online? Yeah, the Deschutes Public Library website has a complete catalog interface that lets you do, well, anything via the web that you can do in the library: search the catalog, request items from other libraries, place holds... okay, this isn't news to people who are, well, literate and visit the library. But I still think it's pretty nifty.

So go visit a library! They rock!

I plucked this item out of the ORBlogs ORpost RSS feed last night (originally via Acid-Cookie), and forgot to blog about it: Zach Braff, from Scrubs, has a blog.

Pretty cool, but what's off the hook is that the blog's only been active for about 2 months, but he's already getting over 1000 comments per entry. Whoa.

You know... while he's onstage at the Republican National Convention, someone should present Bush with a bag of pretzels.

On Sunday I took the kids to the local swimming hole that I frequented when growing up: Reynolds Pond. As to be expected for something located in Alfalfa, there's not much online about it, so I thought I'd remedy that a bit. Herewith a bit of local geography and history, along with some wistfulness over the passage of time.

More...

Al Fasoldt is at it again, this time taking on Wikipedia. Remember him? Last year I blasted him for spreading FUD about web technology ("FUD Alert"), and then apologized this year for being so harsh ("Apology"). Well, now more people have caught on: tonight I read from this article on Boing Boing and this article on Joi Ito that Fasoldt has slammed Wikipedia and then taken the low road when someone called him on it: this article from Techdirt has the skinny:

Rather than take me up on the experiment, or suggest an alternative, he complained simply that the whole idea of Wikipedia was "outrageous," "repugnant" and finally (in another email) "dangerous," and therefore he refused to take part in my experiment. He told me that asking him to take part of an experiment that would show how Wikipedia corrected errors "wouldn't change the danger"