chuggnutt.com

One for the weekend: tomorrow, July 31, (er, rather, today now I guess) is a blue moon. One definition of it, anyway. Enjoy!

My wife and I are heading up to Portland for the weekend, and will be back Sunday sometime. Needless to say, I'll be taking the weekend off from blogging (even though I'll probably be online Sunday night; we'll see). Have a good weekend!

I just got caught up in watching the last hour and a half of Silverado on TV, what a great movie. One of the first westerns I remember seeing that actually felt like what is must have been like in that era. Plus, it's just a fun movie. With an all-star cast that holds up, too: Kevin Kline, Scott Glenn, Kevin Costner, Danny Glover, John Cleese, Brian Dennehy, Rosanna Arquette, Jeff Goldblum, Jeff Fahey, Linda Hunt.

I was interviewed today by a reporter writing a story on local bloggers for the Bulletin. Very interesting, kind of cool. I'm not sure what will come of it other than myself sitting there yammering on semi-coherently, but the article will apparently be published next Thursday. I'll have to pick up the paper to see.

And, the guy is interested in talking to as many bloggers as possible. Email me if you're interested.

In other related news, Jake has an angry letter to the Bulletin on his site. That rant kind of spun out of this local story situation. Worth a read.

Jeez, it looks like I've taken a blog sabbatical around here. July must be that kind of month. Anyway...

So, probably against my better judgement, I read The Da Vinci Code over the last week. (My parents loaned it to me.) It wasn't nearly as earth-shattering as some people would have you believe (especially since I already read the source material, Holy Blood, Holy Grail a number of years ago), but overall I found it mostly, well, amateurish—poorly written.

I mean, the writing just doesn't follow the rules for good writing. Things like showing versus telling, dialogue, triangulation, stuff like that. It's distracting, sloppy. And yet—and yet—this book is a huge bestseller. Huge. So what's the formula?

Short chapters that are quick and easy to read, keeping the pages turning. Characters that are easily identifiable. Chase scenes. And of course, a conspiracy, everybody loves a conspiracy. Especially one with a lot of religious iconographic mystery behind it.

I don't know if this points more to the state of bestselling fiction today or to the level of the average reader. But on the bright side, it should give hope to all aspiring writes of bestsellers out there.

Told you I'd do this. It's a bit of a hack job, but oh well:

Tonight's local blogger meetup was a lot of fun, but only 3 of us showed up! (To be fair, Jesse did show up around 8:20, just as we were leaving.) Myself, Shannon and Simone made it to the Bend Brewing Company and had a good time. The funniest part, which I forgot until I got online just now, was the Nebraska State Quarter Designs riff. Let's just say letting the public design the state quarters might not be the best idea...

I keep seeing references to a new Oregon-related group blog called "BlueOregon," purporting to reside at the domain name www.blueoregon.com. However, every time I try this domain, I get a "Future home of a domain" page—i.e., the domain name has been registered, but it's parked on a generic landing page. (Even ORBlogs is showing content from it.) Is this a joke? Really bad DNS/proxy/caching/something configuration on BendBroadband's part? What's the deal?

Public service announcement: The Bend/Central Oregon bloggers are getting together tomorrow (Wednesday, July 21) at six o'clock at the Bend Brewing Company. I'll be there, and I know a few more of us will be, too. See you there!

Since moving into the new house, it seems like there's a never-ending list of things to do. This weekend it was staining the new fence. That took a big chunk of time.

The way to go when doing something like staining a fence (or a deck) is to get a compression sprayer—a plastic tank that you pour the liquid into, seal airtight and pump air into. This creates pressure that forces the liquid out of the spray nozzle when triggered. Pretty handy, but here's some things you might want to consider doing if you're doing this (all of which I, of course, didn't do):

• Wear goggles. The sealant/stain spray has an amazing tendency to blow back into your eyes when it's windy.
• Wear a mask to avoid inhaling too many fumes.
• Wear a hat, like a painter's cap. Especially during those blowback situtations.

Every now and again I catch the beginning of Iron Chef on Food Network, and man, that is one weird show. The original Japanese version, anyway; I haven't seen Iron Chef America.

Isn't it interesting that after the Deschutes County Sheriff's Office pushed so hard to get a levy passed for more money, with all the hand-wringing and guilt trips about people losing jobs and criminals being let out of jail, now all of a sudden they have extra cash?

Aware of the likely criticism, Stiles insisted the rosier situation wasn't clear before May's vote to approve a 3-year levy, and that the funds come from non-levy sources.

Stiles and Jim Ross, the department's business manager, explained that the agency's 2003-04 ending fund balance, which they had conservatively estimated at $200,000, has turned out to be $874,000 instead.

And not small change, either. No, to the tune of two-thirds of a million dollars. And it might even be more:

And some said Stiles still may be under-shooting the amount of revenues he'll have for the new budget year. "It's going to get to $1.2 million," said Commissioner Tom DeWolf; Maier said at least $1 million beginning balance is likely.

The best part? They insist it's not levy money, and there will still be jail releases. Hello? Shouldn't keeping criminals in jail be a priority here? Or is it just me?

Saw Spider-Man 2 on Friday night. Very good. Better in many ways than the first one, and the first one was very good, too. Herewith some additional thoughts, but they might be spoilerish, so only read on if you've seen the movie (or are willing to risk it).

More...

Going through the chuggnutt.com logfiles for the 6th, I noticed that there were suddenly a bunch of hits to the Oobi image I'd posted here a while back from TotalFark. Basically, someone's linked directly to the image on this server from a high-traffic site.

Now on the one hand, that's kind of cool—but on the other hand, I'm a little irritated because TotalFark is a paid subscription site that I can't access without registering first, which means I can't just go and see what they're doing with the Oobi image they're pulling from me. Does that seem fair? Their site is saving money by sucking an image down over my bandwidth, and on top of that I'd have to pay them additional money to find out why.

And before someone points out to me that it's only like 5 bucks to register and I'm therefore a cheap bastard, well, consider this: FARK's Terms of Service at the bottom of every page reads:

Text comments, audioedit submissions, and photoshopped images posted on Fark by registered users may not be reposted or broadcast without the express written permission or license from Fark.com and must attribute Fark.com as the source.

So if they won't let people use their images without their permission, then why should I? It's the principal of the thing.

Grumble... It might be time to brush up on some Apache rewrite rules...

My wife found this somewhere: the most amazing car accident ever. Damn. I'm just speechless.

We had a good 4th of July here, the weather was beautiful, the fireworks were grand and it was fun in general. I took the kids to the Pet Parade, while my wife and mother visited the gem show in Sisters. Afterwards we drank beer, barbecued hamburgers and set off fireworks for the kids in the cul-de-sac.

We got invited to a neighbor's party down the street, which my wife and I visited for about a half hour after the kids went to bed. (Interesting illustration to me of one of the benefits of living in a "real" neighborhood community.) We came back home and watched the Pilot Butte fireworks from our new backyard for the first time in 5 or more years—that was pretty cool.

All in all, a good Fourth. Hope everyone else's was good, too.

I kind of doubt I'll be online posting much tomorrow, so a pre-emptive note for everyone to have a fun, safe July 4th. We'll be shooting from the hip as far as plans go tomorrow; I'm taking the kids to the Pet Parade downtown at 10 for sure. Should be a good day.

And we can see Pilot Butte from our new house! It's the first time in something like five years we'll be able to see the fireworks. That's cool.

Ever think about sod before? Yeah, me neither, until recently. Always seemed like such a boring topic—yah, grass, lawns, yawn. But I've been thinking a lot about sod lately, since we moved into our new house and had landscaping done. It turns out sod is quite a bit more interesting than I initially thought.

Watching the sod get unrolled out and pieced together to form our new lawn, I realized that I had no idea where the stuff actually came from: were these neat rectangular rolls of grass turf just carved out of somebody's pasture somewhere? Somebody's yard? Who's letting that happen? And wouldn't you start to run out of the stuff pretty quickly if you're poaching it? I mean, even though grass is a renewable resource, it still takes time to establish a yard strong enough to start cutting chunks out of.

And then realizing the amount of sod that must be going into new lawns around here every day, I realized the inefficiency of this and went off in search of answers in my trusty Lawn Care for Dummies.

Turns out sod comes from sod farms. No kidding. (Blindingly obvious in retrospect.) There's actually people running vast farms that do nothing but grow grass for lawns. Not livestock, not grain or vegetables, but lawns. And the best known sod farm in this area? McPheeter's Turf.

Here's a Bend Bulletin profile on McPheeter's Turf.

We work long hours, we just get really tired sometimes. We start at 4:30 or 5:00 in the morning and I'll change water at 9:00 or 10:00 at night. But it's so good to go to bed tired at night.

I know farming is truly hard work and long hours, but still, that seems like a hell of a lot of time and work invested in just growing grass.

Now, I just have to see a sod harvesting machine in action. What? You didn't think they cut and rolled it by hand, did you?

My wife pointed me to this article today, and I thought it was funny.

Specially rigged Coke cans, part of a summer promotion, contain cell phones and global positioning chips. That has officials at some installations worried the cans could be used to eavesdrop, and they are instituting protective measures.
...
"There's things generals should stay up late at night worrying about," he said. "A talking Coke can isn't one of them."

Somehow I doubt the GPS-enabled cell phone Coke can will make it into the next Bond movie.

Interesting. Apparently July is American Beer Month. Website and all.

July is American Beer Month, a time when every American should celebrate the season by exploring the wonderful flavors of American Beer. No matter what kind of beer you like, there's one that's perfect for your tastes that's made in America.

One of the sponsors is Deschutes Brewery. Right on.