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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 :)