chuggnutt.com

On this day...

• Hanukkah ends at sundown
• Festivus is "traditionally" celebrated
• The Night Before Christmas was first published, in 1823
• Eddie Vedder was born in 1964
• The Emperor of Japan Akihito was born in 1933
• Van Gogh cut off his ear in 1888
• A whole bunch of other stuff happened

...and oh yeah, it's my birthday. I'm 34 today.

I'm nerdy, no two ways about it: while thinking about the kind of things I would want for Christmas this year, I got to wondering about fictional gadgets and technology that I wouldn't at all mind having. So, as a perfectly goofy/nerdy/idle/self-amusing blog post, I put together a wish list of sci-fi/fantasy gadgets I'd like to get for Christmas (or my birthday).

(Incidentally, I do have an Amazon.com wish list here. It doesn't necessarily match the list I made for my family this year, but I'm just sayin'.)

Lightsaber

Forget laser guns, a lightsaber is the perfect all-in-one weapon. The blade is indestructible, cuts through anything, deflects energy blasts, and acts as a flashlight. Plus, when you're done slicing up Sith Lords, it has a ton of household uses.

Tricorder

The ultimate all-purpose scanning device and handheld computer. As the various Star Trek series show, there's really nothing your tricorder can't tell you—from general weather and environmental conditions to the movements and stats of hidden people to the spin orientation of quarks.

Sonic Screwdriver

Doctor Who's miracle tool. There was almost nothing he couldn't do with that thing... repairing any machine... unlocking any door... cooking meals... getting cash from ATMs...

Time-traveling DeLorean... or TARDIS

Gotta have a time machine.

For vehicular transport, I can't decide between these two. If I went with the DeLorean, I'd have to go with the fusion-powered flying version, but then I'd run into various hijinks related to the existence of magical automobiles in the wrong era. And, of course, the hassle of being able to get the car up to (arbitrarily) 88 miles per hour just to get anywhen. Plus, it doesn't travel spatially—you travel to the same corresponding point in space in the different time period. Could be a problem if there's a building there in the future or something.

But, the thing looks cool.

On the other hand, Doctor Who's TARDIS travels both temporally and spatially, and is bigger on the inside than the outside. Drawbacks? Doesn't seem like you actually have much control over where and when you travel. Plus, it always seems to look like a goofy blue police box. Or, at least the Doctor's did. Perhaps I could get one of my own, an updated, working model.

Babel fish

Yeah, this isn't a gadget per se, but man, being able to understand and communicate in any language without having to fiddle around with something as cumbersome as a Universal Translator...

That's all I can come up with right now. Though I'm sure somebody will point out that since I chose a Babel fish from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, that I should choose, well, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" as a must-have gadget. Nah. I figure I'll just load Wikipedia onto my tricorder.

Based on what I've been writing (ranting) about "Lost" recently, I was contacted via email by a woman doing a feature story about the subject who wanted to interview me (also via email).

The twist? It's a Brazilian television Lost fan site entirely in Portuguese.

Globalization, ya gotta love it. It's cool seeing my name and site in print, even if I don't know what the article is saying. It's here: "LOST" JÁ ERA? TEMPORADA DESANIMA FÃS E PERDE AUDIÊNCIA NOS EUA.

Guess it's time to fire up the Google translator...

A little cross-pollination: over on Hack Bend I'm going to be posting a Holiday Shopping Guide, and I want to make it collaborative as well as listing my own opinions on where to shop for the holidays.

So if you live in Central Oregon and have any recommendations or want a piece of the action, let me know, or comment on my Hack Bend post.

Cheers!

SouthFlorida.com is running a photo gallery of kids scared of Santa Claus, which is gut-busting funny. (Really! I laughed out loud at a lot of these.) But some of these Santas are so messed up that I had to re-run them here. (But go check out the rest.)

Like this one...

Hard-drinkin' Santa

Or this one:

America's Most Wanted Santa

More...

Bank Robbery Gone Bad Santa

And while those are fun, what the hell is with these fake Santas?

Holy shit this freaks me out... it's like Night of the Corn Santa or something

And finally, I think we have what qualifies as Worst Santa Ever:

Via Boing Boing.

For real.

Yes, I'm aware I haven't posted much here on chuggnutt.com lately. I've been focusing most of my writing energy on The Brew Site and Hack Bend recently, since I keep thinking of topical things for those blogs and I really don't want to become a caricature of myself with "Lost" rants.

Aside from that, here's a loosely-presented list of things that have been happening:

Thanksgiving was very nice, and low-key. We did the expected big dinner at my parents' house, though we weren't a big crowd. We made some excellent pumpkin pies with a gingerbread graham cracker crust. (Gingerbread graham crackers. Seriously. Rachael Ray is on the box.)

I hung outdoor Christmas lights on the house the day after Thanksgiving. The cold air gave me a bit of a cold.

The day after that consisted of generously picking up weary travelers Shannon and Brian from the Redmond Airport; Shannon confessed a creepy desire to pummel saguaro cacti. Whack job. :)

The two recent books I've read/are reading are Stephen Baxter's Manifold: Time and Manifold: Space. I think Time is the better written of the two, where he actually builds characterizations (mostly; he's not as strong here as some writers) for his cast, whereas in Space they feel more like mouthpieces or conveniences. Maybe he just got lazy, since he's sort of continuing the main character's story, and didn't feel necessary to rehash... or not. I don't know. They're full of interesting concepts, nonetheless.

When I get a chance (which isn't often), I've been thoroughly enjoying "Secret Weapons Over Normandy" for the PlayStation 2. That game completely rocks. I didn't think I'd like it as much as I do; I think a big part of that is the relatively simple controls used.

(Yes, that's me: I need simple video game controls. I'm retro that way.)

Anything else? Um... working. Nothing interesting to report there.

I hope everyone's Thanksgiving is a good one. We're baking pumpkin pies today (made with a gingerbread graham cracker crust) and heading out to my folks' house for dinner and family. Enjoy the long weekend!

Something I don't really get about those people (mostly young?) waiting—no, camping—in line for days outside of stores like Best Buy for the PlayStation 3... Do they not have jobs, that they can take the time to spend a week camping out at a store? And if they don't have jobs, how can they afford to buy something as expensive as the PS3 (at $600)?

Of course, I don't get why people would camp out for movie premieres, either. YMMV.

I'm starting to think I'm becoming a parody of myself with these "Lost" posts. I'm also thinking about coining a new phrase: "to pull a Lost." It should be self-evident what I mean by that, but: to start out strong, have everything going your way... and then blow it. Which seems to be what they're doing.

Actually, last night's episode was better than it has been this season... mostly. I'll get into that below after the obligatory spoiler warning...

Here there be spoilers!

I realize I'm about a week late blogging this item (should have been around Halloween), but I just can't resist: Count Dracula not in the numbers, physicist says. A scientist is playing Scully to scientifically disprove the existence of monsters—vampires, zombies, ghosts, and so on.

Articles like this make me amused and irritated at the same time. I always get a kick of out it when a goofy, kooky topic like this shows up in the "serious" mainstream news, but it annoys me when they purport to have The Answer to things and get their science and logic wrong.

Case in point: his proof against the existence of vampires is flawed:

[Costas] Efthimiou takes out the calculator to prove that if a vampire sucked one person's blood each month — turning each victim into an equally hungry vampire — after a couple of years there would be no people left, just vampires. He started his calculations with just one vampire and 537 million humans on January 1, 1600 and shows that the human population would be down to zero by July 1602.

Now I'm not saying that vampires do exist, but that's weak. Yes, you've shown us that repeatedly doubling a number increases it exponentially very quickly, but this "proof" is hardly proof. First of all, why the assumption that vampires always make more vampires? If the vampire doesn't kill you outright, then you become a vampire. I think it's up to the "source" vampire. No exponential increase.

Second, couldn't some of these vampires be feeding on animals instead of humans? (Digression: wouldn't vampire cows be funny?)

Third, I'm sure vampires are reasonably intelligent enough to have figured out that if they keep making vampires, there's no more food left. I imagine they plan accordingly.

Fourth, where did this "one person per month" figure come from? That seems rather arbitrary.

So his reasoning is flawed. I think he would be better off arguing against the more implausible vampire myths, such as the physical impossibility of their not casting reflections in mirrors.

Or, you know, doing real science.

I love this video mashup of Lost and The A-Team. I might even like it better than the actual third season of "Lost" so far!

This entry stems entirely from a gross misspelling/mishandling of the word "proletariat" on my part. "Protolariat" is not a real word; if you search for it nothing comes up. What better opportunity to create a new word and be the only search engine result for it? :)

So, what should the definition be? I'm thinking something along the lines of:

• An incomplete model of string theory
• A poorly-executed or work-in-progress "Web 2.0" site; possibly derogatory. "Friendster is a real protolariat"
• Mushroom juice
• A long piece of rope with a knot at one end

Coining new words with the power of the internet!

The "illness" referred to in the title above is our daughter's; she isn't seriously sick but has this cough that really kicks in after she's been asleep for a few hours, and this happens two or three times a night. It really sucks to have your sleep punctured every couple of hours to go administer meds or water or whatever.

Anyway. It was also our daughter's birthday weekend, so we were running around a lot getting things ready and such. The birthday party went really well, so that's good. Thankfully they seem to get easier as the kids get older and more autonomous. No need to give the little ones booze and sleep it off anymore.

I'm kidding. (Or am I?)

The only hitch was two kids didn't get picked up; turns out the mom who was supposed to be picking them up went to the wrong place. Fortunately, we had our minivan and cellphones, so we were able to take the extra kids to where they needed to be. That may well have been the first time we've carpooled...

Anyway, I'll try to get back to my regular blogging schedule. Which hasn't been very "regular" of late, I know. I'll get right on that... sometime...

No, this won't be quite the rant I did last week, just thoughts since watching tonight's episode of "Lost." In particular I thought tonight's Eko-centric episode was far better than last week's, but most of this is just braindump. Maybe some ranting. And oh yeah, huge spoilers.

Huge spoilers ahead, don't say I didn't warn you...

I'm not sure what this might say about me, but when I was reading this KTVZ story about the utterly ridiculous Measure 37 claim on the Newberry Volcanic Monument, I couldn't help but think the image filed with the story looks like a skull:

See the eyesockets? Yeah, that's messed up.

Oh and FYI, Measure 37? Only one of the most retarded ballot measures ever passed in the state of Oregon.

C'mon, with a title like that, how could it not be?

"It" being the Halloween party we went to last night. Costumes, booze, food, and friends. And a giant inflatable Scooby Doo. (Yes, it was this same Scooby.)  Although this year, perhaps the title of this post should be, "Oh my God, they killed Scooby! Those bastards!"

Yes, that's right: somebody killed Scooby Doo.

See, when Scooby disappeared from the back deck (where he was leering in the window this year), the assumption was the thing had deflated. Somebody suggested that Scooby had, indeed, been killed, but I thought it was just the running gag. Until Scooby's giant deflated plastic corpse was discovered lying in a pool of blood with a large knife in the neck.

(I think this Family Guy clip applies here. I've been looking for an excuse to link to that.)

I knew I had been beating that dead horse into the ground, but I had no idea it would incite a murderous crime of passion...

That was a good party.

Those bastards!

Okay, I've managed to hold out for the first four episodes of "Lost" this season, but after tonight I couldn't resist it any longer. It's a rant. It's gonna be spoilerish, and long-winded, usual disclaimers apply, etc. etc. Only click through if you're ready.

Read on... spoilers ahead.

That's the new toy in the house from this weekend: a garbage can whose lid opens automatically (via infrared sensor). It was from Costco, but I can't find it on their site to pull up a picture; and since I'm too lazy to go look at the brand on the actual thing itself, you'll just have to use the awesome power of your imagination for now.

So far, the sensor has been tripped by standing too close to it; walking by it; intentionally (via Jedi hand-waving magic); and the dog. That dog one only happened once; he sniffed too close to it, it popped open, and he jumped and scrabbled away. That was pretty funny.

Now, what is that goofy phrase they always use on Slashdot and the like? ...I for one welcome our new robotic garbage can overlords...

...because really, it's just a matter of time at this point.

I've been on a reading tear over the summer, mostly all good books, and I thought I'd be a little self-indulgent and list what I've read with some comments.

• Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World. It clocks in at something like 3,000 pages total, but it was by far the best thing I read this year. Maybe several years.
• Virtual Light, by William Gibson.
• Spam Kings, by Brian McWilliams.
• Gray Lensman and Second Stage Lensmen by E.E. Smith. Two middle volumes of what is often considered to be the "best space opera series of all time." Written in the '40s, so they're somewhat dated, but pretty good. I don't know about Best of All Time good, but worth a read nonetheless.
• The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein.
• A Canticle for Liebowitz, by Walter Miller, Jr. Different from what I was expecting from the description on the back cover.
• Still slogging through Gödel, Escher, Bach. Unfinished.
• Across the River and Into the Trees, by Hemingway. Tough to get excited about this one.
• Guns, Germs and Steel, by Jared Diamond. I'm reading this one now, it's very good.

Cyberpunk:

Cyberpunk is a sub-genre of science fiction, noted for its focus on "high tech and low life" and taking its name from the combination of cybernetics and punk. It features advanced science such as information technology and cybernetics, coupled with a degree of breakdown or a radical change in the social order.

Cyberpunk writers tend to use elements from the hard-boiled detective novel, film noir, and postmodernist prose to describe the often nihilistic underground side of an electronic society.... much of the action takes place online, in cyberspace, blurring any border between the actual and the virtual reality.

Classic example: Neuromancer

Steampunk:

Steampunk... concerns works set in the past, or a world resembling the past, in which modern technological paradigms occurred earlier in history, but were accomplished via the science already present in that time period.

The prototypical "steampunk" stories were essentially cyberpunk tales that were set in the past, using steam-era technology rather than the ubiquitous cybernetics of cyberpunk but maintaining those stories' "punkish" attitudes towards authority figures and human nature. Originally, like cyberpunk, steampunk was typically dystopian, often with noir and pulp fiction themes, as it was a variant of cyberpunk.

Further derivatives: Stonepunk, bronzepunk, ironpunk, sandalpunk or classicpunk, middlepunk, clockpunk, dieselpunk and atomicpunk, transistorpunk, spacepunk... though I don't think most of these are full-fledged subgenres, and were developed for the GURPS Steampunk role-playing game.

Classic example: The Difference Engine

Biopunk:

It describes the nihilistic, underground side of the biotech society which is said to have started to evolve in the first decade of the 21st century. Unlike cyberpunk, it builds not on information technology but on biology. Individuals are enhanced not by mechanical means, but by human genetic engineering.

Postcyberpunk: Not so much a derivative as an evolution.

Postcyberpunk describes a subgenre of science fiction which some critics suggest has evolved from classic cyberpunk. Like its predecessor, postcyberpunk focuses on technological developments in near-future societies, typically examining the social effects of an ubiquitous datasphere of computerized informaton, genetic engineering and modification of the human body, and the continued impact of perpetual technological change. Unlike "classic" cyberpunk, however, the works in this category feature characters who act to improve social conditions or at least protect the status quo from further decay.

Includes a sense of humor, as opposed to the frequently deadly serious nature of cyberpunk.

Classic example: The Diamond Age

...At some point, you know, this all seems like a snake devouring its own tail...

Friday, after much hand-wringing and debating and questioning sanity (almost entirely by my wife), we adopted a new kitten from the Humane Society.

He's about seven weeks old and has that full-on kitten rambunctious flexibility that all the good kittens possess. Kittens like that are like crack for some people.

Thankfully the first night was the only night (for me) that messed up my sleep... seems like the last cat we got kept me up a lot more at first. I'm not complaining!

So far, the other two cats are still unsure of what to make of the interloper. I'm sure that will pass and they'll start kicking his ass any day now.

And now, of course, the obligatory kitten pictures.

I haven't decided yet if that black on the nose qualifies this cat to look like Hitler...

On the one hand, I want to say, "who knew it would come to this," but on the other, well, it figures: Dustin Diamon, AKA Screech from "Saved by the Bell," is the latest celebrity to have a sex tape released to the public.

See also stories on TMZ.com here, here, and here. That last link purports to have a preview. Consider all of it NSFW, kids.

This is an incredibly weird story... mind-boggling, really. TMZ describes the tape as:

The tape begins with Diamond in a bathtub, narrating what's to come. It ends with Diamond introducing one of the women to a "Dirty Sanchez." Suffice it say, it is unbelievably graphic.

...I have to say, I never thought the phrase "Dirty Sanchez" would ever appear on this blog. You can look it up on Wikipedia if you like, but I ain't gonna link to it.

The cynical theory is that since Diamond is supposedly flat broke, and his career is stalled out due to the Screech typecast, this video not only breaks him out of that stereotyped image but also kicks-starts the PR on his career.

If that's true, that's pretty hardcore. (Pun intended.)

See also: my post from over three and a half years ago.

I think we should start a new game: "What Can't You Find on Wikipedia?", or, alternatively, "Stump Wikipedia". Seriously, they have over 1.4 million articles now, and it keeps going up. Is there a ceiling?

Although you have to stick to real subjects... you can't punch something in like "nitrate waffles" and expect a legitimate response. (See Googlewhacking if that's the game you want to play.)

Of course, the irony here is even if someone were to find such a subject, that person or another could immediately create a new article for it... thereby negating the point.

So how soon before Wikipedia becomes sentient?

Random link for the day: Cats that look like Hitler.

Really.

Apparently today was "sandwich day" over on Slashfood and it made me think of something I've been meaning to share for a while. Something you'll probably think sounds gross at first. Most people do. But the thing is, even though it sounds gross, it's actually really really good.

And once I tell you about it, you won't be able to stop thinking about it.

Ready?

...the peanut butter and mayonnaise sandwich.

You're all cringing. At least the ones who have never tried this are. But really, a lot of you routinely eat much worse that this. Yeah, I'm lookin' at you, High Fructose Corn Syrup—not to mention Monosodium Glutamate and Red #7. And what about Aspartame?

Think about it. PB & M. You might think it sounds awful, but until you try it, you'll never really know.

Really.

I've started using the spam-killing service Akismet to handle comment spam on my three blogs. That, and instituted a basic moderation system for comments. I can't say as I've been dealing with as much comment spam as some people, but I just got sick and tired of dealing with the problem myself and decided to offload the work.

So far Akismet is pretty slick, though I'd guesstimate that it has only caught 50% or so of the spam comments I've received since activating it today. I'm hoping it gets better.

It took a little bit of work to integrate it into my custom software, but I was able to crib a PHP class someone else had written and get it all integrated fairly smoothly. If you're running one of the standard platforms like Movable Type or WordPress, though, there already exist handy plugins that you should just be able to drop into your blog directory.

So if there's any comment weirdness over the next few days as I monitor the activity and work out the kinks, bear with me. If you post a legitimate comment, it should show up right away, unless it was incorrectly flagged as spam. That's where the moderation comes in; I'll make sure to approve legit comments ASAP.

One year and two weeks after we lost our first cat, we lost our second cat today. We had to have him put to sleep, the same as before; he was essentially end-stage advanced urinary tract disease. We'd spent the last two weeks doing everything we could for him.

This was our cat Lucifer. He was 13. We'd also raised him from a kitten. He was a big Maine coon, with six toes on each of his front paws; he looked like he was wearing mittens. He was also the sweetest cat you would ever meet.

Yes, it sucks. It's like that, sometimes. But at 13, he lived a full, happy, loving life with no complaints; there's not much more you can ask for.

We got the minivan back from the shop this week, and today I had the distinct pleasure of attending a diversion class for the ticket I had received (you all remember my accident, right?) The diversion class was the kind with the driving simulator—whenever you're involved in an accident this is the type of class you get. It ran from nine until about three.

The class by itself was just fine; full of information and videos about traffic safety, etc. Definitely worth it to get the ticket expunged from the record. The simulators, though, they were something else...

...as in, really old technology. I'm quite sure they were state-of-the-art fifteen years ago, but in this day and age they just seem, well, sad. Seriously, these are circa early- to mid-nineties units; the "simulators" are basically adjustable seats with the simplest possible console you can imagine: steering wheel, ignition, speedometer, and indicator lights for the program. Gas and brake pedals. Gear shift (for an automatic) and emergency brake.

Everyone sits in these consoles and watches a screen where the "simulation" is projected from—I kid you not—laserdisc. Laserdisc! Aside from thrift stores, I haven't seen a live laserdisc player since the late 80s. And it's just a movie, basically, no real interaction—you simply "drive" the console in accordance with what's on the screen, and the indicator lights flash if there was an error of some sort (too fast or slow, no turn signal, etc.).

All very basic. Embarrassingly so.

Modern video game systems are more advanced than this. In fact, with how affordable technology is these days, there's almost no reason you couldn't put together a simulator out of a PlayStation or Xbox, cheap LCD monitor, and driving controls (which I've seen for racing games), and have the entire system come in for well under $1000.

Laserdisc! I'm still shaking my head.

Compare and contrast this:

Global warming over the coming century could mean a return of temperatures last seen in the age of the dinosaur and lead to the extinction of up to half of all species, a scientist said on Thursday.

With this:

The earliest civilizations were not a product of favorable conditions but rather a last resort in the face of dramatic shifts in the weather, a climate scientist said on Thursday.

I'm trying to decide if these are complimentary or contradictory. Or maybe I'm just randomly amused, correlating the climate crisis faced in one article with the results mentioned in another...

...what we tend to think of today as civilization was an accidental by-product of unplanned adaptation to catastrophic climate change. Civilization was a last resort...

Interesting stuff.

Our Labor Day weekend itself was decent enough overall, but Sunday night we had to take our oldest cat to the emergency pet hospital because he'd been acting weird all day, and by the evening was seemingly in serious pain. Turned out he had stones in his bladder and was all blocked up.

Since our regular vet wouldn't be open until Tuesday morning, the cat stayed at the emergency hospital from Sunday night through Tuesday morning (about 36 hours), receiving treatment. Tuesday my wife transferred him to our regular vet, and they performed surgery to remove the stones that day.

Recovery Tuesday night, and again tonight. Probably home tomorrow. But all this adds up to another hefty bill. Pets are expensive. I'm beginning to wonder if we should have insurance policies taken out on them.

And before anyone thinks I'm totally cynical, the cat is doing just fine. He's 13 years old, but remarkably healthy otherwise.

I don't know what it is, exactly, but these last few days really seem like summer is done and autumn is just starting. No, it's not the colder weather we had today... perhaps it's like Jennifer's husband said, about the quality of light changing so that it looks like fall.

Actually I think that's a large part of it. The days are shorter and the sun has been shifting southward again, and the light has a fall quality to it. I can smell it in the air, too. Something crisp. It feels like the harvest season, or at least feels like it should be.

And then school's starting on Tuesday... both are kids are in this year (first grade and kindergarden). That plays a factor, I'm sure.

So, even though we officially have nearly another month of summer remaining, it seems to me that it is now (informally) the beginning of autumn.

Did everyone remember to bring in or cover their plants tonight?

Okay, geek levels are off the charts on this one: FC64, a Commodore C64 emulator for Flash. And it's open source. This is just mind boggling...

...because, among other things, what this means is that I could embed a Commodore 64 emulator, games and all, right here on my blog. Because it's in Flash. And Flash in installed on nearly every browser these days.

So not only could you play C-64 games here... if you know BASIC, you could write and run your own programs for it. So then I wonder if those are saveable? I bet that would be easy to hack... Talk about a community project: everybody writing programs for everybody else to run without having to install software or trade files at all. Hmmmmmmmmmm...

More geeky space news! This is more mainstream-popular, though, as I've seen it popping up everywhere. Pluto is no longer a planet. I'm actually a bit surprised at the uproar this seems to be causing; Slashdot has more on this.

Me, I guess I've always been suspicious of Pluto; I mean, the thing has this wildly weird orbit that goes above the plane of the ecliptic and that swings inside Neptune's orbit. And, it's smaller than our own moon. And, its own moon, Charon, doesn't actually orbit around Pluto; rather, they orbit around each other (with the center of axis somewhere between them rather than at Pluto's center).

All decidedly un-planetlike.

So I think reclassifying it is a good move. It doesn't make it any less mysterious or interesting. I guess I just don't see why this is such a big deal; Pluto itself didn't go anywhere.

So, my two cents.

And, getting even geekier (possible?), the Wikipedia article on Pluto mentions it "is the prototype of a yet-to-be-named family of trans-Neptunian objects." Trans-Neptunian? No no no. It should properly be classified as a Kuiper Belt Object. Right up there with other KBOs like Sedna, Quaoar, and the like. (And the name "plutino" is just stupid.)

Okay, I'm a little behind on news, but I thought this story was extremely cool: Voyager 1 passes 100 AU from the sun. I guess this is only of interest to you if you're a space and astronomy geek.

(Some quick Wikipedia references: Voyager 1, AU.)

It's just amazing to me that a spacecraft built with 1970s technology has been able to go so far and outlast a lot of other junk that's been introduced to the world since then. It's currently the most distant man-made object from Earth. Signals from the spacecraft take more that 13 hours to reach us.

The spacecraft [both Voyagers] are traveling at a distance where the sun is but a bright point of light and solar energy is not an option for electrical power. The Voyagers owe their longevity to their nuclear power sources, called radioisotope thermoelectric generators, provided by the Department of Energy.

Voyager 1 is now at the outer edge of our solar system, in an area called the heliosheath, the zone where the sun's influence wanes. This region is the outer layer of the 'bubble' surrounding the sun, and no one knows how big this bubble actually is. Voyager 1 is literally venturing into the great unknown and is approaching interstellar space. Traveling at a speed of about one million miles per day, Voyager 1 could cross into interstellar space within the next 10 years.

Via Slashdot.

So on my way to work this morning, I got into a car accident. One of three cars involved! Westbound on Franklin, just past the light on Third, and the first car stopped for the construction they've got going on, and the car in front of me rear-ended the first car, stopping up short, and I had to hit my brakes—but still rear-ended the second car. A three car pile-up. Sort of.

Anyway, I'm fine, no injuries, just smashed up the front of our Honda Odyssey real good (but the engine seems to be fine, so that's good). The other two drivers are fine, too, so everybody came out of it shaken but unscathed.

Yep, it all sucks. The car is at the shop now, waiting for a damage estimate, and I'm dealing with insurance and paperwork and all that fun stuff.

What I find amusing, is everyone's reaction: first is the natural, "Are you okay?" question; that's been followed up with, "It wasn't the new car, was it?"

(No, it was the older car.)

Yeah, that headline there? Totally saccharine and goofy and pointless. Yes, I know it's cribbed from John Lennon, so what?

Anyway.

The "life that happened" was a sudden and unexpected gall bladder removal for my wife last week. Yeah, I know—Wha?!? She went to the doctor on Wednesday, confirmed that she had gallstones, and they wanted to take the gall bladder out either that night or Thursday. We opted for Thursday, so I spent most of that day at the hospital and the rest of the weekend taking care of, er, everything. So I've been busy.

You know what's crazy? They treat gall bladder surgery (formally known as cholecystectomy, in this case laparoscopic) as basically outpatient; my wife was able to come home Thursday night.

Okay, this is even crazier, and creepy (from that Wikipedia article):

Gallstones are, oddly, a valuable by-product of meat processing, fetching up to $900 US an ounce in their use as a purported aphrodisiac in the herbal medicine of some cultures. The finest gallstones tend to be sourced from old dairy cows. Much as in the manner of diamond mines, slaughterhouses carefully scrutinise offal department workers for gallstone theft.

Wow. And "ew."

On the other hand... no, I won't even go there.

This is absolutely great: Send a free personalized message from Samuel L. Jackson for "Snakes on a Plane." I swear, the thing is brilliant... the audio editing is really good... and it makes phone calls anywhere for free. Even better? You put in the phone number you want it to appear from... and it uses that number for caller ID.

As my brother said, you think you're getting a call from a friend, and Samuel Jackson is commanding you!

Oh, uh, the movie itself? Well, if it's successful, it's because they've been taking the viral approach all along...

I figured it's been just long enough for everyone to forget...

The eye surgery went very well, our daughter has been recuperating marvelously all weekend (it wasn't a very eventful weekend because of this), and things are more-or-less back on track.

Saturday morning we did make a Costco run, largely because I had an eye exam of my own at the optometrist there. It's been probably 15 years since I last had my eyes checked, and the kids having the surgery—not to mention having had eye floaters for years—put me in mind to getting it done. As it happens, I have nearly perfect vision; I see 20/20 in each eye, and have a very mild astigmatism that may necessitate getting glasses in a few years. The floaters are normal.

And yeah, go ahead and get the "floater" jokes out of your system; I can hear a bunch of you snickering in the back.

Like the trip we had almost two years ago, tonight we're in the Phoenix Inn hotel in Lake Oswego in preparation for our daughter's corrective eye surgery tomorrow. Pretty much anything I would say is covered in that previous post; the only details being different really are that my daughter is six and it's her third (and hopefully last) such surgery. And I've taken today, Wednesday and Thursday off from work for it (back on Friday).

On the positive side, we had a really excellent dinner at Piazza Italia in Portland's Pearl District; we got to try some cheesecake from The Cheesecake Factory at Washington Square; and we'll be doing a Trader Joe's run sometime before coming back on Thursday. Anyone need anything from TJs?

I'm taking the day off from work this Friday and going to Portland for the Oregon Brewers Festival! Woo hoo! My original plan was to stay in Portland the entire weekend, but as it turns out I'd already obligated myself to a friend's wedding Saturday evening, so I'll be spending Friday night with my friend Justin (who's also going with me to the Brewfest) and leaving Saturday late morning sometime.

It's going to be an eventful day. Aside from the Brewfest, there's a beer blogger meetup that evening (starting at five) over at the Rogue Ales Public House, so I'll get to meet yet more bloggers from Portland and other far-flung places (Arizona, for one, I think).

Are any other bloggers in the area going to the Brewfest? Let me know.

At any rate, I'll have the camera and notebook and plan on writing a bunch about it. And, Friday right now is looking at an 80-degree forecast for Portland, so that's just about perfect. Three days and counting!

Okay, I've pretty much become addicted to the show with zefrank. I can't help it. It's compelling. And funny. And smart. And for embedded online video, it just works. Go watch. And then go watch a bunch of the archives.

The Cowboy Dinner Tree was fabulous. A real experience, one I would absolutely do again! So this review will mostly consist of gushing over the meal (I can't think of anything bad to say), followed by a few pictures. Read on...

More...

Tonight my wife and I are driving down to Silver Lake to eat at the Cowboy Dinner Tree. This is actually something we've wanted to try out for years, but it was this article in the Bend Bulletin which finally prompted us to make reservations.

Probably the best description I could give is one I'll lift from the Bulletin article:

The Cowboy Dinner Tree, about 85 miles from Bend, is about as rustic as a restaurant can get. Made of rough poles and barn planks, the building itself has the look of a hermit's cabin. A sign on the wall proclaims "No electricity - No credit cards - No kidding," and it's not. A 12-volt solar-powered battery provides the juice for a couple of bare light bulbs in the dining room, but when the sun sets, the lights dim. All the food is cooked from scratch with propane.

When you make your reservations, you get the choice of either the steak or the chicken for dinner. And their serious about they're food; when they say chicken, they mean a whole chicken. And the steaks are 26 to 30 ounces. That's almost two pounds of steak!

Should be an experience, one I'll write about sometime in the near future, if I'm not comatose from that much red meat.

Simone noted the humor/frustration level I was having with Dell this week at work. Of course, anytime I mention "Dell" around her she shakes her head in disgust, so perhaps she's not exactly the most objective observer. :)

What happened was, at work this week one of the newish Dell PCs started making a high-pitched spinning/whining noise. At first I thought it was a fan, so I opened up the box, eliminated the fans as a source of noise, and quickly concluded it was the hard drive. Sounds emanating from the hard drive are, generally, a Bad Thing. And sure enough, when I tried to boot the machine up again in order to copy the data to the network (most of the user data is already on the network, except for a few things like email and some accounting data), I got the Windows blue screen and problems booting.

So I got the person set up with a temporary PC (an older one), pulled the hard drive, and called Dell.

(Let me disclaim in advance that in fact all the people I talked to at Dell were very professional and helpful, and the overall service they performed was very good. It just turned into a minor comedy of errors.)

First of all, the machine's out of warranty; it was purchased one year and one month ago. Of course! Even assuming I'd bought the one-year service plan warranty with it, it still wouldn't matter.

Nearly 45 minutes later, after talking to three different people (a woman from India; some fellow with an unidentifiable accent in Tech Support; and a woman from Roseburg, Oregon in Sales), I was finally able to get the order placed for a new hard drive that matched the specs of the machine and drive in question: 80GB Ultra ATA, IDE interface. Pay attention, that's an important detail.

They tell me that yes, even though I ordered the drive with Next Day delivery, it still may not even ship out until Friday the 14th. That's fine, I say, just get it here ASAP. And guess what? They surprise me by delivering the hard drive the very next day! Woo-hoo!

Open the package, mount the drive into the PC chassis, go to plug everything in... and it's the wrong type of drive. They sent me an 80GB Serial ATA (SATA) hard drive, which is incompatible with the IDE interface in this computer.

So there's not much else to do but get on the phone with Dell again, spending exactly 31 minutes on the phone this time (our office telephones have a call timer). I spoke with the Customer Service department (again a woman from India, as near as I can figure), got the return processed (UPS would pick it up in the next three days), then transferred to Sales, where I made sure to order exactly the right type of hard drive. I hope. This was Thursday.

The new drive hasn't arrived yet, so the speedy Next Day delivery that accompanied the first hard drive hasn't recurred. Hopefully Monday? But, the UPS guy did pick up the return Friday morning, so that's something.

Simone did warn me.

A promo-note to any garage salers reading: my brother and his girlfriend are having a garage sale today (Saturday the 15th). Among other things, he was planning on selling some of his older video game systems (Nintendo 64, Super Nintendo), with games, and we took a toddler mattress over there for them to sell ($45 OBO).

They live over on Douglas Street, just off and north of Wilson. I told them to post an ad on Craigslist, but I don't see one there...

Now, this story is just silly: Fanged killer kangaroo roamed Outback.

Forget cute, cuddly marsupials. A team of Australian palaeontologists say they have found the fossilized remains of a fanged killer kangaroo and what they describe as a "demon duck of doom".
...
The species found at the dig had "well muscled-in teeth, not for grazing. These things had slicing crests that could have crunched through bone and sliced off flesh", Hand said.

I have this absurd image of saber-toothed kangaroos hopping around... Hey, maybe somebody will make a horror-thriller-scifi-Jurassic-Park type movie where killer kangaroos are brought back to life and terrorizing Australia! And if you can come up with a dumb enough name, Samuel L. Jackson will star in it!

While I can't say as I've found much use out of MySpace, my sister-in-law did post an amusing bulletin that I had to steal. I'm sure we've all seen variations on the name game... here's a collection of rules for generating ten of them (along with my results).

Your Spy Name: Middle name and current street name
Travis Desert (only part of my street name, so it wouldn't sound so goofy)

Your Movie Star Name: Grandfather/grandmother on your mom's side, your favorite candy
Guy Snickers

Your Rap Name: First initial of first name, first two or three letters of your last name
J-Ab (Jab?)

Your Gamer Tag: A favorite color, a favorite animal
Purple Chicken

Your Soap Opera Name: Middle name, city where you were born
Travis St. Helens

Your Star Wars Name: First 3 letters of your last name, last 3 letters of mother's maiden name, first 3 letters of your pet's name
Abeittbob (or Abe Itt Bob as they tend to do names in Star Wars)

Your Jedi Name: Middle name spelled backwards, your mom's maiden name spelled backwards
Sivart Rolyat (I made up the maiden name... no way I'm posting that online for real)

Your Porn Star Name: First pet's name, the street you grew up on
Curly Deer

Your Superhero Name: "The", your favorite color, the automobile your dad drives
The Purple Chevy

Your Action Hero Name: First Name Of The Main Character In The Last Film You Watched, last Food You Just Ate
Popeye Radish

So, what are your names?

So I'm fighting off the advances of a summertime cold, picked up from my son. It's that tickly sore throat, run-down feeling and if it doesn't get nipped in the bud right away, then it'll turn full-fledged, and we don't want that. Hence, I've been dosing up on echinacea, Airborne, vitamin C, and Ricola. And tea. So far, I seem to have halted the advance, but I won't know if the tide has turned until the morning after a (hopefully) good night's sleep.

Last night's sleep was not good. At 4:20 in the AM we (as in, the entire household, kids, animals and all) were awakened to the sound of digital beeping. Loud digital beeping. After scouring the house and finding nothing out of the ordinary, my unconfirmed suspicion is that it was the new humidifier we had set up in my son's room. After that, it was sporadic sleep interrupted by the cat pouncing on my feet every 53 seconds.

On a totally unrelated note, why on Earth are so many MySpace pages so bloody ugly? No, I know the technical reason they are—because somebody actually thought it would be a good idea to give users that much control over their page—but holy Corona, don't any of these people have any sense of aesthetics at all? I don't get it.

Yeah, it's one of those "How I spent" posts, inspired by Shannon's this time. Only I'll confine mine to my super-busy holiday weekend.

Saturday, my wife and daughter went to Sisters with my mother for the rock and gem show. They do this every year, it's tradition. While they were gone, my son and I returned a bunch of cans and bottles to Safeway, went to the library, and stopped by the homebrew shop so I could pick up ingredients for a batch of beer and a wine kit for my wife.

A highlight of the homebrew shop: my soon-to-be-five-year-old son asking when we could leave because he didn't like this store... I guess not enough toys? Too creepy for kids? I got a chuckle out of it.

When the others got back, my daughter went home with my mother to have a sleepover, and the rest of us went back to town to check out the Saturday market, get some ice cream, and then head home again. For dinner it was Cibelli's Pizza (had to go pick it up).

Sunday it was off to Albertson's to return some more bottles and cans, return some movies, and run to Bi-Mart. I transplanted a bunch of plants (one of my hop plants, several tomatoes, a couple of beans). In the afternoon we went out to my parents' place for dinner and to pick up our daughter. It was a hot enough day that I took the kids over to Reynolds Pond and we played in the water a bit.

I took Monday off from work, and it was a big homebrew day that I had planned with my friend Paul. After going out to breakfast at McKay Cottage, we spent a good part of the day brewing, and then the afternoon and evening turned into an impromptu barbecue and party with Paul and his wife, Shannon and Brian, and Simone and her husband. The day was punctuated with the power going out all over town (only about a half hour for us, though I heard other people were out for hours), lighting off fireworks that Simone's husband had brought over, and a friendly poker game.

That night at 12:30 AM, someone rang our doorbell. I, however, slept through it, and only woke when my wife, er, woke me. Muzzy-headed with alcohol and sleep, all I knew was that the dog was barking in the middle of the night so I yelled at him to stop, only to find out he was actually performing a service for once... hilarity ensues. I stumbled around in the dark for a while, only wanting to go back to bed, my wife called the police to notify them of the "ding dong ditch" (a name I'm quite sure I'd never heard before then), and left the closet light on all night. I didn't get a very good night's sleep.

Tuesday the Fourth found us getting up and ready to go to the Pet Parade. After the Parade (we hung out there with Shannon and Brian), we wandered the park checking out the booths and food they have every year (festival-style), and then checked out the library's book sale. (Scored a stack of books for only $4!) In the afternoon we were back out to my parents' place for dinner and fireworks, and then when we got back home we did a few more fireworks when it got dark, and then watched the (in)famous Pilot Butte fireworks show. We have a pretty good view of that from our lawn.

And that, in a not-so-small nutshell, was our holiday weekend. Sometime I'd just like to relax for a day or two, you know?

I've been exploring YouTube a bit more lately and just thought I'd point to some of the videos I've found that amuse me...

• Crazy Cat Pinky - the cat in this video wigs out and I actually laughed out loud.
• This Place Sucks - Superfriends - the classic Superfriends/Office Space mashup.
• Deadwood Swearing - nothing but two and a half minutes of swearing edited together... even if you know Deadwood, this might be kind of surprising...
• Ryan vs Dorkman - A really well-done lightsaber duel between two goofy looking guys... really good amateur choreography and great lightsaber effects.

No, I haven't posted much on any of my sites this week. My aunt died on Monday, and I just haven't felt like writing much. There's really not any more to say; the funeral is on Saturday. In the meantime, I hope everyone's having a good week, what with the first day of summer and the hot weather and all.

Okay, tell me this guy doesn't look totally cool:

Photo thanks to Simone at Emerald Bay Photography

This guy was with the fire dancer troup that performed Saturday night at the Bite of Bend. We decided he looked like Willy Wonka, though now I'm also thinking the Mad Hatter. Watching him, I also think he had a Johnny Depp thing going on. Anyway, I begged and pleaded with Simone for a picture of him so I could post it... how could I not? That guy rocks. Seriously.

Top hats are cool.

When I started writing this post, the video in question actually existed... but now the link they had goes to the Visitor and Convention Bureau site... hmmmmmm.

The title of this post might as well be "How not to do viral marketing." It concerns a new animated ad campaign, detailed in excruciating detail in this Bulletin article, launched by the Bend Visitor & Convention Bureau... I'm actually at a loss for words.

Okay, I'm not really. Nor will I mince words: at best, this video makes me embarrassed for Bend.

My wife sent me the link in the morning, without explanation. First of all, it took forever to load, which is not a good sign. Finally, it started, and I was immediately sorry it did; my first impulse was to turn it off. When I first glimpsed something that sort of resembled Pilot Butte in the background, I thought, Is this supposed to be about Bend? It couldn't be, it doesn't even make any sense. But lo and behold, it turned out to be about Bend after all.

My next thought was that somebody had gone out of their way—poorly, I might add—to make fun of Bend. It's certainly not something that would ever entice me to visit.

Finally I saw the Bulletin article, and things started to make a perverse sense. Here's a clip:

The Bend Visitor & Convention Bureau has launched an edgy, animated online marketing campaign featuring a video the bureau hopes is so entertaining that viewers will e-mail it to friends, family and colleagues.

The video is sort of like Bend meets The Simpsons.

Locals will recognize scenes in the lighthearted production and presumably chuckle at the characters and lyrics.
...
"The video is funny and entertaining," Glover said. "But, there's also a message that shows what we have here - the river, rafting, skiing, etc. We hope that people will be entertained, then watch it again or pass it along via e-mail."

Ultimately, the video's goal is to interest more people in visiting Bend.

According to Glover, the video is the first of its kind to market a destination such as Bend through an emerging form of advertising known as viral marketing.
...
Glover already considers the campaign a winner, thanks to a marketing coup that will allow friendster.com, a video downloading site popular among iPod owners, to send links to the video with endorsements to more than 1.25 million of its subscribers.

"Just through that, the campaign is a success," Glover said.

Are you kidding me?

There's nothing "edgy" or Simpsons-like anywhere in that video. In fact, it's some seriously shoddy art and animation work happening there. (I know—well, I hope—the people behind it can do better.) And being a local, trust me when I say there's no chuckling going on, and the "recognizable" scenes are barely even that.

Here's a hint about viral marketing: it tends to work best when it's not directed. Don't hold it out there and proclaim it a success; either it'll happen on its own or it won't. You have no real control over the matter.

And they think hooking up with Friendster is a marketing coup? Really? Friendster is on the wane in a big way. They would have been far better off leveraging MySpace (with 86 million users) and YouTube. Then you'd see some real numbers.

Oh and by the way, pick a better domain name next time... "where-the-hell-are-we.com" just lacks that, how would you say, convenience and ease of use in passing around a link.

I will concede that this video is viral in an avian flu sense—it's spreading around the local blogosphere and everybody I've shown it to hates it. But that's not the kind of viral you'd hope for.

Postscript: And it's gone... I wonder if that was intentional, or there was too much backlash?

Post-postscript: Yes, you'll notice I didn't actually link to the video directly... I debated it. But since it appears to be gone anyway, oh well.

Go and check out today's Pearls Before Swine comic strip. It's the good stuff.

Deadwood is back (as of last Sunday)! I loves me my Deadwood!

I just had to point that out. That, and say, it's about time somebody beat Farnum to a bloody pulp...

I saw the third X-Men movie on Saturday, and while I don't think it's as good as the previous two movies, I rather liked it. It won't classify as a great movie, but it was certainly enjoyable.

So what follows is my review... although it's less of a "review" than just a general geeking-out about things. And there are definitely Spoilers ahead so be warned.

More...

So can you hear this ringtone? It's supposed to be too high-pitched in frequency for the ears of people over 30 to hear... but I can hear it. It's via Shannon, who seems to be alternating between thinking she's too old to hear it, or she's just been exposed to too much loud music over the years.

...she also wants me to use this quote for her quote of the week: "next thing ya know, i'll be wearing depends and drooling." I don't know, that seems too easy to me. We'll see.

This post is really to supplement my Water in the Desert post from yesterday; I wanted to include some pictures of the cistern we used to play on, because that was one of my favorite parts from that post. So while we were out at my parents' place today, I snapped a few pictures.

Here's a view of the thing. The concrete's a little worse for the wear after 20+ years, but you can see it's shaped like a box, and has those weird steel blade-looking things sticking out of it. Like rebar, only sharper. And sideways. Plus, you can get a sense of its height; I was standing on an elevated spot, and the top was still over my head a bit, and I'm six feet tall.

Holding the camera over my head and shooting blindly... here's the top of the cistern. Nice and flat. The pumphouse is adjoining; from the cistern you could wander around on top the pumphouse. That wasn't as much fun though.

Nice view along the side, closeup on the blade thingy. Yes, we would climb on those. They're what, maybe an eighth of an inch thick.

This is part of an ongoing series of articles that I'm writing on Central Oregon and growing up here; you can view the introduction here.

Growing up on the desert, water takes on a special, almost symbolic, significance. You are constantly surrounded by sand, sagebrush, juniper trees, dry vegetation like bunchgrass and cheat grass, all of it broken up by undulating mounds or ridges of dark lava rock... and not a drop of water in sight.

...I was going to write some pithy metaphor about how the mind grows to reflect the desert environment around it and consequently understands water to be as precious as it is to the ecosystem, but you know what? I'm not that high-fallutin'.

More...

Just thought I'd post a quick note on my quick-and-easy (and preferred) method for cooking salmon. Salmon is probably my favorite fish, and nothing beats it when it's fresh... anyway, here's how I've been fixing it lately:

• Turn the broiler on high. Move the oven rack up accordingly.
• Line your broiler pan (or similar) with a sheet of aluminum foil. Turn the edges up to minimize the mess.
• Spritz the foil with non-stick cooking spray. It makes things infinitely easier.
• Prepare the salmon: I season it with seasoning salt, lemon pepper (if I have it), and dill. Simple.
• Place it on the foil, and drizzle with olive oil.
• Put it in the oven, cook for 4-5 minutes (depending on the thickness of the cut). Flip it, and cook for another 4-5 minutes.
• Remove it to your plate, and eat.

Simple, quick, and easy. And so good.

The sixth day of the sixth month of...

Yeah, are we really doing this?

I got nothin'.

I'd seen this before, floating around the net, and should've linked to it then; but now is as good a time as any: People over 30 should be dead.

As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags.

Riding in the back of a pickup truck on a warm day was always a special treat.

We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle. Horrors!

We ate cupcakes, bread and butter, and drank soda pop with sugar in it, but we were never overweight because we were always outside playing. We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle, and no one actually died from this.

You have to go read it all. Love it! :)

Jeez, come back from vacation to find Shannon's latest post:

"some gal on myspace.com contacted me. offered me a free silver bullet. how could i refuse?"

You'll have to go read the entire post for context...

I just hope Shannon doesn't think the silver bullet refers to Coors Light...

Our big Memorial Day weekend was spent over on the Oregon coast, chillin' out in Lincoln City.

...I of course mean "chillin' out" quite literally; it was chilly and windy and rainy on Saturday and Sunday, and finally started getting nice on Monday, when we were leaving. It was in the 50s and maybe low 60s, so by Central Oregon standards, just like spring!

It was nice. It'd been ages since I'd been to the coast, so the chance to get on the beach and touch the ocean and taste the salty air far outweighed any minor weather concerns. We stayed at the 'D' Sands motel right on the beach, just below the D River (the shortest river in the world). It turned out to be a pretty good place to stay since we had a fantastic view, easy beach access and a full kitchen room (condominium style). That worked out well since we had the kids and didn't have to rush to meals anywhere if we didn't want to.

The trip was split between relaxing, shopping, gambling, and drinking. I know, the perfect trip, right? The drinking largely consisted of driving up to Pacific City and visiting the Pelican Pub and Brewery (right on the beach), and having a bottle of wine later while the kids watched TV, and a few odds and ends here and there. Gambling was two hours spent at the Chinook Winds casino (not my cup of tea). Shopping was, well, shopping... Lincoln City improbably has a large and busy complex of factory outlets, and then there's all the tchotske and souvenir shops that you invariably find on the coast.

The relaxing was the money, though. The kids and I flew a kite. We walked on the beach and played in the sand and threw rocks at the ocean. We swam in the swimming pool (a bit chilly there, too). We lazed around the room. I even got up early in the morning and walked barefoot on the beach, collecting a few rocks and shells here and there and splashing in the sea a bit. Yes, nippy! But totally worth it.

Unfortunately, those coast trips never seem long enough. We left Monday bound for Portland, as we had an early Tuesday morning eye doctor appointment for the kids there. Perhaps we'll have to see about a summer trip, when the weather is much nicer... the ocean's still damn cold even then, but that's never stopped us from jumping in anyway.

Just a quick note to let everyone know that I'll be offline for the Memorial Day weekend—through Tuesday, actually. Hopefully everyone has a safe and fun holiday weekend!

There was a site I found the other day (and have subsequently forgotten what it was) that prompted you to enter your birthdate, and it would present you with various facts about your age. You know, what year in the Chinese calendar it was when you were born, what your astrological sign is, etc. etc. One thing resonated with me, though, and it was in the alternative time measurements of age (number of days old, and months, and weeks, like that): the number of seconds old.

Obviously it's an estimate, but the realization that I am more than one billion seconds old kind of brought me up short. On my 33rd birthday five months ago I was (approximately) 1,040,688,000 seconds old.

Put another way, I suppose I could say I'm 1.04 gigaseconds old...

Haven't seen a book on Lost in awhile, but they managed to slip one into the season finale tonight: Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens. Not that it was hard to spot; Desmond only waved it around enough in a bunch of critical scenes.

As far as the season finale itself goes... I'm still trying to decide what I think about it. I think it started out strong enough. But I'm trying to decide if the last 15 or 20 minutes were weak. Definitely ambiguous, and a general "huh?" factor. And, I'm thinking, weak. I'll have to let it sink in some more.

Yeah, I know I'm a little late to the party blogging this, but I thought this was pretty good footage of the Trojan nuclear power plant being destroyed: Trojan implosion on YouTube.

There's not much more to be said on Trojan (check out some of the latest news); I never knew much about the plant, but I remember always being impressed, even when little, seeing the looming tower rise out of the forest on the horizon. There's something jaw-dropping, fleeting, and a little creepy seeing such an icon emerging from the landscape all of a sudden.

Trojan power plant, on Flickr

I had to wait a bit, but Shannon's got another quote of the week: "i think i need some higher goals in life like buying a house or putting money away for retirement but for now, i just want to be a dancing bunny."

I've been liking the remixed movie trailers I've been seeing lately, but this one made me laugh tonight: 10 Things I Hate About Commandments. Someone's remixed the Charlton Heston movie as a teen comedy... I especially like the surprise addition to the cast at the end. :)

Via Boing Boing.

This is sort of like those "How I spent my summer" essays—did anyone ever really have to write those? Anyway...

The main purpose of our day trip to Eugene was to visit one or several of the children's stores they have over there that specializes in kid beds; our four-year-old is soon to turn five and it's time to move him from the toddler bed to a regular bed. We'd looked around here in Bend but there's just not a great selection.

It was a beautiful day to cruise over the Santiam, and aside from some controlled burn haziness, ran into no problems at all. It's been years since I've actually been to Eugene, so it was a nice drive. And only about two-and-a-half hours, easier than the trip to Portland, even.

Our travels brought us first to the Valley River Center, to check out a store that, as luck would have it, was having a 20% off clearance sale. We looked at a few things, made some mental notes, and headed for downtown to check out the other store and get some lunch.

A quick note about navigation in Eugene: it's almost criminally easy. (Granted, we only went to a few places.) I always expect more complication, but the few times I've been there I've never really had any problem figuring out where to go. Today, for instance, I think we found every place we needed despite ourselves.

Downtown Eugene led us to the other children's store and then the Steelhead Brewery for lunch (I wrote a review of that on The Brew Site). We still hadn't decided about a bed, so after lunch back across the street we walked (nice, eh? The store and the brewery were next door to each other) to take another look at the styles we liked, and then it was back to the Valley River Center and the first store again.

That was the store that won out; we bought the bed we liked, but it was the floor model and they needed an hour to disassemble it for us, so off we went back downtown again.

This time, we were looking for a store named Down to Earth, which sells "natural products for the home and garden." My mom had ordered a couple of plants from them and asked if we could pick them up for her; no problem. Good grief, but this is a big store; it's basically a warehouse that spans the length of a city block and packs in an amazing variety of things. We were able to find my mom's plants (they had to search) and while we were wandering around the nursery, an employee asked the kids if they'd like to plant some free flowers for Mother's Day.

Turns out, they had planned and promoted this "Free Flower Day" thing for kids, but not that many showed up. It was a very cool idea though; we left with three extra pots of flowers, all free. And I was even tempted by a "hardy banana" plant, with the bold claim of being able to withstand temperatures as cold as -20°F. It was close, but I resisted. Aside from the exotic idea of having a banana plant growing in the backyard, it's not like we don't already have plants that can withstand that kind of cold: they're called "trees."

Back to the store to pick up the bed components, and some creative minivan-loading later, we were ready to head out of town. Almost, anyway; we had to make the obligatory trip to Trader Joe's.

Come on, you know the routine: Trader Joe's simply rocks, and whenever a Central Oregonian travels to a city with one, they have to stop and stock up on Three Buck Chuck, or shepherd's bread, or ten-pound bars of authentic Swiss dark chocolate, or whatever. Often, there's even a list of things to pick up for other people. It's okay. We've all been there. :)

Anyway, one quick TJ's stop later and we were on our way. We made good time coming back, just as in the morning, and pulled into the driveway at about 6:30. Sure, it made for a long day, but not as long as a Portland trip, for instance.

Hey, that makes me think of a great tag line for Eugene: "We're closer than Portland. And criminally easy to navigate."

Tomorrow we're off to Eugene for a day trip. We doing some kids bed shopping, and will likely stop at the Steelhead Brewing Company (fodder for The Brew Site) for lunch and beer. Likely it'll be a decent trip. It's supposed to be 71 in Eugene tomorrow, so that's good.

I had hinted a while back about a new project I was starting, and I think it's time to launch and announce it. It's a new blog called Hack Bend, and it's purpose is to be an insider's guide to Bend and Central Oregon. (In fact, the tagline I have on it right now is "Getting the most out of Bend and Central Oregon." Original, no?)

There's always a bit of trepidation in announcing something like this, but I'm excited about it. I've got a bunch of ideas and things to write about already, but as I wrote on the About page, "obviously, I can't claim to have all the answers or know everything there is to know about the area." One of the things I'm considering is opening it up to multiple authors, making it a group blog—but that would be down the road sometime. In the meantime, anyone who has any hints, advice, stories, or hacks about the area, please let me know! I'd like to make this a definitive website about Bend, and the more contributions I get, the more likely that'll happen.

So pop on over and check things out, subscribe to the RSS feed, and become a regular contributor. And let me know what you think!

Bill Gates' house: Found this on Wikipedia's Unusual articles page. Pretty amazing stuff; some things that jumped out at me:

• Assessed values (as of 2002) of $113 million, with over $1 million in annual property tax
• 66,000 square feet
• The wood columns from main floor to roof in entry area are over 70 feet tall.
• Some of the interior passage doors weigh over 800 lbs, but are balanced for easy use.
• The roofing is stainless steel.
• Hidden cameras are everywhere, including the interior stone walls.
• Gates insisted on saving a 40 year old maple adjacent to the driveway. The tree is monitored electronically 24 hours per day via computer. If it seems dry, it gets just the right amount of water automatically delivered.
• All woodwork is flawless. Much of the woodwork is of various rare types from all over the world - imported especially for this house.
• The theater (underground in a concrete shell) is the most state of the art theatre in the world according to specialty contractor.

Picture? Of course!

Photo from Flickr

More photos can be found on this Flickr group.

I'm not sure I can even get my mind around a place like this. Some of the photos look like a Disneyland attraction.

This is a series I've been mulling over for a while now and even at one point promised Simone I would write. I've been wanting to write it partly because I think the perspective of growing up in rural Central Oregon is unique, and partly because I think there's some good stories to tell. So bear with me.

First off: an introduction. The background. I'm laying the groundwork and setting the stage...

More...

I'm pretty sure I had something cool I wanted to blog about today, but for the life of me I can't remember what it was. I'm having a Moment.

In the meantime, enjoy Shannon's latest quote of the week: "i wish i knew how to roller blade and could beat up people because i'd totally want to be a roller girl." T-shirt fodder! Yes, I laughed.

I'm also working on a big blog entry that should be up in a day or two. It's a beginning of something bigger that I've been lazy to start. Be warned!

Since it's 24 night, I thought I'd share this quote I thought was hilarious (emphasis mine):

As an actor, you want to be loved or liked, and when the guy you're playing suddenly turns evil, you feel marginalized. It sounds silly to verbalize, but you start thinking, 'What happens if Jack Bauer, America's avenging angel, doesn't like me anymore?'

Man, that just about sums up the entire show.

The title refers to the board game, not a business monopoly. Sorry to anyone coming here looking for juicy Bend business gossip. :)

According to CNNMoney, Monopoly is updating its look with modern places and landmarks and further, letting users vote on their board placement. That's pretty cool, and it brings to mind the panoply of custom Monopoly games that are floating around out there on just about every conceivable topic.

Which led me to wonder: Is there a custom Bend, Oregon Monopoly game anywhere? I tentatively want to say that I might remember seeing one at one time—perhaps in one of the shops downtown—but I'm pretty doubtful. A cursory web search revealed nothing.

So maybe I'll make one. It'd certainly be easy enough to print out new board spaces and glue them onto an old game; anyone have any suggestions as to what they'd like to see on Bend Monopoly?

(And then, of course, we'll have to play at the next blogger meetup.)

When I said "the first part of my day" in my earlier post today, I really had no idea that actually meant "the entire day." Somehow I always undershoot these estimates with the misplaced optimism... like also thinking I'd only need one load of compost...

In order to topdress the lawn with compost, I had to borrow my dad's truck so I could haul it in bulk (ever tried to cover several thousand square feet of lawn with only bags of fertilizer? Me neither, and I wasn't about to try). My mom had suggested steer manure compost, and most places in town that offer it (always in a mix with "yard debris") were outrageously expensive, so we settled on getting it from Hershey Cattle Company over in Redmond for only $15 per yard. This is actually a 40/60 mix of manure with topsoil or something, but it was still half as costly as the next place.

The catch, of course, to borrowing Dad's truck was that I had to drive out to his place (in Alfalfa) and help him load a couch into the back of the truck, which he'd promised to a co-worker. So out I went at 8:30 in the morning. We loaded up the couch, tied it up, and I followed him back into town.

I helped him deliver the couch, to an apartment complex behind COCC, which of course was on the second floor, up a narrow, cracked concrete staircase. Once that was done, we were back to my place, where Dad took my car back home and left me with the truck. By now it was about 10:30.

Let me digress for a bit about Earth Day, since I did mention it in the title to this post. Today being both the anniversary of this blog and Earth Day, it was of course the perfect day to do Earth-friendly yardwork with (ahem) organic eco-friendly fertilizer. My wife transplanted flowers. I worked out in the sun all day. So it doesn't get any more "Earth Day" than that, despite the goofy guy in a "Cat in the Hat" hat on Z21 yapping about how cool it was that there was some parade downtown to celebrate... how cool the Earth is, or something (hey, his words, not mine). Okay, digression over.

I left around 10:50 or so for Redmond. (I actually had to turn back after two blocks because I forgot my tarp. You didn't think I was going to drive all the way back from Redmond with a truckload of manure and not have it tarped, did you?) Let me just say this about my dad's truck: I know it's been awhile since I had my S-10, but holy crap the clutch on his truck is way looser than mine was and that truck's seen some miles (and it was only a year older than mine). I was about halfway to Redmond before I got used to driving it.

Got to the Hershey place, paid for a yard (which pretty much fills up an S-10 truckbed), and panicked a bit when the guy dumped the load of manure into the truck with the backhoe and I thought for a moment the shocks were going to go. All of a sudden I was driving a rear-wheel low-rider—really low. I wasn't looking forward to the drive home (on busy Highway 97 nearly the whole way). So I tarped up the load, tied it, and was pulling out when I realized another nasty little surprise had crept up on me.

You ever drive a pickup truck when it's fully loaded in back? And by "fully loaded" I mean overloaded? Yeah, besides the obvious (it takes a lot longer to speed up and slow down), the entire front end seems to float around, like you're suddenly piloting a wobbly boat. I hadn't really remembered that little phenomenon since living at home and hauling over-burdened loads of hay. I was less than thrilled.

The drive home was uneventful, though (if a little tense). By the time I got back it was nearly 11:30.

Now, this compost was really good, really soil-like in composition. It still stank like steer manure, but it might as well be topsoil in appearance. I figured it would be easy to spread, because we have this little Turf Builder® spreader with adjustable spray opening, and I could just walk around the yard, pushing the spreader and blithely spraying manure all over the place. So I load it up, and the thing won't work worth a damn. It's just too small for what we're dealing with.

So that meant back to the tried-and-true method for cursing gardeners everywhere: wheelbarrow and shovel, and spreading it by hand.

And of course today was a windy day. Not just breezy, but big wind gusts that would come in and handily blow steer manure dust from the shovel all over the place—in your shoes, on your clothes, in your face and eyes. Very lovely. I think I can still sense the stuff in my nasal cavity. But I got a rhythm going finally, and went back for a second load at about 2:30.

Same routine as before, only I think this load was heavier: piloting a jerky boat down the gusty highway. This load went quicker, thanks to my wife helping, and we even had a couple of wheelbarrow loads left over (now in a pile out by the shed). By the time I'd showered and was sitting down to relax, it was 5:20! Where'd the day go? Oh yeah, I got a bunch of shit done... (rim shot).

Now I don't want to get off on a rant here, but I'm really getting tired of owning a lawn. I think I'm beginning to hate it, actually. The stupid thing is full of dry and dead patches, there's not enough topsoil underneath the front half (thus necessitating the topdressing), watering is a joke during the summer months (we're on the edge of the High Desert, remember?), and general maintenance of what amounts to a crop of an invasive plant species is wearing very, very thin with me.

And what are lawns good for, anyway? Let's see, sitting on (watch out for bugs)... avoiding dog poo... playing croquet on (if you're British)... lawn darts (try not to kill the opponent)... hmmm. Jeez, when I was growing up, we had very little lawn, and we kids always ran off to play in the dirt and rocks and trees anyway. Go figure.

(Okay, not entirely true; the lawn made a good wrestling ring when we were trying out WWF wrestling moves. But they say kids shouldn't do that nowadays, so...)

Me, I'd be perfectly happy with a little more natural Central Oregon wilderness. But that's just my opinion; I could be wrong.

The rest of my day involved drinking some beer and reading my favorite new book. Now that's the right way to end a day.

And oh yeah, I even sunburned my neck a bit. Now I'm just a red neck hauling manure around in an old truck.

Go figure.

Yes, it was exactly four years ago today that I started this blog. I don't have much to say right now, I just wanted to mark the occasion.

Though I should probably do something special for it. The first part of my day will be hauling manure around, topdressing the yard, so I guess I'll have to come up with something better for later. ;)

I've seen this name show up a few times now in my email spam filter: Natalie Gadzooks. Perhaps it's not the best spam name ever, but every time I see it, it makes me laugh.

I've just gotta give Shannon props for writing up the quote of the year: "i thought it was cool in a blog stalker sort of way." Love it! I am totally going to steal it. :)

Okay, maybe not for the entire year... but I'll give it to her for April, at least.

One of the Flickr feeds I'm subscribed to is photos tagged with "Spokane," since we lived up there for a few years a decade ago.

One of the photos that showed up tonight is here: a tavern I used to drink at named Snoops. Yeah, it was kind of a dive, but what are you gonna do? I was in my twenties. :)

Oh, this is such a twisted, twisted thing to laugh at, and yet I couldn't stop laughing: The Easter Bunny Hates You (video).

I wouldn't let the kids watch this one, lest they be scarred for life...

Thanks, Shannon!

Okay, the headline is a bit sarcastic. But since the date for the closing of the Newport Avenue Bridge has been a moving target up until now, it's hard to take it seriously when they finally commit to it. But there's this item on KTVZ naming tomorrow (Saturday) the day, and I also heard the same thing on the radio this morning.

The first date I'd heard for the closing was April 1st. Then, a few days before the first, word was the date got pushed back to the 7th. Next it was the 10th. However, the orange construction sign at the bridge downtown still says April 7th. (I noticed this as I crossed the bridge yesterday, on the 13th.) And in the meantime there's been a big pile driver sitting there, ready to get started on wanton deconstruction.

So, if the bridge is actually closed tomorrow, everybody has to remember to use the Portland Avenue or Galveston Avenue bridges to get to the west side. What a pain.

Oh, and does anyone really believe the bridge will only be closed for seven months? Knowing how road projects tend to work around here, I'm betting it'll run long... Maybe we should start a pool.

If you're familiar with web programming and AJAX and PHP, check out this item about Client-side PHP on The Daily WTF. Go ahead, take a look. I'll wait.

Done? Good. Now, if you're familiar with what's happening in that code, I'll wait while you convulse in horror. :)

Holy expletive, that code makes me angry and want to laugh at the same time. I'll just reiterate Deane's headline: Someone please fire the person who wrote that.

Yes, April has been a slow month on this site so far. I'm working on rectifying that. But it also occured to me that I hadn't blogged about the High Desert Sun lately or even pointed to my articles that were published in it (and are online). So, they are here and here, and the third one should be up soon (I just picked up the April edition of the paper at the library). Enjoy!

This is pretty cool: Dummies Book Cover Generator (via eMusings). Now you can generate a fake "For Dummies" book for any occasion (which would have been handy when I originally created this and this). Imagine the mayhem...

At the very least, I can now mockup my For Tards ideas:

Just wanted to blog a short note about the Bond Street Barber Shop in Downtown Bend. I went there for a haircut for the first time Tuesday after work, it's a nice place. The big draw, though, is the complimentary beer and wine you get while you're waiting!

Yep, you read that right. They stock Cascade Lakes beer (and a few macros), but I didn't see what variety of wine; I thought maybe there was a bottle of Yellow Tail red something, but I couldn't be sure. And on Saturdays, they also have Bloody Marys.

As far as haircut experiences go, they were good. A bit of a wait, actually (I was waiting for almost a half hour, then another half hour to cut my hair), but they're old school—straight razors for the fine hairs and everything. I was happy with what I walked out with.

So it'll likely be my regular barbershop from now on; anytime you can combine scissors, straight razors and beer, you know you're in for a good time!

You may have noticed the new banner in the sidebar, for Obsidian Stock. What's Obsidian Stock? It's Simone's newish stock photography venture, and she's putting out a call for Central Oregon photographers.

Simone does good work, and I think she's going to do really well with this venture. So click over and check things out.

Plus, now she owes me a beer. :)

By now most of the world has passed the once-in-a-century date and time sequence of "01:02:03 04/05/06". And you thought Daylight Savings Time was big news!

Yeah, right.

I think the anchor on NBC Nightly News tonight summed it up best: Perhaps it's more notable that someone thought that up in the first place...

I can't help but notice that this cartoon by Hugh MacLeod seems to be lifting from my "For Tards" book idea I blogged about back in 2004... :)

So. April 1st. Any April Fool's Day stories to pass on? I have one. My wife calls this morning as they're supposed to be leaving San Diego, and says they're not leaving because my daughter has a 103 degree fever. I freak out a little bit.

April Fool's!

That's all I got, actually. I forgot it was the first of April.

In non-practical joke news, I helped Shannon and Brian move into their new apartment in downtown Bend. Well, I and five other people helped. Not a bad move at all, though; they already had everything packed up and ready to go, and they don't own too many big pieces of furniture. And, really, they don't own that much stuff—at least compared to the amount of crap I and my family have been hauling around for years now. So we were mostly done by one o'clock. And got pizza and beer out of the deal.

Their new place is pretty sweet. Overlooking downtown, mere blocks away from, well, everything, with a view of Pilot Butte from the balcony—yeah, we're gonna be hanging out there a lot this summer, I think. Several of us have already discussed getting our own keys and setting up a mini-fridge full of beer on the balcony. :).

After work today I swung by Newport Market over on the westside for their Thirsty Thursday beer tasting. I just found out about these Thirsty Thursdays recently; they're every, er, Thursday from 3:30 until 6:00. Free beer! Can't go wrong with that.

Today it was a rep from Deschutes Brewery doing tasting of their two newest: Inversion IPA and Buzzsaw Brown. Both good, but the IPA was really good. So I picked up a six-pack of it, and then, to my amazement, found a bottle of Deschutes' Mirror Mirror, which I'd heard about but hadn't seen anywhere. I'm excited! But it's a big barleywine, so I'm saving it for the weekend. Or Friday night.

So remember—Thursdays at Newport Market.

Beep! Yesterday afternoon one of the smoke alarms started the intermittant beeping that indicates when the battery is getting low. These are smoke alarms that are actually wired directly into the electrical system of the house, but have nine-volt batteries in them for backup (in case the power goes out). No biggie, I knew we had newer batteries.

Beep! Well, a bigger task then I thought; I couldn't figure out at first which smoke alarm was beeping. We have a total of seven in the house, one down at the bottom of the stairs and six others upstairs. And due to the acoustics in our house, I was moving from one alarm to another waiting for the telltale beep, but everytime I'd get close to one the Beep! would chirp out, seemingly from behind me.

Beep! I finally traced it to the smoke alarm in my bedroom. Popped out the battery, replaced it with a fresh one. All good, the beeping stopped. Case closed. Had dinner, went to bed.

Beep! Wha—? Huh? I roll over in bed, echoes from whatever dream I'd been having shredding away in the onset of consciousness. Peer at the clock; 4:40. In the morning.

The hell—?

Beep! Oh, shit. Another smoke alarm is warning me its battery is too low. I do not want to get out of bed for this—

Beep! Beep! Uhhhh... If I'm not mistaken, that was two different beeps. Son of a bitch.

Beep! So for the next 30 or 40 minutes I'm stumbling around the house, tring to catch a smoke alarm in the act, failing miserably, swapping out fresh batteries only to find I don't quite have enough because I just know that all the damn batteries have chosen 5:00 in the morning to sputter out, and all the while Beep! Beep! and I can't figure out which ones are chirping.

Beep! Screw this, I get vicious and pull the batteries out of all the smoke alarms. They're wired anyway, and I'll just buy brand new batteries tomorrow to make sure I'm covered.

...Did it work? Did the beeps stop? Looks like I was—

Beep! No. No no no nonononononononononononono.

It dawns on me that we have a carbon monoxide detector plugged in to the wall in the hallway. It's supposed to beep when it detects high levels of CO gas... and I think there's a battery in it too.

Check it... sure enough, the damn thing says "Err" on it's tiny beeping fu—ahem, LCD screen. Okay, pull the detector, pull the battery, and...

Silence.

Ever notice how peaceful it is at 5:45 in the morning?

All this week (since Saturday, actually) it's just me and my son at home. My wife and daughter took advantage of spring break to head down to San Diego to visit my brother and sister-in-law. Sadly, spring break doesn't cover work or preschool/daycare, so we were left behind.

It's all good. We're having a good time so far, despite the logistics of being a single parent for a week. No big plans, otherwise, though.

Okay, just a little while ago I saw the creepiest, randomest commercial for Skittles ever... I won't even pretend to try to understand it...

Anyone else seen it? Basically, a guy with a weird, long (like, three-feet-plus long) beard is at a job interview, and the beard is moving like an elephant's trunk, feeding the guy skittles from the desk. The woman conducting the interview is trying to turn him down, and—

Yeah, freakshow—

—and the beard feeds the woman a Skittle and strokes the side of her face, while he just chuckles in a creepy way.

And that's it.

I can pretty much guarantee I'll never buy another pack of Skittles again.

...You didn't think I wouldn't give you a link, did you? Here's the video on YouTube.

I admit, when I first saw this skull, I would not have guessed what animal it ultimately came from. I mean, that is some crazy wicked toothwork...

So, who can identify it without cheating?

It's like my regular Lost Book Watch feature or something. Anyway, right there on the screen in your face, Judy Blume's Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. I don't know that it has anything to do with the overall theme or plot of the show; since Sawyer was reading it, I rather suspect the producers are just having fun with us.

"Us" being those people like myself who have nothing better to do than blog about the books that show up on Lost...

Heads-up, Bendites: The Paperback Exchange, which is one of the oldest used bookstores in Bend (if not the oldest), is closing! Right now they're having a huge 75% off sale on everything. I stopped over there after lunch and bought four books (for only $4.50, which would have been regularly priced at $18) and talked with the owner a bit.

They have to be out by April 30th, but will probably close a week or so before that to empty out the store. So, you've got about a month left to get there and get some great deals.

It's located at 184 NE Greenwood, on the corner of 2nd and Greenwood. Hours are Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Over browsing at JCPenney this evening, and I saw that they had "Vote for Pedro" t-shirts for only $9.99. Some other good ones, too.

Just a heads-up to y'all. :)

If you enjoyed the Chuck Norris Facts site, and like the TV show 24, well then, this is the perfect mashup for you: Random Jack Bauer Facts. Same exact premise (some are even lifted from the Chuck Norris Facts!), and some are really funny:

The city of Los Angeles once named a street after Jack Bauer in gratitude for his saving the city several times. They had to rename it after people kept dying when they tried to cross the street. No one crosses Jack Bauer and lives.

If Jack Bauer was in a room with Hitler, Stalin, and Nina Meyers, and he had a gun with 2 bullets, he'd shoot Nina twice.

Jack Bauer's calender goes from March 31st to April 2nd, no one fools Jack Bauer.

Jack Bauer once forgot where he put his keys. He then spent the next half-hour torturing himself until he gave up the location of the keys.

Funny mashup goodness! Now, I need to set about creating a similar ripoff mashup site with some other larger-than-life character...

For the mathematically-inclined, today is Pi Day. Because today is 3-14. Get it? Even better, the celebration begins at 1:59 p.m.

Curiously enough, today is also Albert Einstein's birthday. Odd coincidence, considering.

My mom mentioned this yesterday, though I didn't see it online and I'm too lazy to do a deep search: there is now apparently one realtor for every 200 people in Bend, according to The Bulletin. Wow.

I figure this should be good fodder for the newish Bend, Oregon Housing Bubble blog.

There was a magnitude 4.5 earthquake off of Oregon's coast this morning. Interesting. Not a huge one—not enough to strike up a tsunami—but a good reminder that a big one could hit at any time.

I never did get any comments on my poll the other day...

Is this thing on? :)

It was a whirlwind tour of Portland, but we managed to make the most of it. We did some quick shopping in Gresham on the way in, stopped to visit with our friends for a bit (had to take over some of my pumpkin ale for a missed birthday), and then went out to lunch at the Horse Brass.

The Horse Brass rules. Seriously. It's an English pub, with a ton of beers on tap, real darts, English food, the works. We had a tasty lunch (never had a Scotch egg before—it was good), tasty beer, and when we were finished, we stopped in to Belmont Station and picked up some harder-to-find beers.

Afterwards, I was able to go to Powells for a little bit ("a little bit" is relative, because my ideal visit to Powells would quite easily be half a day), but didn't find anything I wanted to spend that much money on.

We checked in to the hotel, relaxed for a few minutes, met with our friends who were also going to the concert, and then went to BJ's Brewhouse for dinner. It was good, although slow, and the service was ditzy at best. I have to say, though, they're seven taster deal is amazing: seven five-ounce(!) tasters of beer for only $7.25.

And, finally, the concert. We walked to the Rose Garden, entered without fanfare, found our seats. A local Portland band was playing the opening gig (they won a contest), I didn't catch their name but I wasn't paying close attention anyway. We had to move around seats a bit because when the tickets were purchased, the available seats remaining were single seats two rows apart (of course!), and after playing musical chairs trying to figure out the best place to see (and—damn it—missing a good portion of one of the classical Bon Jovi songs that everyone is actually there to see), the usher got permission to seat my wife and me in the announcer box seats at the top of the section—otherwise roped off to everyone else. That was pretty cool, because the view was much better and we weren't surrounded by screaming fans.

As far as the concert itself, it was decent. Two songs they performed that they didn't do last time were "Runaway" (eh) and "Blaze of Glory" (cool!). And, Jon had a lot more audience interaction—the first song was from amidst the crowd in the back rows of the floor seats, and "Blaze of Glory" was amidst the crowd at our level one section over from us. The most amazing part? He wasn't mauled by the crowd. :)

Okay, this is getting long. I'll leave you with this writeup of the concert—with pictures.

On Sunday we'll be heading up to Portland to see Bon Jovi in concert at the Rose Garden. Yes, we've done this before (warning: I sound like a drooling fanboy in that post).

Anyway, we're casting about for something to do Sunday after we get to Portland... we'll be seeing some friends, probably, and of course my wife would love to do some shopping. Myself, I don't really have any real plan; I like going to Powells and I wouldn't mind hitting a brewpub or two, but I'm pretty open.

Would any Portland bloggers want to meet up? I'm not promising anything, but you never know. ;)

For that matter, any bloggers/readers going to see Bon Jovi too?

Since I'm tired of waiting on Simone for a new site design :), I thought I'd start playing around with it myself. It's just high time things got refreshed around here. So, I thought I'd run my early attempts by everyone, and ask a few questions.

The big change is converting the site to a stylesheet-driven design rather than a table-based one. I also want the clutter reduced, and to remove unnecessary features.

You can see a bit of what I'm doing on the project page and the archive page. So far the primary changes you'll see are on the sidebar, I haven't really re-worked the header much yet (but I will).

So, the questions:

• What do you think of the new design elements?
• Should I keep or drop the calendar at the top of the sidebar?
• I'm thinking of changing the header to some sort of revolving photo background. Thoughts?
• Any features I don't have that people would like to see?
• General comments/ideas?

Don't pull any punches, either. I can take it! :)

There's a whole bunch of stuff I'll bet you never knew about Chuck Norris.

Guns don't kill people. Chuck Norris kills people.

There is no theory of evolution. Just a list of animals Chuck Norris allows to live.

Chuck Norris does not sleep. He waits.

Chuck Norris doesn't read books. He stares them down until he gets the information he wants.

Chuck Norris can lead a horse to water AND make it drink.

If you ask Chuck Norris what time it is, he always says, "Two seconds 'til." After you ask, "Two seconds 'til what?" he roundhouse kicks you in the face.

Chuck Norris can win a game of Connect Four in only three moves.

Chuck Norris originally appeared in the "Street Fighter II" video game, but was removed by Beta Testers because every button caused him to do a roundhouse kick. When asked bout this "glitch," Norris replied, "That's no glitch."

Chuck Norris CAN believe it's not butter.

Some people wear Superman pajamas. Superman wears Chuck Norris pajamas.

Chuck Norris is currently suing MySpace for taking the name of what he calls everything around you.

If at first you don't succeed, you're not Chuck Norris.

Google won't search for Chuck Norris because it knows you don't find Chuck Norris, he finds you.

When Chuck Norris does division, there are no remainders.

Chuck Norris sold his soul to the devil for his rugged good looks and unparalleled martial arts ability. Shortly after the transaction was finalized, Chuck roundhouse-kicked the devil in the face and took his soul back. The devil, who appreciates irony, couldn't stay mad and admitted he should have seen it coming. They now play poker every second Wednesday of the month.

Just had to point it out (even my wife noticed it): this week's book on Lost was The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

It's going on the list...

On the radio today, to commemorate Mardi Gras, they were asking the question, "What fatty (get it?) food can you not get enough of?" and taking calls. I thought I'd play along.

(Granted, I really don't each too much junk food these days. Bear with me.)

• Doritos. Love 'em. The original nacho cheese flavor is the best.
• Cheesecake.
• Peanut butter.
• Biscuits and gravy. Has to be the creamy sausage gravy, though.
• Apple fritters. Really good apple fritters, not the crunchy overcooked ones.

What else?

This idea seems like a natural: a blog spotlighting funny Bend-related T-shirts. All locally designed and offered via CafePress.

I wish I'd thought of it first.

Last night we did something different (and fun): we went out to the Tower Theatre and I participated in The Education Foundation's Trivia Bee. Sadly, our team didn't make the best showing; of the 12 questions we had (there were 12 questions per round, and six rounds, with seven different three-person teams per round), we trailed along in last place for the first half-dozen or so questions, then finally pulled it out in the end... to tie last place with a few of the other teams. :)

It was a lot of fun, though, and we weren't the worst team of the night, so we weren't totally irredeemable. Although I have to say, some of the rounds seemed to have far easier questions than our round... and at least one was harder, so it could've been worse!

Anyone else go last night?

Inspired of late by Boing Boing's pointers to subway maps that have been remixed to used anagrammed names, I thought it would be fun to do the same with Bend. Only, Bend doesn't have a subway (or any mass transit, grrr), so I did the next best thing: remixed the map of downtown.

The only constraints I followed were dropping the directional part of the street names (the NW in NW Franklin) and spelling out the type of roadway ("Avenue" vs. "Ave").

Enjoy! Oh, and the Internet Anagram Server came in amazingly handy for this.

Click to view full map

I just had to point to this: The Top Ten Sci-Fi Films That Never Existed. You gotta love it when he opens the Star Wars section with:

Everyone remembers the exact moment when they realized that their Phanom Menace sandwich was filled with shit. For me, it was the scene on Tatooine where Qui-Gon is talking and Jar Jar is snatching fruit from the bowl with his tongue, eating like an insect. Annoyed, Qui-Gon reaches out and snatches his tongue out of the air and holds it in his fist while he talks. That was when I realized I was watching a cartoon.

Good stuff. Via... I actually don't remember where I first saw this. Oh well.

That's the current population of Bend, Oregon. It's up, what, 40% from the year 2000 census population of 52,029. My question is, have that many people moved into the city (18,209 of them) in that time, or have the powers that be mostly been creative with the city limits (which is what got us to the 50,000 milestone in the first place)?

It feels like a Sunday, not like we had a three-day weekend, that's how busy everything's been.

Saturday we were up and out the door by 7:30am on our way to McMinnville. We had a first birthday party to attend: close friends of ours who had asked us to be their son's guardians (should the need arise), so off we went. We made good time over the pass, despite the bitter cold and snow warnings here in Bend—in reality we had sunny blue skies and nearly spotless roads.

Some sidenotes. McMinnville is pretty much right in the heart of Oregon wine country; we saw many signs for wineries on the way there and the way back, including the Eola Hills Winery, though we really didn't have the time to stop at any. McMinnville itself is a town of just over 30,000, about half the size of Bend, and has a cute little historic downtown. Also, the locals refer to it as "Mack."

Anyway, the party was fun, we hung out and visited with our friends that evening, and had lunch with them the next day before heading for home. Over the pass this time we had to nearly stop for an accident at Lost Lake, but we missed this one by about half an hour. Traffic was backed up for three hours at that one.

Those made for some long days. To top that off, my in-laws have been in town, and have been entertained as well. So things have just been busy. And tiring.

Could I have another day off? To catch up? Anyone?

Not only was it about six degrees this morning in Bend, but we woke up to blowing snow and snow drifts in our backyard and cul-de-sac. Fun! You can see the ground in some spots, others are buried in drifts up to six inches deep.

On the radio they claimed it was an Arctic front that has moved in. Stellar.

Okay, in light of all the Dick Cheney hijinks, I saw this on Boing Boing the other day and I finally succumbed. What can I say? This makes me want to laugh out loud every time I see it:

For the record, my favorites are "Telekinesis," "Raining blows down upon you," and "With his bare hands."

Okay, I'm spending too much time on this, but... after reading the comments on my post last night and thinking about it more, here's how I think they should have ended the episode:

Sayid, while interrogating/torturing the Guy Who May or May Not be an Other, finds out something equally ambiguous and creepy from him—something that makes Sayid pause, sit back, uncertain of what to do next. Meanwhile, Jack and Locke are in the middle of their confrontation, just as it played out before, and while Locke is in his haste trying to enter the number, the timer reaches zero... and cut to black.

That's right, a cliffhanger ending. I'd be fine with that, I think it would much better than the cop-out hieroglyphics. It would have been a stronger ending. Keep all of Sayid's flashback, that's fine, just end on zero and forget the goofy speech with Charlie on the beach.

They totally need to hire me as a writer. :)

Yeah, this is getting somewhat regular: recording some thoughts about the latest episode of Lost. I suppose some of these might be spoiler-y, though, so I'll put it behind the clickthru. (RSS readers: well, uh, you don't get that luxury, so watch out: there might be spoilers.)

More...

This was an amusing read, and devilishly detailed: The Lost Ultimate Theory. I won't guess as to the accuracy of it—quite a bit seems too science fantasy for my taste—but I will say that if the producers are ever looking for new writers for the show, they should contact this guy.

Nothing grand to report, but somehow we managed to fill up the weekend.

Friday night after work we had dinner at the excellent La Rosa, over on the west side. Afterward, we meandered around Wal-Mart and Shopko looking for gifts for birthday parties are kids were invited to. Exciting, right? When we got home and put the kids to bed, I cleaned bottles for the batch of pumpkin ale I had in the pantry.

Saturday, we made Valentines cookies (heart-shaped sugar cookies, of course). Later on, my daugher went to one of the afore-mentioned birthday parties, and soon after some old friends that we hadn't seen in five or so years came over. These were friends from the homebrew club we had back in the day, but they moved to Eugene and we just fell out of touch. But, they moved back to Bend recently, and we're reconnecting.

These are friends that are really into beer and homebrewing, so needless to say I drank entirely too much Saturday night and we had a great time. No ill effects, though, except for a minor headache when I woke up this morning. Good thing, too! I feel like I dodged a bullet. :)

Sunday (today) the kids frosted the Valentines cookies and I bottled up the pumpkin ale. The rest of the day was fairly mellow; we relaxed, and went to my parents' house for dinner.

And I have to mention the gorgeous un-February-like weather. Sunny, mid-50s, fantastic. It probably won't last, but that's okay, it is still winter, technically.

I've been informally keeping track of the books that appear on Lost, so of course I caught tonight's little Easter egg. Anyone else catch the title of the book Locke was shaking through when Sawyer found him in the hatch? The text on the cover read "Owl Creek Bridge", and a quick sweep on Wikipedia reveals:

"An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" is a short story by Ambrose Bierce originally written in 1886.... [It] is the story of a man who is sentenced to death by hanging at the Owl Creek Bridge of the title.

You can go to the page to read the spoilers about it, I won't reveal them here. What's interesting is, I remember seeing this on an old episode of The Twilight Zone!

I don't know if it's supposed to fit into the show's mythology, or the writers just liked the book enough to put it in there and mess with people's heads. I suppose that could go either way...

Last week I met with a local businessman who was interested in finding a local PHP expert/consultant for a project that he's expanding. He already has a long-distance PHP guy doing work for him, but also wanted someone local. This got me to thinking; aside from myself and a few isolated individuals, and Alpine, who are the PHP people for Central Oregon? Are there any PHP-specific shops or consultants who are available for this kind of thing? If not, why not? And how would anyone find out about them?

My next thought, invariably, was We need a local PHP user group for exactly this kind of thing. A local organization where any and all of the PHP programmers/users can get together, and perhaps build a directory of services and maybe even host events.

Would this be of interest to anyone? I'm actually pretty ignorant about the user group thing (it's probably been close to a decade since I've been anywhere near a user group type of function), so I may not actually know of which I speak. For instance, is there already a Central Oregon PHP user group that I'm totally unaware of?

I'd be interested in getting involved one way or another. What says the community-at-large?

It's amazing what they're publishing in For Dummies books these days... I almost wish I had made this up:

Pit Bulls for Dummies

This just makes me laugh. The fact that it's for real just makes this that much more irrationally funny to me...

In case you were wondering why I suddenly dropped off the radar, it's because Thursday I came home from work feeling achy and tired and running an elevated temperature of 100 degrees or so. Went to bed, skipping dinner, slept more-or-less through the night, and got up Friday feeling better—not perfect, but well enough to try going to work. I'd still been slightly elevated when I awoke—99 degrees or so—but that subsided.

Still, felt mostly under the weather Friday, even when it came to the "mandatory" work meeting that was held at, of all places, McMenamins—with free beer. Feeling a bit out of it meant only nursing a single (free! damn it) beer for the better part of an hour.

Friday night I went to bed early (for me), avoiding the computer. Saturday was kind of a "recovery" day (how I approached it, anyway... got a lot of reading done) and we had some friends from out of town visiting, who we met at the Deschutes Brewery for dinner. We were visiting until about 10:30, and I was tired enough to head to bed without hitting the computer. (Tell the truth, it's kind of liberating to not feel like having to plunk down in front of it and catch up on all the news and blogs and email.)

Today I had to replace the (same) computer's power supply... perhaps it's an omen of some kind?

I thought this sounded interesting considering how popular poker is these days (you know who you are): PHP Editors is holding a PHP programming contest for a Texas Holdem game. I might try it out. It wouldn't be anything like most commercial poker sites out there, but it would be an interesting programming project.

...Not unlike being back in school, writing a program for whatever computer course I'd be in. Those were the days; they were still teaching Pascal at the time. I remember writing a Hangman game (it mostly sucked), and an algorithm for storing shuffling a deck of cards (which might have been a precursor for a poker program).

Of course, handling and "shuffling" a deck of cards that only exists in a computer program is trivial. You simply need to have a structure representing the cards, and draw them randomly. (And a method for keeping track of what's been drawn.) Each subsequent "shuffle" is simply a different random number set selecting the cards.

For anyone keeping track of these things, the snow they keep warning us about (last I heard, the advisory was from 3pm today until something like 5am tomorrow morning) has started in earnest at about 1:30pm, here in Downtown Bend.

So, yeah. Go check it out. It's funny.

I would've blogged this week... but work beat it out of me. (I did manage to keep blogging over on The Brew Site, barely...)

Not just "regular" work, I've also been working on a website in my spare time as well. As part of my other, semi-freelancing gig. That's taking up a lot of my time (and still will this weekend).

So anyway, sucky week. Kind of derailed me.

Yep, that's what we did over the weekend: bought a new (used) car. The time had finally come to retire the pickup.

We got a 2004 Hyundai Sonata, very good condition with low miles. It's pretty nice. I'm now cruising around Central Oregon in style.

I think Jennifer almost always has insightful things to say about Bend (and is a fine writer to boot), but last night's post was really remarkable, I think. She points to the Bend 2030 website (the project of which I was only really tangentially aware of until the past few days), and drops the bomb on a couple of the hard questions:

What's the most significant issue facing Bend?

Well, an increase in growth threatens two of the three things I value most about living here. So Bend's biggest issue is limiting growth or, if that's impossible, limiting the damage.

Also: this town has a severe divide between rich and poor with almost no middle class. That gives my kids a wacky sense of how the world works. First, it's not a reflection of most of the United States; and second, they don't see a model for success — except, of course, in real estate. People grow up here and disappear for awhile, then come back as doctors and lawyers. Or they grow up wealthy and never work for keeps. Unless Bend changes, my kids won't have much opportunity to watch someone start out on a low rung and work their way up.

So, to answer question four:

What is your personal vision for the future of Bend?

I want growth in Bend to slow way, way down, so that we can get a psychic grasp on what's happening here. And then I would like Bend to work toward becoming not a resort town or a retirement mecca but a normal city, where people work and go to school — and just happen to climb mountains or ski or run rivers whenever they get a chance.

Dead on. I really couldn't have said it better myself, and I find myself nodding in nearly perfect agreement with this.

I've been thinking a lot about Bend and its growth and what it's been turning into lately. In light of my rant yesterday, I think it's safe to expect more rants and thoughts on this topic from me. In the meantime, keep watching Jennifer. She's going to be a force to be reckoned with.

I don't know how I missed this the first time around (December 23rd, probably because I don't read the New York Times): Where Timber Was King, the Golf Club Replaces the Ax.

I don't really know what to think about this article. I certainly can't relate to it, it's aiming for the affluent and reeks of elitism. A little fisking, anyone?

WHEN you own a home in the sixth-fastest-growing region in the country, you worry about letting the cat out at night because of the coyotes howling in the forest. You scribe fresh powder turns down 9,000-foot-high bowls and muscle bicycles through high-desert hills. At some point, perhaps on a fairway between Holes 4 and 5, you wonder whether those lonely volcanoes lingering on the skyline will ever blow. The thing you rarely do is call your town rural.

Dammit, I do call my town rural; I grew up rural, that's how we are. We actually did lose a cat to coyotes, growing up. I don't ski, I'm sorry to say, nor do I golf. So far, it's failing to hook me.

Albert Angelo Jr., an owner of a family-run development company, bought in Bend for its 300 annual days of sunshine and the 4.3 million acres of public land just beyond his floor-to-ceiling windows. He plans to divide his time between his houses in Vancouver, Wash., and Palm Desert, Calif., and his new $3 million, 5,100-square-foot single-story house in Pronghorn, a resort on the outskirts of town.

"When I look out my Pronghorn house facing north, I see a covered patio with a 10-foot-diameter barbecue pit, a pop-up plasma TV and a view of the golf course - but of a putting green, so my house won't get hit by golf balls," Mr. Angelo, 59, said. "You have a good lifestyle down there."

Okay, I totally cannot relate. I'd say this guy's idea of "a good lifestyle down there" is completely out-of-sync with the reality of Bend.

About 300 people are on a waiting list to purchase another dozen town houses at the Bluffs at the Old Mill, a neighborhood with views of the Mount Bachelor, Broken Top, and Three Sisters volcanoes.

Again with the volcanoes. In my day we just called them "the mountains." And for everybody wondering about the high real estate prices, look no more... the 288 people on that waiting list who won't get a choice home want to go somewhere...

Bend's proximity to trails for hiking and cross-country skiing, coupled with a bustling vibe, appealed to Stephen Johnson, 29, a salesman from Medford, Ore. In November, he bought a new 1,933-square-foot, two-story weekend house for $215,000 in southeast Bend. "It still feels like a small town but with more amenities that make it a fun place to visit," he said.

Holy shit, there was a two-story, 1,933-square foot house for sale in town for only $215,000 as recently as November? Who did he have to kill to get the place for that cheap??

When Benders aren't bouncing through the 370 inches of annual snowfall at Mount Bachelor, about 30 minutes west, much of the après action centers on Wall and Bond Streets, downtown's two main arteries. Today, you'll find no hardware store off the brick sidewalks, but should you seek information on a $2.75 million resort home or wish to make a donation to pierced buskers outside Bellatazza coffee shop, you need walk only a few blocks.

First of all, that should be "Bendites," not "Benders"—we're neither (mostly) drunks nor a certain sarcastic cartoon robot. Second of all, don't remind me that there's no hardware store downtown—it was a sad day when Masterson St. Clair finally closed down. But it's good to know I can find that info on that $2.75-mil home, that's important. Otherwise, this whole paragraph? Pretty much reeks of narcissistic self-importance. "Après action" and "pierced buskers" my ass.

Bend is 94 percent white. The joke among locals is that diversity means Subarus of different colors.

I've never heard that joke. I've lived here most of my life.

Okay, that's enough. Go read the article, even if it bothers you as much as it seems to have me. I can't help but wonder if they're writing about the same town that I live in...

Spotted this article on CNN today: Geocaching puts authorities on edge. It's about what happens when police find geocaches and think they might be bombs and such.

Rounding a corner on his motorcycle to finish rigging his cache, he was greeted by a barricade of police cars and a bomb squad. He struggled to explain the misunderstanding.

"I got off my bike and three officers approached me very cautiously, hands on their holsters," he said. "I was trying to turn off my MP3 player and I think they were worried I was going for a detonator."

(Find out more about geocaching at the official site.)

I've got a GPS, but haven't actually gotten around to trying geocaching, even though I want to. Maybe this year. But the article also makes me think of what a friend asked me, once: What if someone actually does put a bomb or something in a geocache? And ruins it for everybody?

Something I don't really have an answer to; I'm not that cynical, I suppose. The good thing is, it hasn't happened yet that I know of, and hopefully it won't ever happen.

An idea, and a question (or the other way around). I've always liked astronomy; growing up I had several astronomy books and a small telescope, I eagerly consumed news and information about space (I had a newspaper photo clipping of Saturn as taken from Voyager taped to my wall), and I took Astronomy for my physics elective in college, and one thing that always struck me was how outdated the various books I had were, even though they were relatively new (at the time I got them). You would read some theoretical composition of Jupiter's atmosphere even as data was coming in updating and contradicting the old information.

So I was thinking the other day of the planet Pluto and how it has three moons now (I don't remember the context), and how this information could potentially change some fundamental conception of the solar system, and yet it would probably take a year, maybe 18 months before this would make it into the latest and greatest book on astronomy. And I thought, wouldn't it be neat if there was an open (as in open source) astronomy book online somewhere, maybe like a wiki, that was textbook-quality and was kept up-to-date with the latest discoveries? People could freely access it, print it out, download a copy, whatever, and it would always be relevant.

The question: Does such a thing exist already? Now, I'm familiar with Wikibooks, the self-described "open-content textbooks collection," but their Astronomy book is paltry at best. (It might make a good starting point, though.) So does anyone know of something like this?

If not, I might start it myself. It would make a neat hobby, at the very least.

(And if it worked, this would make a good model for other books that could be open and possibly wiki-fied. I've got a few ideas.)

Something I hadn't blogged yet but thought I should "break": I've been approached by the new publisher of the High Desert Sun newsletter to write for them. I said yes, of course, and the first article I'm turning in (by tomorrow) is based on my Reynolds Pond blog entry from about a year and a half ago.

I hadn't heard of the High Desert Sun before, but it's a newspaper-format newsletter that covers most of Central Oregon: Bend, Redmond, Prineville, Alfalfa, Powell Butte, Terrebonne, Madras and Crooked River Ranch. (I culled those from the "Locations" page on the website, it's possible they also cover Lapine, Sunriver, and Sisters as well.) The publisher found my little corner of the web here and liked my writing well enough to invite me to write for the paper.

Cool! It's not huge, granted, but it's a start. Of course, if I become a regular writer for the newsletter, then I'll need to start thinking things up to write about—I'd hate to have to recycle stuff from my blog all the time. :)

So first a mouse set a man's house on fire, now a puppy has done the same thing here in Bend:

A frisky puppy left in a laundry room apparently sparked a northeast Bend house fire that almost claimed his life. Investigators said Friday the dog caused an aerosol can to discharge vapors that a water heater pilot light ignited, setting the room ablaze.

It's like When Animals Attack, but weirder. Awesome.

As an aside, I really like the new NewsChannel 21 site. Barney done good!

Chris started it; I'm just jumping on the bandwagon!

Okay, this is kind of an awful story...

No, scratch that. It's a story that seems like it should be awful, but I just can't take it seriously. It just makes me laugh. I can't help it: Mouse takes down house.

On Saturday, a Fort Sumner man's home fell victim to a mouse fire.

Homeowner Luciano Mares said he caught a mouse inside his residence and discarded the creature in a pile of garden refuse he was burning on his property near the home.

"I had some leaves burning outside, so I threw it in the fire, and the mouse was on fire and ran back at the house," he said.

The. Mouse. Was. On. Fire.

Update: Snopes debunks it. It almost happened, but the mouse was already dead.

Update #2: According to CNN, the story may be true after all:

Is that plausible? Fort Sumner Fire Chief Juan Chavez said Tuesday he thinks so.

"There's no reason for him to lie about what he told us," Chavez said. "I don't doubt it at all."

There's hope!

Just pointers to a couple of blog posts I enjoyed.

First, Chris reviews Burger King in a fun sort of anti-Bend Restaurants way. Plus, you gotta love it when someone puts so much effort into writing a review like this...

"Parked in lot?", you ask, and yes I did because there are critical steps in eating your Whopper, and the first is, eat it when it's hot and fresh. Yes, "Eat your Whopper while it's hot and fresh," is what momma always told me. Also the fact that the window view from the restaurant isn't really much different helps too. The next tip I have to offer you is to put a few onion rings and some of the zesty onion ring sauce on your Whopper and then get ready for Whopper-Bliss.

The other pointer is to Jake and to his post about the PHP easter egg. I wasn't aware of this particular quirk, either, but apparently PHP will output an image of a dog if you append a string to the URL appropriately. I do know of the phpinfo() "easter egg" that only appears on April 1—the PHP logo image is replaced with something goofy. But this other one is new to me.

So I had a bunch of Christmas and birthday money this year and decided to go crazy and do something I normally wouldn't do: I bought a PlayStation 2 game system. I know, I know, new XBox, yadda yadda, but frankly there's a larger library of PS2 games out there and most of the ones I really want to play are on PlayStation only anyway.

It was the Costco bundle; comes with the console (which includes one controller), an extra controller, memory card, and two games. The one game we played around with this evening (kid friendly) is ATV Offroad Fury 3. It's pretty fun so far. We get a kick out of watching/causing some truly spectacular crashes. :)

Also I'm intrigued by the possibility of plugging it into the internet and doing some network gaming, since it has that capability. We'll see.

So, now I'm looking back over 2005 from my own standpoint. It was a busy, eventful year.

Last January I buckled down and began eating healthy in order to lose weight. That was enormously successful—and satisfying—as I lost 40 pounds. So far I've kept it off, and plan to keep it off. My next goal in this vein should be to get into shape; yes, I've lost the weight, but I definitely need to start exercising. Realistic? Knowing me, it could go either way.

Also last January I narrowly missed being selected for a jury. Of the one week I was on call for jury duty, I only got called in that first day, and ultimately wasn't selected. It was the first time I'd ever had jury duty.

I wrote about it, but I didn't get fired for blogging.

Memorial Day weekend, I put together a playground. Almost. I find it notable because I think it's the largest thing I've ever built.

It was a year for travel. We made it to Portland a few times, but our big trips were the Alaskan cruise and our week in Florida.

The cruise vacation marked not only the first time I'd been on a cruise, but also the first time in Canada and Alaska. That was quite a trip: we drove to Vancouver, B.C., stopping to visit friends in the Seattle area each way. And Alaska was amazing... I'd definitely go back.

Florida was flat and humid. The trip was worth it, though, and we made it out ahead of Hurricane Wilma.

I also did an overnight trip to Walla Walla, Washington, for work. First time there, too; I rather liked it, except for going during the hottest part of the summer.

I lost my cat. That was one of the hardest, worst things to happen in many years.

And, we got a new cat. A kitten, actually. That's fine, I don't really have an opinion on it one way or another, it is what it is. Better a cat than a dog, though. I'm so not a dog person.

Looking back on some of the historical events of 2005. For some reason, it seemed to me to be an interesting year for centennial events also.

2005:

• The Huygens probe landed on Titan (Saturn's moon).
• One Pope died and a new Pope was selected.
• Deep Throat's identity was revealed.
• Hurricane Katrina destroyed much of New Orleans, Bixoli, and the Gulf Coast. It was an unusually dense and destructive year for tropical storms.
• Civil unrest hit France in the Paris suburbs.
• A 7.6-magnitude earthquake stuck the Kashmir region in Northern Pakistan, killing nearly 90,000 people.
• NASA more-or-less successfully launched a projectile into a comet for study.

Centennial notes (1905):

• Einstein published his Special Theory of Relativity.
• Bend, Oregon became officially incorporated.
• Las Vegas was founded.

Bicentennial notes (1805):

• Lewis and Clark arrived and wintered at the Pacific Ocean.
• The Battle of Trafalgar: Admiral Nelson defeats a combined French and Spanish naval fleet.
• Napoleon, meanwhile, soundly defeats the Russians and Austrians at the Battle of Austerlitz.

Obviously I'm only touching on a very, very abbreviated list. A good one to review (and getting better each day) is Wikipedia's 2005 page. But, I think it's a decent touchpoint to start with, and it definitely stimulates the thinking. At any rate, those are some of the first things I thought of or stood out to me when I was looking back at 2005.

What 2005 events are significant to you?

Okay, not so much really since it's only the beginning of January, but go watch this. It's surprisingly hilarious.

I warned you there was more coming. :)

It's time for another edition of the Chuggnutt Zeitgeist, in the spirit of Google and since I did one last year. Interesting stuff, if you're into blogs and stats and such. On to it!

• Number of blog entries: 244. Last year: 306.
• Approximate total number of words: 39,810. Last year: 45,537
• Average words per blog entry: 163.2. Last year: 148.8
  
  It only looks like I wrote less than last year, but you know what? I was also writing on The Brew Site. I'm doing a Zeitgeist post over there too, but the quick numbers are 222 posts and 38,371 words... which combined, yields 466 posts and 78,181 words. Surpassed!
  
  
• Total visitors: 633,110. This is unfiltered, so it includes bots, spiders, RSS readers, etc. Last year: 242,433
• Average visitors per day: 1,734. Last year: 687
• Total real visitors (approximate): 430,505. This is the actual number, with most of the bots and such filtered out.
• Average real visitors per day: 1,179
  
  This year I made the attempt to show actual visitors to the site, not just the automated stuff out there. To that end I filtered out anything identifying itself as a spider, known RSS feed slurpers/readers, bots, crawlers, and non-browser agents. I didn't get everything out, but this is a pretty decent snapshot. Note this doesn't speak to unique visitors; the stat package I'm using doesn't classify that and I'm not using Sitemeter or anything that supposedly tracks unique visitors. I imagine a good part of the total visitors are repeat visits, so I won't hazard a guess as to how many unique hits are there.
  
  
• The most active month was October, by a long shot, because of the Burger King mask post—people were hammering this post looking for a Burger King Halloween costume. Not surprisingly, this post has also garnered the most comments: 673
• There were three days on which traffic spiked considerably: April 30, with 9,152 visitors; July 20, with 7,575 visitors; and August 18, with 8,915 visitors. Unsurprisingly, those appear to be times when I was FARKed—that is, someone linked to one of my pictures from the FARK forums.
• Ten most popular blog entries:
  1. The Burger King creeps me out: 28,910
  2. Houston's glass public toilet: 9,610
  3. My Burger King mask post is on fire!: 9,511
  4. Goofy Burger King job flyer: 5,234
  5. The Donald Trump/Bend urban legend: 4,879
  6. Leonard Nimoy's Bilbo Baggins: 4,862
  7. Super Wal-Mart: 4,619
  8. Central Oregon's biggest baby?: 3,821
  9. Leeroy Jenkins!: 3,781
  10. Never ending fall: 3,017
• Total number of comments (not counting spam): 1,556
• Most popular searches on this site:
  • burger king: 34
  • burger king mask [variants]: 24
  • i want to buy the burger king mask: 5
  • Beaubien [variants]: 28
  • z21: 27
  • ktvz: 8
  • html2text: 24
  • trump: 10 (plus 3 variants)
  • donald trump: 6
  • donald trump bend: 3
  • donald trump bend oregon rumor: 3
  • (Total Trump related: 25)
  • fantastic 4 cash card [variants]: 14
  • fantastic 4 [variants]: 16
  • bend oregon [variant]: 14
  • bend: 12
  • php: 12
  • blog: 12
  • amazon: 11
  • lovecraft: 10
• Ten most popular search engine searches landing here:
  1. burger king mask: 5,295
  2. boba fett: 3,086
  3. pdb reader: 1,972
  4. free palm ebooks: 1,805
  5. darth maul: 1,534
  6. kermit the frog: 1,376
  7. leeroy jenkins: 1,221
  8. www.amazon.com/burgerking: 1,210
  9. super walmart: 973
  10. palm reader: 877
• Top five search engines:
  1. Google: 72,180
  2. Yahoo: 20,629
  3. MSN: 4,042
  4. AskJeeves: 1,259
  5. AOL Search: 1,061
• Here's the approximate breakdown of browsers and agents, gleaned from the full numbers:
  • Internet Explorer: 61% of all traffic
  • Mozilla/Netscape browsers (Firefox mostly, I think): 23%
  • Opera: 1%
  • RSS readers/agents: 2%
  • Bots/search engine crawlers: 8.2%
  • Other stuff (random bots, feed readers, crawlers, obscure browsers): 4.8%
• Among real visitors, some surprises in country of origin (I'm not listing all country stats here; suffice to say, the U.S. and Canada are the top two):
  • China: 13,221 visitors
  • Malaysia: 1,930
  • Uruguay: 1,371
  • Sweden: 912
  • Saudi Arabia: 899
  • Greece: 524
  • Iran: 450
  I'm surprised I'm that popular in China.

No, my title doesn't really have to do with anything... I just thought I'd use the first thing that popped to mind when I started this entry. This is pretty much a plain-vanilla blog entry, with some ramblings about books and such.

I've been reading Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson lately, getting close to the end. It and Red Mars—great books. I'm not sure if I'm going to start reading Blue Mars (the final book in the trilogy) right away, or start something else; I've been anxious to start Quicksilver, of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, but that's a monster book in its own right... Plus, I'm halfway through How the Mind Works, by Stephen Pinker, and that's pretty interesting stuff, too.

What's sad awesome is I went and bought a bunch more books with my gift card and Christmas money. I'd better get reading!

I'll have some more 2005 wrap-up stuff written tomorrow, too. And I'll do another "Chuggnutt Zeitgeist" chock-full of stats and trivia. Perfect for all the navel gazers out there. Executive summary: traffic was up from 2004. Nice, eh?

Being inspired by Chris's post about the same, I decided I'd list my favorite/best posts for 2005. These aren't the most popular ones (I'll cover those later), but the ones I personally think are the best.

I'm not ranking them, though, other than in the date in which they appeared.

• Bandage Man
• Globe
• Things about Bend that I miss
• Things about Bend that I like
• Our local Jedi
• My semi-annual TV rant
• Pimp name
• Hard drinkin'
• Bandon cheese woes
• 4 8 15 16 23 42 (my long rambling post on Lost)
• Haunted Bend
• Tarding down literature