chuggnutt.com

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.