chuggnutt.com

Over the year I've seen a number of domain names that I was interested in get picked up by someone else and often wondered what's to stop someone or some bot (perhaps at the whois/registrar site itself) from scanning people's searches for domain names and registering them. After all, those searches at minimum appear in server logs, so somewhere there's a record of the domain names you're interested in, and these could be weighted based on how often you check them—so a domain name that might seem "hot" could get grabbed before you get your chance.

Sound paranoid? Tonight this Slashdot article outlines this very scenario. The original article that Slashdot points to calls these people(?) "domain tasters" and claims that there are severe leaks in the domain name system. And that's it's been going on for quite awhile.

Slightly more paranoid than me. Something to think about, though.

On a slightly related note, does anyone else have a hard time taking ".info" domains seriously? (Or any other non .com, .net, .org domains, for that matter...) Right now GoDaddy has them available for $2.99, which is killer cheap, but it seems almost like... I don't know, like giving up, maybe. Or am I just being elitist?

I promised to post fiction and get this blog "revitalized". I will! I'm working on it! It just got busy during the holiday time, as it tends to do.

Part of that revitalization is redesigning the site, cutting out the needless stuff and going with a more minimal design. Really minimal. Basically I want to get the focus on the content and make it as clean as possible. That means cutting graphics and viciously culling the sidebar down—dropping the Amazon link, the "Random Link", changing the archive presentation format, minimizing the Google ads impact, to name a few things.

(Oh, I'll still have ads. Just less on this site, generally. I do like those graphic buttons for my other sites, Obsidian Stock and Pegasus Books—I created 3 of those 4 and I don't get any revenue from them. Free advertising, baby. So those'll stay.)

Plus I'm doing some stuff behind the scenes to make things work better. Tell the truth, I'm kind of getting sick of my own blogging system and coding, and I've considered switching it all over to WordPress and letting other people sweat the technical details so I can just write... meh. It's a thought.

I plan to throw the switch on this new design on or around January 1st. That's nice and symbolic, I think. Things should pick up from there.

First there was a full moon on my birthday and then there was a fireball on Christmas Eve. (Wish I'd seen that.) I hope everyone's Christmas was nearly as eventful.

Merry Christmas!

Interesting to note that today is the full moon... my birthday. I don't remember having a full moon fall on my birthday before, though I'm sure it must have at some point. It's also the northernmost full moon of the year. Besides that, we (Earth) are passing as close as we're going to get to Mars right now until some time in 2010. So Mars is high in the sky, very near the full moon tonight.

Not that I think there's anything astrologically significant about it... I just like neat coincidences like that. Plus I wanted to mark the occasion, being my birthday and all.

Carry on.

We popped the DVD of "The Incredibles" in for the kids tonight, and I swear, I can't not watch it when it's on. "The Incredibles" is pretty much at the top of my list for the best superhero movie out there. While it's tough to pin down exactly what makes it so good—I mean, they did pretty much everything right—I think one of the strongest points to the movie is that they don't bog it down with origin stories. They just present it to you with, "here's their world, they have superpowers, it doesn't matter how or where they got them."

They don't let the origins get in the way of the story, in other words. Almost every other superhero movie I can think of does.

I'll grant the exception to "Batman Begins." The whole point of that movie is the origin of Batman, and it's done so well that it's also on my list of top superhero movies.

Speaking of which, I watched the illicit trailer for its sequel, "The Dark Knight," online today. Even bootlegged, grainy, shaky-camcorder style footage doesn't stop me from thinking, Hot damn I want to see that movie. It's gonna be a really good Joker, I think.

What else is on my list? Um, "Mystery Men," I think. The first "Superman" movie. "Unbreakable" too, I think (it was so unconventional).

As for others, I'd have to weigh them carefully before I commit. You'll notice I'm not talking about "comic book movies" here—I'm considering the superhero genre, and some of them are based on comics, some aren't. At some point I'll compile and post my full list.

This is one of the (few) completed stories I've written, and it's mostly polished for my liking, though I tend to tinker with it from time to time. (Bad habit, that.) It's also short, about 2244 words in length. The title? Ah, the title. When I first wrote this (way back in a creative writing class), I had a title that was overly oblique and really had nothing to do with the story; it was more reflective of my trying to be clever with the inspiration for the story. I've since ditched it. It's for the best. Suggestions would be welcome.

As usual, this is freely available and copyrighted under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. Go nuts.

"How will I know where to go?" the boy asked.

"You will know," his father said simply.

And so he found himself at the edge of the village at dawn the next day. Beyond the oasis of the village lay the vast expanse of the desert, yellow-brown sands glowing red in the rising sun. On the horizon lay the thin, dark line that was the forest. The morning air was silent and dry and filled with the acrid scent of cooking smoke—the boy breathed deep the aroma of spice-cakes.

With a single glance back at the village, he set out into the desert. He carried nothing. He walked in the direction of the forest, as he had seen the adults do.

Continue reading

This article is all kinds of awesome. I never thought I'd see the day.

The Commodore 64 is 25 years old this year. Kind of shocking, really.

So here's the deal. It's blindingly obvious that I haven't devoted much time to this blog in quite a while, even though I consider this site my "main" identity on the web. Part of it is blog fatigue, part of it is all my best ideas these days are related to my other blogs, part of it is inertia.

Whatever, I'm tired of looking at how desolate and empty this site has become. So I'm going to revitalize this blog, and in doing so I'm undertaking something that is—for me—entirely new and radical.

I'm going to start publishing all of my fiction writing here. Mostly old stuff, and whatever new stuff I write. All of it.

My thinking is this:

I talk a lot about being a writer, but let's face it—these days especially—it's mostly talk. Well, that's not entirely true; I seem to be writing a lot on the blogs, but for this exercise I'm talking about being fiction writing. So I talk a lot about being a writer, and wanting to do it for a living, but I also need to be realistic about it: I know myself, and at the rate I'm going (or rather not going), that's just not going to happen.

I've got a bunch of old writing that I haven't done anything with, though only one or two stories are actually finished; it's mostly work-in-progress stuff, rough drafts, like that. Science fiction, largely, though there's some plain vanilla fiction and at least one horror-ish piece. And some Star Trek fan fiction as well.

As for new stuff, well, I've got lots of ideas, but my execution has been lacking. I'm thinking that this will prompt me to, you know, actually write.

So I'm gonna put my money where my mouth is and publish it all online here. Because the reality is, if I don't do it here, I won't do it at all, of which I'm 99.993% certain.

Plus, I get to dabble and experiment in this whole new publishing model, where writers are putting their works online under Creative Commons licenses, for instance. Why not? Stuff published online potentially has a much vaster audience available than traditional printed works with limited runs. It's wide open.

So here's the deal: I'll tag the title of the post as "Fiction" and whether it's a completed piece or (most likely) a work in progress ("WIP"). Much of it will be dreadful, I'm sure—some of this stuff goes back years, and... well. Let's just say a lot of this will be "rough drafts."

It'll all be published under the same Creative Commons license I have on this site—Attribution, Noncommercial, Share Alike 3.0—which means it can be copied, shared, remixed, mashed up, basically treated how you want as long as proper attribution is given (i.e., credit given to me) and it's all noncommercial (no money is made from it). Otherwise, it's all free.

Comments and criticism are welcome (encouraged!) and on the off chance that someone actually does some sort of CC-related stuff like I related above, let me know.

We went and picked up our Christmas tree today, and ended up getting a seven foot Grand Fir from the Tom's Trees lot downtown, right across the street from the Franklin Crossing building (and next to El Caporal). Good trees—I like Tom's Trees, they always have good ones—but the weather left the experience somewhat less than optimal.

Near-freezing temperatures plus rain/snow mixture plus strong gusty winds equals cold, wet, and cold. Throw a cold, soaking wet tree into that mix, shake well.

All's well that ends well, though. The tree is trimmed and sitting in the living room pretty as you please.

Just to get something on here, jeez...

• Halting State by Charles Stross
• The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx
• Accelerando by Charles Stross
• Collapse by Jared Diamond
• The Way We Ate by Jacqueline B. Williams

No real commentary, though I found all of these to be good. Particularly the Charlie Stross novels.

This is kind of random, but see if you can follow my thinking. Though I suppose if you weren't geeky familiar with the TV shows in question, it may not make sense to you; carry on.

Back in the 70s, when "The Six Million Dollar Man" and "The Bionic Woman" were on TV, the "bionic sound" became somewhat iconic (still is). You know, the sound effect they used when they used their bionics for running, or throwing something, or whatever. I don't even know how to describe it—ratcheting?—other than the completely lame "na na na na na" slightly-onomatopoeic phrase, but to my mind that bionic sound is the "tech sound" of the 70s.

Similarly, I think the iconic "tech sound" of the 80s was the sound of Transformers, er, transforming. From the cartoon, of course. It was just something that worked, on an almost intuitive level; and I can't think of many people I've run into who wouldn't instantly understand what it meant to hear that sound effect.

(Both of these meanderings were jarred loose one day when I was musing on the fact that there was both a Transformers movie and a new "Bionic Woman" series this year.)

My theory here is that it seems to be decade-oriented, like everything else. So, what's the "tech sound" for the 90s? Sound of a modem dialing and handshaking? "You've got mail," courtesy of AOL (ugh)? I can't think of what else could be drawn from pop culture that had an impact like the bionic and transforming sounds.

Same thing for the 2000s—what's the iconic sound?

Sometime in the distant past when I put the link to my Amazon wishlist here on the site, I wondered if it would actually inspire people to buy me stuff from it or if it was just a vanity move (I use that wishlist as much as a bookmark system as an actual list of things I'd like to buy someday). I figure it was mostly a vanity thing; I truly did not expect anyone to buy me anything from it.

So imagine my surprise when a package from Amazon came to the door, with the book Halting State (newly added to my wishlist) inside. At first it was real head-scratcher; I didn't remember at first that I had published the wishlist link and then I was confused because it listed me at an older mailing address (one of something like the 6(!) addresses that Amazon had on file that had slipped through the cracks) but had made it here anyhow.

(I know, I'm supposed to be out on the leading edge of this internet thing, right?)

Once I realized what had happened, I was astounded; a PHP developer named Dave Ross had found my PHP stemmer script and it had saved him a lot of work (his words) and in gratitude, he bought the book for me. I guess I was astounded because I put those PHP scripts online for free, and I enjoy helping people out who have questions about them and incorporating improvements that they send to me; it's an open source thing, I suppose, and I'm just glad I can put something out there that's useful to people, but the thought of compensation didn't occur to me in this case.

Okay, enough being naive, get to the point. Thank you, Dave, for the extremely generous gift. I'm glad I was (indirectly) able to help you out. And I hope I can repay the favor sometime in the future.

It's the gift economy. Sometimes it rears up and slaps you in the face. In a good way.

A recipe we've been playing around with, and took to a Halloween party Saturday night. It's quite tasty. For a single serving:

• 1 ounce vodka
• 1 ounce vanilla liqueur
• 1.5 ounces apple juice
• 1 tbsp. real pumpkin
• Cinnamon (dash)
• Nutmeg (garnish)

In a shaker with ice, shake up all the ingredients (yes, shaken, not stirred). The pumpkin should be pureed—canned pumpkin, in other words. The best apple juice I've found is all-natural—the cider-looking stuff.

You can rim the glasses with graham cracker crumbs, and even do a spritz of whipped cream on the drink—you could consider that the "pumpkin pie martini."

So apparently the Storm Worm—an email-propagating trojan that's creating an unknowingly-large botnet—has learned how to figure out when security researchers are probing it and is retaliating (Via Boing Boing via Slashdot):

The Storm worm is fighting back against security researchers that seek to destroy it and has them running scared, Interop New York show attendees heard Tuesday.

The worm can figure out which users are trying to probe its command-and-control servers, and it retaliates by launching DDoS attacks against them, shutting down their Internet access for days....

As researchers test their versions of Storm by connecting to Storm command-and-control servers, the servers seem to recognize these attempts as threatening. Then either the worm itself or the people behind it seem to knock them off the Internet by flooding them with traffic from Storm’s botnet....

Now, if I were approaching this news from a science fiction (writing) or a conspiracy theoretical angle, I'd be seriously wondering if this isn't the rise of a distributed sentient AI.

(*cough* Skynet *cough*)

This isn't a new idea. William Gibson back in '98 wrote a script for "The X-Files" based on the same premise: a computer virus (several, actually) was loosed upon the internet to spread and evolve and bootstrap itself into a networked emergent AI.

Then, of course, it tried to kill everybody who tried to stop it.

Jen posted something along the lines of what I was thinking; first there was National Novel Writing Month, now there's also a National Blog Posting Month, what's next?

Any why are they both for November? Did the NaBloPoMo guys just follow the model too closely?

Okay, enough rhetorical questions. (The answers, by the way, are National [insert meme here] Month, they aped NaNoWriMo, and yes.) For what it's worth, I'm half-seriously considering trying NaNoWriMo (that's the one where you try to write a 50,000-word novel in a month)—I know, I know, I've said this before—but by now everyone should know I'm full of grandiose schemes and ideas, right? Right?

At any rate, blogging every day isn't really that much of a stretch, since I'm more or less doing that already (not here recently, but certainly between my other two blogs). But the novel... you'd have to average 1667 words per day just to meet the 50,000 mark.

(For reference, my longest piece (I think it's my longest) here on chuggnutt.com is this, at about 3500 words, just over twice what that daily average should be.)

Something to chew on. At least the idea's out there in the ether now. And it looks as though Jen will be participating in both—though I like her idea of National Cookbook Writing Month (NaCoWriMo?) in an ironic sort of way...

I know I'm a day behind on this, but every now and again, Slashdot posts a story that is so incomprehensibly gibberish-sounding that I point and laugh. Yesterday was one such: Time Dimension To Become Space-like.

'We show that regular changes of signature on brane-worlds in AdS bulks may account for some types of the recently fashionable sudden singularities. Therefore, the fact that the Universe seems to approach a future sudden singularity at an accelerated rate of expansion might simply be an indication that our braneworld is about to change from Lorentzian to Euclidean signature. Both the brane and the bulk remain fully regular everywhere.'

What the hell is that? I can't even follow it. I can't even pretend to follow it. I think Slashdot is trying to write dialog for a Star Trek episode again.

Jake beat me to the punch on blogging this, but I couldn't resist anyway. I got this comment on my clothesline post the other day:

The rules are the rules. Anyone who doesn't want to live by the rules can go live in the ugly lowlands.

It was signed "Sally Heatherton" and points to the blog "Marvelous Bend!". Intrigued (I mean, would someone really say such a thing?), I checked out the blog and was utterly incredulous for a minute, and then realized that it's a fake. Satire. And it's brilliant! It's freakin' brilliant!

Well, maybe not that brilliant, but it's damn funny. (And sad to say, plausible enough—I actually know someone very much like this.)

Like Jake, I went through searching the web and DIAL and Dex and found nothing.

Almost nothing, that is. It's not an identity or anything like that, but (up until today) the only result I could get for "Sally Heatherton" on Google (quotes included) was a hit on a character in a book: The Barrow Murder by James Huston. Via Google's Book Search (that's good stuff):

I went to the window of a teller I knew at the bank, Sally Heatherton. We had even dated for a short time, until she called our relationship off. "I don't want to get involved with someone who's broke all the time," she announced. "A loser. I want to get married to someone who's a success, who can support me, so I can get the hell out of this teller cage."

I guess the new game around here is "Guess Who Sally Heatherton Really Is."

Jake points to an utterly jaw-dropping article in the Wall Street Journal about a woman who is running into trouble up on Awbrey Butte by... get this... daring to hang her laundry on a clothesline.

No kidding.

This is stupid beyond words. Check it:

The regulations of the subdivision in which Ms. Taylor lives effectively prohibit outdoor clotheslines. In a move that has torn apart this otherwise tranquil community, the development's managers have threatened legal action. To the developer and many residents, clotheslines evoke the urban blight they sought to avoid by settling in the Oregon mountains.

"This bombards the senses," interior designer Joan Grundeman says of her neighbor's clothesline. "It can't possibly increase property values and make people think this is a nice neighborhood."

Let's break down a couple of those things, shall we? It states, "clotheslines evoke the urban blight they sought to avoid by settling in the Oregon mountains"—ummm, if you're settling in the "Oregon mountains," you'd better believe clotheslines are a way of life. You know, the kind of life you moved here to experience? If that's a problem, then leave.

And "urban blight" and "bombards the senses"? Seriously? It's a clothesline. If anything, I would think it would not only make the neighborhood nicer, but it would increase property values. That's how the world works for those of us with common sense, anyway.

So Brooks Resources is threatening legal action. And while she may be, technically, in violation of the CC&Rs for the neighborhood,

Ms. Taylor responded by pointing out that the subdivision is "blatantly full of noncompliant owners" who display everything from plastic play equipment to exterior paint colors that don't meet the requirement of "medium to dark tones." She added: "Who am I hurting by hanging clothes out to dry?"

So yeah, I'm just blown away by this level of stupidity. Hanging a clothesline is the "green" and environmentally-responsible thing to do—and isn't being green the new trend, especially among the "elite" and all these new, trendy homes and developments that are going up? How does caring about the environment constitute "blight"?

I guess being environmentally responsible isn't a priority for Brooks Resources or the other fools complaining over a backyard clothesline; if I was really snarky I'd write a headline saying Brooks Resources hates the environment.

Man, some days I agree with Jake's comment that Bend really seems to be turning into a craphole.

When I wrote the post about the G.I. Joe movie awhile back, I started ruminating over the apparent trend over the past few years of making movies based on 80's TV series. Like "Miami Vice" and "The Dukes of Hazzard."

It took awhile, but there is an "A-Team" movie in production, scheduled for a 2008 release. And I'm a little surprised someone hasn't taken up such obvious movie-fodder as "Airwolf" and "MacGyver." I mean, if ever there was an 80's show destined to be a movie, "Airwolf" is it.

It's when they start hitting the 80's cartoons that you realize they're desperate (or is that brilliant?)—like "Transformers" and the afore-mentioned "G.I. Joe." I got to thinking about what other noteworthy 80's cartoons to watch out for...

• Robotech: recently announced, possibly headed up by Tobey Maguire.
• He-Man: "Masters of the Universe" was made way back in 1987, with Dolph Lundgren as He-Man. That's apparently not stopping a new version (set for 2009) though: here's the IMDB page for it, and here's an article from May of this year.
• Voltron: There was some speculation that JJ Abrahms' weird "Cloverfield" movie was going to be Voltron, but that was debunked. However, someone else picked up the ball: a movie set for 2008 apparently; here's the super-secret IMDB page for it. More details here.
• Thundercats: Good grief, Esquire has an article about this that includes cast and everything. Who knew? (Ugh, it even mentions a "Care Bear" movie.) I got snookered! (See comment below.) Here's a real link to a "Thundercats" movie.
• Gummi Bears: Please, no.
• Smurfs: Please, no. (Alas, it looks like a CGI animated movie is set for 2008.)
• M.A.S.K.: None as far as I know.
• Thundarr the Barbarian: I'm getting Eclectic Old-School here. But a cartoon set on an apocalyptic, far-future version of the Earth? (Even the moon is split in two!) What's not to like? But no movie treatment as far as I know.

What's next?

Announced on Variety.com: a live-action G.I. Joe movie, to be released summer of 2009 and directed by Stephen Sommers.

Hasbro's Goldner said that the mythology of G.I Joe was fleshed out during the 1980s through 155 issues of Marvel Comics, as well as an animated TV series. There are about 30 core characters, good and evil, that can be exploited in films.

"Marrying Steve's vision with 25 years of this brand mythology feels like a great way to go forward," Goldner said.

While some remember the character from its gung-ho fighting man '60s incarnation, he's evolved. G.I. Joe is now a Brussels-based outfit that stands for Global Integrated Joint Operating Entity, an international co-ed force of operatives who use hi-tech equipment to battle Cobra, an evil organization headed by a double-crossing Scottish arms dealer. The property is closer in tone to "X-Men" and James Bond than a war film.

Brussels-based and more like an "X-Men" movie? I don't know, sounds like it could be weird. I guess that's what you'd expect from the guy who directed Van Helsing.

And I might be wrong, but reading over the Wikipedia G.I. Joe page, isn't the "double-crossing Scottish arms dealer" Destro? If they don't have Cobra Commander with the ultimate casting choice playing the role... man, I don't know. (Next fun diversion: picking the ultimate cast for the movie.)

I guess the time is ripe for this sort of thing. But yeah, I'm surprised it took this long, though on the other hand, I remember seeing a live-action G.I. Joe movie back in 1994...

A random collection of things that... well, the title pretty much says it all, doesn't it?

• "There's two roles I think [Steve] Buscemi was born to play. The first is Cobra Commander in a live-action G.I. Joe movie. 'Retreeeeeat!'" source
• I found the trailer on YouTube for the never-released 1994 Fantastic Four movie... it is so bad. (And wow, what's the deal with the effects/costume/WTF for The Thing? It's hysterical, but at the same time, freaky as hell.)
• The "Expendable" Red Shirt on ThinkGeek ("Just don't stand next to us when you wear that thing.")
• "You're single because you use emoticons." someecards.com - many more much, much funnier but waaaaay too raunchy for me to repeat
• "And then a second and a half later I thought, 'wait, this is exactly how Uncle Ben died.'" source

Before I get asked by anybody: No, the person who signed "Chuggy" to the "Web Rant" section at the bottom of page 5 of the latest issue of The Source is not me.

I feel the need to preemptively clarify this because my own wife asked if that was me.

So there you have it. Ain't me. I'd sign either "Jon" or "Chuggnutt," never "Chuggy."

This past weekend was the annual family reunion up at Suttle Lake, and since it's the one time of the year that we actually have to go camping, we packed up the gear and off we went.

The weather sucked, though. It was windy—really windy, tent-flattening wind (other people's tents; ours was well-shielded by trees)—all day Friday and Saturday. Saturday afternoon the clouds rolled in and sure enough, it began to rain that night around 11pm. Kind of a constant drizzle throughout the night, nothing like the downpour we had in 2004, but enough to leave everything outside wet. Inside the tent was fine and dry, fortunately. Breaking camp and putting stuff away was no fun.

I need to pay more attention to Suttle Lake and its environs more, though. I was looking at it in Google Earth and noticed that there are 3 other lakes just down the road(s): Blue Lake, Scout Lake, and Dark Lake. (Here's the respective Google Maps page.) How have I never noticed those or checked those out before?

This article from the NY Times (link is good at the moment, though I'm not sure it won't disappear behind some paywall at some point and be inaccessible) covers the sufficiently weird theory/philosophy proposed by Nick Bostrom that we are likely (actually, almost mathematically certainly) living inside a computer simulation.

("Living" wouldn't quite be the correct term, of course.)

It's a theory I've encountered before, though the NY Times does a good job of simplifying it and squirting it out into the public consciousness:

You couldn’t, as in “The Matrix,” unplug your brain and escape from your vat to see the physical world. You couldn’t see through the illusion except by using the sort of logic employed by Dr. Bostrom, the director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford.

Dr. Bostrom assumes that technological advances could produce a computer with more processing power than all the brains in the world, and that advanced humans, or “posthumans,” could run “ancestor simulations” of their evolutionary history by creating virtual worlds inhabited by virtual people with fully developed virtual nervous systems.

Some computer experts have projected, based on trends in processing power, that we will have such a computer by the middle of this century, but it doesn’t matter for Dr. Bostrom’s argument whether it takes 50 years or 5 million years. If civilization survived long enough to reach that stage, and if the posthumans were to run lots of simulations for research purposes or entertainment, then the number of virtual ancestors they created would be vastly greater than the number of real ancestors.

There would be no way for any of these ancestors to know for sure whether they were virtual or real, because the sights and feelings they’d experience would be indistinguishable. But since there would be so many more virtual ancestors, any individual could figure that the odds made it nearly certain that he or she was living in a virtual world.

I don't know about this "virtual ancestors" scenario necessarily—I mean, why not just run a simulation for the heck of it, a là The Sims or something? The author considers that:

And if owners of the computers were anything like the millions of people immersed in virtual worlds like Second Life, SimCity and World of Warcraft, they’d be running simulations just to get a chance to control history — or maybe give themselves virtual roles as Cleopatra or Napoleon.

Anyway. I followed this up by finding Simulated reality on Wikipedia, which contains a rundown of Bostrom's theory as well as broad coverage of others. Interesting stuff, and it got me thinking as to how one would go about determining whether one lives in a computer simulation.

(As a start, consider how one might determine whether or not one is dreaming. After all, dreams are a type of simulated reality, no?)

Of course, it all hinges on whether or not consciousness itself is a computable phenomenon. I'm a little torn on that question; I certainly think the brain is a computational entity of some sort—Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works is an excellent book, by the way—but does that make consciousness computable as well, or something more? Or is it merely an illusory side-effect of some process? Or is it ultimately indeterminable?

From a science fictional standpoint, I like the idea of the brain being an advanced quantum computer of some sort, with whatever wackiness extending from that. That's probably neither here nor there, but I just wanted to throw that out there.

Hmmm... I guess it doesn't all hinge on the computability of consciousness.

Would the simulations (ie, us) becoming aware that they are a simulation qualify as becoming "self aware" in the "real world"? I mean, we have a term for it when a computer program does: Strong Artificial Intelligence. (Okay, that's theoretical too, since we don't currently have Terminators or a Data running around.) Does "self awareness" count if it's only theoretical and there's no way to prove it?

Good thoughts. Random, but good.

My goodness, I've certainly been neglecting this site. Most of my blogging energy has focused on The Brew Site and Hack Bend, but I've also been neglecting other areas of this site—the projects page in particular needed cleaning up, and I needed to catch up on PHP code fixes for my HTML2Text class and Word Stemmer class that people had sent me over the past year or so.

So I spent some time yesterday doing just that. There's really not much to see if you're simply here for the blogging portion of the site, but in case you were here looking for my PHP code or were one of the people who were nice enough to email me fixes for the bugs, I've gotten that stuff updated (and thanks to the suggesters).

In the meantime I'll see what I can do about the writing portion of the site—ie, the blog. I certainly have no intention of retiring it but that's sure what appears to be happening... so no no, not gonna happen, I shall start making more effort to write regularly here again. And perhaps tweak the site design around a bit. I mean, it's only been...

...holy hell, it's been five years? How on earth did I let that anniversary pass by without comment or celebration or something? Back on April 22nd, this was...

Whoa.

One more day and I'm off to the Oregon Brewers Festival; like last year, I'm going again with the intent of blogging the experience. (You can read all of my OBF-related stuff on The Brew Site here.)

What's different this year, though, is that I, as a blogger, am also recognized as a media/press person; I contacted the OBF press guy and as a result, I get the full treatment: press kit, program, and all. Now I know most media/press folks (and a few pro bloggers) would be entirely blasé about it, but I have to say—I'm incredibly excited about this! Maybe the shine will wear off at some point, but for now, I just think it's too cool.

I'm also hoping to meet other bloggers and writers, and brewers, and, well, anybody interesting. So I'm trying something new; I'll have my cellphone with me but I don't necessarily want to publish my phone number for the world to see and abuse, so I registered a free phone number and voicemail with PrivatePhone—a service from NetZero that seems promising.

How it works is I get a free private phone number, and all calls to it go directly to voicemail. I can check this voicemail via phone or computer.

So here's the deal; if anyone wants to get a hold of me this weekend, call and leave a message on this number: 360-362-1627. I'll check for messages every hour or so, and call you back.

(Yeah, I couldn't get an Oregon area code. What's up with that?)

I'll also try to be checking email, but that won't be happening til evenings, if I get the chance. So don't rely on that if you want to reach me sooner rather that later.

Off to drink beer and blog about it!

Yes, you read that right: over on my Hack Bend blog, I get to do a giveaway for a pair of tickets to The Fray—playing in Bend this next Wednesday, July 25th, at the Les Schwab Amphitheater. How cool is that?

So if you live in Central Oregon—or you're planning on being in Central Oregon next week—and want to see The Fray, head over and sign up for the drawing for the pair of tickets—a $70 value.

We left Friday morning (just the wife and I; Grandma had the kids for the weekend) and headed down to southern Oregon for a play and a getaway. The weather turned out great, and the trip was largely a winery tour, among other things; we visited four wineries and ended up buying just over a case of wine.

The last time we'd been to Ashland was nine years ago, before the kids were born. Compared to Bend over the past decade, few things in the area have changed; both Medford and Ashland have remained pretty stable, and even though there are signs of growth, much of it (particularly downtown Ashland) is as I remember it.

(Holy smokes, this post got long.)

Click through to read on...

Not surprisingly, I had to comment on this.

Topping the list of words most likely to make web users "wince, shudder or want to bang your head on the keyboard" was folksonomy, a term for a web classification system.

"Blogosphere", the collective name for blogs or online journals, was second; "blog" itself was third; "netiquette", or Internet etiquette, came fourth and "blook", a book based on a blog, was fifth.

"Cookie", a file sent to a user's computer after they visit a website, came in ninth, while "wiki", a collaborative website edited by its readers, was tenth.

I can only really get behind two on this list: "blogosphere" and "folksonomy". I'd never heard of "blook" until now, and I'll continue to pretend it doesn't exist.

I hate "blogosphere", and I hate more that I've actually used it in conversation and writing. "Blog" I'm good with. I love "blog". "Blog" is succinct, and people pretty much know what it means. "Blogosphere", on the other hand, is just... is just... yeah. How about just "online community" instead?

I thought "folksonomy" was dumb the first time I saw it, and I continue to pretend it doesn't exist. Fortunately, its use seems to have dropped off significantly.

"Wiki" I like, too. Great word. Even better than "blog", as far as I'm concerned. I don't get the the hate here.

"Netiquette" and "cookie"? Seriously? Man, those ships have sailed. Like, back in 1995.

Over the past week and a half I read through two zombie novels: Monster Island and Monster Nation, both by David Wellington. Now I'm the first to admit that I'm not a true aficionado of the zombie genre; aside from Stephen King's Cell, I can't think of any other books I've read, and I've only seen a handful of movies. That being said, I really enjoyed both books. They're well-written and entertaining, real page turners. If you don't mind the squick factor involved with the cannibalistic undead, of course.

But then, you know, zombies. If you pick up a book subtitled "A Zombie Novel", I'm guessing you don't mind that so much.

But the more interesting aspect to the novels were what drew me to them in the first place: the author first published them online on a blog, in serial format. In fact, he's publishing all of his (recent) novels online first, in the same way; it was based on the success of these blog novels that he landed a brick-and-mortar publisher to put his words to paper. That's cool. That's really cool.

More and more, that seems to me to be the future of publishing.

Oh, and Wellington just had the third novel in his zombie trilogy published: Monster Planet. I'm debating whether to read it online first, or wait for the library to get the hardcopy in.

Finally got out to see "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End" back on the first weekend of this month, and I quite liked it. I really liked it, I thought it was fun and supremely escapist with excellent action sequences and truly excellent special effects. A perfect summer blockbuster, in other words. And I think it capped the trilogy nicely, while being open-ended enough to credibly be able to do a fourth movie (if, as Johnny Depp has famously said, the script is right).

In fact, I already know what the subtitle of the fourth movie should be: "Drink and the Devil." At least, that's from my working notes thus far. :)

And as I was thinking about it, it occurred to me that something I'd read elsewhere was true: the "Pirates" movies really are the "Star Wars" movies of this generation. (I'm talking about the Original Trilogy, of course; the Prequel Trilogy doesn't come close.) That's a tricky thing to pull off; I don't think it can be done intentionally. The "Matrix" movies might have come close, but ultimately they collapsed under their own weight.

I won't go into some sort of pedantic nerdly comparison essay between the two; suffice to say that the "Pirates" movies I can go back and watch again and again and still enjoy, like the Original Trilogy. That's good stuff.

The tech and "Web 2.0" section of the blogosphere is all a-twitter over the alpha launch of the new "people-powered" search engine, Mahalo, by Jason Calacanis (of Weblogs, Inc. and Netscape-relaunch fame). I've been checking it out a bit, and have some comments...

There's definitely no mystery under the hood, technology-wise, here: it's simply a locked-down wiki software. MediaWiki, in fact, the same wikiware used to run (and developed by) Wikipedia. Pretty smart, actually, because there's no reinventing the wheel going on, and MediaWiki provides a really slick platform overall. Plus, it's not like his other endeavors have been built on developing new tech—they have, in fact, been people-oriented and built upon existing technologies, which is what he seems to do best (and is successful at it).

On the other hand, this is not a new idea: Mahalo is "guide" driven, by people who filter through the best results for top search terms and build pages for them. I can't help thinking that this makes it just another About.com (at least, from the early days of About.com—a clone without all the cruft that About.com has accumulated over the years), or, even more apt, just another Open Directory Project (which pretty much has been doing the exact same thing for years).

So I'm kinda split. I guess the real question is, "Would I use it?" And generally, the answer is no... since they're only covering the top search terms, and not the esoterica that I'm often searching for (for which I primarily use Google), I don't see it happening. I like the concept, though.

A few link-worthy items that caught my eye but that I can't squeeze a full post out of (yet)...

The Real Oregon: a new(ish) blog subtitled "Oregon for the eccentric traveler." Looks promising, with travel tidbits about Oregon that seem pretty interesting to me.

How a $2 bottle transformed the wine industry: Charles Shaw wine (AKA Two (or Three) Buck Chuck) turns five. Who'd'a thunk it? And for the record, I rather like the wines.

Burst Culture: A bit of brilliance from Warren Ellis that's been making the rounds online. Pretty much ties in with ideas I've been having about the web and blogging, and giving me stuff to think about.

Tonight's lauded season finale of "Lost"? Yeah, there was 10, maybe 15 minutes out of the entire two hours that was any good. And those 10 or 15 minutes had to do with one thing and one thing only: revenge upon the Others.

You want a rant? I got your rant right here...

Spoilers ahoy.

Could you try not to ruin whatever TV show is currently broadcasting by cutting in with no warning to report on tepid election results? I mean really, that's just inept; every other station is able to scroll the election results in a marquee on the bottom of the screen, or even shrinks the main program picture to show off the fancy graphics of same. In fact, you used to do that! What gives?

So barring the technical ability to scroll a text overlay, maybe you could do the special reporting thing during a commercial, or at least some time when I'm not missing key points to the plot of "Law & Order." Both shows.

Yeah. Just a little irritating. Especially considering that the "news" of the election results was so lackluster (I already said "tepid") that it could have waited until the 11 o'clock news anyway.

I'm just sayin'.

Yeah, I can't help it. I have to say tonight's episode of "Lost" jumped the shark. They just went all retarded. Why?

...well, check after the link. There's spoilers, not that it matters I guess.

Read more.

So have you been exposed to lolcats yet? If not, check out here and here. I can't help it; they make me laugh. I mean really, really laugh. Especially the random ones.

Don't let the title completely fool you, this entry is a rant, as much as anything else. And don't think that I'm some sort of pop culture otaku; I'm usually behind the curve when it comes to such things, especially music.

But I seem to consume a fair amount of it anyway, and so here we are.

What do I really have to say about pop culture? Read on...

The news on KTVZ tonight about the former Rajneesh land being sold caught my ear and got me reflecting a bit on that particular period of weirdness in Central Oregon history. I wouldn't go so far as to call it a "dark day" in Oregon history like the interviewee on the news did, but it was definitely weird.

The Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh was an Indian (from India the country, not Native American) spiritual teacher who in 1981 came to Oregon, where his followers bought The Big Muddy ranch outside of Antelope and started a commune there. Naming the commune Rajneeshpuram, they attracted all sorts of attention among the locals, mostly negative.

Understand, this part of Oregon in the 80s was much more conservative and rural than now; the majority of the population was based in agriculture (farmers, cowboys) and operated on Good-Ol-Boy-ism. So the idea of a cult moving in and then taking over the town of Antelope was met with open hostility.

It didn't help that the Rajneeshees had a number of odd practices and goings-on as well. They all wore red, for instance. They owned a large number of Rolls Royces and the Bhagwan would ride around in them everywhere. They carried machine guns in open sight.

And when I said they "took over" Antelope, I'm not kidding—they registered to vote there and got a referendum passed renaming the town to "Rajneesh." They were able to do this because some 7000 of them lived in the commune.

Sheela, the Bhagwan's Number Two person, was a real piece of work. When authorities started investigating the Rajneesh commune, the crazy stuff came to light and Sheela and several leaders "were indicted and convicted of several crimes, including immigration fraud, wiretapping, first and second degree assault (poisoning) of two public officials, and the attempted murder of Rajneesh's personal physician."

Sheela and the Rajneeshees also have the dubious honor of perpetrating the largest germ warfare attack in the history of the U.S., when they infected a salad bar in a restaurant in The Dalles with salmonella—sickening over 750 people.

The Bhagwan went on the run and was caught back east in North Carolina and deported. The sheriff or whoever who was involved in the capture appeared on the news, drawling, "We caught us a Bag-wahn from Ory-gun."

Strange days, indeed.

(Pure geek post.)

This is sick (not in the gross sense): 6502 compatible compiler and emulator in javascript.

In JavaScript.

If you don't know what any of this means, that's okay. I can't hardly get my head around it either.

Via JWZ.

Jake first found and posted this: the Bend Bulletin has their own official, bonafide RSS feed. It's about time! That means I can finally take down my hacked-up RSS scraper feed for them.

So, this is official notice that I'm deprecating my Bulletin RSS hackfeed, by implementing a redirect to the official feed, and then I'll be killing off the script entirely. So all three or so people who were using it, be warned.

We had a great spring break trip to San Diego last week, and while we took a bunch of pictures, there are three especially that I couldn't resist posting here. Mostly because they're so messed up and random.

The first two are from Legoland. That place is like the Lego Disneyland—lots of rides and fun things, with Lego sculptures everywhere. Pretty straightforward concept, right? That's why it's totally awesome to run across something like this:

I wants me a Lego Skeleton Kit™ bloody well right now.

And among the various other Lego sculpture decor, most of which was themed and made sense, there was this:

What. The. Hell??

Best. Themepark. Ever.

Earlier in the week, we visited the Fleet Science Center, and they have a section especially for kids there called "Grossology." While most of the Grossology exhibits are pretty much what you'd expect, there was no way I could pass up taking a photo of this genuine video game:

Yep. Played it. Need a PlayStation version.

Writer Charlie Stross has a blog post entitled Why the commercial ebook market is broken that's a really good read and puts forth a thought I hadn't really considered before:

My take on ebooks is that they are — and should be seen as — the cheapest form of disposable literature.

"Disposable literature." I like it. I should probably point out that this isn't meant to be derogatory; rather, Stross is using it in the same sense as for mass market paperbacks: cheap, portable, easy to mass-produce and replace.

I'm not sure I have more to say about it at the moment... I'm kinda letting the concept roll around and ferment in my head a bit.

Last night, as I reported on my Hack Bend blog, the house across the street caught fire. It wasn't terribly serious, as these things go: some hot embers from the chimney landed on the wood shake roof and sparked into flames. But the fire department came out in full force; there were four engines, the fire chief's (or whomever's) SUV, an ambulance, and police closing off the street.

The weird thing is, we didn't hear any of the emergency vehicles arrive, but other people in the neighborhood told us they heard them coming. Instead, around 6:20 I started noticing a rumbling noise coming from outside, but we were eating dinner and I didn't think much of it—nothing that couldn't be checked until we were done, anyway. It was my wife who took something out to the garage that heard the noise, too, and went to the window to see what it was.

Imagine our surprise!

So we ran outside and rubbernecked along with the rest of the neighborhood. Smoke was still rising from the roof next to the chimney while we were there; our neighbor next door told us she had seen the flames when she came out. They were still hosing the roof down, but got the smoke under control pretty quickly. After that, they tore out the chimney and the part of the roof that was (presumably) still hot and/or smoldering.

Nobody was hurt. According to the KTVZ article, the fire did $25,000 worth of damage, with minor smoke damage inside the home.

Here's some of the pictures I took (when I finally had the presence of mind to run back in the house for the camera):

Apologies for the mediocre quality of these pictures... it was dusk and the low-light conditions along with the zoom was enough to get the point, but some came out shaky. And actually, when it was starting to get really dark, they brought one of the engines over with a set of bright spotlights to illuminate the scene:

You can see the light pole sprouting up from the top of the truck. And here's a shot of the lighted-up scene at full dark:

I actually think this last picture is kind of cool. Unfortunate set of circumstances, but you know what I mean.

Next week is spring break around here, and this year we decided to pack up and head down to San Diego for the week, to visit my brother and his wife.

We're driving down, spreading it out over two days each way. It's roughly 1000 miles from Bend to San Diego, so that's a lot of driving. But hey, that's the Jack Kerouac experience, right? Sort of. Though I'm pretty sure Kerouac didn't have a family along with him.

It's been awhile since I've taken this much time off from work. I wonder if I'll be able to go back.

Okay, it's been a good long while since I unleashed a comic book rant here and got my geek on. If you don't read comic books, or don't care, or whatever, you can safely pass this by. Otherwise, expect this to go long, and you may even be a little embarrassed for me. :)

Full-on rant after the jump...

The other day Dave posted a story riddle with a creepy punchline: the people who answer it "correctly"—i.e. a certain way—think like psychopaths. (Sorry to spoil the surprise.) It's meant to illustrate a particular way of thinking that pyschopaths exhibit: that of other people—even family—as impersonal tools to be used for their own benefit.

(Fortunately, I didn't answer the riddle "correctly.")

Of course, I make random connections, as I am wont to do, and I remembered this older post on Boing Boing about psychopathy:

Are psychopaths genetically adapted to survive by exploiting the rest of us?

[CBC's Quirks and Quarks] talks to research psychologists about the biological basis for psychopathy — and the fact that psychopaths are sexually profligate and have lots of kids. Psychopathic rapists target fertile women — not children or old women.

Dr. Marnie Rice is a psychologist with the Mental Health Centre Penetanguishene, in Penetanguishene, Ontario. She studies criminal psychopaths who are incarcerated there. She views psychopathic behaviour as an evolved survival strategy. She says that there’s not a lot of evidence to suggest that psychopaths are mentally ill but there’s good reason to believe that their disturbing behaviour is an evolved trait. She says psychopaths have evolved to capitalize in a particular environmental niche — namely preying on the rest of society.

Yeah, it's kind of an odd thing to be ruminating about. But it's a weirdly compelling idea to imagine that psychopathy is a possible result of natural selection. It makes a certain sense. I wonder what the "particular environmental niche" is referring to—large cities? Seems to me (from a purely layman's perspective) that's where this particular trait would take hold and be successful in an evolutionary context.

For reference, here's Wikipedia's article on psychopathy.

Anyway, cheery thoughts to take you into the weekend.

So my friend Brian of BuzzTouch Designs has a regular podcast, each show lasting a few minutes (not super long, like some) and touching on local happenings—and on yesterday's "episode" I was the guest star. Or interviewee. Or something. Basically, Brian called me up and we did an interview (I was in my "Brew Site" persona) on the topic of beer label art.

I had fun doing it, and actually thought it turned out okay. (Not a slam on Brian—I just wasn't sure how I'd sound myself!) You can listen to the show here.

So far this 2007 I've been consuming bunches of books. Kind of continuing my trend from last year, though based what I've gone through in these first six weeks of the year, my year-end list might be much larger.

• Lisey's Story, by Stephen King. His latest, pretty good but not the best he's ever written. I had a pretty good hunch where the plot was going and I was mostly right. What makes it interesting is all the backstory which is where all the real stuff is happening.
• Manifold: Origin, by Stephen Baxter. Rounding out the Manifold series he wrote (the first two of which I read in the last months of 2006). Interesting concepts, all of them (he wrote them as possible solutions/scenarios to the Fermi paradox), but one thing Baxter generally isn't good at is characterization. And Origin, plot-wise, is the weakest of the bunch; a lot of stuff happens that has nothing to do with the final reveal, or the overall point of the story.
• High Desert of Central Oregon and Bend in Central Oregon, both by Raymond Hatton, which I reviewed respectively on Hack Bend here and here.
• The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins. Sure to be controversial. Oddly enough, it's the first Dawkins book I've read, even though he's been publishing since the '70s. He's been called "Darwin's rottweiler," and that's pretty much in full force here.
• Mona Lisa Overdrive, by William Gibson. Pretty good read—it's Gibson, after all—but I think my least favorite of his three "Sprawl" novels. Neuromancer set a pretty high bar.
• I've been going through all the trade paperbacks of the Fables comic series (available at the library, which is very cool). This is a really brilliant series. The premise: All those fairy tales and fables of lore are real, but they've all been driven out of their worlds by a mysterious Adversary, and live in New York City in their own private and secret community named Fabletown. King Cole is the mayor, Snow White the deputy mayor, like that. For mature readers. I'm through the first seven trades, at least three were this year.
• The Ghost Map, by Steven Johnson. Pretty good, about the cholera outbreak in Victorian London in 1854 and how that changed science and cities.
• I'm also finishing up Bend, Overall by Scott Cook, though that's quite a bit shorter than most of the others. It's a guidebook read.

Next book will be fiction again. I haven't decided on one definitively yet; it's between Idoru (William Gibson), Wolves of the Calla or Cell (Stephen King), Singularity Sky (Charles Stross), and A Deepness in the Sky (Vernor Vinge). Or, perhaps I'll read several concurrently...

Okay, I was a little slow on the uptake for this one: Transformers: The Movie. Live action. For real. Opening July 4th of this year.

I remember hearing the rumor about this way back when, thought, "Hey, that would be cool," without thinking it would actually happen—you know, the usual Hollywood stuff, rumors are always flying. Then, suddenly, I recently spot the trailer online and nearly fall out of my chair.

Yes, I'm fully aware I'm out-geeking even myself here, but back in the day Transformers were the toys to have and it was the cartoon on TV to watch. I even made paper Transformers, for crying out loud.

Not surprisingly, Wikipedia has a comprehensive page on the Transformers movie. I only have one complaint: Bumblebee will no longer be a Volkswagon Bug—instead, he's a 1974 Chevrolet Camaro. WTF?? That just ain't right.

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 and the series as a whole here.

Living relatively self-sufficiently on five acres, we always had some livestock. For all intents and purposes, we had a farm, but it was more of a small family farm than the big operations I usually think of when I hear the term (with cattle, pigs, chickens, sheep, etc.).

At any given time our livestock generally consisted of one milk cow and a coop full of chickens. Along the way we tried out different animals, but this was the general combination that held.

Read on...

I suppose it was bound to happen sooner or later, but I don't quite get how this is going to work: Publisher launches its first "wiki" novel. It's:

...a Web-based, collaborative novel that can be written, edited or read by anyone, anywhere thanks to "wiki" software, the technology behind Web encyclopaedia Wikipedia.

The novel, "A Million Penguins," went live on Thursday and its first lines are already being written, edited and rewritten by enthusiasts on www.amillionpenguins.com.

Penguin, which embarked on the project with a group of creative writing and new media students, says it is using the novel as a test of whether a group of disparate and diverse people can create a "believable fictional voice."

So, are they planning on "locking down" chapters as they're finished? Because there's really nothing stopping anybody from going in and changing, well, everything at any point, if it truly is open like Wikipedia. Suddenly chapter three makes no sense because chapters one and two are now telling a different story.

Cool and interesting experiment, though. I might have to play around with it.

Making lunches for the next day: my daughter's, then my own. My daughter's is simple: peanut butter and honey, carrot sticks, CapriSun, GoGurt, cheddar cheese sandwich crackers. Oh yeah, throw some candy for dessert in, too. Pack it all up in the Barbie cooler.

Start on mine. Bologna and cheese on wheat, very original. Retrieve from the fridge: mayonnaise, dijon mustard, bread. Pause, then queue up some Journey on the computer. The kitchen is apparently in need of rock ballads tonight.

Highway run
Into the midnight sun
Wheels go 'round and 'round
You're on my mind

Sandwich comes together. Set it aside, back to the fridge. Carrots, celery... celery is droopy, good thing it's the last of it.

Any way you want it
That's the way you need it
Any way you want it

Oddly appropriate music to chop veggies to. Careful of the fingers, the carrot is rolling a bit. Now, cottage cheese or yogurt?

Streetlights, people
Living just to find emotion
Hiding somewhere in the night

Cottage cheese. It's the big container, Costco-sized but not from Costco. Scoop some into the tupperware-that-isn't-tupperware plastic bowl, snap a lid on it. Pack it all up into my lunch cooler (soft-walled), then grab an orange while Steve Perry tells me to Don't stop believin'.

Lunch is ready.

So there's this article that appeared in the New York Times about Activia, Dannon's yogurt that is filled with "live cultures" that are healthy and good for you. And they're marketing it like it's something new and revolutionary.

Ummmm, okay...

Except every bit of yogurt I've ever bought—regardless of brand—has been full of live cultures that are healthy and good for you. That's what yogurt is. Seriously, go buy a generic brand of yogurt—it says this on the container. Are people not aware of this?

Yeah, I know there's a lot of misinformation out there, but for some reason this one just rubbed me the wrong way.

I find it rather surreal that the Oregon Lottery is now offering Space Invaders lottery tickets. Seriously. It's part of their "Travel back" line of Scratch-Its. They look rather complicated though, and cost $3 a pop.

Now they need to come out with other classic arcade games: Pac Man, Donkey Kong, Asteroids...

Just a collection of links to things I like and/or found amusing recently.

• dive into mark: Spaceships
  "Parenting is like an ongoing episode of CSI. You’re always following the evidence back to the crime."
• The Bend Bigfoot stuff:
  • Jake's original link
  • The KTVZ story
  • My Hack Bend post
  • My photographic evidence of Bigfoot on Pilot Butte
• YouTube: Discover Card "Scissors"
  Is anyone else as freaked out as I am by the image of thousands of scissors coming to life and swarming the streets?
• Project Gutenberg: The London and Country Brewer (1736)

Yes, it's that introspective time again. Since I've done these for the last two years already, I thought it would be interesting to put it all together in a table format to compare years.

I'm adding up the numbers from my three blogs, and it turns out that between them I wrote approximately 101,192 words among 511 blog entries for 2006. Wow... the previous year the numbers were 78,181 and 466. Another way to look at it: that's roughly the equivalent of a novel a year.

Time has been passing too quickly lately. Seriously. Where has it been going? I keep finding myself surprised to discover that something I thought happened just last year was really three years ago, for instance, or that I've been at my current job for four years, and it doesn't seem nearly that long.

Part of it is that I get older, the passing of time seems to speed up. My grandmother used to say this all the time, and while (as a kid) I knew the truth of this, I never really knew the truth of it, you know? I'm not sure that's possible when you're young; time seemed to pass so slowly then.

(And yet, here I am now, stuck in the present like always.)

I don't mean to imply that I'm depressed about my age, or anything like that. It was more of a fleeting observation that I wanted to write down—without sounding too maudlin. Perhaps I'll have more to write about this at a later time...

I did this same thing last January, and thought it was good fodder for looking back on 2006: my favorite posts over the last year. I noticed that I wrote less here as I stepped up my writing on The Brew Site and Hack Bend, and I wonder: if quantity went down, did quality go up? :)

• Mouse fire!
• NYTimes on Bend (late review)
• 10 ways Dick Cheney can kill you
• Anagram map of Downtown Bend
• Smoke alarm batteries
• Blogday, Earth Day, and a lawn rant
• Growing Up in Central Oregon: Introduction
• Growing Up in Central Oregon: Water in the Desert
• The Dirty Screech (mostly for that photo I found...)
• The truth about vampires
• These Santas are so wrong

I suppose the measure of how good a New Year's party is would be the hangover you have the next day... if so, then the party we had last night was a pretty good one. It wasn't wild or crazy or anything like that, we just had friends over (a bunch of them brought their kids), and it was just the accumulation over the course of the evening that did me in.

That, and the two (two! ugh) shots of Jagermeister I drank. I was mostly fine until that.

Anyway.

I never did the obligatory post-Christmas post-birthday post, either. So I'm rolling it all into one.

My birthday was very nice. We had lunch at the Bend Brewing Company where I drank their Hophead Imperial IPA and their seasonal Doppelbock. Both good. I love the fish and chips there. For dinner we had take-out Chinese and my mom and brother and his girlfriend joined us. Cake was a delicious dense dark chocolate cake.

My gifts? The traditional photo Christmas ornament (the photo is of the kids), a beer rating guide book (the name escapes me at the moment and it's not nearby), Barnes & Noble gift cards, money, a PS2 video game, a bottle of Jack Daniels with a measuring shot glass, and a neat shot glass and beer tasting glass from my brother in San Diego.

Christmas Eve was dinner at our house with the family. Lasagna, this year. (We don't really have a traditional Christmas Eve dinner, unlike, say, ham on Christmas day or turkey at Thanksgiving.) We set out the mountain of presents (90% for the kids) and the kids could hardly get to sleep.

Christmas morning the kids were up at 6:30 and going through their stockings by flashlight. So I got up a little before 7, started coffee, checked out the stocking loot, and helped the kids sort out presents. You can imagine what followed.

My gifts? Stephen King's latest novel, Lisey's Story, slippers, a bottle of beer, a book on the making of the Charlie Brown Christmas TV special, some crafty ornaments from the kids, more money, another PS2 game, a gift certificate to Pegasus Books here in town, and surprisingly, I even got the lightsaber I asked for! Totally didn't see that one coming.

Am I forgetting anything? ...probably.

Since then, I've spent some of my money and gift cards on a bunch of books, another PS2 game, some beer. And, I only worked two days in the past 11—five days off around Christmas, two at work, then four more for this last New Year weekend. Going back to work tomorrow? Uh, yeah, not really looking forward to it.

...but at least I'm not still hungover!