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Yeah, I'm aware that this is the first blog post I've made here this month, and it happens to be an American Idol post. I suck, now let's move on.

Basically, after watching all this season and tonight's finale, my pick for the winner is David Cook. I thought both finalists did really well, but my criteria is this: I pick the one who I would actually listen to on the radio. David Archuleta has got an amazing voice, and can really sing, there's no doubt—but he sings real yawners, stuff that I just wouldn't listen to. I get bored most of the time when he sings.

Plus, David Cook is a lot more dynamic on stage, and actually seems like the exact kind of personality-slash-performer the whole competition is staged to discover.

So Cook should be the winner. Of course, the judges all disagree and voted for Archuleta, and they're usually right.

In that case, it'll be another Daughtry phenomenon... Archuleta will win, but he'll fade into obscurity almost immediately while Cook will go on to have a successful career. You'll hear him on the radio within the year.

This is cross-posted from Hack Bend (I was there in a "Hack Bend" capacity) because it's cool and I'm just narcissistic enough to post multiple times:

Last month I had been invited to be on media panel at the Deschutes County offices, as the resident blogging expert representing how blogging and "new media" are becoming more prevalent in news and reporting and such. (The "expert" notion is up for debate, of course. I just do what I do.) The panel was to supplement media communications training for County employees and was held today—and I have to say, it was interesting and enlightening, and definitely something I'd do again if asked.

With me on the panel were Barney Lerten, of KTVZ; Heather Roberts, of KOHD; Heidi Hagemeier, of the Bulletin; and R.L. Garrigus from the Bend Radio Group. I've known Barney from back when he was still Bend.com, and had known of the others but not met them before. All very nice folks, and I was pleasantly surprised to find out they were already familiar with Hack Bend(!).

For the most part, it was as much a learning experience for me as for the County employees, I suspect; I talked a bit about the blogging aspect of things as it pertains to media and reporting and communication, but to a large extent I just listened to the others, all of whom come from more established channels with much more background than I.

And a big thanks to Anna Johnson, the Public Communications Coordinator with the County, for inviting me and arranging it all. Thanks!

I cross-posted this over on Hack Bend, as well: that blogger bash I wrote about? Yeah, it's on for sure.

This Wednesday, April 30th, at The Summit Saloon and Stage in downtown Bend at 125 NW Oregon Avenue. Starts about 5:30ish and goes til whenever. Here's the "official" description:

The first blogger meetup was a big success! Since then there's been a lot of growth and new folks have popped up in our local "blogosphere". Meetups like this are a nice chance for all of us to gather, unwind, and put some faces together with the blogs.

This event is primarily intended for bloggers who wish to meet other bloggers. If you don't have a blog, then this may not be the get-together for you. So, if you just can't stand not being there and don't already have a blog... what are you waiting for?!

I'll be there for sure. Will you?

Today I've been officially blogging for six years. Ironically, yesterday marked Chris' five-year blogiversary. It's going around!

Not much more to it than noting the date, except to bring up the imminent next blogger meetup.

Which will be this month, on the 30th—next Wednesday.

Shannon, Jen, BOR, and I are in talks to figure out where. (Stay tuned for further announcements.) So obviously the four of us at least are in. Who else is in?

Since I'm celebrating six years of blogging this month, I thought it'd be interesting to go back through the past six Aprils and link to some highlights.

April 2002 - Really not much to see here... I was just starting blogging, playing with the software I was developing, and it's really just mundane stuff. I think Pong was a highlight.

April 2003 - Even less than in 2002. We saw Bon Jovi for the first time and there was more work on the software.

April 2004 - I was blogging up a storm. Pretty geeky stuff, an equal mixture of technical posts and non-technical-but-still-geeky posts and some random things. My musings for an A-Team movie first appeared, and—strangely enough—I first noted the use of the word "blog" on Law & Order.

April 2005 - I feel like I was hitting my stride in blogging style. A lot less of the technical posts and more... I don't know, "general" posts? Fun posts? More of a mix of links, ideas, commentary, irony... Not sure if that's the best way to describe them, but here's a sample to judge for yourself:

• Superman is a dick
• Globe
• Sesame Street top 25
• Scrapple
• $40 a day
• Cougar! (and Cougar! The Return and Cougar! Reloaded)
• The Burger King creeps me out (with 673 comments!)
• Things about Bend that I miss

April 2006 - More of the same. I really think it was around 2005 and into 2006 that I found my "voice" and I don't really cringe when I read those and later posts. You can see the seeds of Hack Bend being sown with this post (and I started Hack Bend the following month, in May '06), and this post and this post still make me laugh. A lot.

April 2007 - I blogged a lot less—no kidding, right—but I prefer to think of it as "quality over quantity" in this case. My favorite for that month has to be this post, showcasing just how wonderfully twisted San Diego-area activities can be.

This is one of those TV posts that I hate to do because I feel like I become a parody of a cliché of myself, but I need to scratch the itch so I'll just keep the commentary down to short one- or two-line comments rather than long-winded diatribes. And no, I'm not going to talk about "Lost."

"American Idol" — they really, really need to get rid of both Paula Abdul and Ryan Seacrest (or, as I like to call him, "America's Douchebag").

"The Office" — the funniest show on TV. Last week's first new post-writer's-strike episode: funny and uncomfortable!

"Scrubs" — the other funniest show on TV.

"CSI: Miami" — I don't watch it.

"I Survived" — the few bits of this I've seen? Damn, the most depressing show ever.

"ER" — I don't watch it.

"Law & Order" — I like the new cast members this season; didn't realize 'til later that Linus Roache also played Thomas Wayne in "Batman Begins." Nice.

"24" — what? There's a show called "24"? Oh, maybe next year.

It's been at the back of my mind recently that this month marks six years of blogging for me. I am of course talking about "official" blogging, with the software and reverse-chronology posts and comments and such—naturally I had web pages before 2002 but none of those were blogs.

Six years of blogging. April 22nd, 2002, to be exact, and since then I've spun out two other blogs (which lately have been getting far more attention from me) and written a crazy amount of words—exactly how many will have to be a topic for another post. But I keep thinking that this is some sort of milestone (since I missed the five-year anniversary) and that it should be celebrated somehow.

Shannon's organizing another blogger meetup this month, I believe, so maybe something in conjunction with that.

Thoughts?

Not a hangover in the literal sense, but it sort of feels that way because I'm not sure where March went and I'm sitting here looking at the calendar thinking, "Where the hell did April come from?" Like it's already starting out with that thick, muzzy-headed pounding that you have with a hangover.

Seriously, what the hell did happen to March? St. Patrick's Day, Easter, Spring Break... everything seemed off this year. I blame Easter. It was far too early. And Spring Break went by too fast.

And April... well, April. No, I don't do April Fool's Day; at least, not online. (Not really in real life, either.) I can't stand April Fool's Day online; I find it's just an enormous waste of time. Look, it's been done; I get it, ha ha, now move along, there's plenty of other oddball and cool stuff to see online that's for real.

See? I told you, March hangover: I'm coming across cranky as hell, fumbling for a brick of aspirin while gulping down coffee and squinting against the inordinately bright light.

Okay, I'm being too clever even for myself. More later with some real content.

On Thursday I was interviewed by Peter Sachs from our local paper the Bulletin for an article on the local blogging community, and today the article showed up—on the front page, no less! Here's the link to the online version.

I didn't get my picture in it this time (unlike the last time, a few years ago, that we bloggers were profiled), but—allow me to gloat a little—I did get the first quote. Which was a total surprise to me; I actually figured I was more incidental this time around, since there were a bunch of other people that were talked to before me.

On a similar note, I was invited by Anna Johnson, Public Communications Coordinator for Deschutes County, to serve on a media panel on blogging and the media late in April. I accepted, and as that approaches, I'll probably have more to say on it.

Fun! Maybe there is something to this blogging thing after all...

Over on The Brew Site today, the topic is "Organic Beer" (it's The Session, which is a net-wide beer blogging event where anyone with a blog—not just beer bloggers—can write about the given theme) and while I was writing a review of Deschutes Brewery's Green Lakes Organic Ale, I had originally inserted a bit about "organic" and what it (as a term) means to me.

However, it felt a bit out-of-place over there, so I'm reprinting it here instead, largely because I like what I wrote well enough that I didn't want to lose it, and also because it fits in better with my "Growing Up in Central Oregon" series that I sporadically write here on this blog.

Here's what I wrote on the topic of "organic":

With respect to people like Chris [O'Brien, of the Beer Activist blog hosting The Session this month] who are genuinely trying to make the world we live in a better place, if I'm being totally honest, I tend to take a suspicious view of things labeled "organic." Not that I think organic is bad, or denotes something lesser than "normal"... rather I think it's because nowadays it seems to have been co-opted as a marketing term, which is opposite of the way I grew up.

When my parents moved here to Central Oregon back in the mid-seventies (I was three), they wanted to live as self-sustainingly as possible. To that end they bought five acres of rural land upon which large vegetable gardens were grown and cows and chicken were raised. We had fresh milk and eggs every day, beef and chicken that we raised and butchered, fruits and vegetables grown in the garden, and all of it was done completely organically—no chemicals, no hormones, nothing like that. Only manure and compost for the gardens, locally-bought hay for the cows (along with what grass we grew in the pasture), natural foods for the chickens, all like that.

In a word, organic.

Only we never called it "organic" or had to verbalize it—it just was. Growing up like that shaped my view of things, and to this day the "organic" way of doing things is, to me, just the natural, logical way these things should be done. Having to refer to "organic" as a special designation therefore just seems to me to be... well, backwards, I guess.

Honestly, I don't intend to sound high-and-mighty on the subject, and it's very possible that I'm speaking from some fundamental ignorance on the movement.

But there you go. To me, labeling something "organic" as a special designation somehow actually seems more artificial. Or maybe more contrived... either way, I may have just opened myself up for a flaming.

This is one that I started years ago and have yet to finish. It's definitely a draft revision, rough and cringeworthy in parts. I've recently given thought to rewriting it (and finishing it) from a different viewpoint—largely because of my vast ignorance in the hows and whys a State Police Detective would actually get about in a story like this.

Current running word count is about 7,288.

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

With a clatter, Roberta Marvis picked up the used dishes from the table and began scraping the scraps of food into the grimy steel sink. Bits of corn, chicken bones, crumbs of bread splattered into the stained basin with tiny splashes into what brackish water there was. The chicken bones floated, small chunks of torn flesh still attached. Muttering under her breath, Roberta flipped a limp strand of mousy hair back out of her eyes and stacked the plates and soiled silverware on the counter. She could clean it up later; right now she drifted from the drab yellow trailer kitchen toward the minuscule living room and her husband and daughter, from where sounds of "Wheel of Fortune" were emanating.

Four hours later the drab yellow was a dull grayish in the lack of light when Roberta went back to clean up the dishes. The corn scraps' heady aroma wafted up from the sink, but Roberta scarcely noticed as she cleaned the dishes with a lot of clattering and went to bed. Only later did she remember that the chicken bones that had been floating in the sink water had disappeared.

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We are off to Portland for the long weekend; the first such trip we've done in awhile. A chance to relax, do some shopping, maybe visit OMSI, that sort of thing. No real plans, just a relaxing vacation trip.

One stop I'm definitely planning to make—the only one I actively campaigned for, actually—is John's Marketplace. It's a stunningly amazing beer store, with more selection than I've ever seen. I blogged about it on The Brew Site last year after my first trip there; this time I'll take the real camera and get some proper pictures. And some beer.

As usual, computer with us, but I don't know how often I'll be online. If anyone wants to reach me, shoot me an email or fill out the contact form. Otherwise, have a good weekend!

The trailer for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull came out today. See it here.

Of course, I could've embedded it here, too, but I thought I'd rather whet your whistle with screengrabs. More fun, too.

Continuing in my series of totally random toy posts... presenting the JUSTICE HEROES LEAGUE!!!

Flea markets and foreign knock-offs of American pop culture are the best. (Via.)

My brother sent me the link to this today: The 10 Star Wars Toys that Unintentionally Look Like Other Celebrities. Everyone must see this.

And I don't care what anybody says, this is the best one:

I posted the movie poster to the new Indiana Jones movie last month, but now I've got something even better.

LEGO Indiana Jones.

Oh yeah. Four sets. And yes, there's a LEGO Ark of the Covenant.

But wait—it gets even better:

LEGO Indiana Jones: The Video Game.

Holy. Crap.

Want.

I finally broke down and have been checking out a couple of Web 2.0 apps the past few days. Sooner or later I'll catch up and be trendy. Maybe.

twitter

Okay, so what's the big deal exactly? I guess it's kind of like micro-blogging, which seems interesting. You can use the service on your cell phone, via SMS, if you're into that kind of thing (I'm not). And I have yet to "follow" enough people to make it compelling. But hey, you never know. My profile is here, so you can check it out, follow me, whatever.

Anywhere.FM

This sounded interesting when I read about it: they host your music library for you, and it's available, er, anywhere via a browser with an internet connection. Basically, like iTunes only hosted on the web and accessible from any computer. I'm not a die-hard music guy, but if nothing else this is a good service to put my MP3s on, and so far it's free and unlimited.

(Oh yeah, it also has friend lists and free music and that whole social networking aspect... maybe you can listen to friends' music? Not sure yet.)

Only, it's basically one big Flash app and seems buggy yet; one day last week the thing kept restarting itself for "updates" in the middle of the day, so was basically unusable. Beta software, I guess, but it seems to work well (when it works) and the music sounds fine. It has promise, but I can't help but wonder what's going to happen when the other shoe drops and it's no longer free and unlimited. Which we all know is inevitable, right? Right?

This is another of the (few) completed stories I've written. It goes way back... to the first creative writing course I took in college... about 16 years ago or so. It's been ages since I've looked at it, but I can tell you it's rough, not very polished. I remember being inspired by Stephen King while writing this, too.

It's about 3215 words in length.

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

I

I stand on the edge of the rock, overlooking the ocean. It is windy, sand blowing in my eyes; I convince myself that's what's causing the tears to stream down my face. I look at my hands, and I wonder at the past four days.

I am high up.

The ocean looks so inviting.

II

I slung the duffel bag over the rail and onto the deck of the boat. Around me, people, some scruffy-looking, some well-dressed, traveled to and fro along the dock, working at their respective trades or enjoying the sights and smells of the fishing fleet in port. The day was relatively mild, with a clear blue sky and a light breeze coming in from the ocean. Out to sea there was a thin gray line of fog, about five to eight miles out — it would be in the bay by nightfall, with the wind. The air tasted of brine and was heavy, but not oppressive, with moisture, and the sounds of the tourism and fish packing plants carried over the water of the bay with eerie clarity.

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As seen on Slashdot: Dreams Actually Virtual Reality Threat Simulation? (Follow through; it's trippy.)

I knew there was a reason I was dreaming about [insert sufficiently goofy dream topic here]!

This past year I kept track of all the books I read. Why, I'm not entirely sure, other than curiosity. All in all, not counting the large number of comics and comic trade paperbacks, I read 35½ books in 2007. (The "half" book was a book of short stories by H.P. Lovecraft; I'd read the first half ages ago.)

The ratio of fiction to non-fiction was about 2-to-1. And even though most of these books weren't actually published in 2007, that's irrelevant since that's when I read them and this list is simply based on my opinion anyway... just use it as a starting point for some really good reads.

(And while all the books I read were pretty good, these were the standouts.)

Best fiction books (no particular order)

• Pattern Recognition, by William Gibson. I haven't yet read Gibson's latest (Spook Country), but Pattern Recognition was so amazingly well-done that it (finally) toppled Neuromancer as Gibson's best work.
• Halting State, by Charles Stross. This was the year I picked up and started reading Stross' work (four novels) and Halting State, the newest, is the best so far. Way fun and full of irritatingly thought-provoking ideas. In a good way, of course.
• Cell, by Stephen King. I already extolled the virtues of Cell here. Great book, tightly plotted, gripping and satisfying.
• The Shipping News, by E. Annie Proulx. Didn't see this one coming, but I was totally engrossed.

Best nonfiction books (no particular order)

• Collapse, by Jared Diamond. Like his last book, Diamond takes mountains of information and evidence and seemingly unconnected facts and weaves them all together effortlessly so as to make them seem completely obvious.
• The Ghost Map, by Steven Johnson. Historical medical detectives. Or "CSI: Victorian London." Whichever, it's really good. A little squicky, too.
• Listening for Coyote, by William Sullivan. Sullivan hiked across Oregon, from Port Orford (I think) to Hells Canyon, and kept a fantastically detailed diary along the way. Super readable and enjoyable.

I just flipped the switch on the new design for the site, and very surprisingly, things mostly went off without a hitch.

There's still some unfinished things I need to, uh, finish, and I haven't ported the design over to all the pages in the site yet... so you'll still see the old green layout pop up from time to time, depending on where you go. And I'll be fine tuning over the next couple of days too. A good rule of thumb is, expect it to be broken... til I fix it.

The main point of the redesign is to focus on the primary experience: reading the stuff I write. Without all the unnecessary crap elements getting in the way. There's some of the advertising stuff going on too, because I'm not that pure.

Assuming you're not just reading this in your favorite RSS reader, and are actually visiting the site, tell me what you think.

The first post of 2008! Hope everyone's having a good holiday and stayed safe last night. Not much going on today, just a relaxing day off... aside from some blogging (and playing around with the new design for this site), I'll just kick back with a book and maybe some video games.

New Year's resolutions? Anyone got 'em? (I'm thinking about it. Nothing yet.)

2008. Possibilities.