chuggnutt.com

Starting tomorrow (er, today... Friday), I'm gonna be offline. We're going camping for the family reunion all weekend. It'll be nice to unplug for a while.

And nice to be camping, too. It's one of those things I really like to do, but only ever do it once a year—yep, at the family reunion. Which is fine, but it always turns into such a production... it'd be nice sometime to throw a bunch of gear in the car and just go, maybe take more time than a weekend, and just... I don't know, decompress maybe.

But I'll take what I can get. We'll have a great time, we've got a really good campsite this year, it's gonna be good.

I'm in Walla Walla tonight, on the road for work. My company purchased a house up here and needed to get a computer and WiFi set up. It's kind of a cool deal, the house is available to employees spending time up here—business takes a priority, but it's open to anyone who wants to take a weekend in Walla Walla also.

So, in addition to getting the stuff done I came to do, I also stopped at Three Rivers Winery and bought some wine to take home, and had dinner at the Mill Creek Brewpub (and wrote a review of it on The Brew Site).

Back home tomorrow. In case anyone's wondering, it was a five hour drive from Bend, counting a few reststops. I'll have more to write about the drive and Walla Walla tomorrow night, probably.

Spent half a day Saturday at the county fair, which was both good and bad. The bad part was that it was hot—damn hot—and expensive. The good part is that it's the Fair and we had fun—and we got there when they opened so we didn't have to deal with the crowds and lines like Chris did.

You know what I like best about the fair? The livestock and the crafts. The stuff the fair is actually supposed to be about: showing your animals, or your goods, and the competition between those things. I particularly like the poultry exhibit, probably because we raised chickens growing up. I enjoy viewing the rest of the livestock, some more than others (the sheep are just "eh"), but the birds are the best.

The canned, prepared, or grown foods are highlights, too. I particularly like the beer and wine showings; there's never many anymore, but it's still cool. I remember when I entered my homebrew in the fair some years back; I brought home several ribbons. That was cool.

The kids loved the rides, of course. I could personally do without: they're expensive and you have to wait too long in the heat. I remember liking the rides well enough when I was younger, I think; at least, the "boring" stuff I described above didn't interest me. I wonder at what point that changed...

All good fun. I even won some stuffed toys for the kids at the midway games. Know the secret to winning those games? They're easy; the secret part is how much each individual game costs! That's how they get you. If you want to win a big prize, you basically need to shell out $16-32 per game (assuming you win each "throw" you buy). That's some crazy economy of scale, right there.

All in all, a good, tiring time was had. Maybe next year I'll brew some beer to enter in the fair; my wife is convinced that if I'd entered my pumpkin ale, I would have won first prize. Possibly. But that's what next year is for.

A year ago tomorrow, I had a photo shoot with the Bulletin (along with Jake and Chris) for a big article on local blogging that ran a week later. Amazing, that was a whole year ago.

Eh, it wasn't that bad. We had our picnic dinner in the park with Shannon and Simone, at the farmer's market. I'm rethinking this whole "blogger meetup" thing though since only Shannon, Simone, and myself ever get together... if someone else wants to organize a blogger deal, I'll come, but I'm done trying to put something together. For now, anyway.

The blogworthy part of the evening (the part Shannon didn't want to read... or maybe she did, I'm not sure) was Shannon's skirt. She's wearing a just-above-the-knee orange skirt and we're all sitting on the grass (my family's there, too), and what happens when you're wearing a short skirt and sitting on the ground? Yah, it rides up and every time you shift you have to make sure you're not flashing the person sitting across from you. Which was me.

Do you know how hard it is to not see up someone's skirt in that situation? Well, I didn't see anything—I almost did, once or twice—but at some point Shannon realized that I was studiously looking elsewhere whenever she'd start shifting around and caught herself just in time. It turned into the joke afterward, but no, I wasn't trying to see if she was going commando or not.

See what kind of fun y'all miss out on? :)

Update: No, Shannon wasn't doing anything on purpose... it was just an unfortunate arrangement. See, this is why I don't wear skirts...

Shannon did a lurker day on her blog a couple of weeks ago and said I should do one, too. Okay!

Since it's nearly midnight, let's call Friday "Lurker Day" on chuggnutt.com! If you lurk on my site, make a comment! I'd love to hear from you. Even if you've made comments before :). And, I'll shamelessly steal Shannon's Lurker Day questions for myself:

1. Who are you?
2. How did you find this blog?
3. Why do you come back?

Seemed long because we had so much going on. Friday night my wife and I stayed at the Pine Ridge Inn here in town for an early anniversary trip (my mother stayed with the kids). While having dinner at Cork Friday night, I happened to see an old friend walk by the window, and this was about as unlikely an encounter as it gets: this is someone I knew and worked with in Spokane, back in the mid-90s, whom I haven't seen in nearly five years, and currently lives near Seattle. So when I first saw him (and his wife and son) walk by the window of a restaurant in downtown Bend, at first I thought I'd had too much wine.

Turns out they came down for the weekend, pretty much spur-of-the-moment, and hadn't had a chance to call us yet.

Saturday we checked out the Saturday Market (pretty small around here), then hit the Bite of Bend. We hooked up with our friends again there, and made plans to have Father's Day dinner at our place with my family. Of course, we had to go shopping to get everything we needed, so we picked up the kids, hit Costco and Safeway, and had a quick dinner at Subway.

As to the Bite of Bend, I'll write up a mini-review after this.

Sunday, Father's Day. Nice, leisurely day, except for all the house cleaning in preparation for having everyone over. Everyone had a good time, even when the massive storm hit (we were barbecuing, wouldn't you know). Rain, hail and thunder—it hailed so much that there were still drifts in the backyard hours later. And actually the rain pretty much stopped by the time I was out cooking on the grill, so it was no big deal.

So yeah, it definitely felt like we had a long weekend. After leaving work on Friday, I didn't get on the computer at all (except to shut it down) the entire weekend, til work on Monday... that was kind of nice. Kind of a mini-vacation from it all.

But, back to it.

But I'm really not. If I'm burning out on anything, it's work and the daily routine of it. As a consequence, blogging takes a backseat and even though I have things I want to write about, when I'm finally at the computer at a point where I can, I just don't have the energy or ambition to do it. Which is ironic, since what I'd really rather be doing is blogging/writing full time instead. But alas, I haven't yet (figured out how to) (gotten to the point where I can) make enough money doing that...

...Jake of UtterlyBoring that is. He posted an item today about our local Wal-Mart being open 24 hours, mentioned it to Barney, and a story showed up on the Z21 news NewsChannel 21 this evening. Barney confirms it in the comments.

That's hot.

June already? Geez, where'd the time go? It's not like May wasn't a full month... some highlights:

• Put together a monster swingset
• Dental cleaning... with novocaine. I had two back teeth that needed periodontal work and scaling. Nasty stuff. My mouth was sore for days afterward.
• The end of the TV season (I have another post on this sometime)
• Beautiful, 80-plus degree weather... dampened (no pun intended) by massive flash flood inducing thunderstorms
• We were more socially active than normal... we went to at least three barbecues, which is a lot for us

Hmm, that's all I can think of right now. June promises to be a busy month, too. There's a potluck at work tomorrow, a neighborhood BBQ on Friday, a kids birthday party on Sunday, our anniversary, a friend's college graduation, and more I'm sure.

Perhaps we should do a blogger get together this month?

Just a quick note, today is the three year anniversary of when I started this blog (April 22, 2002). It's also Earth Day, but this is more important :).

Kind of crazy to think it's already been three whole years... I guess I'll have to celebrate, somehow.

I got a copy of Wednesday's Bulletin today (the Community Life section) that mentions my blog (see The Bulletin quoting my site?). The article is about both Reynolds Pond and Mayfield Pond, both east of Bend, as little-known oases in the desert. I wasn't quoted directly, but I got a paragraph:

Go to www.chuggnutt.com and you'll find a wistful description of Reynolds Pond written by a person who spent a lot of time out there as a child. On a return visit 12 years later, the author noted that several barren islands in the pond were now covered with vegetation.

That sounds about right. I don't know about spending "a lot of time out there" but I did write that I frequented the pond growing up, so that's fair, I guess.

Jim Witty, the Bulletin's travel writer (I think), wrote the article. When we used to get the paper, I enjoyed the accounts of Oregon and beyond he would write for the weekend travel section. Thanks, Jim!

We don't get the Bend Bulletin anymore, so I missed this, but apparently yesterday the Bulletin ran an article in their Community section (which they don't post online) wherein they quoted my blog on the subject of Reynolds Pond (with attribution—to my blog, but not to me by name). I found out today when my mom told me about it, and then someone at work told me they saw it, also.

I'll get a copy, and I'll definitely comment on it when I do, but in the meantime, has anyone else seen this?

Don't have much to write about. Okay, that's not totally true; I've got some things I want to write about, but they'll run long and that's not really what I feel like doing at nearly 11:30 at night. The topics? You'll see why I'd run long:

• Evolution
• Ebooks
• Reviews of some regular books I'm reading

So instead, tonight, I'll stick with the mundane things that tend to bore the hell out of people...

We steam cleaned the carpet this last weekend. It's amazing how much dirt and pet hair had accumulated in the ten months we've been living here. Amazing and gross. Makes me want to get rid of all the pets.

This next weekend we need to dethatch the lawn and try to restore parts of it. I hate lawn maintenance. Makes me want to get rid of all the grass.

The week before last, when I was sick, it turned out I had a bronchial sinus infection. I ended up getting antibiotics to get rid of it, which is something I almost never have to do.

I've been teaching my five year old to play checkers. She's got a good grasp of the rules, though needs to learn strategy and how to see the big picture. I'm pretty impressed by how quickly she picked it up, though. I have a feeling the strategy part will come to her pretty fast and then I'll be frustrated at how I get beat every time :)

Maybe some have noticed this, but I finally got around to making my weblog archives by category publically viewable; you can view the summary list here. Yes, that's a lot of categories; I model my system after The Open Directory Project's. And no, I don't have all my weblog entries there; there's a bunch that I made before I started categorizing. The list will grow as I assign the old stuff.

And you're not seeing the true hierarchy like ODP does, for simplicity's sake I'm just showing the final category each entry sits in. And I tend to multi-categorize, too, so posts may show up under several. Anyway, it's a whole new way to datamine my site. Enjoy.

I've been sick all week. Starting last Thursday, in fact. The weird thing is I never get sick like this. It's very odd. Started out like I was coming down with the flu or something, joints and muscles all achy, pressure in the head building up intolerably. That was last Thursday, so Friday I spent about an hour and a half at work and then came home and slept (also something I never do).

Over the weekend it moved into a head/lung cold. Like a sinus infection, so while my nose didn't run much like a headcold would, the pressure in my sinuses was such that rolling my eyes too much in their sockets would hurt. And I had a deep cough, so that my lungs hurt when I coughed but not much of anything would come up—not a wet cough, though occasionally I'd cough up some phlegm.

This week it's lessened, but I'm still low on energy and fighting it. The pressure in my head is pretty much gone but I still have a cough, wetter now and I cough junk up.

Sleeping fine for the most part; I've been taking aspirin before bed (tried some fake Sudafed Sunday night, but totally didn't like the way it messed up my sleep and dreams). I've seriously considered seeing the doctor several times, and then I start to feel better enough to drop the notion.

So that's what's going on with me.

Sorry for the light posting lately. I've just been swamped at work and busy with sick kids at home and not really feeling like writing anything. I'm still swamped at work but of course I'm taking a minute to blog this :).

Wow. I just did a quick check and found that, counting this post, I've made 552 entries here on this blog. I had no idea I'd written that much... that's kind of scary.

Jake clued me in to the fact that anyone trying to add comments here was getting big, ugly PHP error message. D'oh! I figure it's been down for three days, when I was last futzing around with blocking comment spam. Go figure. But on the bright side, I haven't gotten any comment spam for three days.

As promised, I've changed this site's copyright to a Creative Commons license; specifically, an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 license. What this means is, anyone is free to make derivative works of my stuff, or to copy, distribute, display, and perform it, so long as they give me credit, distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one (if they alter, transform, or build upon this stuff), and not use the work for commercial purposes.

Basically, in English, this clears up any copyright legal issues that might arise with things like aggregators or the Google Toolbar that reuses/remixes my content. I may try out different CC licenses from time to time, but for the most part I think it's covered.

Yeah, I know, but I just haven't felt the need to blog much of anything lately. My ambition to post has waned, and the empty stretches between entries grow larger... It won't last forever, though. I know this much.

Meanwhile, Central Oregon has been experiencing unseasonably warm weather, and they're saying it's going to be a drought year because there's been no snow. Not that I mind the springlike weather overly much, but could we at least wait until it's spring? I like having seasons, and it seems vaguely ridiculous to be washing the car by hand in January (which I did last weekend).

Damn global warming. :)

Gah, there's nothing worse than sitting here trying to think of something to write, and getting nothing. I have some ideas for things, but nothing that seems particularly illuminating while I'm sitting here tonight. I just got tired of seeing too many days going by on that calendar there on the right and felt like I should write something down.

Interesting; look at my post from January 9th of last year. It's very nearly the same.

Jury duty was interesting—I skirted being on a DUI trial by that much. How it works is about 30 people show up for the jury summons. Of those, 12 are randomly selected and interviewed. I was one of the 12. Several potential jurors were excused, and after an hour of jury interviews they finally selected the final six.

Two things stand out. First, the courtroom was cold, like air conditioning was on or something. (Hello, it's like 20 degrees outside!) Second, the defense attorney was just a kid, a young guy who looked like he'd just graduated from law school. He spent a good 45 minutes interviewing us, and asking the randomest, strangest questions. Total newbie.

I don't have to go tomorrow, and I don't know yet about Friday. After that, I'm done for whenever I get summoned again. Mark off another milestone in life.

Yup, that's what I got tomorrow. Never been summoned for jury duty before, so I'm anxious to see what it's like, but I hope I don't end up on some big trial or a sequestered jury or anything like that.

In the spirit of the Google Zeitgeist, I've pulled together some interesting stats from chuggnutt.com for the year 2004. On to it!

• Number of blog entries: 306
• Approximate total number of words: 45,537
• Average words per blog entry: 148.8
• Total visitors: 242,433 (includes bots, spiders, aggregators, all that junk)
• Average visitors per day: 687
• April was the most active month, as LiveJournalers found my Matrix Name page; April 1 alone showed 6,122 visitors
• Most popular phrases people searched this site for:
  • matrix name
  • matrix
  • mysql
  • html2text
  • ebooks
  • php
  • amazon
  • kermit
  • netoffice
  • black butte porter
  • sony
  • spokane
  • beer
• Most popular phrases people entered on search engines to get here:
  • free palm ebooks (and tons of variants on this and "palm reader," "pdb reader," "palm ebooks," etc.)
  • boba fett
  • matrix name
  • scary picture
  • darth maul
  • kermit the frog
  • what's in a name
  • name generator
  • html to text conversion
  • a-team movie
  • zach braff blog
• Internet Explorer accounts for about 62% of all traffic. Mozilla/Netscape, about 14%. Blog- and RSS-related "browsers" are running at about 17-20%.
• People made 566 comments on this site (not counting comment spam I deleted).

Interesting year! Can't wait to see how 2005 will shape up.

Yeah, a straight-up ego/vanity post. I'm off from work today, the first day of a five-day weekend. How's everyone else's day going? :)

Yes, I'm finally back posting. It's been a week.

The eye surgery went very well, as good as it could have gone, and except for red eyes, you wouldn't even know our son had surgery. The only real issue we've had is a bit of a struggle when we give him his eye medicine (topical ointment). Other than that, everything went through with flying colors.

Coming back from Portland Wednesday we ran into some snow and a short delay on the Santiam Pass. Right about at the summit, in the worst of the snow, traffic was backed up on a corner because somewhere up ahead (out of sight) a truck or snowplow or something had apparently spun out. Otherwise it was a fairly uneventful drive.

Thursday and Friday were catch-up days at work, and it didn't help that I had my employee review Thursday morning (nearly two hours shot) and the annual company meeting Friday (the entire first half of the day gone). So I'm still behind on some stuff and that won't go away as I have six more days off this month (three holiday days and three vacation days). Incidentally, my review went fine.

Did some Christmas shopping today. Picked up a few things, need to get more. We have "Secret Santa" at work next week and I have two of five gifts so far.

And to top it all off, my right wrist is hurting like a son-of-a-bitch. All going blind jokes aside, it's been sore all week and since yesterday it's just killing me; I don't know if it's onset carpal tunnel or a pinched nerve or what, but the source of the pain seems to be the base of the thumb joint at the wrist, and I can't make much of a fist nor grip anything with any strength. Nor is there really a full range of motion without it being painful. Typing is not terrible, but not great. Gah. Must be getting old.

Sitting in the Red Lion Inn at the Convention Center in Portland tonight; we'll be here for the next couple of days. Not a pleasure or casual visit, though; tomorrow our son (he's three) has corrective eye surgery for esotropia.

It'll be his second such surgery (our daughter, who's five, has also had two eye surgeries). It's simultaneously a minor and a major surgery; minor because there's nothing being transplanted, or amputated, or anything like that, and major because he will still be fully anesthetized and getting the full surgical "treatment."

The gory details? The lateral muscles of the eyes—those attached to the sides—are moved forwards or backwards on the wall of the eyeball to correct the respective alignment problem. Yes, this involves removing them from where they attach and sewing them onto a new location. Freaky? You bet, but at the same time utterly amazing at what can be accomplished in this day and age.

Anyway, that's the latest in case blogging gets light the next couple of days. (Though tonight I'm blogging a bit.)

December is upon us already. Bust out your advent calendars (we did), hang your wreaths (we did), Christmas is a mere 24 days away. Was Thanksgiving really less than a week ago? Jeez, having this cold must be screwing with my sense of time.

I made my traditional fruitcakes over the weekend. Really! I (loosely) follow a recipe from an older Betty Crocker cookbook, it's better than most modern fruitcake recipes I've seen, and I wrap the fruitcakes in brandy-soaked cheesecloth to mellow for a month (or more, depending on when I make them). That's the secret, soaking in brandy and aging. I love my fruitcakes. You would, too. Maybe tomorrow I'll post the recipe I use.

Gotta gear up for more holiday baking, too. Gingersnaps, sugar cookies (shaped and cutouts), fudge, at least. I remember one thing my mom used to make for the holidays: dates stuffed with almonds and cream cheese and rolled in powdered sugar. Awesome! More work than I want to take on right now, though.

Mmmmmmmm, December.

I hope everyone had a pleasant Thanksgiving this year. Ours was, except for the fact that I was sick. Nothing serious, I just came home from work early Wednesday totally drained, achy, throaty—all the usual signs of the flu. Went to bed for awhile, got up for dinner (soup), went to bed early. Took much medicine. Slept poorly, but fortunately it "merely" turned into a troublesome cold. (This is the latest I've been up since Tuesday, and I won't be up for much longer.)

We had a small group for Thanksgiving this year—just us and my mom. Despite that, we still had a 20 pound turkey to roast for some insane reason. That thing was a monster. It's still a monster, sitting in the fridge waiting to be carved... but it was delicious.

Okay, enough for tonight. Gotta go cough some more before bed.

Looks like this Thursday the 18th will be the next Bend/Central Oregon Bloggers get-together, at the new McMenamins Grand Opening at the Old St. Francis School. We (my wife will be joining us this time) should be there sometime between six and seven o'clock, but I don't know where we'll be meeting anybody, as it might be kind of crazy.

I'm pleased to report that Portland is still where it's supposed to be. Or at least, it was when we left on Sunday, I can't really speak for any time after that.

We stayed at the downtown Residence Inn over the weekend, which despite being located right next to I-5 is a rather nice hotel. Our room had been upgraded to a two-bedroom suite at no charge after my wife told them the sob story about our miserable night in Stockton next to the freeway, so we ended up with two full bathrooms, three TVs and a full kitchen. They have a very good breakfast for guests, beyond the typical continental breakfasts of juice and muffins you usually see. The only drawback (aside from the freeway) was that they have road work and construction of some kind going on literally all around the hotel, so getting in and out is a hassle and confusing at first.

No WiFi in the rooms, though. They do have high speed internet access, but it's ethernet-based and sadly, I don't have a card for that in the laptop. So be warned.

Oh, the other thing was that I forgot to take my own pillow with me; I can't stand hotel pillows and just have the hardest time getting a good night's sleep with them. I figure I must be getting old.

Took the kids to see "The Incredibles" and then to Chuck E. Cheese's on Saturday. "The Incredibles" was fantastic; my next entry will be about that. Chuck E. Cheese's, well, it's been awhile since I'd been there, so I'd forgotten just how crazy that place is. Like Vegas for kids, as my friend Justin said. I'll probably let another year or two or three pass before I take the kids again :).

Off to Portland this weekend. I may be online—we're taking the laptop with the wireless card—but may not be, either; sometimes it's nice to unplug.

Don't bother buying a Brother printer. I helped to set up a new one today and, get this, it didn't come with any type of interface cable. No USB, no parallel cable, nothing. It even says so on the quickstart instructions. WTF? Is that stupid or what?

Speaking of stupid, or perhaps just stubborn, AOL apparently doesn't get the hint that we don't need their service, and has called us several times. Of course, I brought this on myself—when we went to San Diego, I installed AOL (the free trial) on the laptop just in case we needed to get online and didn't have any other means of doing so. (Never needed it; we got a strong WiFi signal at my brother's place.) AOL is sure trying to master the hard sell. When I cancelled, the guy tried to resell me on AOL something like three times, even after I had explained that I didn't need it and already have broadband access. Must be following the "three NOs before you go" rule. They sure aren't gaining any favor at our house.

I guess I'd better blog something before people think I'm dead. Well, not totally: I've been posting to The Brew Site, so it's not a total wash.

So let's see, what to blog about... this looks interesting: National Novel Writing Month. Write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. I've almost half toyed with the idea of doing this. Almost.

Quick post over! Nothing more to see here. Move on about your business...

We had a blogger get-together at the Cascade Lakes Brewery again this evening, it was a lot of fun and more of us showed up. I'm tired so there'll be a more detailed post later, but here's a short version: Simone brought Swiss chocolate. Dane wants a video game based on smashing Coke cans with a sledgehammer. Kasey can't read blogs at work. Jesse never played Donkey Kong before tonight.

Actually, there was a lot more going on. More later.

Yes, we're back from our vacation to SoCal. Actually, we got back yesterday and today was back to work and routine, but I just wasn't quite ready to "return" to the blog, as it were.

It was a good trip, but tiring. San Diego is a neat city, but in general I wouldn't want to live in Southern California; there's too many people and too much traffic and it's just too big... I'd go nuts. And it's too damn expensive. I'm glad to be back in Bend.

I'll dole out travel stories gradually, rather than writing everything up in one giant blog entry. It's easier on everybody that way :)

Vacation is about to start. Once I leave work, we're pretty much on the road, and while we're bringing a laptop, there's no guarantee I'll be online much, so this may be the last post for a while. Or not; I'll try to update from the road if I get the chance.

Au revoir!

I got an email today from someone from the online magazine Preservation Online wanting to get a quote from me about the Crane Shed demolition, since I wrote a bunch about it. Cool. I wrote back letting them know I'd be happy to give a quote, or they could just quote my blog. Since I haven't heard back from them, I assume they'll quote my blog.

Yikes, it would appear that I've taken a blogging hiatus. Not so. I guess time just sort of slipped away from me, and keeps slipping; I've got things to write about, I just always seem to be doing something else. So consider this the recap post for the past few days.

I've been playing with Bloglines as my primary newsreader/RSS aggregator, and I really, really like it. Very well done, the kind of web app that I'm totally envious of when I write web apps. The big plus is it's web-based, so I can comfortably read my RSS anywhere, not just on the one computer at home. Highly recommended.

Fall seems to have arrived a bit early here in Central Oregon. The weather forecast this evening indicated it would be in the mid 60s this week, and 54 degrees on Saturday. I have nothing against fall, but man, where'd the sunshine go?

Cold weather's not the only thing arriving; Simone saw a cockroach at Super Burrito in downtown Bend, Jake picked up the story and now everyone's anti-Super Burrito. Too bad, I liked eating there from time to time. Could be worse, though, we could all live back east or in the South where roaches are a way of life. We're pretty lucky overall.

Al Fasoldt is at it again, this time taking on Wikipedia. Remember him? Last year I blasted him for spreading FUD about web technology ("FUD Alert"), and then apologized this year for being so harsh ("Apology"). Well, now more people have caught on: tonight I read from this article on Boing Boing and this article on Joi Ito that Fasoldt has slammed Wikipedia and then taken the low road when someone called him on it: this article from Techdirt has the skinny:

Rather than take me up on the experiment, or suggest an alternative, he complained simply that the whole idea of Wikipedia was "outrageous," "repugnant" and finally (in another email) "dangerous," and therefore he refused to take part in my experiment. He told me that asking him to take part of an experiment that would show how Wikipedia corrected errors "wouldn't change the danger" of Wikipedia — and mentioned how important it was that teachers everywhere knew what a dangerous tool this was. After this email exchange, he came to Techdirt himself, and commented that, based on what he read here, he was disappointed in our educational system — and proceeded to misquote a poem.

...by refusing to back up his claims, by mis-stating or ignoring nearly everything I said to him and by resorting to misdirection in his arguments, personally, I find Mr. Fasoldt to be untrustworthy — but I suggest you make your own judgment call on that one.

Now, I'll be fair, I read Fasoldt's original article that kicked this off, and I didn't find it problematic. A little FUD-ish, but hey, that's what he does. It could've stayed civil and turned into a good future article for him. But all this followup?

Well, I'm just sayin'.

I don't know what it is about this weekend, but here's a few items illustrating the pitfalls of owning a home and raising a family:

Saturday evening I noticed that the dryer had died. More specifically, that the drum belt had broken; the dryer would run, but the drum wouldn't turn. So I spent most of this morning figuring out how to open the thing up, then buying a new belt and figuring out just how to fix it and put it all back together again. (You'd think a belt would be easy or intuitive to replace. If you're like me, you'd be wrong.) Joy. It works, though.

The event that led up to me discovering the dryer wasn't working? My son, our youngest, was sick; he ate only a bite or two of dinner, then went to lie down on the couch. Which he then threw up on. But it wasn't just the bite or two of dinner he threw up; it was lunch, too. So, I got to interrupt my dinner to clean up vomit from the couch. It was also on a throw pillow, which I cleaned, and was going to put in the dryer—and discovered the problem with the dryer.

Same kid, twice over this past week, has set off his Tickle Me Elmo in the middle of the night (5:10-ish the first time, 2:10-ish the next time). Nothing's quite as freaky as waking up in the dead of night out of a deep sleep hearing Elmo saying, "Elmo's not ticklish there! Tickle Elmo again!"

Odds and end, bits and pieces tonight.

Looks like the Bulletin article won't be appearing Friday (tomorrow). Nobody knows when for sure. I'll post here when I find out.

Interestingly, the guy who interviewed us for the story on blogs now has a blog: Drunk with Ink. Cool!

Tonight on a whim I set up my old Sega Genesis game system, and introduced the kids to it. They seem quite taken with Sonic the Hedgehog, although they really can't work the controls very well.

We had a good 4th of July here, the weather was beautiful, the fireworks were grand and it was fun in general. I took the kids to the Pet Parade, while my wife and mother visited the gem show in Sisters. Afterwards we drank beer, barbecued hamburgers and set off fireworks for the kids in the cul-de-sac.

We got invited to a neighbor's party down the street, which my wife and I visited for about a half hour after the kids went to bed. (Interesting illustration to me of one of the benefits of living in a "real" neighborhood community.) We came back home and watched the Pilot Butte fireworks from our new backyard for the first time in 5 or more years—that was pretty cool.

All in all, a good Fourth. Hope everyone else's was good, too.

Okay, yes, so I didn't write anything here last night, the first time since the beginning of the year that I missed a night. I actually felt a little guilty about that. Keeps me honest, I guess. Anyway, I'm back tonight with some links.

The first is Topix.net, courtesy of ongoing. On the front page, Topix appears to be a news site that aggregates the news from umpteen online sources. Ho-hum, Google News anyone? But the cool thing happens when you give it your zipcode to get local news; BAM! suddenly you get a page devoted to your city/region, and I have to say, the Bend, Oregon News page is one of the best local news pages I've seen online. Not just news, either; local weather, sports, resources, even Amazon bestsellers for Bend. Color me impressed.

And call me crazy, but I'd swear Topix was developed in PHP.

The next link is to BlogBinders, courtesy of Adam Curry. It's a site/service that will turn your blog into a bound book. Interesting. I remember quite a while ago reading an article on blogging where this idea was suggested, and I thought it was eye-opening. I wonder, though, that a lot of blog entries revolve around linking to other sites—I can't imagine this translates well to a book. Nor would I really want to read all my blog entries in book format—some are simply throw-away.

Third link is to A Californian's Conception of the Continental United States, courtesy of Utterly Boring. I just thought this was funny.

It may be pretty raw, but here I am posting the first entry to this blog. It's a homegrown system I hacked out in about 2 days using PHP4 and a MySQL database.

Still a ton of things I'd like to do with this, given the time. I probably need to make it template-based, right now the HTML is hard-coded into the PHP, but that was a quick way for me to hack it out.

So, email me and tell me what you think!