Chuggnutt!

Month: June 2002

  • Portland Spirit

    We’re off to Portland tomorrow, without the kids, for an anniversary dinner cruise on the Portland Spirit. Should be a pretty good trip; I may even get to finally see Star Wars Episode II.

    Here’s an interesting little piece of news/trivia: Deschutes Brewery is apparently bottling their beers in a new bottle (they were simply plain brown 12-ounce bottles): brown with a nice raised imprint of hops around the bottle just below the neck, and gold caps (formerly they were silver). These were from a six-pack of Mirror Pond Pale Ale picked up at Fred Meyers today. I can’t find any mention of this bottle upgrade on their web site, but maybe it’s to help celebrate their 14 year anniversary.

    Random Web Link: It’s been around for awhile, but still proves entertaining: The Greedo Assassination Conspiracy Page

  • Truth? Or Onion?

    This is what passes for news in the Bend Bulletin, our local newspaper. I swear, this reads like it’s straight out of The Onion (excerpts, with my own commentary):

    Tuesday, June 25, 2002

    Prineville man questions how the pyramids were built

    Alan St. John was reading the December issue of Popular Mechanics when he spotted a one-page article about an investigation… about how the pyramids were built….

    That’s the Egyptian pyramids, not to be confused with their muddy Mexican and Central American siblings….

    (That’s good. I didn’t want to accidentally misunderstand which pyramids we might be reading about here.)

    Just how the ancients constructed these triangles in the sand has long been a head-scratcher for scientific eggheads and occultists alike.

    (Triangles in the sand? Pyramids have square bases and four sides. Nice tone to this paragraph, too; I think it’s meant to target the low-brow audience.)

    They have good reason to want to reason through this: They didn’t exactly have backhoes 5,000 years ago….

    (Gee. They didn’t exactly have backhoes. What exactly did they have? Tractors? It’s clear at this point who the intended audience is: people who are intellectually equivalent to having lived in a cave for most of their life. Give your readers some credit.)

    St. John believes everyone has been overlooking the obvious.

    (Yeah. The obvious. Despite the obvious lack of any evidence to support his theory. I’m immediately suspicious of anyone who’s got a theory they think is “obvious.”)

    With pulleys and enough rope, sand could be used as a counter-weight to the huge stones….

    (Here I admit, this sounds reasonable. Then of course, 3 paragraphs later, comes my favorite part:)

    The recently divorced St. John, who lives in a fifth wheel trailer next to his parent’s house in Prineville, has been a quick study in Egyptian history, when he’s not working at Norm’s Extreme Fitness Center….

    (Okay. This blows away any shred of credibility he might have had. He’s a kook.)

    The article goes on with St. John citing Herodotus (which the Bulletin misspells as Herodatus), but apparently that’s as much as he’s read on the pyramids. He also sent a letter to Popular Mechanics, which generated some initial interest, but hasn’t subsequently heard back from them. And that leads into the most sensible quote from the entire article:

    The problem… is that there’s no hieroglyphic or archaeological evidence that counterweights were ever used in ancient Egypt….

    What amazes me is how this made it into the paper to begin with… it really does come across like an article you’d read in The Onion. I’m thunderstruck and laughing at the same time. How did they find this St. John guy? Did he approach the Bulletin? And why— why??— is this considered news?

    Unfortunately, the Bulletin isn’t even running the article online on their web site. Otherwise, you could even see the goofy photo they have of this guy holding his hands over his head in the shape of a pyramid…

    This was just too priceless not to share. Interestingly, the same issue of the paper also has an article about Rocket Guy, arguably Bend’s most notorious and colorful character.

    What a day.

  • Warning:

    Do NOT watch “Bandits.”

  • More than Meets the Eye

    To my great delight, Amazon.com has the entire first season of the Transformers on DVD. This was the perfect television show that embodied the 1980s: a wildly popular cartoon whose sole purpose was to support an insanely popular line of toys, and yet there was such a seamless integration between the two that at times it seemed toys were introduced because they had characters in the cartoon (like the Dinobots and Constructicons).

    I was a total tool for the Transformers— the toys and the cartoon both. One thing that always bothered me about them, though, was the names of the various factions; in the beginning, there were two: the good guys were the Autobots, and the bad guys were the Decepticons. Simplistic, yet descriptive: the Autobots were robots based on cars, and the Decepticons were deceptive robots that were bad (like cons— as in convicts). If you didn’t look for any real meaning behind the names, fine. But why did they always have new factions or groups with names ending in “bot” (for the good guys) and “con” (for the bad guys)?

    That was just plain silly, even to my brainwashed mind. It was the laziness of marketing greed going too far, and destroying the illusory experience of deeper meaning. I mean, really. Right off the top of my head I can recall (aside from the Autobots and Decepticons) Dinobots, Constructicons, Insecticons, Aerialbots, Motorcons, and Predacons.

    So then, I have to ask: where do Emoticons fit in? You know, emoticons— those plain-character simulated facial expressions that are an inseparable part of Internet culture (like

    :)

    to indicate a smile,

    ;)

    to indicate a wink, and

    :P

    to indicate sticking your tongue out). Are they what they appear? Or are they really a new breed of Decepticon? Or, a clever synergy of ’80s toy culture and post-modern Internet culture?

    Perhaps only I know the true answer…

    Some Transformers links for the stalwart:

  • Friday

    Ah, Friday. A fine end to a skewed week.

    We finally got a decent connection to the Internet at work, after three weeks in the new office in Bend. The DSL connection provided by Oregon Trail Internet just didn’t work out— the connection kept getting dropped, and when it was active, bandwidth would fluctuate wildly. No good. So we replaced the DSL with a high speed wireless connection provided by, well, High Speed Communications, formerly Empire Net. Today was the first day it was active, and it was stable and fast. Finally!

    Plus, my mid-week trip to Portland really threw things off for me. Hopefully next week I’ll be able to get back on track.

    Random Web Link: VillianSupply.com

  • Wayback to Portland

    Went on a business trip to Portland today (for Alpine Internet Solutions, the company I work for) to meet with a new client we recently signed. It’s a big project, potentially high profile… though I probably shouldn’t mention who they are yet. I don’t want to attract the wrong kind of attention too soon…

    Here’s a cool link: The Internet Archive, featuring the Wayback Machine. They’ve been taking “snapshots” of websites for a number of years now (in association with Alexa) that you can search for and view. So you can check out what your favorite website looked like in days past. Pretty nifty!

    Random Web Link: Tilt of the hat to my bro: WildStorm Comics.

  • I’m Batman

    Bat-Sandwich
    So on ReasonablyClever.com there is this Flash-based applet called the Mini-Mizer which allows people to build little custom Lego people out of all sorts of parts. Clearly, I’ve been playing with it.

    The coolest part about it is some wickedly neat things like Star Wars and comic book superhero parts, and some utterly non-sequitous things like some of the items you can place in your Lego person’s hands: a large drumstick, a tennis racket, an electric guitar.

    Needless to say, it’s been eating up my evening, so instead of various other things I had a mind to do, I’ve been sucked into a hilariously simple activity with endless permutations. Ah, viral marketing!

    Everyone should visit Wil Wheaton Dot Net for bringing the Mini-Mizer to everyone’s attention.

  • Procrastination; Father’s Day; Summer Reading

    Ack. I’ve been letting my mutant ability for procrastination take over on this site, and I haven’t even finished getting the relatively simple stuff done that I had intended— like, making the “Check it Out” area handle more than one item, or putting up more background material. Or perhaps I shouldn’t chalk it all up to procrastination; my interest level in various projects ebbs and flows like the tide. Probably just got caught up in an eddy before getting back on track…

    And of course, today was Father’s Day. It was a good day; I got several books and got to spend my day playing with the kids and relaxing. And got to drink some Pike Kilt Lifter (though it was flat).

    My summer reading list:
    • Content Management Bible by Bob Boiko
    • Programming Jabber by DJ Adams
    • Everything’s Eventual by Stephen King
    • Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter

    And more to come…

  • New Office!

    We’ve been spending the last week or so at work packing up the old office in Sisters (Oregon) and moving into Bend, so things have been thrown into chaotic disarray while we unpack, build out, and get used to our new office space. My commute has been cut from 25 miles (one way) to 5 miles, which I am indescribably happy about. I can get to work in just over 10 minutes now!

    Our new office is sweet. We’re located in an old mill building right in the middle of a developing area (called, appropriately enough, the Old Mill District), in a very SOHO-like atmosphere. It’s still raw, but very, very nice and will be awesome when it’s all finished. I can’t wait.