Chuggnutt!

Month: February 2004

  • The Pine Tavern

    When it comes to dining in Bend, Oregon, few places compare to The Pine Tavern. Located in Downtown Bend, just off Mirror Pond and the Deschutes River, the Pine Tavern Restaurant is one of the signature establishments of this town and one of the best places to eat, period.

    Good food, good drinks and good service. I’ve never had a bad meal there. And inside is one of the most unique features you’ll find anywhere around here: the restaurant is built around a large, live ponderosa pine tree that is the centerpiece of the dining area; the trunk dominates the room and rises through the ceiling with the top of the tree high above the building. Windows in the ceiling afford the full view. It’s quite amazing.

    If you happen to be visiting Bend, you should definitely consider having dinner at the Pine Tavern a requirement. Even my in-laws, who are notoriously picky about what and where they can eat, love the place and have at least one meal there every trip. On the other hand, if you live in Bend and haven’t been, then I’m seriously thinking about revoking your Bend card.

  • Language

    About a week back Andrei Zmievski blogged about taking linguistics classes and on the fluid nature of languages, and got me thinking about them. I hold a Bachelor of Arts degree in French with the equivalent of a minor in Russian (and yet I work in the computer industry… funny, eh?), but I’m far from fluent in either language, even though I’d like to be. And I’d like to learn other languages, too, if I had the time.

    I think every American should learn a second, maybe even a third language. Especially when a good part of the educated world beyond our country is multi-lingual; I think it puts us at a definite disadvantage.

    Yes, I know there’s always someone who will disagree with me on this point. English is quite the lingua franca, and will continue to be, so it’s easy to argue that there’s no need to learn another language in today’s world. Not so. I’ll touch on this in a future post.

    And of course, this always brings to mind one of my favorite rants from Dennis Miller, about the English language:

    I understand that English is a protean, evolving language that must constantly change in order to remain relevant. But let’s not go out of our way to appropriate words from other cultures simply to justify making something more expensive. Hey, you can add all the Italian suffixes you want, you’re not fooling anybody over there at Starbucks—it’s still just coffee. Now ring me the fuck up, you frappaloser.

  • More Testing

    Doing some further testing on the new CMS. There should be a “MORE” link below if you’re viewing this from the front page. If you click on it, you’ll get the extended body text and as a treat I’ll throw in some of the things I’m doing behind the scenes. (more…)

  • Spam Pounder

    So the spam problem finally got to be a little overwhelming on our BendCable email account, and we opted in to use BendCable’s anti-spam software/service, Spam Pounder. But here’s the catch: you don’t actually get this anti-spam service on your regular bendcable.com email, no—instead they change your email to a bendbroadband.com address because that’s where they have the actual anti-spam software running. (In order to preserve your bendcable.com address—which you may have had for years, as we have, and don’t want it gone—they set up a forward that shunts everything from your bendcable.com address to the bendbroadband.com one.)

    I mean, what the hell is that? Sure changing your email address is a solution for spam, but that’s not the point. I don’t have a lot of confidence in an ISP that can’t even set up spam filtering software on their main mail server, fer chrissakes.

    And what the hell is with that name (“Spam Pounder”) and logo?? The images I’m associating with it are not good ones…

    Now, having said all that, I will concede that so far it’s doing the job: almost all of the spam is now being caught, I’d give it a 98-99% effectiveness rating so far. The technology seems to work.

    But why can’t BendCable integrate this into their main email server like everyone else?

  • Flipping Switches

    I’m flipping switches on my blog tonight, and going live with my new CMS I’m working on. Hopefully, all will work as planned; consider this entry a test message.

  • Back with links

    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.

  • CMS Ranting

    Gadgetopia has a good rant on content management that I’m just getting around to posting about. (CMS’s Should Manage Content, Not Display It)

    My solution was to write a function library to make raw database calls to get everything out in a nice, big, nested PHP array. I essentially built an API for the CMS to make pulling content easy, but I do all the HTML processing in PHP, abandoning completely the display side of this CMS. I still use it for administration, workflow, etc. (which it excels at), but when PHP is such a fantastic, mature language, why reinvent the wheel?

    I really don’t have anything to add to this, other than that this is largely why I favor developing my own PHP software rather than using pre-built systems—I have absolute control over the way the software works and I don’t have to rely on clunky, awkward front-end architecture and programming that I disagree with. Give me the data, and let me decide what to do with it.

  • Cheese

    I was looking at a cookbook over at my parents’ house this evening and came across a general primer on making cheese. I was under the impression that making cheese was a rather complicated procedure, but it turns out it’s not, really; only time-consuming.

    Basically you separate milk into whey and curds, and then drain and age the curds until they become cheese. Well, okay, it’s slightly more complicated than that, but still.

    While making cheese at home may seem like some to be some kind of insane throwback rustic hobby, it appeals to me in the same way that brewing beer or making wine does—it’s a way to recapture some of the old skills that seem to get lost sometimes in our mass-production-consumerism society. And, it’s reflective on the way I was raised; growing up in rural Central Oregon, I’m just more used to the idea of growing and raising your own food. Move along now.

    Anyway, here’s a link to a Google search for “how to make cheese”.

  • Timely Wired Issue

    After all the hubbub over Google the last few days, I thought it was pretty interesting when my issue of Wired came today, with “Googlemania!” on the cover. Timely.

  • Writing tips

    Here’s a good link for anyone who’s trying to be a writer: Learn Writing with Uncle Jim. It’s a series of posts on a message board on the topic of writing commercial novels, from a professional writer. It’s also an insane 27 pages long, with 21 (is that right? I counted twice…) posts per page. It’s good stuff, what I’ve read so far.