Chuggnutt!

Month: June 2004

  • The Move

    So tomorrow we get funded and close on our new house, and take possession. Then comes the Move; we’ll start hauling a load or two over tomorrow evening, and then Saturday is the big day. Fortunately, this time we’ve hired movers to do all the heavy lifting.

    I don’t expect to be online much or at all after I leave work tomorrow, at least until Sunday sometime, maybe later. If all goes according to plan, Bend Broadband should have our cable service turned on Saturday (I think), but I seriously doubt I’ll be interested in going online after spending the day moving.

    Thus marks the end of one chapter of our lives, and the beginning of a new one. It’s not the first house we’ve bought, but it will be first brand new one we’ve lived in. Should be interesting!

  • Wikipedia’s New Look

    Just a quick note here… I saw Wikipedia‘s new look this evening and I have to say, I like it.

  • Alton Brown

    My favorite show on Food Network is Good Eats—it’s entertaining, informative, and quirky, all due to its host/creator, Alton Brown. So after reading the story on Alton Brown in this month’s Wired, I figured it was high time to blog some links.

    So, in addition to his site, which I linked to above, it’s interesting to note that he has a blog.

  • Thongs

    Thongs, flipflops, whateverWhen I was growing up, thongs were the semi-sandals that you wore on your feet, pictured to the right. Nowadays, they’re called “flipflops” and if you call them “thongs” in public, you get sharp looks and people think you’re having a stroke when you try to explain what you were talking about.

    Sigh. The times, they are a-changin’.

  • Bend Brew Fest

    The Bend Brew Fest is kicking off this year at the Les Schwab Amphitheater, on Saturday, August 21. Excellent! Not quite a contender with the awesome Oregon Brewers Festival, but very cool nonetheless.

    From the Les Schwab Amphitheater Events page:

    On Saturday, August 21st over 20 Pacific Northwest brewers will present over 40 craft beers for public tasting at the Les Schwab Amphitheater for the first annual Bend Brew Fest.

     

    Event hours are Noon to 10pm. Cost of admission is $10 for an advance ticket or $15 at the gate. Included in the cost of admission are a commemorative tasting mug and two tasting tokens. One token is required for each beer sample. Token costs are $1 apiece.

  • McMenamins Finally!

    Finally! McMenamins is on track to open the Old St. Francis School here, on November 15, 2004. Seems like we’ve been hearing about this for years, but this time it’s the real deal. (I hope.)

    Bend.com has an article on the opening. This paragraph is noteworthy:

    Gathering of stories, photos and memorabilia is currently under way to supply the artists with subject matter, as well as for documenting the school’s seven decades of experiences. Anyone interested in contributing is encouraged to contact McMenamins historian Tim Hills at (503) 223-0109 or via e-mail to timh@hq.mcmenamin.com.

    If you’ve ever been to a McMenamins, you know that the art, history and memorabilia play a huge role in creating their unique atmosphere. Seems like a cool opportunity to get a little piece of the action.

  • Sony Bend… Again!

    I saw this yesterday (actually, my wife saw it and sent me the link) and forgot to blog it: “Bend firm gets paid to play,” about the mysterious Sony Bend and the release of their third Syphon Filter game. As usual, Jake beat me to the punch on blogging this and gives me entirely too much credit for this article.

    Pretty cool, though. And, anyone who wants to work in the video game industry, take note: Sony Bend is looking to hire 20 artists, designers and programmers this year.

  • Mt. Hood and the Moon

    Tim Bray has posted an amazing photo of Mount Hood that he took from a plane—his description is “Mount Hood paying its respects to the moon” and I think that’s entirely appropriate. Worth a look.

  • Stumps

    The previous post got me thinking for some reason about the 2000 year-old tree stumps found just off the Oregon coast, in Neskowin. You haven’t heard about them? Judging by the amount of time searching to find any pointers or references to them, most of the Web hasn’t either.

    This is from KXL.com’s Coastal Tour Guide page:

    This downright spectacular oddity is almost a rare sight in Neskowin, but you may not know just how spectacular it is unless you know what it is you’re looking at.

     

    They look somewhat like old, ragged pilings leftover from something manmade – but they are, in fact, stumps of a 2,000-year-old forest. As many as 100 are sometimes visible in various shapes and sizes. It’s theorized that around 2,000 years ago a massive, cataclysmic earthquake abruptly dropped this forest as much as six feet. This wound up preserving them, rather then destroying and scattering them as natural erosion might’ve done.

    An article on these appeared in 1998, and I remember being awed and amazed that these artifacts from the era of Christ and the Roman Empire were being exposed right in my backyard, so to speak. Scouring around the Web, there’s only a couple of decent articles I was able to find on the subject: this Herald-Sun Newsbrief from March 18, 1998 and this archived Sunset article. Good to know I’m not completely crazy.

    Anyway, if you find yourself in or around Neskowin, Oregon, find your way down to the beach and check it out.

  • Great Salt Lake life forms

    Is this for real?

    Scientists Finding Strange Life Forms in Great Salt Lake

     

    With levels now at a 30-year low, the salt in portions of the shrinking lake has reached saturation levels ten times the salinity of seawater. Westminster, the University of Maryland and George Mason University are not only finding life where life shouldn’t exist, but life, perhaps like nothing of this earth.

     

    Instead of the rods, spheres and spiral shapes microbiologists are familiar with, they’re seeing organisms shaped like pyramids, triangles, squares and crescents.

     

    Dr. Bonnie Baxter, Westminster College Microbiologist: “Completely novel sequences that don’t match up with anything in the databases. And one of our genome guys who was taking a look at these said this looks like alien DNA. It doesn’t match anything we have on earth.”