Chuggnutt!

Month: July 2004

  • Blue Moon

    One for the weekend: tomorrow, July 31, (er, rather, today now I guess) is a blue moon. One definition of it, anyway. Enjoy!

  • Weekend off

    My wife and I are heading up to Portland for the weekend, and will be back Sunday sometime. Needless to say, I’ll be taking the weekend off from blogging (even though I’ll probably be online Sunday night; we’ll see). Have a good weekend!

  • Silverado

    I just got caught up in watching the last hour and a half of Silverado on TV, what a great movie. One of the first westerns I remember seeing that actually felt like what is must have been like in that era. Plus, it’s just a fun movie. With an all-star cast that holds up, too: Kevin Kline, Scott Glenn, Kevin Costner, Danny Glover, John Cleese, Brian Dennehy, Rosanna Arquette, Jeff Goldblum, Jeff Fahey, Linda Hunt.

  • Interview

    I was interviewed today by a reporter writing a story on local bloggers for the Bulletin. Very interesting, kind of cool. I’m not sure what will come of it other than myself sitting there yammering on semi-coherently, but the article will apparently be published next Thursday. I’ll have to pick up the paper to see.

    And, the guy is interested in talking to as many bloggers as possible. Email me if you’re interested.

    In other related news, Jake has an angry letter to the Bulletin on his site. That rant kind of spun out of this local story situation. Worth a read.

  • The Da Vinci Code

    Jeez, it looks like I’ve taken a blog sabbatical around here. July must be that kind of month. Anyway…

    So, probably against my better judgement, I read The Da Vinci Code over the last week. (My parents loaned it to me.) It wasn’t nearly as earth-shattering as some people would have you believe (especially since I already read the source material, Holy Blood, Holy Grail a number of years ago), but overall I found it mostly, well, amateurish—poorly written.

    I mean, the writing just doesn’t follow the rules for good writing. Things like showing versus telling, dialogue, triangulation, stuff like that. It’s distracting, sloppy. And yet—and yet—this book is a huge bestseller. Huge. So what’s the formula?

    Short chapters that are quick and easy to read, keeping the pages turning. Characters that are easily identifiable. Chase scenes. And of course, a conspiracy, everybody loves a conspiracy. Especially one with a lot of religious iconographic mystery behind it.

    I don’t know if this points more to the state of bestselling fiction today or to the level of the average reader. But on the bright side, it should give hope to all aspiring writes of bestsellers out there.

  • For Shannon

    Told you I’d do this. It’s a bit of a hack job, but oh well:

    The Nebraska state Kool Aid quarter

  • Bloggers and Quarters

    Tonight’s local blogger meetup was a lot of fun, but only 3 of us showed up! (To be fair, Jesse did show up around 8:20, just as we were leaving.) Myself, Shannon and Simone made it to the Bend Brewing Company and had a good time. The funniest part, which I forgot until I got online just now, was the Nebraska State Quarter Designs riff. Let’s just say letting the public design the state quarters might not be the best idea…

  • Blue Oregon?

    I keep seeing references to a new Oregon-related group blog called “BlueOregon,” purporting to reside at the domain name www.blueoregon.com. However, every time I try this domain, I get a “Future home of a domain” page—i.e., the domain name has been registered, but it’s parked on a generic landing page. (Even ORBlogs is showing content from it.) Is this a joke? Really bad DNS/proxy/caching/something configuration on BendBroadband’s part? What’s the deal?

  • Bend Blogger Get-together

    Public service announcement: The Bend/Central Oregon bloggers are getting together tomorrow (Wednesday, July 21) at six o’clock at the Bend Brewing Company. I’ll be there, and I know a few more of us will be, too. See you there!

  • Spending the weekend with noxious chemicals

    Since moving into the new house, it seems like there’s a never-ending list of things to do. This weekend it was staining the new fence. That took a big chunk of time.

    The way to go when doing something like staining a fence (or a deck) is to get a compression sprayer—a plastic tank that you pour the liquid into, seal airtight and pump air into. This creates pressure that forces the liquid out of the spray nozzle when triggered. Pretty handy, but here’s some things you might want to consider doing if you’re doing this (all of which I, of course, didn’t do):

    • Wear goggles. The sealant/stain spray has an amazing tendency to blow back into your eyes when it’s windy.
    • Wear a mask to avoid inhaling too many fumes.
    • Wear a hat, like a painter’s cap. Especially during those blowback situtations.