Chuggnutt!

Month: June 2005

  • Bend Farmer’s Market

    Wednesday after work (around five) I met the the family down at Bend’s farmer’s market in Drake Park. Strangely enough, it was the first time I’d been to it, despite living in Bend for, oh, most of my life. I liked it a lot; we ended up buying a bunch of stuff, including giant cookies, three kinds of berries, a bouquet of flowers, cherries, dried apples, and fresh vegetables (including zucchini—I’ve been totally wanting to make zucchini bread for ages, and I’ve got a nice big one now to do so). I was hoping to score some fresh honey, but I didn’t see any (I’d heard honey mentioned on the radio that morning when they were promoting the farmer’s market).

    Next time we go back I think I might also pick up some locally-made cheese, from Juniper Grove Farm in Redmond (no website that I can find). And maybe a baguette.

    What’s funny is Shannon was there too—but we missed her. Next time we’ll need to coordinate better :). Or how about this? Get a blogger/friends/family thing together at the farmer’s market, buy a bunch of food there, and have a picnic dinner in the park.

  • Goofy Burger King job flyer

    Last weekend as a treat we picked up Burger King for lunch. To go. When we got home, inside the bag we found this incredibly poorly done “help wanted” flyer. It’s so bad it’s funny! So of course, I had to scan it in and post it here. Enjoy!

    Poorly done Burger King help wanted flyer (click to see larger version)
    (Click to see larger version)

  • The Ringworld Engineers

    Blogging has been light lately because I’ve been reading The Ringworld Engineers by Larry Niven, and just finished it up last night. It was a decent enough novel, and a decent sequel to the original Ringworld, though I think I liked the original better.

    Niven does a great job of building a complex, consistent universe and then coming up with logical, consistent solutions to the puzzles he throws at his characters. And the Ringworld—and his Known Space universe—is a compelling one to play in. This story is no different. He brings back most of the characters from the first book, 23 years later, and drops them on the Ringworld with a seemingly impossible task: save it before it crashes into the sun. (The first book merely had them explore and ultimately escape when things went wrong.) He pulls this off in a satisfying way.

    One of things I thought was weak to the point of distracting was the overuse of interspecies sex. Niven contrived this practice among the Ringworld natives as a bargaining tool, to seal deals, to avoid mating within a species, and just as a general titillating contrivance. Yeah, odd, and unconvincing. It smacks of “dirty old man” syndrome, or a cheap male fantasy (a world with free no-strings-attached sex!). There’s nothing explicit or pornographic—it’s just annoying. There’s no real point to it, it just seems gratuitous, and that makes weak writing.

    In general, I like the stuff Niven and Jerry Pournelle produce together better than just Niven’s work alone—although granted, I’ve only read these first two Ringworld novels, and he has quite a body of work that I haven’t touched, so it may not be a fair comparison.

    Overall, Engineers is a good summer read. Watch out for sequel-itis, though: you defintely need to read the original Ringworld to follow what’s going on. (And speaking of sequel-itis, I observe that there are two more sequels in this series… good grief…)

  • "Pet Sematary" zombie dogs

    Okay, this is damn freaky. Apparently US scientists have succeeded in reanimating dead dogs—yup, bringing them back to life by replacing their blood, cooling them down, and shocking them with electricity.

    They claim the zombie dogs are “perfectly normal, with no brain damage.” Riiiiiight.

    There is no way I would trust a dog—or any animal really—to be normal again that died and was brought back to life like Frankenstein’s monster. I’ve seen Pet Sematary (just the movie; ironically it’s one of the few Stephen King novels I haven’t read), that just ain’t happenin’.

    On the other hand, when I clicked through to the article I just about wet myself laughing so hard at the totally inappropriate stock photo they used…

    Via Slashdot.

  • Yahoo is cold calling me

    My wife fielded a call this afternoon from a telemarketer looking to speak with the owner of chuggnutt.com (which is what I use as the registrant for my domain names), and was confused to find out it wasn’t a business he was calling. This wouldn’t be noteworthy except for the fact that the guy identified himself as working for Yahoo! and was trying to sell their Pay Per Click ad service.

    Since when does Yahoo—or any of the big internet players, for that matter—resort to telemarketing? Cold calling no less? I would have thought that Yahoo especially would know better. I may or may not have looked into their ads in the future, but I’m pretty sure I won’t at all now. Here’s a hint: I don’t like telemarketing. I used to work for a telemarketing company in Spokane, so while I can totally sympathize with the individuals who have to actually make the day-to-day calls and deal with people that basically hate them, I really, really don’t like the companies/corporations behind telemarketing, especially the ones trying to sell something. It’s a sleazy business.

    In the interests of transparency, here’s the info from call: the number was 888-254-2716 (toll free, which was kind of odd), and the person my wife spoke to was Walter. He specifically identified himself as working for Yahoo. I Googled the number (heh), but didn’t find much, just enough to indicate that it points to Yahoo/Overture.

  • Bite of Bend mini-review

    I don’t get out to many of the local festivals, but we did hit the Bite of Bend last Saturday, so here’s my mini-review. Actually, the one thing I really wanted to see at the Bite of Bend was the Iron Chef competition among six local chefs, and I got to see a bit of that—so this review will probably focus more on that than anything else :).

    They had closed off most of the Old Mill District—the main drag between the parking lots at the movie theater and the smokestack building—and even so, we were able to find parking in the theater lot fairly easily. At the time we got there (around 11:30), most of the upper lot (above the theater) was empty, too. That’s pretty good for an event like this, particularly in Bend.

    Decent selection of food, too, and just okay on the beer. When you see a sign saying, “Beer garden” I guess you expect more than four beers on tap. Although, in addition to the one wine vendor, the Bendistillery was there serving up hard alcohol. Nice!

    Actually, the food selection was more than decent; to me it seemed like a lot and a good variety. There could have been more—Pilot Butte Burgers would have been nice, for instance—but c’est la vie.

    Didn’t pay any real attention to the music. That’s about all I can say about that.

    Ah, but the Iron Chef competition was fun. I actually only got to wander over to it three times (everyone else thought I was weird to get excited about it), but I managed to see the start of the first contest—secret ingredient (tombo tuna) and all—and come back later to watch the matches in action. I don’t know who won any of the match-ups, though. And I don’t think they had to make more than one dish (unlike the TV show, which requires four or five), but it was still a lot of fun to watch. Interestingly, Standard TV and Appliance had set up a big screen HDTV off to the side and had two camera guys filming the competition up close—so you could watch the details on the TV. I was hoping they were recording it all and would broadcast it on the local cable channel, but I haven’t seen anything about that.

    It would have been cool to have someone doing an intelligent (i.e., knowledgeable about food and cooking) running commentary, but I guess not everyone’s as into the Iron Chef thing as I am. Regardless, I hope they do this again. Maybe they could do it at some of the other festivals and not just Bite of Bend…?

    Any other Bendites have reviews they’d like to post here?

  • Almost seemed like a long weekend

    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.

  • Bite of Bend

    So who’s going to the Bite of Bend this Saturday? We were thinking of it but likely won’t go if the weather’s rainy like they’re predicting.

    Although I really want to see the first annual Iron Chef Competition they’re having—six local chefs in three one hour matches, just like the TV show. The Source has a good listing of the chefs and judges involved. Sounds cool! We’ll see, we’ll see.

    And someone really should buy up the domain name biteofbend.com and give them a proper site…

  • BittyWiki

    Just for grins, and to flex my PHP chops, I decided to write a simple wiki system. The catch, though, is to see how short I can make the actual program; I was inspired by this Shortest Wiki Contest, though I can’t profess to be quite as fanatic as those guys (I prefer readable code—squishing it all into a minimal number of obfuscated lines just seems like cheating), I think I did pretty well so far. Read through if you’re interested; it’s pretty technical and I include the PHP source.

    (more…)

  • New(ish) Bend blogger

    Forgot to mention this when I saw it the other day, but there appears to be another blogger here in Bend: e n | x | e n d u b. Did anyone else catch this?

    Either way, welcome!