Chuggnutt!

Month: September 2005

  • Bend celebrities

    This looks interesting: The Bend, Oregon Celebrity Weblog.

  • The country’s safest places to live

    According to this list from MSNBC/Forbes, seven of the 10 safest places to live in this country are in the Pacific Northwest. Central Oregon didn’t make the list, presumably because of the Sisters bulge and our general proximity to volcanoes.

    I’m a little surprised to see Medford/Ashland make the list, though; part of the selection criteria was taking account of extreme weather, which they define as “abundant rain or snowfall or days that are below freezing or above 90 degrees Fahrenheit,” and Medford is routinely hotter than most parts of the state during the summer—easily over the “extreme” 90 degree mark.

    Even more surprising though is Honolulu, Hawaii, as the nation’s safest place to live. Who’d’a thunk it?

    Via LifeHacker.

  • Season of change

    Change, indeed. Today was our eldest’s first day of kindergarten. Huge transition! She’ll be riding a bus and everything. She attends in the afternoon; our youngest is in a new preschool, attends in the mornings, five days a week (at the old preschool it was only three). The schedule change is still taking some getting used to, I think.

    The whole household dynamic is different since our cat died. It feels that way to me, at least; things seems shifted, somehow, at angles to the way they were before.

    We painted the kids’ rooms this past weekend, changing from the rather bland “toasted almond” that came with the house to more vibrant blues, purples and pinks. The difference is striking.

    And of course it’s that time of year again—the weather’s changing; you can feel the autumn coming in the air. The days are getting shorter. It’s definitely feeling like fall to me.

    So this seems to be the month of change. What’s next?

  • Maybe it’s a good time to learn COBOL

    Two interesting factoids from ADTmag’s 2005 Salary Survey:

    [Application Programmers] Programmers in mainframe and Unix shops make the most, topping $59,000 a year in base salary. By development language environment, programmers in CICS and COBOL shops fare best, drawing average salaries of almost $62,000 for CICS-based development and $59,000 for COBOL.

    [System Programmers] Mainframe skills continue to be a strong suit for systems programmers, who earn an average of $71,100, outpacing their Unix counterparts by about $2,000. By development language environment, systems programmers in CICS and COBOL shops fare best, drawing average salaries of $72,100 and $70,200, respectively.

    $59K to $70K per year for being a COBOL programmer? Whoa.

    Oddly, it ties into my COBOL note from almost exactly a year ago.

  • Bad, bad day

    I may not be posting much this weekend. Today we had to have our oldest cat, Bob, put to sleep. He had a cancerous intestinal tumor that was inoperable. He was also 12 years old, he lived a long good life; we’d raised him from a kitten so this is especially hard.

    …it’s like losing a member of the family. He really was the best cat you could ask for. Thankfully I got to be there with him in the end, and bury him.

    I’m not functioning all that well right now, good thing it’s a long weekend.