Chuggnutt!

Month: July 2006

  • Oregon Brewers Festival and Portand Friday

    I’m taking the day off from work this Friday and going to Portland for the Oregon Brewers Festival! Woo hoo! My original plan was to stay in Portland the entire weekend, but as it turns out I’d already obligated myself to a friend’s wedding Saturday evening, so I’ll be spending Friday night with my friend Justin (who’s also going with me to the Brewfest) and leaving Saturday late morning sometime.

    It’s going to be an eventful day. Aside from the Brewfest, there’s a beer blogger meetup that evening (starting at five) over at the Rogue Ales Public House, so I’ll get to meet yet more bloggers from Portland and other far-flung places (Arizona, for one, I think).

    Are any other bloggers in the area going to the Brewfest? Let me know.

    At any rate, I’ll have the camera and notebook and plan on writing a bunch about it. And, Friday right now is looking at an 80-degree forecast for Portland, so that’s just about perfect. Three days and counting!

  • the show

    Okay, I’ve pretty much become addicted to the show with zefrank. I can’t help it. It’s compelling. And funny. And smart. And for embedded online video, it just works. Go watch. And then go watch a bunch of the archives.

  • Cowboy Dinner Tree review

    The Cowboy Dinner Tree was fabulous. A real experience, one I would absolutely do again! So this review will mostly consist of gushing over the meal (I can’t think of anything bad to say), followed by a few pictures. Read on… (more…)

  • Cowboy Dinner Tree

    Tonight my wife and I are driving down to Silver Lake to eat at the Cowboy Dinner Tree. This is actually something we’ve wanted to try out for years, but it was this article in the Bend Bulletin which finally prompted us to make reservations.

    Probably the best description I could give is one I’ll lift from the Bulletin article:

    The Cowboy Dinner Tree, about 85 miles from Bend, is about as rustic as a restaurant can get. Made of rough poles and barn planks, the building itself has the look of a hermit’s cabin. A sign on the wall proclaims “No electricity – No credit cards – No kidding,” and it’s not. A 12-volt solar-powered battery provides the juice for a couple of bare light bulbs in the dining room, but when the sun sets, the lights dim. All the food is cooked from scratch with propane.

    When you make your reservations, you get the choice of either the steak or the chicken for dinner. And their serious about they’re food; when they say chicken, they mean a whole chicken. And the steaks are 26 to 30 ounces. That’s almost two pounds of steak!

    Should be an experience, one I’ll write about sometime in the near future, if I’m not comatose from that much red meat.

  • Dell computer fun

    Simone noted the humor/frustration level I was having with Dell this week at work. Of course, anytime I mention “Dell” around her she shakes her head in disgust, so perhaps she’s not exactly the most objective observer. :)

    What happened was, at work this week one of the newish Dell PCs started making a high-pitched spinning/whining noise. At first I thought it was a fan, so I opened up the box, eliminated the fans as a source of noise, and quickly concluded it was the hard drive. Sounds emanating from the hard drive are, generally, a Bad Thing. And sure enough, when I tried to boot the machine up again in order to copy the data to the network (most of the user data is already on the network, except for a few things like email and some accounting data), I got the Windows blue screen and problems booting.

    So I got the person set up with a temporary PC (an older one), pulled the hard drive, and called Dell.

    (Let me disclaim in advance that in fact all the people I talked to at Dell were very professional and helpful, and the overall service they performed was very good. It just turned into a minor comedy of errors.)

    First of all, the machine’s out of warranty; it was purchased one year and one month ago. Of course! Even assuming I’d bought the one-year service plan warranty with it, it still wouldn’t matter.

    Nearly 45 minutes later, after talking to three different people (a woman from India; some fellow with an unidentifiable accent in Tech Support; and a woman from Roseburg, Oregon in Sales), I was finally able to get the order placed for a new hard drive that matched the specs of the machine and drive in question: 80GB Ultra ATA, IDE interface. Pay attention, that’s an important detail.

    They tell me that yes, even though I ordered the drive with Next Day delivery, it still may not even ship out until Friday the 14th. That’s fine, I say, just get it here ASAP. And guess what? They surprise me by delivering the hard drive the very next day! Woo-hoo!

    Open the package, mount the drive into the PC chassis, go to plug everything in… and it’s the wrong type of drive. They sent me an 80GB Serial ATA (SATA) hard drive, which is incompatible with the IDE interface in this computer.

    So there’s not much else to do but get on the phone with Dell again, spending exactly 31 minutes on the phone this time (our office telephones have a call timer). I spoke with the Customer Service department (again a woman from India, as near as I can figure), got the return processed (UPS would pick it up in the next three days), then transferred to Sales, where I made sure to order exactly the right type of hard drive. I hope. This was Thursday.

    The new drive hasn’t arrived yet, so the speedy Next Day delivery that accompanied the first hard drive hasn’t recurred. Hopefully Monday? But, the UPS guy did pick up the return Friday morning, so that’s something.

    Simone did warn me.

  • My brother’s garage sale

    A promo-note to any garage salers reading: my brother and his girlfriend are having a garage sale today (Saturday the 15th). Among other things, he was planning on selling some of his older video game systems (Nintendo 64, Super Nintendo), with games, and we took a toddler mattress over there for them to sell ($45 OBO).

    They live over on Douglas Street, just off and north of Wilson. I told them to post an ad on Craigslist, but I don’t see one there…

  • Killer Kangaroo!

    Now, this story is just silly: Fanged killer kangaroo roamed Outback.

    Forget cute, cuddly marsupials. A team of Australian palaeontologists say they have found the fossilized remains of a fanged killer kangaroo and what they describe as a “demon duck of doom”.
    …
    The species found at the dig had “well muscled-in teeth, not for grazing. These things had slicing crests that could have crunched through bone and sliced off flesh”, Hand said.

    I have this absurd image of saber-toothed kangaroos hopping around… Hey, maybe somebody will make a horror-thriller-scifi-Jurassic-Park type movie where killer kangaroos are brought back to life and terrorizing Australia! And if you can come up with a dumb enough name, Samuel L. Jackson will star in it!

  • The name game

    While I can’t say as I’ve found much use out of MySpace, my sister-in-law did post an amusing bulletin that I had to steal. I’m sure we’ve all seen variations on the name game… here’s a collection of rules for generating ten of them (along with my results).

    Your Spy Name: Middle name and current street name
    Travis Desert (only part of my street name, so it wouldn’t sound so goofy)

    Your Movie Star Name: Grandfather/grandmother on your mom’s side, your favorite candy
    Guy Snickers

    Your Rap Name: First initial of first name, first two or three letters of your last name
    J-Ab (Jab?)

    Your Gamer Tag: A favorite color, a favorite animal
    Purple Chicken

    Your Soap Opera Name: Middle name, city where you were born
    Travis St. Helens

    Your Star Wars Name: First 3 letters of your last name, last 3 letters of mother’s maiden name, first 3 letters of your pet’s name
    Abeittbob (or Abe Itt Bob as they tend to do names in Star Wars)

    Your Jedi Name: Middle name spelled backwards, your mom’s maiden name spelled backwards
    Sivart Rolyat (I made up the maiden name… no way I’m posting that online for real)

    Your Porn Star Name: First pet’s name, the street you grew up on
    Curly Deer

    Your Superhero Name: “The”, your favorite color, the automobile your dad drives
    The Purple Chevy

    Your Action Hero Name: First Name Of The Main Character In The Last Film You Watched, last Food You Just Ate
    Popeye Radish

    So, what are your names?

  • Don’t you hate that under the weather feeling?

    So I’m fighting off the advances of a summertime cold, picked up from my son. It’s that tickly sore throat, run-down feeling and if it doesn’t get nipped in the bud right away, then it’ll turn full-fledged, and we don’t want that. Hence, I’ve been dosing up on echinacea, Airborne, vitamin C, and Ricola. And tea. So far, I seem to have halted the advance, but I won’t know if the tide has turned until the morning after a (hopefully) good night’s sleep.

    Last night’s sleep was not good. At 4:20 in the AM we (as in, the entire household, kids, animals and all) were awakened to the sound of digital beeping. Loud digital beeping. After scouring the house and finding nothing out of the ordinary, my unconfirmed suspicion is that it was the new humidifier we had set up in my son’s room. After that, it was sporadic sleep interrupted by the cat pouncing on my feet every 53 seconds.

    On a totally unrelated note, why on Earth are so many MySpace pages so bloody ugly? No, I know the technical reason they are—because somebody actually thought it would be a good idea to give users that much control over their page—but holy Corona, don’t any of these people have any sense of aesthetics at all? I don’t get it.

  • How I spent…

    Yeah, it’s one of those “How I spent” posts, inspired by Shannon’s this time. Only I’ll confine mine to my super-busy holiday weekend.

    Saturday, my wife and daughter went to Sisters with my mother for the rock and gem show. They do this every year, it’s tradition. While they were gone, my son and I returned a bunch of cans and bottles to Safeway, went to the library, and stopped by the homebrew shop so I could pick up ingredients for a batch of beer and a wine kit for my wife.

    A highlight of the homebrew shop: my soon-to-be-five-year-old son asking when we could leave because he didn’t like this store… I guess not enough toys? Too creepy for kids? I got a chuckle out of it.

    When the others got back, my daughter went home with my mother to have a sleepover, and the rest of us went back to town to check out the Saturday market, get some ice cream, and then head home again. For dinner it was Cibelli’s Pizza (had to go pick it up).

    Sunday it was off to Albertson’s to return some more bottles and cans, return some movies, and run to Bi-Mart. I transplanted a bunch of plants (one of my hop plants, several tomatoes, a couple of beans). In the afternoon we went out to my parents’ place for dinner and to pick up our daughter. It was a hot enough day that I took the kids over to Reynolds Pond and we played in the water a bit.

    I took Monday off from work, and it was a big homebrew day that I had planned with my friend Paul. After going out to breakfast at McKay Cottage, we spent a good part of the day brewing, and then the afternoon and evening turned into an impromptu barbecue and party with Paul and his wife, Shannon and Brian, and Simone and her husband. The day was punctuated with the power going out all over town (only about a half hour for us, though I heard other people were out for hours), lighting off fireworks that Simone’s husband had brought over, and a friendly poker game.

    That night at 12:30 AM, someone rang our doorbell. I, however, slept through it, and only woke when my wife, er, woke me. Muzzy-headed with alcohol and sleep, all I knew was that the dog was barking in the middle of the night so I yelled at him to stop, only to find out he was actually performing a service for once… hilarity ensues. I stumbled around in the dark for a while, only wanting to go back to bed, my wife called the police to notify them of the “ding dong ditch” (a name I’m quite sure I’d never heard before then), and left the closet light on all night. I didn’t get a very good night’s sleep.

    Tuesday the Fourth found us getting up and ready to go to the Pet Parade. After the Parade (we hung out there with Shannon and Brian), we wandered the park checking out the booths and food they have every year (festival-style), and then checked out the library’s book sale. (Scored a stack of books for only $4!) In the afternoon we were back out to my parents’ place for dinner and fireworks, and then when we got back home we did a few more fireworks when it got dark, and then watched the (in)famous Pilot Butte fireworks show. We have a pretty good view of that from our lawn.

    And that, in a not-so-small nutshell, was our holiday weekend. Sometime I’d just like to relax for a day or two, you know?