Sunbeams illuminating a coastal forest in Port Orford, Oregon

Chuggnutt!

Author: Jon

  • Blogging Bush

    The big news around here is that George W. Bush came to town. Ironically, he came to talk about healthy forests and programs to help cut down the forest fire danger, but was pre-empted from Camp Sherman to Redmond because of forest fires.

    Here are some links:

    And Jake over on UtterlyBoring has blogged a bit about it, too, both here and here.

  • Error!

    Yikes. For the past, oh, 6 hours or so, I’ve had this error killing the site entirely:

    Parse error: parse error, unexpected T_VARIABLE in /path/to/blog.inc on line 395

    (Of course, if you tried to connect during that time, you’ll know what “/path/to” really is. It’s probably already cached in Google, damn it all.)

    I’d forgotten the all-important semi-colon at the end of line 394. This comes about because I’d been making changes today, and like an idiot forgot to test the last upload I’d made before heading home. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  • Chicago

    Just saw the movie version of Chicago this evening, and I just have to say: eh.

    I’m sure this will make me popular with those who loved the movie (even my wife loved it, and she normally hates musicals), but I honestly do not see the big deal with this movie, and I certainly don’t see why it garnered so many award nominations… unless it’s just because it has the label “musical” slapped on it. I’m sorry, but it was just a bit too tedious for me.

    Of course, it doesn’t help that I don’t really like René Zellweger, or that Richard Gere pretty much proved he can’t sing his way out of a paper bag. Those aside, it was simply a mediocre plot and thin storyline heavily padded with music and dance numbers.

    (I couldn’t sit through all of Moulin Rouge either.)

  • Back Online

    Yep, back from our excellent adventures in camping. It was a good weekend, sunny and hot, the nights not too cold. I was a little nervous about how the kids would do sleeping in the tent this year, but for nothing: they slept better than the adults did.

    The campground itself was a bit primitive—no plumbing. Restroom facilities were outhouses, and the only water was from an old-fashioned pump. I didn’t mind so much, but others did. Next year’s family reunion will be held somewhere slightly more modern. But overall, Cold Springs Campground is a nice rustic little campground, and we had a great time.

    The Beach Boys concert on Sunday was cool, too, even though we were dead tired from camping. Free drinks, cigars, steak dinner. VIP indeed. The only drawback was that only the serving areas were tented; all the tables were right out in the hot hot hot sun and we all sat roasting for awhile before some of us figured out we could sit out behind the main tent in the shade and the breeze to cool off before the concert actually started. After that, it was a perfect evening.

  • PHP Cruise Clarification

    Back on the 11th I blogged about the PHP Cruise and quoted the price for 2 as $1199.99 plus $819.99. I wanted to clarify that I was talking about the Full Suite pricing, which is the most expensive (and would also be the nicest for traveling with my wife). Marco from php|architect commented to point out the better deal price of $799.99, for the Inside Cabin fare. Details here. He’s absolutely right; re-reading my entry made it sound like it was more expensive that it is. So get on it! $800 is a pretty good price for a cruise in the Bahamas.

  • Offline

    I’m going offline this weekend, starting today at noon. We’re going to the annual family reunion, and camping out at Cold Springs Campground just outside of Sisters. And then Sunday when we get back, we have the Beach Boys concert. Full weekend. I may be back online Sunday night. Maybe.

  • Air Time

    More on the California governor race. In order to be fair, federal rules dictate that all candidates have to have equal air time on television, and since there’s a huge disparity between the screen time someone like, say, Arnold Schwarzenegger has and someone like, say, Larry Flynt has, cable TV networks have made the decision to pull Arnold’s movies. There’s a story about it here.

    As you might imagine, I have several thoughts on this.

    First of all, nationwide cable TV networks are pulling Arnold’s movies? Seems unfair to punish the rest of the nation for the consequences of California’s governor race. I wonder how long it will take for some litigation-happy idiot outside of California to try to sue the SciFi Channel for this.

    But then, wouldn’t it be much more amusing (and California-like) if instead of pulling Arnold’s movies, they gave equal amounts of screen time to the other candidates? Then there would be nothing on California TV except candidates… imagine the horror:

    • Hours and hours of Diff’rent Strokes for Gary Coleman;
    • For Larry Flynt, there’d either have to be a Hustler Channel (is there one already?), or just show The People vs. Larry Flynt over and over again—though no doubt some Californians would vote for him thinking they were electing Woody Harrelson;
    • Arianna Huffington would be on the air flaming all the other candidates and progressively moving closer to a “gang audit” (in the immortal words of Dennis Miller) by various government agencies;
    • Porn. Courtesy of Mary Carey. This might not be so horrible.

    If you’re interested, the certified list of candidates is here (PDF). All 135 of them.

  • Google Calculator

    Here’s an interesting tidbit: Google now has a built-in calculator. This is a cool feature to be sure, but AlltheWeb has been doing this for a while now (as an undocumented feature), since at least April 14, 2003. Try it and see.

  • PHP Cruise

    Here’s a first: php|architect is organizing a PHP cruise. I’d heard of the geek cruises before, but I certainly never expected to see one exclusively for PHP. Interesting and slightly off-kilter at the same time.

    Prices put it out of my reach, however. $1199.99 plus $819.99 is just more than I could afford. It might be fun, though…

  • Comments are now on

    Okay, I’ve enabled user comments and I’m crossing my fingers. You should now be able to post comments to entries, starting with this very entry, if you’re so inclined. Hopefully nothing major will break! :)