Last week my company sent me and three co-workers to Simi Valley, California for a three-day training course with Bruce Clay. Bruce Clay, if you didn’t know (and likely you don’t; it’s pretty niche) is a Search Engine Optimization specialist and the training was, naturally, for SEO.

It was actually pretty worthwhile and interesting, despite my skepticism of SEO. But for purposes of this post, it got me thinking as to what search terms my three blogs rank well for on Google. Here’s a preliminary list:

• bandage man: #1 (chuggnutt.com)
• bill gates house: #2 on Google Images (chuggnutt.com)
• matrix name generator: #1 (chuggnutt.com)
• cowboy dinner tree: #2 (chuggnutt.com)
• smoke alarm beeping: #4 (chuggnutt.com)
• pumpkin ale recipe: #1 (The Brew Site)
• pumpkin ale: #2 (The Brew Site)
• budweiser american ale: #7 (it was #3 at one point) (The Brew Site)
• simcoe hops: #1 (The Brew Site)
• best cheap beer and cheap beers: #1 (The Brew Site)
• beer online: #5 (The Brew Site)
• pumpkin patch bend oregon: #2 and #3 (Hack Bend)
• kbnz: #2 (Hack Bend)
• 92.7 fm bend: #1 and #2 (Hack Bend)
• free kibble: #4 (Hack Bend)
• three creeks brewery: #3, #4 and #5 (The Brew Site and Hack Bend)

Since the year is now three-quarters over, I thought I’d post about some of the best books I’ve read so far for 2008. Yes, I’m keeping track (again).

Fiction:

• The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. So, so messed up. Really curious to see how the movie turns out.
• World War Z, by Max Brooks. Really well-done zombie mockumentary.
• Coalescent, by Stephen Baxter. I actually found this book to be in some ways frustrating, but overall I think it was a well-done departure for Baxter. Though he does revert to some of his own cliches too.
• Hornet Flight, by Ken Follett. Very pleasantly surprised by this World War II-era thriller.
• Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman. Holy crap this is a most excellent book.
• Spook Country, by William Gibson. I really liked his earlier Pattern Recognition, and the same applies here.

Non-fiction:

• Ambitious Brew, by Maureen Ogle. A history of American brewing, from the mid-1800s onward. Very engaging.
• Cabin Fever, by William Sullivan. Simply a fun book to read.

I’ve read several beer/brewing books this year, but they were more technical and I don’t really rate for that.

Snickers Charged: with caffeine, taurine, and "other B vitamins"—essentially the same stuff they put into energy drinks like Red Bull.

Really? Was Snickers not… I don’t know… "loaded" enough? Next thing you know, they’ll be putting guarana and ginseng and who knows what else into them.

No, I haven’t tried one. There’s a review here, if you’re interested.

FAIL Blog: This is not so much "weird" as "spastically funny."

The horse: I forgot about this til just now. A woman was riding a white horse across the lawn of the Barnes & Noble at 27th and Highway 20 (here in Bend). This was a week or two ago. Right across the lawn and up to the crosswalk at the intersection… waiting to cross, I guess.

Yeah, one of those things I have a cameraphone for, but I was driving, so I didn’t get the picture.

Pretty much it can be summed up thusly: I got a job. (Background.)

No, I won’t keep you in suspense about it, and get straight to the reveal-disclaimer of who it is: Smart Solutions. They’re a web and software development company and, well, I’m doing web development work (again).

The job started the 3rd, right after the first day of school, so in a way it’s like I was on the school schedule: I got the summer off and then went right back to work, in tandem with the kids. Since then, there really hasn’t been much to report: most of my time has been taken up with full time work again.

So… yeah. It’s taken some adjustment, going from full time to half time to unemployed to full time again (learning a new job, no less) over the course of six months. But, I realize I’m lucky too; I know people who were (are) out of work for longer than that. And I like the new job, so—fingers crossed.

I had actually hoped to start writing a lot more here since my last post, but August slipped away and September is here with all its changes. But before I get to those, here’s how the rest of August went.

The week following the 8th, we had to travel to Florida for unavoidable family business. It was fairly last-minute, and traveling cross-country is no picnic. We were essentially gone from Monday through Sunday.

The week after that was a continuation of the job search and interview process. I actually did a fair amount of running around and, of course, it was the "recovery week" from the previous week’s trip to Florida.

The final full week of the month was spent essentially getting ready for school and the Labor Day weekend—my brother and sister-in-law were coming up from San Diego and they were staying with us at least part of the time (that we knew of—it actually was the whole time) so there was a fair amount of shopping and cleaning to do in preparation.

Labor Day weekend rocked, and I can safely say I exercised my liver quite a bit without any ill effects. (It’s all in how you pace yourself.)

There you are, the capsule version. My next post will encompass what’s happened since the beginning of this month.

Seems like everybody’s talking about the "08/08/08" calendar conjunction moreso than other years that I remember; somehow it’s supposed to be lucky or something. (I can’t remember; is there a name for this sort of numerical calendar occurrence?) Of course, it’s also a Friday, and you’re never supposed to start a trip on a Friday (or do a slew of other things), so maybe they cancel each other out.

Meanwhile, UFOs are being sighted in the area. You can follow the links and even see the captured video, though it mostly looks like a shiny dot. It was a little late for the Project Blue Book Festival, too—maybe next year!

(Yes, those last two links are blatant pointers back to my Hack Bend blog. If you got it, flaunt it.)

The best tie-in to "08/08/08" I know of is Stone Brewing’s 08.08.08 Vertical Epic Ale. Each year, from 01.01.01 through 12.12.12, they are releasing a limited-edition beer. You can drink it right away, or save it up for an epic "vertical tasting" of all the beers together in 2012 (or later).

Stone Brewing is awesome.

The job hunt is still ongoing. I have some strong leads but nothing definitive yet.

…if only someone would pay me a ton of money to write on my blogs full time. That would rock.

We saw "The Dark Knight" a little over a week ago, and bottom line, it’s not only the best movie I’ve seen this year, it’s also the best Batman movie ever made.

Without spoilers, here are some of the pluses:

• No origin story for the Joker. I’ve said before, these things work when not bogged out with origin stories. By presenting the Joker as "an absolute" (the filmmakers’ words), just there, it’s perfect.
• Speaking of the Joker, Heather Ledger’s interpretation: yeah, amazing.
• The way they handled Harvey Dent was really, really, really well done. I won’t say more because of spoiler issues, but if you know the source material, well…
• Like "Batman Begins," they keep everything (more or less) grounded in reality, which is such a breath of fresh air after the horrible, horrible Joel Schumacher Batman films.
• It’s freaking awesome.

One of the reasons it’s the best Batman movie ever made, I think, is that they treat the material seriously and have devotional respect to the character—and they assume an intelligent audience, rather than a theater full of nitwits who want to see nipples on the Batsuit.

Now I just wish someone would come along a reboot the Superman movie franchise and make it as good as Batman. (No, I haven’t seen "Superman Returns", nor do I want to.)

That secret being: I’ve been "officially" unemployed since mid-June.

I use "officially" in quotes because the Dire Employment Situation began earlier than that, but it wasn’t until June that I was entirely laid off.

What happened was, well, I was working for a builder, and we all know how the local economy has been treating home builders and real estate, right? Anyway, I guess it was in March when I found out that my hours were going to be cut back to half-time at some point in the near future, and then that happened in April. (I think; my timeline on this is a bit fuzzy.)

Thus, I became a part time employee for a couple of months. I started searching the local job scene but avoided blogging about any of it at the time, because

1. the status of my current job was still unclear, and I didn’t want to rock the boat unduly one way or another; and
2. I didn’t want to tip off potential future employers with something that could potentially be interpreted the wrong way—i.e., it was something I’d rather discuss in person, if needed.

Then June came, and the official layoff came to pass. (It was myself and two other employees from a small-ish sized staff, to give you an idea of the scope.) In some ways it made everything easier—with the kids out of school, I could be home with them, I could devote my time fully to the job search, etc.—but of course this kind of thing is never easy.

Several people have asked why I didn’t blog about getting laid off sooner, and use the blog as a networking tool. Good question.

Here’s one reason: I screwed up my application for unemployment compensation and didn’t manage to get that resolved until just last week, so I didn’t want to somehow compound the problems I was having by blogging something inadvertent until it was fixed.

That’s a true answer; I really did screw up the unemployment and I really was a bit paranoid about blogging it—but it’s not "the" answer. Not that I can give you an alternate reason, other than I just wasn’t ready to write anything about it.

Anyway. For the past month and a half we’ve been watching our budget closely, I’ve been seeking employment (I’ve had a few interviews, too—two as far away as Portland and Lincoln City), and ideally I’m doing some freelance web development work to make ends meet while job searching.

I’d like to say that I took the extra time to really focus on my writing and blogging and trying to turn them into viable revenue generators, but, well…

So. I’m currently unemployed, and if anyone should have any leads on a computer- or internet-related job (I specialize in PHP and MySQL web development, don’t ya know), I’m available.

(I don’t do Bar Mitzvahs.)

Finally, some pictures to accompany my Oregon Coast travelogue post from the beginning of this month. Nothing earth-shaking here, just what you’d expect.

Their big sign on Highway 101. You can’t miss it.

Click through for the rest of the pictures

The packaging production line at Tillamook Cheese. It doesn’t run on weekends.

Big blocks of cheese (40 pounds or so?) being extruded into plastic bags. The blocks then proceed along a conveyor belt to end up in the automated storage warehouse.

The end of the beach at Oceanside, where the tunnel entrance looms out of the rock like some old prohibited bunker.

The entrance up close. "Caution. Falling rock."

After oh, I don’t know, 25 yards or so, you pop out on the rocky "secret" beach. Here’s the tunnel exit, considerably less developed than the entrance.

The "secret" beach. The rocks in the distance (one and half of them, anyway) are "Three Arch Rock."

Here’s a small version of a really amateur "stitch" job I did of the Fishtails Café in Newport. (Ignore the cars.) Click on it for a larger version. The building really is dually-segmented like that, with the main entrance in the red-brown door on the left half.

A sea lion hanging out on the dock below the Port Dock One pier and Restaurant.

This probably needs no explanation, huh?

Rogue’s gift shop (the tasting room is upstairs, which we didn’t visit this trip).

More of the gift shop.

The distiller in Rogue’s House of Spirits just across the marina from the Brewery. This is actually behind chain link and barbed wire (to the customers) but I poked the camera lens through the links.

The Mount Rushmore Of… is a new blog that is one of those obvious-in-hindsight ideas I wish I’d thought up, because it satisfies the "Top X List" jones of twitchy web surfers everywhere.

Everyone knows what Mount Rushmore is, right?  Mount Rushmore is a National Memorial featuring the sculptures of the heads of the most influential Presidents of the first 150 years of the United States.  The Mount Rushmore Of takes that same principle and asks the question of who’s head should be carved in stone for other subjects, like:

• Who is on the Mount Rushmore of Baseball?
• Who is on the Mount Rushmore of Punk Rock?
• And so on…

Debate encouraged. Naturally.

Incidentally, Neal Stewart, the mastermind behind it, also writes the highly entertaining Turkey Sandwich Report. Oh yeah, he works in beer, too—a marketer, but I don’t hold that against him.