This past weekend was the annual family reunion up at Suttle Lake, and since it’s the one time of the year that we actually have to go camping, we packed up the gear and off we went. The weather sucked, though. It was windy—really windy, tent-flattening wind (other people’s tents; ours was well-shielded by trees)—all… Continue reading Suttle Lake
Author: Jon
Simulated reality
This article from the NY Times (link is good at the moment, though I’m not sure it won’t disappear behind some paywall at some point and be inaccessible) covers the sufficiently weird theory/philosophy proposed by Nick Bostrom that we are likely (actually, almost mathematically certainly) living inside a computer simulation. ("Living" wouldn’t quite be the… Continue reading Simulated reality
Housecleaning
My goodness, I’ve certainly been neglecting this site. Most of my blogging energy has focused on The Brew Site and Hack Bend, but I’ve also been neglecting other areas of this site—the projects page in particular needed cleaning up, and I needed to catch up on PHP code fixes for my HTML2Text class and Word… Continue reading Housecleaning
On blogging, media and the OBF
One more day and I’m off to the Oregon Brewers Festival; like last year, I’m going again with the intent of blogging the experience. (You can read all of my OBF-related stuff on The Brew Site here.) What’s different this year, though, is that I, as a blogger, am also recognized as a media/press person;… Continue reading On blogging, media and the OBF
Free tickets to The Fray in Bend
Yes, you read that right: over on my Hack Bend blog, I get to do a giveaway for a pair of tickets to The Fray—playing in Bend this next Wednesday, July 25th, at the Les Schwab Amphitheater. How cool is that? So if you live in Central Oregon—or you’re planning on being in Central Oregon… Continue reading Free tickets to The Fray in Bend
A weekend in Ashland
We left Friday morning (just the wife and I; Grandma had the kids for the weekend) and headed down to southern Oregon for a play and a getaway. The weather turned out great, and the trip was largely a winery tour, among other things; we visited four wineries and ended up buying just over a… Continue reading A weekend in Ashland
Top hated internet words
Not surprisingly, I had to comment on this. Topping the list of words most likely to make web users “wince, shudder or want to bang your head on the keyboard” was folksonomy, a term for a web classification system. “Blogosphere”, the collective name for blogs or online journals, was second; “blog” itself was third; “netiquette”,… Continue reading Top hated internet words
Zombies!
Over the past week and a half I read through two zombie novels: Monster Island and Monster Nation, both by David Wellington. Now I’m the first to admit that I’m not a true aficionado of the zombie genre; aside from Stephen King’s Cell, I can’t think of any other books I’ve read, and I’ve only… Continue reading Zombies!
At World’s End
Finally got out to see “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End” back on the first weekend of this month, and I quite liked it. I really liked it, I thought it was fun and supremely escapist with excellent action sequences and truly excellent special effects. A perfect summer blockbuster, in other words. And I… Continue reading At World’s End
Mahalo
The tech and “Web 2.0” section of the blogosphere is all a-twitter over the alpha launch of the new “people-powered” search engine, Mahalo, by Jason Calacanis (of Weblogs, Inc. and Netscape-relaunch fame). I’ve been checking it out a bit, and have some comments… There’s definitely no mystery under the hood, technology-wise, here: it’s simply a… Continue reading Mahalo