Sunbeams illuminating a coastal forest in Port Orford, Oregon

Chuggnutt!

Author: Jon

  • Election Day

    Did you vote yet? You can bet I did, mailed it in last week. (You gotta like the Oregon vote-by-mail system.) I’ve been spending the last hour and a half or so sitting here compulsively hitting refresh on the CNN and MSNBC sites to review the latest numbers, while catching up on Bloglines. It’s close but right now looks like Bush is going to win. What I find interesting is that while NBC has projected Ohio going to Bush, as of this moment CNN is considering it too close to call and hasn’t tallied those votes for him yet.

    CNN has the better site for this, I think; not only can you drill-down from the national map to each state, but you can further drill-down into each state to see how each county is doing. And they’re on top of the numbers. Very interesting.

  • Halloween Summary

    As usual, it was as cold as a witch’s tit last night for Halloween, but at least it wasn’t snowing or anything; last year I wrote that it was in the teens. Fortunately this year it was “only” around 30 degrees.

    Ah, but this year we live in a new neighborhood! One that’s filled with houses, unlike our old one that we could hit maybe four or five when trick-or-treating. We took the kids up and down several blocks, amassing a small fortune in candy and revelling in the wonderment of people, before the cold finally drove us home. What’s interesting is that our house sits at the end of a cul-de-sac in the new development, which only has four other houses with people in them… so our doorbell only rang perhaps three times because nobody wanted to wander off the beaten path down the dark street for only one house. So in that respect, it was very much like our old neighborhood.

    Whatever, it was still a good Halloween; the best part is watching the kids enjoy it more as they get older and have a better grip of what’s going on. Although my youngest needs to work on his timing: they’d ring the doorbell and he would immediately say “Trick or treat!” before anyone actually opened the door.

    And Jake has the best Halloween story. I think I’m most glad I don’t live in his neighborhood :).

  • Crappy tech service

    Don’t bother buying a Brother printer. I helped to set up a new one today and, get this, it didn’t come with any type of interface cable. No USB, no parallel cable, nothing. It even says so on the quickstart instructions. WTF? Is that stupid or what?

    Speaking of stupid, or perhaps just stubborn, AOL apparently doesn’t get the hint that we don’t need their service, and has called us several times. Of course, I brought this on myself—when we went to San Diego, I installed AOL (the free trial) on the laptop just in case we needed to get online and didn’t have any other means of doing so. (Never needed it; we got a strong WiFi signal at my brother’s place.) AOL is sure trying to master the hard sell. When I cancelled, the guy tried to resell me on AOL something like three times, even after I had explained that I didn’t need it and already have broadband access. Must be following the “three NOs before you go” rule. They sure aren’t gaining any favor at our house.

  • Grand Theftendo

    Via Slashdot tonight, this is totally amazing and cool: Grand Theftendo, a port of Grand Theft Auto III to the original Nintendo Entertainment System (an 8-bit machine!). (“Port” is a bit misleading; it’s all original, from the graphics to the dialogue to the code—it’s probably more of a tribute.) What’s more, the guy is writing the thing in assembly. Using an assembler and compiler he wrote himself to do the job.

    Did I mention this is just a hobby that he works on in his spare time?

    I stand in awe, and am half-seriously considering giving up this computer thing to become a potato farmer or something.

  • First snow of the season

    Just looked out the window here at work and saw that it’s snowing. As far as I know, this marks the first snow of the season for Bend.

  • No, I’m not dead

    I guess I’d better blog something before people think I’m dead. Well, not totally: I’ve been posting to The Brew Site, so it’s not a total wash.

    So let’s see, what to blog about… this looks interesting: National Novel Writing Month. Write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. I’ve almost half toyed with the idea of doing this. Almost.

    Quick post over! Nothing more to see here. Move on about your business…

  • Private Solar System?

    I saw this headline from Reuters in Bloglines today: “FedEx to Build 2nd-Largest U.S. Private Solar System” and of course I immediately wondered if they were building a model of the Solar System and why that would matter to FedEx (and why would it be private?), before realizing what was meant was Solar Powerered System. Very odd alleys the mind wanders into some days.

  • Tasteless… yet funny

    Tasteless ad from Zeldman's Ad Graveyard

    Found on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents: The Ad Graveyard, via Boing Boing. Pretty much speaks for itself.

  • When Bush was in Medford…

    I’m very, very surprised this story isn’t being picked up nationally (or if it has, I haven’t seen it anywhere yet except locally): during Bush’s visit to Medford, three schoolteachers were removed from the rally for wearing offensive T-shirts. How offensive? They read, “Protect Our Civil Liberties.”

    Via Jack Bog’s Blog, this post points to the relevant Bend.com article:

    President Bush taught three Oregon schoolteachers a new lesson in irony – or tragedy – Thursday night when his campaign removed them from a Bush speech and threatened them with arrest simply for wearing t-shirts that said “Protect Our Civil Liberties,” the Democratic Party of Oregon reported.

     

    The women were ticketed to the event, admitted into the event, and were then approached by event officials before the president’s speech. They were asked to leave and to turn over their tickets – two of the three tickets were seized, but the third was saved when one of the teachers put it underneath an article of clothing….

     

    Three Medford school teachers were threatened with arrest and escorted from the event after they showed up wearing T-shirts with the slogan “Protect our civil liberties.” All three said they applied for and received valid tickets from Republican headquarters in Medford.

     

    The women said they did not intend to protest. “I wanted to see if I would be able to make a statement that I feel is important, but not offensive, in a rally for my president,” said Janet Voorhies, 48, a teacher in training.

     

    “We chose this phrase specifically because we didn’t think it would be offensive or degrading or obscene,” said Tania Tong, 34, a special education teacher.

    So, they show up to a rally to support the President, wearing T-shirts that are about as politically innocuous as they can be, and they get booted?

    Hmmmmmmm.

  • Doom Dog

    Okay, here’s a picture of the scariest dog I’ve ever seen—come to think of it, the entire picture is pretty freaky:

    Doom dog!
    (Picture found on Strong Gundogs)

    Holy shit, that looks like something that would come from Doom or something…

    Apparently people breed dogs like these to hunt wild boar. Jeez…