Author: Jon

Our Thanksgiving was pretty great, thanks to a big (for us) group of family and friends and despite the cold and snow the weather decided to dump on us. ("Snowmageddon" is my term for such events because everyone always gets up in such a tizzy over them.) We have Thanksgiving dinner at our house, and… Continue reading Wrapping up November

I’ve ranted about daylight saving time before but these past few weeks are really bringing home just how much I truly hate the practice: it’s pitch dark at 7am. (I get up at 6:45.) Pitch dark! It’s ridiculous! It should never be that dark at 7 in the morning in mid-Autumn—unless you live above the… Continue reading I still hate Daylight Saving Time

Happy Halloween! We’re getting ready to go trick-or-treating soon, but if you need something hilariously funny, check this out: The 50 Most Terrifying Sesame Street Costumes. lolz!

Being a couple of days from Halloween naturally conjures up images of ghost stories and spooky hauntings. And this being a blog means, of course, links. John Gottberg Anderson (Bend’s resident restaurant critic and travel writer) has a couple of posts on his blog this week: Sleeping with Oregon Ghosts, and Sleeping with Portland Ghosts.… Continue reading The Halloween season

We’ve had our Android phones for a few weeks now—-yes, finally catching up to much of the rest of the First World in that a phone is no longer just a device you talk to people on, but a full-fledged computer you carry around in your pocket—-and they’re slick little pieces of hardware, oh yes.… Continue reading Some random thoughts for September

Stuck with me (again) since watching Inception (not to mention other movies and sources like The Matrix) is the notion of simulated reality, and more specifically, the (perhaps surprising) idea that it’s statistically more probable than not that we are in fact living in a simulation. From Wikipedia: Simulated reality is the proposition that reality… Continue reading Simulated reality

No, I’m not going to review or spoil the movie Inception or prattle on at length about it here. I really rather enjoyed it, it has a few holes here and there, and it gets you thinking. In particular, I like the idea of having a totem. Seems safer that way.

I didn’t realize I hadn’t blogged here at all for the entire month; that’s kind of disconcerting. I even had a couple of things to write about but just never got around to it: one was a review of Stephen Baxter’s novel Transcendant (and on Stephen Baxter’s works in general), another on the movie Inception.… Continue reading July? What July?

My wife and I spent the past weekend in Walla Walla, Washington, for an anniversary trip to check out the booming wine scene they have going on. How booming? Well, they have some 130 wineries in the Walla Walla Valley (an area that also encompasses Milton-Freewater in Oregon), and 85 of those have tasting rooms… Continue reading ain’t no party like a Walla Walla party

I was going to write up my (extensive, and probably redundant) analysis of the final episode/season of LOST, but it just got the better of me. Frankly, it was just kind of a shit ending that didn’t make much sense and really answered none of the questions at the heart of the series, or that… Continue reading LOST and Found