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 this year the cooking proceeded really smoothly as well—when you’re dealing with a 21 pound turkey you never quite know for sure.

Of course, having lots of beer and maintaining a rolling buzz throughout the day helps tremendously as well.

I have a birthday approaching, whereupon I will turn 38, and for the longest time I’ve had it in my head that I’m already 38; it’s more of an effort to remember that no, I’m only yet 37. I’m not sure if that means I should be worried, or that I’m just caring less and less about my actual age.

I know I’ve been saying for a while now that I’ll be moving chuggnutt.com over to WordPress soon… I’m thinking "soon" might be this week or so. I know this is really of no interest to you unless you’re a blogging software enthusiast, but I think what I’m going to end up doing is forgoing the old categories/tags entirely and simply focus on bringing over the content and comments. I can always go back and re-categorize and re-tag later, if I’m ambitious.

There will likely also be a number of broken links; I believe early entries to this blog had a URL that ended in ".html" and the later ones are ".php"; I will probably preserve the ".php" as I did for my other two blogs, but with WordPress that will break the old ".html" URLs. I should be able to handle those with redirects, but the site might look like a circa-1999 "under construction" website in some places for a bit.

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 Arctic Circle, but that’s a different matter.

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. Talking about the various places he’s stayed, I believe, that are rumored to be haunted.

I am amused and not a little pleased to see that a Google search for "Bandage Man" still has my original 2005 post as the number one result. That’s still a great, quirky-Oregon story, and there are even a couple of "first-hand accounts" in the comments on that post.

For some closer-to-home (that being Bend) ghost stories, check out the Hack Bend post I wrote up two years ago (it being based on an earlier post originally on this site).

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. I’m still in "tinkering" stage and not really using it, or rather exploiting it, the way it could be, yet. Half the time I still want to, you know, just make phone calls.

Don’t know where the thought came from, but it occurred to me earlier today that the (nearly 20-year-old) cartoon "James Bond Jr." was really a terrible idea.

Thus far in the new TV season I’m liking The Event (though I won’t be as generous with it as I was with Lost—I’ve learned that lesson) and Hawaii Five-O; I thought last week’s (two hour) premiere of Law & Order SVU was ridiculously melodramatic, even by SVU standards (they’re just not very good cops); I’m hoping Law & Order Los Angeles will be good enough to be a replacement to real Law & Order (RIP); and somehow I’ve gotten pulled into watching Modern Family and Parenthood, both new from last season. I’m not sure how to feel about those two.

I’m meh about the various CSI series; the fake overly-futuristic computer technology they portray highly annoys me, and Miami is worthless as near as I can tell (especially since they’ve apparently eliminated the opening one-liner). How that show is still on the air is a mystery to me.

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 could be simulated—perhaps by computer simulation—to a degree indistinguishable from "true" reality. It could contain conscious minds which may or may not be fully aware that they are living inside a simulation. In its strongest form, the "simulation hypothesis" claims it is entirely possible and even probable that we are living in a simulated reality.

This is quite different from the current, technologically achievable concept of virtual reality. Virtual reality is easily distinguished from the experience of "true" reality; participants are never in doubt about the nature of what they experience. Simulated reality, by contrast, would be hard or impossible to separate from "true" reality.

…the philosopher Nick Bostrom investigated the possibility that we may be living in a simulation. A simplified version of his argument proceeds as such:

i. It is possible that an advanced civilization could create a computer simulation which contains individuals with artificial intelligence (AI).

ii. Such a civilization would likely run many, billions for example, of these simulations (just for fun, for research or any other permutation of possible reasons.)

iii. A simulated individual inside the simulation wouldn’t necessarily know that it is inside a simulation — it is just going about its daily business in what it considers to be the "real world."

Then the ultimate question is — if one accepts that the above premises are at least possible— which of the following is more likely?

a. We are the one civilization which develops AI simulations and happens not to be in one itself?

b. We are one of the many (billions) of simulations that has run? (Remember point iii.)

Kind of crazy, huh? I’m not advocating one way or the other but it’s tremendously interesting to read and speculate about. In particular, the question of, "How would we know or find out we’re living in a simulated reality?"

The Matrix, for instance, posits bugs and artifacts of various sorts present in the system that might well reveal the simulation (though the general populace is completely unaware). Inception raises the good point that in a dream reality, even the craziest dream seems completely normal to the dreamer, so there may well not be any way to determine what is real (other than by waking up, although the use of the totem can help if you suspect you are in a dream… maybe).

Of course, this all spirals into much more existential philosophical points (the nature of consciousness, perception vs. reality, and so on) than I’m going to go into here. Suffice to say, it’s pretty thought-provoking.

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.

Well, I’ll still write about those things; but I couldn’t just let July get away without some sort of blog post here.

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 open to the public.

And, an interesting coincidence: the weekend we were visiting also happened to be the weekend of the Wine Bloggers Conference.

I’m not going to give a blow-by-blow account of all the wineries we visited, but I will highlight at least a few that stood out:

• L’École No. 41 is one of the biggest and oldest wineries in the area and on Friday afternoons (starting at 2:00) they have a special "Honor Roll" tasting for a nominal fee. We got there just in time to not only get an inside tour (with tasting wines from the barrels, even) but to enjoy a vertical tasting of their Perigee line of estate wines. Pretty fantastic.
• Tertulia Cellars was a fun stop not only for the wines but also the lively conversation of the hostess (I don’t remember her name).
• Similarly good conversation and wines at Rulo Winery, along with a large platter of artisan cheeses to help ones’ self to. We loved their Syrca red wine and I particularly enjoyed their oak-aged Chardonnay—I was most impressed with the side-by-side tasting they did with their stainless steel-aged Chardonnay so you could taste the difference: it was like the kind of beer geekery I’m all over.
• Saviah Cellars was another great source of conversation and information; in addition to getting an interesting impromptu lesson in viticulture, we got the lowdown on some good sources of beer in the area (though we didn’t get any) and some inside info on the local wine industry. Oh, and good wines, too.

Friday night we attended the Walla Walla party of the year: the Charles Smith/K Vintners party held in part for the Wine Bloggers Conference. It would sound much cooler to say, "we crashed the party," but in reality we were legitimately on the list so there was no party-crashing involved.

And by "party of the year" I mean just that: apparently Charles Smith is a rock star in Walla Walla, the area’s larger-than-life personality who is eccentric, makes incredible wine, and throws the best parties. We had no idea who he was or that the party was a big deal; we almost didn’t go until we heard it was going to be the place to be. (And afterward, everyone who heard we were at the party was highly impressed.)

In addition to the free wine tastings, live rock band, and burlesque dancers, the other highlight of the party was meeting fellow beer blogger The Beer Wench (AKA Ashley Routson), who was undercover attending the Wine Bloggers Conference and, well, generally partying, as near as I could tell.

By our count, we ended up visiting 13 wineries, and tasting the wines of several others. That sounds like a lot, but on our first day (and second winery), we met a couple who was on their 20th winery of the day. They were tasting then pouring their wine out, but even so, how they were still standing (much less driving) is a bit of a mystery.

A good weekend, all told. And I may have some more anecdotes from it to post. We’ll see.