Sunbeams illuminating a coastal forest in Port Orford, Oregon

Chuggnutt!

Category: Blogging

  • Two brilliant (goofy?) ideas

    One of the goals I have in mind for 2011 is to get back to writing more on this, my first blog (without slacking off on my other two blogs). Sometimes that will be in the form of braindumps, just random ideas I have bouncing around my head that need to be recorded somewhere. Brilliant? Maybe. Goofy? Possibly. Here are two.

    #1: Santa Claus, Zombie Killer. This just seems so obvious that I’m not sure why I haven’t seen it somewhere before. Although I admit I may have been subliminally influenced by Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter; it’s hard not to see a title like that and not internalize it somehow.

    #2: Godzilla vs. Voltron. This popped into my head on New Year’s Eve while we were over at our friends’, watching a Godzilla movie (one of the ’90s ones). Since Godzilla is usually the villain this would totally work; it would of course have to be the lion Voltron fighting Godzilla. This would be completely awesome, though I bet the licensing on this type of deal would be a real bitch.

  • 38 revolutions

    The title of this post is a reference to the number of times I’ve ridden this planet around the Sun, as of today.

    (I wonder how many pseudo-clever ways you can say it’s your birthday without outright saying it.)

    (And then I’m thinking “38revolutions.com” sounds like a good domain name for… something.)

    Anyway. I’m being a bit self-indulgent today: I took the day off from work and am enjoying the start of a four-day holiday weekend, which sounds just about perfect. Three of those days we get to spend with family and good friends, eating lots of good food and drinking lots of good drink—as it should be.

    And if you see me around town today, you should buy me a beer. 🙂

  • WordPress!

    This site is running WordPress now; if you’ve visited in the last few days you may have noticed. The transition process was overall pretty painless, having done this already for my other two blogs; the real work is in going through old entries (many of the first, I don’t know, couple of years worth?) and updating them to fix the URLs (many of which are currently broken in WordPress) and re-categorize and tag everything.

    It’s interesting revisiting these old posts, watching the evolution of the writing as I find a “voice” on the blog. And it’s amazing how far back this all goes—I started this blog back in 2002 and there’s been an amazing amount of change in my life since then.

    I’ll be continuing to make fixes and add features over the next few days/weeks. That’s one thing I love about WordPress, is the ease of building this stuff out. (Of course, that can be one of the things to hate about WordPress too.)

  • Random bits on a Friday night

    → My porting of The Brew Site to WordPress worked out remarkably well (minus more fine tuning I still need to do), so sooner or later I’ll get around to porting this site over as well.

    → Not sure what to do with the ebooks page anymore. It’s not going anywhere (I don’t like linkrot), but the Palm eReader platform they were all released for seems to no longer be a relevant format. Seems like Mobipocket is the way to go: it’s supported by all main platforms, it’s an open standard (with development tools, I think), and even Amazon.com has adopted it.

    Of course, I have less time than ever to even think about offering up new ebooks…

    → We went to the school’s Family Fun Night this evening and actually won the drawing for a weekend coast getaway—a condo in or near Newport.

    → Last weekend I opened up some mystery bottles of homebrew that had been in storage for an indeterminate (but fairly long) amount of time.They were actually not at all bad; one was very oxidized and reminiscent of a sherry—no idea what style it was originally—the other was a stout, also oxidized but not as badly. Kind of fun tasting mystery brews like that, so this evening I put four more bottles in the fridge to taste this weekend.

    In this case, I know for sure what at least one of them is: the second beer I ever brewed, a honey wheat ale. Vintage, mid-nineties.

    For reference, I have several bottles of my early batches of beer: one bottle of the very first batch I brewed, a generic amber-ish ale; a bottle or two of the honey wheat; one bottle of the third(?) I brewed, a porter; a bottle of an Oktoberfest (very early also, but I don’t recall exactly when); and one or two bottles of “Capricorn Porter”, a beer brewed with all sorts of things like juniper berries and licorice and such. It dates to ’96 or ’97 I think.

    There are also several other unlabeled bottles as well. I can’t speak for certain how any of these have held up with questionable storage conditions, but who cares? I’m having fun with the adventure. Anyone want to get in on it?

  • 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”, or Internet etiquette, came fourth and “blook”, a book based on a blog, was fifth.

    “Cookie”, a file sent to a user’s computer after they visit a website, came in ninth, while “wiki”, a collaborative website edited by its readers, was tenth.

    I can only really get behind two on this list: “blogosphere” and “folksonomy”. I’d never heard of “blook” until now, and I’ll continue to pretend it doesn’t exist.

    I hate “blogosphere”, and I hate more that I’ve actually used it in conversation and writing. “Blog” I’m good with. I love “blog”. “Blog” is succinct, and people pretty much know what it means. “Blogosphere”, on the other hand, is just… is just… yeah. How about just “online community” instead?

    I thought “folksonomy” was dumb the first time I saw it, and I continue to pretend it doesn’t exist. Fortunately, its use seems to have dropped off significantly.

    “Wiki” I like, too. Great word. Even better than “blog”, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t get the the hate here.

    “Netiquette” and “cookie”? Seriously? Man, those ships have sailed. Like, back in 1995.

  • Items of interest

    A few link-worthy items that caught my eye but that I can’t squeeze a full post out of (yet)…

    The Real Oregon: a new(ish) blog subtitled “Oregon for the eccentric traveler.” Looks promising, with travel tidbits about Oregon that seem pretty interesting to me.

    How a $2 bottle transformed the wine industry: Charles Shaw wine (AKA Two (or Three) Buck Chuck) turns five. Who’d’a thunk it? And for the record, I rather like the wines.

    Burst Culture: A bit of brilliance from Warren Ellis that’s been making the rounds online. Pretty much ties in with ideas I’ve been having about the web and blogging, and giving me stuff to think about.

  • Rajneesh

    The news on KTVZ tonight about the former Rajneesh land being sold caught my ear and got me reflecting a bit on that particular period of weirdness in Central Oregon history. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a “dark day” in Oregon history like the interviewee on the news did, but it was definitely weird.

    The Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh was an Indian (from India the country, not Native American) spiritual teacher who in 1981 came to Oregon, where his followers bought The Big Muddy ranch outside of Antelope and started a commune there. Naming the commune Rajneeshpuram, they attracted all sorts of attention among the locals, mostly negative.

    Understand, this part of Oregon in the 80s was much more conservative and rural than now; the majority of the population was based in agriculture (farmers, cowboys) and operated on Good-Ol-Boy-ism. So the idea of a cult moving in and then taking over the town of Antelope was met with open hostility.

    It didn’t help that the Rajneeshees had a number of odd practices and goings-on as well. They all wore red, for instance. They owned a large number of Rolls Royces and the Bhagwan would ride around in them everywhere. They carried machine guns in open sight.

    And when I said they “took over” Antelope, I’m not kidding—they registered to vote there and got a referendum passed renaming the town to “Rajneesh.” They were able to do this because some 7000 of them lived in the commune.

    Sheela, the Bhagwan’s Number Two person, was a real piece of work. When authorities started investigating the Rajneesh commune, the crazy stuff came to light and Sheela and several leaders “were indicted and convicted of several crimes, including immigration fraud, wiretapping, first and second degree assault (poisoning) of two public officials, and the attempted murder of Rajneesh’s personal physician.”

    Sheela and the Rajneeshees also have the dubious honor of perpetrating the largest germ warfare attack in the history of the U.S., when they infected a salad bar in a restaurant in The Dalles with salmonella—sickening over 750 people.

    The Bhagwan went on the run and was caught back east in North Carolina and deported. The sheriff or whoever who was involved in the capture appeared on the news, drawling, “We caught us a Bag-wahn from Ory-gun.”

    Strange days, indeed.

  • Where there’s smoke, there’s fire

    Last night, as I reported on my Hack Bend blog, the house across the street caught fire. It wasn’t terribly serious, as these things go: some hot embers from the chimney landed on the wood shake roof and sparked into flames. But the fire department came out in full force; there were four engines, the fire chief’s (or whomever’s) SUV, an ambulance, and police closing off the street.

    The weird thing is, we didn’t hear any of the emergency vehicles arrive, but other people in the neighborhood told us they heard them coming. Instead, around 6:20 I started noticing a rumbling noise coming from outside, but we were eating dinner and I didn’t think much of it—nothing that couldn’t be checked until we were done, anyway. It was my wife who took something out to the garage that heard the noise, too, and went to the window to see what it was.

    Imagine our surprise!

    So we ran outside and rubbernecked along with the rest of the neighborhood. Smoke was still rising from the roof next to the chimney while we were there; our neighbor next door told us she had seen the flames when she came out. They were still hosing the roof down, but got the smoke under control pretty quickly. After that, they tore out the chimney and the part of the roof that was (presumably) still hot and/or smoldering.

    Nobody was hurt. According to the KTVZ article, the fire did $25,000 worth of damage, with minor smoke damage inside the home.

    Here’s some of the pictures I took (when I finally had the presence of mind to run back in the house for the camera):

    Fire trucks on the scene

    Fire hydrant pumping water

    Fire fighters clearing the roof after a house fire

    Fire fighters clearing the roof after a house fire

    Fire fighters clearing the roof after a house fire

    Apologies for the mediocre quality of these pictures… it was dusk and the low-light conditions along with the zoom was enough to get the point, but some came out shaky. And actually, when it was starting to get really dark, they brought one of the engines over with a set of bright spotlights to illuminate the scene:

    Fire truck at dusk lighting up the scene

    You can see the light pole sprouting up from the top of the truck. And here’s a shot of the lighted-up scene at full dark:

    Fire truck lighting up the scene at night

    I actually think this last picture is kind of cool. Unfortunate set of circumstances, but you know what I mean.

  • Psycho!

    The other day Dave posted a story riddle with a creepy punchline: the people who answer it “correctly”—i.e. a certain way—think like psychopaths. (Sorry to spoil the surprise.) It’s meant to illustrate a particular way of thinking that psychopaths exhibit: that of other people—even family—as impersonal tools to be used for their own benefit.

    (Fortunately, I didn’t answer the riddle “correctly.”)

    Of course, I make random connections, as I am wont to do, and I remembered this older post on Boing Boing about psychopathy:

    Are psychopaths genetically adapted to survive by exploiting the rest of us?

    [CBC’s Quirks and Quarks] talks to research psychologists about the biological basis for psychopathy — and the fact that psychopaths are sexually profligate and have lots of kids. Psychopathic rapists target fertile women — not children or old women.

    Dr. Marnie Rice is a psychologist with the Mental Health Centre Penetanguishene, in Penetanguishene, Ontario. She studies criminal psychopaths who are incarcerated there. She views psychopathic behaviour as an evolved survival strategy. She says that there’s not a lot of evidence to suggest that psychopaths are mentally ill but there’s good reason to believe that their disturbing behaviour is an evolved trait. She says psychopaths have evolved to capitalize in a particular environmental niche — namely preying on the rest of society.

    Yeah, it’s kind of an odd thing to be ruminating about. But it’s a weirdly compelling idea to imagine that psychopathy is a possible result of natural selection. It makes a certain sense. I wonder what the “particular environmental niche” is referring to—large cities? Seems to me (from a purely layman’s perspective) that’s where this particular trait would take hold and be successful in an evolutionary context.

    For reference, here’s Wikipedia’s article on psychopathy.

    Anyway, cheery thoughts to take you into the weekend.

  • Links

    Just a collection of links to things I like and/or found amusing recently.