Sunbeams illuminating a coastal forest in Port Orford, Oregon

Chuggnutt!

Category: Blogging

  • It’s the gift economy

    Sometime in the distant past when I put the link to my Amazon wishlist here on the site, I wondered if it would actually inspire people to buy me stuff from it or if it was just a vanity move (I use that wishlist as much as a bookmark system as an actual list of things I’d like to buy someday). I figure it was mostly a vanity thing; I truly did not expect anyone to buy me anything from it.

    So imagine my surprise when a package from Amazon came to the door, with the book Halting State (newly added to my wishlist) inside. At first it was real head-scratcher; I didn’t remember at first that I had published the wishlist link and then I was confused because it listed me at an older mailing address (one of something like the 6(!) addresses that Amazon had on file that had slipped through the cracks) but had made it here anyhow.

    (I know, I’m supposed to be out on the leading edge of this internet thing, right?)

    Once I realized what had happened, I was astounded; a PHP developer named Dave Ross had found my PHP stemmer script and it had saved him a lot of work (his words) and in gratitude, he bought the book for me. I guess I was astounded because I put those PHP scripts online for free, and I enjoy helping people out who have questions about them and incorporating improvements that they send to me; it’s an open source thing, I suppose, and I’m just glad I can put something out there that’s useful to people, but the thought of compensation didn’t occur to me in this case.

    Okay, enough being naive, get to the point. Thank you, Dave, for the extremely generous gift. I’m glad I was (indirectly) able to help you out. And I hope I can repay the favor sometime in the future.

    It’s the gift economy. Sometimes it rears up and slaps you in the face. In a good way.

  • "Sally Heatherton"

    Jake beat me to the punch on blogging this, but I couldn’t resist anyway. I got this comment on my clothesline post the other day:

    The rules are the rules. Anyone who doesn’t want to live by the rules can go live in the ugly lowlands.

    It was signed “Sally Heatherton” and points to the blog “Marvelous Bend!“. Intrigued (I mean, would someone really say such a thing?), I checked out the blog and was utterly incredulous for a minute, and then realized that it’s a fake. Satire. And it’s brilliant! It’s freakin’ brilliant!

    Well, maybe not that brilliant, but it’s damn funny. (And sad to say, plausible enough—I actually know someone very much like this.)

    Like Jake, I went through searching the web and DIAL and Dex and found nothing.

    Almost nothing, that is. It’s not an identity or anything like that, but (up until today) the only result I could get for “Sally Heatherton” on Google (quotes included) was a hit on a character in a book: The Barrow Murder by James Huston. Via Google’s Book Search (that’s good stuff):

    I went to the window of a teller I knew at the bank, Sally Heatherton. We had even dated for a short time, until she called our relationship off. “I don’t want to get involved with someone who’s broke all the time,” she announced. “A loser. I want to get married to someone who’s a success, who can support me, so I can get the hell out of this teller cage.”

    I guess the new game around here is “Guess Who Sally Heatherton Really Is.”

  • 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 Stemmer class that people had sent me over the past year or so.

    So I spent some time yesterday doing just that. There’s really not much to see if you’re simply here for the blogging portion of the site, but in case you were here looking for my PHP code or were one of the people who were nice enough to email me fixes for the bugs, I’ve gotten that stuff updated (and thanks to the suggesters).

    In the meantime I’ll see what I can do about the writing portion of the site—ie, the blog. I certainly have no intention of retiring it but that’s sure what appears to be happening… so no no, not gonna happen, I shall start making more effort to write regularly here again. And perhaps tweak the site design around a bit. I mean, it’s only been…

    …holy hell, it’s been five years? How on earth did I let that anniversary pass by without comment or celebration or something? Back on April 22nd, this was…

    Whoa.

  • 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; I contacted the OBF press person and as a result, I get the full treatment: press kit, program, and all. Now I know most media/press folks (and a few pro bloggers) would be entirely blasé about it, but I have to say—I’m incredibly excited about this! Maybe the shine will wear off at some point, but for now, I just think it’s too cool.

    I’m also hoping to meet other bloggers and writers, and brewers, and, well, anybody interesting. So I’m trying something new; I’ll have my cellphone with me but I don’t necessarily want to publish my phone number for the world to see and abuse, so I registered a free phone number and voicemail with PrivatePhone—a service from NetZero that seems promising.

    How it works is I get a free private phone number, and all calls to it go directly to voicemail. I can check this voicemail via phone or computer.

    So here’s the deal; if anyone wants to get a hold of me this weekend, call and leave a message on this number: 360-362-1627. I’ll check for messages every hour or so, and call you back.

    (Yeah, I couldn’t get an Oregon area code. What’s up with that?)

    I’ll also try to be checking email, but that won’t be happening til evenings, if I get the chance. So don’t rely on that if you want to reach me sooner rather that later.

    Off to drink beer and blog about 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.