Sunbeams illuminating a coastal forest in Port Orford, Oregon

Chuggnutt!

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  • wikinovel

    I suppose it was bound to happen sooner or later, but I don’t quite get how this is going to work: Publisher launches its first “wiki” novel. It’s:

    …a Web-based, collaborative novel that can be written, edited or read by anyone, anywhere thanks to “wiki” software, the technology behind Web encyclopaedia Wikipedia.

    The novel, “A Million Penguins,” went live on Thursday and its first lines are already being written, edited and rewritten by enthusiasts on www.amillionpenguins.com.

    Penguin, which embarked on the project with a group of creative writing and new media students, says it is using the novel as a test of whether a group of disparate and diverse people can create a “believable fictional voice.”

    So, are they planning on “locking down” chapters as they’re finished? Because there’s really nothing stopping anybody from going in and changing, well, everything at any point, if it truly is open like Wikipedia. Suddenly chapter three makes no sense because chapters one and two are now telling a different story.

    Cool and interesting experiment, though. I might have to play around with it.

  • Making lunch (a vignette)

    Making lunches for the next day: my daughter’s, then my own. My daughter’s is simple: peanut butter and honey, carrot sticks, CapriSun, GoGurt, cheddar cheese sandwich crackers. Oh yeah, throw some candy for dessert in, too. Pack it all up in the Barbie cooler.

    Start on mine. Bologna and cheese on wheat, very original. Retrieve from the fridge: mayonnaise, dijon mustard, bread. Pause, then queue up some Journey on the computer. The kitchen is apparently in need of rock ballads tonight.

    Highway run
    Into the midnight sun
    Wheels go ’round and ’round
    You’re on my mind

    Sandwich comes together. Set it aside, back to the fridge. Carrots, celery… celery is droopy, good thing it’s the last of it.

    Any way you want it
    That’s the way you need it
    Any way you want it

    Oddly appropriate music to chop veggies to. Careful of the fingers, the carrot is rolling a bit. Now, cottage cheese or yogurt?

    Streetlights, people
    Living just to find emotion
    Hiding somewhere in the night

    Cottage cheese. It’s the big container, Costco-sized but not from Costco. Scoop some into the tupperware-that-isn’t-tupperware plastic bowl, snap a lid on it. Pack it all up into my lunch cooler (soft-walled), then grab an orange while Steve Perry tells me to Don’t stop believin’.

    Lunch is ready.

  • Truth(?) in advertising

    So there’s this article that appeared in the New York Times about Activia, Dannon’s yogurt that is filled with “live cultures” that are healthy and good for you. And they’re marketing it like it’s something new and revolutionary.

    Ummmm, okay…

    Except every bit of yogurt I’ve ever bought—regardless of brand—has been full of live cultures that are healthy and good for you. That’s what yogurt is. Seriously, go buy a generic brand of yogurt—it says this on the container. Are people not aware of this?

    Yeah, I know there’s a lot of misinformation out there, but for some reason this one just rubbed me the wrong way.

  • Oregon Lottery Space Invaders!

    Oregon Lottery Space Invaders Scrach-ItI find it rather surreal that the Oregon Lottery is now offering Space Invaders lottery tickets. Seriously. It’s part of their “Travel back” line of Scratch-Its. They look rather complicated though, and cost $3 a pop.

    Now they need to come out with other classic arcade games: Pac Man, Donkey Kong, Asteroids…

  • Links

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

  • 2007 Chuggnutt Zeitgeist

    Yes, it’s that introspective time again. Since I’ve done these for the last two years already, I thought it would be interesting to put it all together in a table format to compare years.

      2006 2005 2004
    Number of blog entries: 155 244 306
    Total words written (approximate): 29,894 39,810 45,537
    Average words per entry: 192.9 163.2 148.8
    Total visitors (including all the junk): 1,041,504 633,100 242,433
    Average visitors per day: 2,853 1,734 687
    Total real visitors (approximate): 681,069 430,505 n/a
    Average real visitors per day: 1,865 1,179 n/a
    Most active month:  October, then May October n/a
    Ten most popular blog entries:
      1. The Skittles beard commercial: 8,253
      2. Bill Gates’ house: 2,985
      3. Smoke alarm batteries: 2,922
      4. Jack Bauer Facts: 2,245
      5. Cooking salmon: 2,186
      6. The Lost Ultimate Theory: 2,016
      7. Chuck Norris facts: 1,935
      8. The name game: 1,778
      9. The Dirty Screech: 1,705
      10. Life is what happens when you’re making other plans: 1,390

     

     
      1. The Burger King creeps me out: 28,910
      2. Houston’s glass public toilet: 9,610
      3. My Burger King mask post is on fire!: 9,511
      4. Goofy Burger King job flyer: 5,234
      5. The Donald Trump/Bend urban legend: 4,879
      6. Leonard Nimoy’s Bilbo Baggins: 4,862
      7. Super Wal-Mart: 4,619
      8. Central Oregon’s biggest baby?: 3,821
      9. Leeroy Jenkins!: 3,781
      10. Never ending fall: 3,017

     

     

    		  
    Total non-spam comments: 599 1,556  
    Ten most popular searches landing here:
      1. boba fett: 2,851
      2. darth maul: 2,243
      3. burger king mask: 2,158
      4. skittles beard commercial: 1,395
      5. free palm ebooks: 1,389
      6. matrix name generator: 1,045
      7. pdb reader: 993
      8. jedi: 890
      9. never ending fall: 865
      10. biggest baby: 851

     

     
      1. burger king mask: 5,295
      2. boba fett: 3,086
      3. pdb reader: 1,972
      4. free palm ebooks: 1,805
      5. darth maul: 1,534
      6. kermit the frog: 1,376
      7. leeroy jenkins: 1,221
      8. www.amazon.com /burgerking: 1,210
      9. super walmart: 973
      10. palm reader: 877

     

     

    		 n/a
    Top five search engines:
      1. Google: 66,133
      2. Yahoo: 19,000
      3. MSN: 4,526
      4. AskJeeves: 1,871
      5. Altavista: 510

     

     
      1. Google: 72,180
      2. Yahoo: 20,629
      3. MSN: 4,042
      4. AskJeeves: 1,259
      5. AOL Search: 1,061

     

     

    		 n/a
    Approximate breakdown of browsers and traffic:
      • Internet Explorer: 61.83%
      • Firefox/Mozilla: 25.06%
      • Opera: 0.76%
      • RSS stuff: 5.21%
      • Other: 7.13%

     

     
      • Internet Explorer: 61%
      • Firefox/Mozilla: 23%
      • Opera: 1%
      • RSS stuff: 2%
      • Bots/search engine crawlers: 8.2%
      • Other: 4.8%

     

     

    		 n/a
    Total number of bot hits: 418,028 n/a n/a

     

  • Words written in 2006

    I’m adding up the numbers from my three blogs, and it turns out that between them I wrote approximately 101,192 words among 511 blog entries for 2006. Wow… the previous year the numbers were 78,181 and 466. Another way to look at it: that’s roughly the equivalent of a novel a year.

  • Where is the time going?

    Time has been passing too quickly lately. Seriously. Where has it been going? I keep finding myself surprised to discover that something I thought happened just last year was really three years ago, for instance, or that I’ve been at my current job for four years, and it doesn’t seem nearly that long.

    Part of it is that I get older, the passing of time seems to speed up. My grandmother used to say this all the time, and while (as a kid) I knew the truth of this, I never really knew the truth of it, you know? I’m not sure that’s possible when you’re young; time seemed to pass so slowly then.

    (And yet, here I am now, stuck in the present like always.)

    I don’t mean to imply that I’m depressed about my age, or anything like that. It was more of a fleeting observation that I wanted to write down—without sounding too maudlin. Perhaps I’ll have more to write about this at a later time…

  • My favorite posts of 2006

    I did this same thing last January, and thought it was good fodder for looking back on 2006: my favorite posts over the last year. I noticed that I wrote less here as I stepped up my writing on The Brew Site and Hack Bend, and I wonder: if quantity went down, did quality go up? :)

  • Auld lang syne

    I suppose the measure of how good a New Year’s party is would be the hangover you have the next day… if so, then the party we had last night was a pretty good one. It wasn’t wild or crazy or anything like that, we just had friends over (a bunch of them brought their kids), and it was just the accumulation over the course of the evening that did me in.

    That, and the two (two! ugh) shots of Jagermeister I drank. I was mostly fine until that.

    Anyway.

    I never did the obligatory post-Christmas post-birthday post, either. So I’m rolling it all into one.

    My birthday was very nice. We had lunch at the Bend Brewing Company where I drank their Hophead Imperial IPA and their seasonal Doppelbock. Both good. I love the fish and chips there. For dinner we had take-out Chinese and my mom and brother and his girlfriend joined us. Cake was a delicious dense dark chocolate cake.

    My gifts? The traditional photo Christmas ornament (the photo is of the kids), a beer rating guide book (the name escapes me at the moment and it’s not nearby), Barnes & Noble gift cards, money, a PS2 video game, a bottle of Jack Daniels with a measuring shot glass, and a neat shot glass and beer tasting glass from my brother in San Diego.

    Christmas Eve was dinner at our house with the family. Lasagna, this year. (We don’t really have a traditional Christmas Eve dinner, unlike, say, ham on Christmas day or turkey at Thanksgiving.) We set out the mountain of presents (90% for the kids) and the kids could hardly get to sleep.

    Christmas morning the kids were up at 6:30 and going through their stockings by flashlight. So I got up a little before 7, started coffee, checked out the stocking loot, and helped the kids sort out presents. You can imagine what followed.

    My gifts? Stephen King’s latest novel, Lisey’s Story, slippers, a bottle of beer, a book on the making of the Charlie Brown Christmas TV special, some crafty ornaments from the kids, more money, another PS2 game, a gift certificate to Pegasus Books here in town, and surprisingly, I even got the lightsaber I asked for! Totally didn’t see that one coming.

    Am I forgetting anything? …probably.

    Since then, I’ve spent some of my money and gift cards on a bunch of books, another PS2 game, some beer. And, I only worked two days in the past 11—five days off around Christmas, two at work, then four more for this last New Year weekend. Going back to work tomorrow? Uh, yeah, not really looking forward to it.

    …but at least I’m not still hungover!