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Chuggnutt!

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  • The Dark Side of geocaching

    Spotted this article on CNN today: Geocaching puts authorities on edge. It’s about what happens when police find geocaches and think they might be bombs and such.

    Rounding a corner on his motorcycle to finish rigging his cache, he was greeted by a barricade of police cars and a bomb squad. He struggled to explain the misunderstanding.

    “I got off my bike and three officers approached me very cautiously, hands on their holsters,” he said. “I was trying to turn off my MP3 player and I think they were worried I was going for a detonator.”

    (Find out more about geocaching at the official site.)

    I’ve got a GPS, but haven’t actually gotten around to trying geocaching, even though I want to. Maybe this year. But the article also makes me think of what a friend asked me, once: What if someone actually does put a bomb or something in a geocache? And ruins it for everybody?

    Something I don’t really have an answer to; I’m not that cynical, I suppose. The good thing is, it hasn’t happened yet that I know of, and hopefully it won’t ever happen.

  • Open astronomy book

    An idea, and a question (or the other way around). I’ve always liked astronomy; growing up I had several astronomy books and a small telescope, I eagerly consumed news and information about space (I had a newspaper photo clipping of Saturn as taken from Voyager taped to my wall), and I took Astronomy for my physics elective in college, and one thing that always struck me was how outdated the various books I had were, even though they were relatively new (at the time I got them). You would read some theoretical composition of Jupiter’s atmosphere even as data was coming in updating and contradicting the old information.

    So I was thinking the other day of the planet Pluto and how it has three moons now (I don’t remember the context), and how this information could potentially change some fundamental conception of the solar system, and yet it would probably take a year, maybe 18 months before this would make it into the latest and greatest book on astronomy. And I thought, wouldn’t it be neat if there was an open (as in open source) astronomy book online somewhere, maybe like a wiki, that was textbook-quality and was kept up-to-date with the latest discoveries? People could freely access it, print it out, download a copy, whatever, and it would always be relevant.

    The question: Does such a thing exist already? Now, I’m familiar with Wikibooks, the self-described “open-content textbooks collection,” but their Astronomy book is paltry at best. (It might make a good starting point, though.) So does anyone know of something like this?

    If not, I might start it myself. It would make a neat hobby, at the very least.

    (And if it worked, this would make a good model for other books that could be open and possibly wiki-fied. I’ve got a few ideas.)

  • High Desert Sun

    Something I hadn’t blogged yet but thought I should “break”: I’ve been approached by the new publisher of the High Desert Sun newsletter to write for them. I said yes, of course, and the first article I’m turning in (by tomorrow) is based on my Reynolds Pond blog entry from about a year and a half ago.

    I hadn’t heard of the High Desert Sun before, but it’s a newspaper-format newsletter that covers most of Central Oregon: Bend, Redmond, Prineville, Alfalfa, Powell Butte, Terrebonne, Madras and Crooked River Ranch. (I culled those from the “Locations” page on the website, it’s possible they also cover Lapine, Sunriver, and Sisters as well.) The publisher found my little corner of the web here and liked my writing well enough to invite me to write for the paper.

    Cool! It’s not huge, granted, but it’s a start. Of course, if I become a regular writer for the newsletter, then I’ll need to start thinking things up to write about—I’d hate to have to recycle stuff from my blog all the time. :)

  • First a mouse, now a puppy…

    So first a mouse set a man’s house on fire, now a puppy has done the same thing here in Bend:

    A frisky puppy left in a laundry room apparently sparked a northeast Bend house fire that almost claimed his life. Investigators said Friday the dog caused an aerosol can to discharge vapors that a water heater pilot light ignited, setting the room ablaze.

    It’s like When Animals Attack, but weirder. Awesome.

    As an aside, I really like the new NewsChannel 21 site. Barney done good!

  • I am Snarky Bend!

    Chris started it; I’m just jumping on the bandwagon!

  • Mouse fire!

    Okay, this is kind of an awful story…

    No, scratch that. It’s a story that seems like it should be awful, but I just can’t take it seriously. It just makes me laugh. I can’t help it: Mouse takes down house.

    On Saturday, a Fort Sumner man’s home fell victim to a mouse fire.

    Homeowner Luciano Mares said he caught a mouse inside his residence and discarded the creature in a pile of garden refuse he was burning on his property near the home.

    “I had some leaves burning outside, so I threw it in the fire, and the mouse was on fire and ran back at the house,” he said.

    The. Mouse. Was. On. Fire.

    Update: Snopes debunks it. It almost happened, but the mouse was already dead.

    Update #2: According to CNN, the story may be true after all:

    Is that plausible? Fort Sumner Fire Chief Juan Chavez said Tuesday he thinks so.

    “There’s no reason for him to lie about what he told us,” Chavez said. “I don’t doubt it at all.”

    There’s hope!

  • Two for the price of one

    Just pointers to a couple of blog posts I enjoyed.

    First, Chris reviews Burger King in a fun sort of anti-Bend Restaurants way. Plus, you gotta love it when someone puts so much effort into writing a review like this…

    “Parked in lot?”, you ask, and yes I did because there are critical steps in eating your Whopper, and the first is, eat it when it’s hot and fresh. Yes, “Eat your Whopper while it’s hot and fresh,” is what momma always told me. Also the fact that the window view from the restaurant isn’t really much different helps too. The next tip I have to offer you is to put a few onion rings and some of the zesty onion ring sauce on your Whopper and then get ready for Whopper-Bliss.

    The other pointer is to Jake and to his post about the PHP easter egg. I wasn’t aware of this particular quirk, either, but apparently PHP will output an image of a dog if you append a string to the URL appropriately. I do know of the phpinfo() “easter egg” that only appears on April 1—the PHP logo image is replaced with something goofy. But this other one is new to me.

  • PlayStation 2

    So I had a bunch of Christmas and birthday money this year and decided to go crazy and do something I normally wouldn’t do: I bought a PlayStation 2 game system. I know, I know, new XBox, yadda yadda, but frankly there’s a larger library of PS2 games out there and most of the ones I really want to play are on PlayStation only anyway.

    It was the Costco bundle; comes with the console (which includes one controller), an extra controller, memory card, and two games. The one game we played around with this evening (kid friendly) is ATV Offroad Fury 3. It’s pretty fun so far. We get a kick out of watching/causing some truly spectacular crashes. :)

    Also I’m intrigued by the possibility of plugging it into the internet and doing some network gaming, since it has that capability. We’ll see.

  • ’05 retrospective (personal)

    So, now I’m looking back over 2005 from my own standpoint. It was a busy, eventful year.

    Last January I buckled down and began eating healthy in order to lose weight. That was enormously successful—and satisfying—as I lost 40 pounds. So far I’ve kept it off, and plan to keep it off. My next goal in this vein should be to get into shape; yes, I’ve lost the weight, but I definitely need to start exercising. Realistic? Knowing me, it could go either way.

    Also last January I narrowly missed being selected for a jury. Of the one week I was on call for jury duty, I only got called in that first day, and ultimately wasn’t selected. It was the first time I’d ever had jury duty.

    I wrote about it, but I didn’t get fired for blogging.

    Memorial Day weekend, I put together a playground. Almost. I find it notable because I think it’s the largest thing I’ve ever built.

    It was a year for travel. We made it to Portland a few times, but our big trips were the Alaskan cruise and our week in Florida.

    The cruise vacation marked not only the first time I’d been on a cruise, but also the first time in Canada and Alaska. That was quite a trip: we drove to Vancouver, B.C., stopping to visit friends in the Seattle area each way. And Alaska was amazing… I’d definitely go back.

    Florida was flat and humid. The trip was worth it, though, and we made it out ahead of Hurricane Wilma.

    I also did an overnight trip to Walla Walla, Washington, for work. First time there, too; I rather liked it, except for going during the hottest part of the summer.

    I lost my cat. That was one of the hardest, worst things to happen in many years.

    And, we got a new cat. A kitten, actually. That’s fine, I don’t really have an opinion on it one way or another, it is what it is. Better a cat than a dog, though. I’m so not a dog person.

  • ’05 retrospective (historical)

    Looking back on some of the historical events of 2005. For some reason, it seemed to me to be an interesting year for centennial events also.

    2005:

    • The Huygens probe landed on Titan (Saturn’s moon).
    • One Pope died and a new Pope was selected.
    • Deep Throat’s identity was revealed.
    • Hurricane Katrina destroyed much of New Orleans, Bixoli, and the Gulf Coast. It was an unusually dense and destructive year for tropical storms.
    • Civil unrest hit France in the Paris suburbs.
    • A 7.6-magnitude earthquake stuck the Kashmir region in Northern Pakistan, killing nearly 90,000 people.
    • NASA more-or-less successfully launched a projectile into a comet for study.

    Centennial notes (1905):

    • Einstein published his Special Theory of Relativity.
    • Bend, Oregon became officially incorporated.
    • Las Vegas was founded.

    Bicentennial notes (1805):

    • Lewis and Clark arrived and wintered at the Pacific Ocean.
    • The Battle of Trafalgar: Admiral Nelson defeats a combined French and Spanish naval fleet.
    • Napoleon, meanwhile, soundly defeats the Russians and Austrians at the Battle of Austerlitz.

    Obviously I’m only touching on a very, very abbreviated list. A good one to review (and getting better each day) is Wikipedia’s 2005 page. But, I think it’s a decent touchpoint to start with, and it definitely stimulates the thinking. At any rate, those are some of the first things I thought of or stood out to me when I was looking back at 2005.

    What 2005 events are significant to you?