Sunbeams illuminating a coastal forest in Port Orford, Oregon

Chuggnutt!

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  • Back from Florida; local happenings

    We’re back from Florida none the worse for wear; we actually got back Saturday late, missing hurricane Wilma by two days. As my friend Kerry said, ironic that the one time we should pick to visit Florida, the biggest storm ever tracked starts building up nearby.

    Florida was… flat and humid. No, really.

    Well, it was. Anyway, we had a good time. My wife’s grandparents have a swimming pool (of course) so we spent a lot of time in it. And of course we drove up to Disney World for a few days (three and a half hours each way), that was a trip; it’s utterly mind-boggling just how big Disney World is. We only had time to visit the Magic Kingdom (which is basically all of Disney Land), and part of Epcot.

    Some general Florida observations, from an outsider: what’s up with drivers there? Nobody uses turn signals! And apparently they’ll hit-and-run other cars in parking lots (which seemed to happen to us— borrowing the grandparents’ car— on our mini-trip to Disney) all the time, we’re told. Also, everywhere you go— and I mean everywhere— there’s air conditioning. All the time. Many times we were in restaurants and it was too cold— people were wearing sweaters or jackets. Not what you expect to see in Florida, of all places.

    Didn’t see any gators (in the wild, anyway). I was kind of hoping.

    Meanwhile, it’s interesting to note some of the local goings-on while we were away:

    • There was an E. coli outbreak at McGrath’s; Bulletin story here, Bend.com here. Damn, I knew there was a reason I’m always resisting going to eat there… What really worries me though is the Bulletin’s article states, “No changes in McGrath’s operating procedure were suggested”— say what? Yeah, I’m done.
    • More information has come to light regarding Deschutes County Commissioner Tom DeWolf’s sex abuse scandal: details from the investigation reveal that he allegedly put his hand down two separate women’s pants and groped their genitals. Bulletin story here, Bend.com story here. Not surprisingly, DeWolf is resigning. His statement is here. Not really much more to say, other than I’m not really surprised. That’s some seriously stupid shit to do, Tom.

    Anything exciting anybody wants to tell me about?

  • Off to Florida tomorrow

    Ah, we’re quite the travelers this year: tomorrow we’re flying out to Florida for a week. We’ll be visiting my wife’s grandparents near Fort Lauderdale and yes, taking some time to drive up to Orlando for Disney World.

    It probably goes without saying that I won’t be online much, or at all. We’re taking the laptop, but time and connectivity may not permit much. I’m not too devastated by this.

    See y’all on the other side.

  • 4 8 15 16 23 42 (my long rambling post on Lost)

    So these days the one show during the week I have to watch is Lost. Any other show I could miss and catch in reruns and it’s no big deal. What can I say—I’m hooked. I’m along for the ride, and despite my best intentions to simply sit back and enjoy the story as it unfolds, I find myself getting caught up in rampant speculation about—well, everything. So, it’s spilling over into a long blog post that will contain spoilers and that has no central thesis, just random musings and speculation about the show.

    (more…)

  • Baby factory

    Mom delivers 16th child, thinking of more: I’m sorry, but this is just messed up. That’s pretty much all I can say about it. Except for a few quotes which demonstrate how truly creepy this is.

    Michelle Duggar had her first child at age 21, four years after the couple married.

    Which of course means they got married… at age 17…

    Michelle and Jim Bob Duggar’s children include two sets of twins. Each child’s name begins with the letter “J”… [includes list of names, including some zingers]

    I’m just speechless.

  • W and G (May contain nuts)

    Wallace and GromitSunday my dad and I took the kids to see Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Hands down, the best movie I’ve seen this year. The story is funny and quirky, and the claymation is simply a delight to watch. And it’s genuinely funny, which is rare in a movie these days; like my dad said, I haven’t laughed so hard at a movie in a long time.

    Amazon has a good deal on the first three Wallace and Gromit films on DVD. I’ve got a couple of them on videotape around here somewhere, but it sure would be nice to get a hold of this…

    In other related news, a fire wiped out Aardman Animations over the weekend… destroyed nearly everything, including the props and sets from those first Wallace and Gromit films. That’s rough.

  • The King has a posse

    Okay, this is getting crazy: my Burger King mask post is up to 236 comments, and there’s currently active discussion on where to find a Burger King mask online, and a guy named “John” is even making his own masks and selling them on eBay! In fact, I grabbed a couple of his pictures of the homemade mask:

    Homemade Burger King mask
    The weird and creepy…

    Homemade Burger King mask being modeled
    Just when you thought it couldn’t get any weirder!

    And I’ll throw a link to John’s auctions on eBay—better get a mask while the getting’s good…

    With all this going on, I figured it was high time The King got himself a posse:

    The King has a posse

  • Bandon cheese woes

    Among other things, Bandon, Oregon is known for two things: cranberries and cheese. Whenever we’ve been to Bandon we’d stop at the Bandon Cheese store and indulge in a bit of tasting and shopping. Not long ago, though, someone told me that the Tillamook Creamery had bought and made Bandon Cheese, though still sold it under the Bandon label.

    Now I see that Tillamook has closed the Bandon cheese store completely. So, now you can’t even buy Bandon cheese in Bandon? That’s just dumb. What’s worse, the cheese is now being made in Wisconsin—Tillamook can’t even be bothered to make their own cheese?

    They’re even goofier than that, according to the Pacific Northwest Cheese Project article I linked to above:

    Another aspect of the sordid Tale of Tillamook and Bandon encompasses Tillamook’s misguided pursuit of its newly acquired “Bandon” trademark. Tillamook threatened the city of Bandon, Oregon with a lawsuit for violating its intellectual property by using the name “Bandon.”

    Threatened the city itself for violating the trademark? Uh, hello?

    Lee on RoguePundit has more on the closure and goofy Tillamook practices, too. Of course, he has a good point:

    At one time, the purpose of the store wasn’t just sales, but promoting the brand. Since the brand looks rather hollow when the cheese has to be imported for sale, maybe it’s better to not remind folks that the Bandon Cheeses are just flavors that can be made anywhere. The attractive label with the Coquille River Lighthouse is just marketing.

    Although the flavors can’t necessarily be “made” anywhere; cheese acquires some of its characteristics from the types of food the cows (or goats, or whatever milk-producing animal) eats, and that can certainly be regional.

    Anyway, I just thought it sucked. That’s one less neat thing about Bandon, and that much more unemployment for Oregon.

  • BendSearch

    Check this out: BendSearch.com. Alpine, the company I used to work for, has finally resurrected it and updated it. Good for them.

    I was responsible for a lot of the work that went into that site back in the day (this would be in 2000-2001). Oh, I’m not bragging; that was, of course, early in my career as a PHP developer, so there was a lot of ugly, bad code floating around in there, courtesy of yours truly.

    Hopefully they’ll be able to get somebody to give it the attention it deserves; it’s looking a little sparse right now but I rather like what I’m seeing.

  • Ning

    By now the geeky part of the blogosphere and, er, web-o-sphere has been rocked by the announcement of Ning two days ago. Check it out. Their one-line description reads “Ning is a free online service (or, as we like to call it, a Playground) for building and using social applications.”

    What this means is they’re hosting a service/platform that allows people to build their own social software applications… things like online voting/polls, dating services, bookmarks, review sites. In theory the level of complexity in creating these ranges from point-and-click Clone-N-Theme all the way up to Advanced PHP Developer.

    Yup, PHP. It looks like they’re opening the doors to the system and letting you code the apps directly. “Uh-oh,” I thought. “I hope they have PHP sandboxed.” And sure enough, it says in the FAQ that they do. Sounds iffy to me (let’s just say I’m glad I’m not responsible for running this service!), though I’ll give them points for innovation and guts here.

    Looks like they offer up an API for their developer environment, all running under PHP 5. And from what I’ve been seeing, they’ve assembled a team of some of the top PHP people out there to put this together, so that’s impressive.

    It’s all very Web 2.0, especially with tags (and the annoying/clever convention of showing the relative popularity of various tags with different font sizes). I don’t know, it looks interesting, and it’ll be hot for awhile, but I gotta wonder just how valuable it is to have hundreds of crappy variations of “Which is cuter,” most of which were created as throwaway examples and abandoned by idly curious people (like me)…

  • My Burger King mask post is on fire!

    The Burger King mask post I made back in April is insanely out of control; right now, it has 59 75 comments on it, mostly from people who want one of those masks (and one or several guys who claim to be making it, or have it for sale)! It’s such great entertainment to watch the comments roll in.

    I’m getting so many hits on this because of great search engine placement for “burger king mask.” On Google, I’m number 5 and on Yahoo, number 3(!). Man, I wish I could plan posts like that one…