Sunbeams illuminating a coastal forest in Port Orford, Oregon

Chuggnutt!

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  • What I did over the weekend

    With summer nearly gone and school started, it seemed appropriate to have one of those “what I did” posts, but I’m not ambitious enough to talk about much beyond the weekend. :)

    And even then, Saturday was the only day really worth writing about, Sunday was a lazy day. So let’s see, on Saturday we had kindergarten soccer—made all the more exciting by the fact that most of the kindergarteners have no real idea of competition. But they have a lot of fun, so that’s good. The weather this weekend was much better than the weekend before, but with fall nearly here, who knows how long that will last.

    Saturday night I went to a bachelor party for Shannon‘s soon-to-be husband. Nothing unusual to report, it was a night of drinking at Stars and I kept my alcohol intake down and left earlier than the rest of the guys (all four of them). A later night than I’m normally used to.

    No hangover or anything, either. I doubt I could say the same about the groom, though.

    And that about wraps it up.

  • Link odds-n-ends

    Scanning through my Bloglines Clippings list, found a few items that I’d probably been meaning to point to but hadn’t gotten to yet.

  • Bend celebrities

    This looks interesting: The Bend, Oregon Celebrity Weblog.

  • The country’s safest places to live

    According to this list from MSNBC/Forbes, seven of the 10 safest places to live in this country are in the Pacific Northwest. Central Oregon didn’t make the list, presumably because of the Sisters bulge and our general proximity to volcanoes.

    I’m a little surprised to see Medford/Ashland make the list, though; part of the selection criteria was taking account of extreme weather, which they define as “abundant rain or snowfall or days that are below freezing or above 90 degrees Fahrenheit,” and Medford is routinely hotter than most parts of the state during the summer—easily over the “extreme” 90 degree mark.

    Even more surprising though is Honolulu, Hawaii, as the nation’s safest place to live. Who’d’a thunk it?

    Via LifeHacker.

  • Season of change

    Change, indeed. Today was our eldest’s first day of kindergarten. Huge transition! She’ll be riding a bus and everything. She attends in the afternoon; our youngest is in a new preschool, attends in the mornings, five days a week (at the old preschool it was only three). The schedule change is still taking some getting used to, I think.

    The whole household dynamic is different since our cat died. It feels that way to me, at least; things seems shifted, somehow, at angles to the way they were before.

    We painted the kids’ rooms this past weekend, changing from the rather bland “toasted almond” that came with the house to more vibrant blues, purples and pinks. The difference is striking.

    And of course it’s that time of year again—the weather’s changing; you can feel the autumn coming in the air. The days are getting shorter. It’s definitely feeling like fall to me.

    So this seems to be the month of change. What’s next?

  • Maybe it’s a good time to learn COBOL

    Two interesting factoids from ADTmag’s 2005 Salary Survey:

    [Application Programmers] Programmers in mainframe and Unix shops make the most, topping $59,000 a year in base salary. By development language environment, programmers in CICS and COBOL shops fare best, drawing average salaries of almost $62,000 for CICS-based development and $59,000 for COBOL.

    [System Programmers] Mainframe skills continue to be a strong suit for systems programmers, who earn an average of $71,100, outpacing their Unix counterparts by about $2,000. By development language environment, systems programmers in CICS and COBOL shops fare best, drawing average salaries of $72,100 and $70,200, respectively.

    $59K to $70K per year for being a COBOL programmer? Whoa.

    Oddly, it ties into my COBOL note from almost exactly a year ago.

  • Bad, bad day

    I may not be posting much this weekend. Today we had to have our oldest cat, Bob, put to sleep. He had a cancerous intestinal tumor that was inoperable. He was also 12 years old, he lived a long good life; we’d raised him from a kitten so this is especially hard.

    …it’s like losing a member of the family. He really was the best cat you could ask for. Thankfully I got to be there with him in the end, and bury him.

    I’m not functioning all that well right now, good thing it’s a long weekend.

  • Leeroy Jenkins!

    My brother sent me this video the other day, and it’s the funniest thing I’ve seen in awhile (you have to be nerdy to really appreciate it though): Leeroy Jenkins (Windows Media File, 5MB). I’ve been laughing over it for days. It’s a clip from the World of WarCraft multiplayer online game, of a group of players talking (over headsets) about a strategy for fighting a bunch of dragons—typical nerd game stuff—when suddenly one of the players jumps up, screams “Leeroy Jenkins!” and takes off, getting them all killed.

    Repeated watchings and listening to the comments make it funnier. I imagine drinking some beer while watching it would be even better :). As a bonus, check out LeeroyJenkins.net.

    I’ve got a copy of the file, but I’m afraid to serve it because of bandwidth issues; but if the one I link to above has problems, I’ll consider uploading mine.

  • More indications blogging is getting mainstream

    Today’s hint that blogging is gradually getting mainstream comes from an article in this month’s Realtor Magazine titled, “Blogging for profit“. It was pointed out to me here at work (since I work for a builder, with real estate agents coming and going). There’s nothing new here, it’s just another introductory article, though there’s an interesting statistic in the print version of the article that doesn’t show up online: only 26% of Americans are familiar with blogs. Which means that 74% of Americans haven’t heard of blogs (or are unfamiliar with them; I guess this depends on what your definition of “familiar” is). I’d guess that sounds about right.

  • Shoe trees

    Pril is wondering what the deal is with shoe trees. I’ve been curious about that myself, since seeing one on my Walla Walla trip. I know of two (that I’ve seen personally): the one I just mentioned, on highway 97 south of Grass Valley, I believe, and north of Shaniko, and another one on highway 26, between Prineville and John Day (which may even be this one, but I can’t say for sure).

    Very strange.

    Some Googling turns up a number of shoe tree sites. Here’s one. Here’s another.