Sunbeams illuminating a coastal forest in Port Orford, Oregon

Chuggnutt!

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  • Yahoo is cold calling me

    My wife fielded a call this afternoon from a telemarketer looking to speak with the owner of chuggnutt.com (which is what I use as the registrant for my domain names), and was confused to find out it wasn’t a business he was calling. This wouldn’t be noteworthy except for the fact that the guy identified himself as working for Yahoo! and was trying to sell their Pay Per Click ad service.

    Since when does Yahoo—or any of the big internet players, for that matter—resort to telemarketing? Cold calling no less? I would have thought that Yahoo especially would know better. I may or may not have looked into their ads in the future, but I’m pretty sure I won’t at all now. Here’s a hint: I don’t like telemarketing. I used to work for a telemarketing company in Spokane, so while I can totally sympathize with the individuals who have to actually make the day-to-day calls and deal with people that basically hate them, I really, really don’t like the companies/corporations behind telemarketing, especially the ones trying to sell something. It’s a sleazy business.

    In the interests of transparency, here’s the info from call: the number was 888-254-2716 (toll free, which was kind of odd), and the person my wife spoke to was Walter. He specifically identified himself as working for Yahoo. I Googled the number (heh), but didn’t find much, just enough to indicate that it points to Yahoo/Overture.

  • Bite of Bend mini-review

    I don’t get out to many of the local festivals, but we did hit the Bite of Bend last Saturday, so here’s my mini-review. Actually, the one thing I really wanted to see at the Bite of Bend was the Iron Chef competition among six local chefs, and I got to see a bit of that—so this review will probably focus more on that than anything else :).

    They had closed off most of the Old Mill District—the main drag between the parking lots at the movie theater and the smokestack building—and even so, we were able to find parking in the theater lot fairly easily. At the time we got there (around 11:30), most of the upper lot (above the theater) was empty, too. That’s pretty good for an event like this, particularly in Bend.

    Decent selection of food, too, and just okay on the beer. When you see a sign saying, “Beer garden” I guess you expect more than four beers on tap. Although, in addition to the one wine vendor, the Bendistillery was there serving up hard alcohol. Nice!

    Actually, the food selection was more than decent; to me it seemed like a lot and a good variety. There could have been more—Pilot Butte Burgers would have been nice, for instance—but c’est la vie.

    Didn’t pay any real attention to the music. That’s about all I can say about that.

    Ah, but the Iron Chef competition was fun. I actually only got to wander over to it three times (everyone else thought I was weird to get excited about it), but I managed to see the start of the first contest—secret ingredient (tombo tuna) and all—and come back later to watch the matches in action. I don’t know who won any of the match-ups, though. And I don’t think they had to make more than one dish (unlike the TV show, which requires four or five), but it was still a lot of fun to watch. Interestingly, Standard TV and Appliance had set up a big screen HDTV off to the side and had two camera guys filming the competition up close—so you could watch the details on the TV. I was hoping they were recording it all and would broadcast it on the local cable channel, but I haven’t seen anything about that.

    It would have been cool to have someone doing an intelligent (i.e., knowledgeable about food and cooking) running commentary, but I guess not everyone’s as into the Iron Chef thing as I am. Regardless, I hope they do this again. Maybe they could do it at some of the other festivals and not just Bite of Bend…?

    Any other Bendites have reviews they’d like to post here?

  • Almost seemed like a long weekend

    Seemed long because we had so much going on. Friday night my wife and I stayed at the Pine Ridge Inn here in town for an early anniversary trip (my mother stayed with the kids). While having dinner at Cork Friday night, I happened to see an old friend walk by the window, and this was about as unlikely an encounter as it gets: this is someone I knew and worked with in Spokane, back in the mid-90s, whom I haven’t seen in nearly five years, and currently lives near Seattle. So when I first saw him (and his wife and son) walk by the window of a restaurant in downtown Bend, at first I thought I’d had too much wine.

    Turns out they came down for the weekend, pretty much spur-of-the-moment, and hadn’t had a chance to call us yet.

    Saturday we checked out the Saturday Market (pretty small around here), then hit the Bite of Bend. We hooked up with our friends again there, and made plans to have Father’s Day dinner at our place with my family. Of course, we had to go shopping to get everything we needed, so we picked up the kids, hit Costco and Safeway, and had a quick dinner at Subway.

    As to the Bite of Bend, I’ll write up a mini-review after this.

    Sunday, Father’s Day. Nice, leisurely day, except for all the house cleaning in preparation for having everyone over. Everyone had a good time, even when the massive storm hit (we were barbecuing, wouldn’t you know). Rain, hail and thunder—it hailed so much that there were still drifts in the backyard hours later. And actually the rain pretty much stopped by the time I was out cooking on the grill, so it was no big deal.

    So yeah, it definitely felt like we had a long weekend. After leaving work on Friday, I didn’t get on the computer at all (except to shut it down) the entire weekend, til work on Monday… that was kind of nice. Kind of a mini-vacation from it all.

    But, back to it.

  • Bite of Bend

    So who’s going to the Bite of Bend this Saturday? We were thinking of it but likely won’t go if the weather’s rainy like they’re predicting.

    Although I really want to see the first annual Iron Chef Competition they’re having—six local chefs in three one hour matches, just like the TV show. The Source has a good listing of the chefs and judges involved. Sounds cool! We’ll see, we’ll see.

    And someone really should buy up the domain name biteofbend.com and give them a proper site…

  • BittyWiki

    Just for grins, and to flex my PHP chops, I decided to write a simple wiki system. The catch, though, is to see how short I can make the actual program; I was inspired by this Shortest Wiki Contest, though I can’t profess to be quite as fanatic as those guys (I prefer readable code—squishing it all into a minimal number of obfuscated lines just seems like cheating), I think I did pretty well so far. Read through if you’re interested; it’s pretty technical and I include the PHP source.

    (more…)

  • New(ish) Bend blogger

    Forgot to mention this when I saw it the other day, but there appears to be another blogger here in Bend: e n | x | e n d u b. Did anyone else catch this?

    Either way, welcome!

  • Revenge of the Sith

    I went and saw Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith yesterday, and… wow. It was by far the best of the three prequel films, and the first one of the three that actually felt, I don’t know, epic in the sense that it’s carrying the weight of Star Wars history that fleshed out the first three movies. It was good, I’d go see it again, if I get the chance.

    This is going to turn into a larger review, and some general observations on Star Wars in general, and there will be spoilers, so only click through if you’ve already seen it (or don’t mind reading spoilers).

    (more…)

  • Fan fiction

    Checking out Wikipedia’s excellent (as always) article on fan fiction today, I ran across the site FanFiction.net, which I hadn’t seen before. It’s a comprehensive directory of fan fiction, organized by TV shows, movies, cartoon, games, books, and much more.

    The amount of fan fiction out there is truly astounding; I’ve known this, of course, but I just never guessed at the sheer depth and breadth it covers. Let’s take a little stroll through the site for some examples.

    • The combined number of Star Trek stories: 9240. Wow. They actually split the Star Trek stories up by each TV show, but that doesn’t really matter.
    • X-Files: 5393 stories.
    • Lost (the TV series that debuted just this season): 1462 stories.
    • Buffy the Vampire Slayer: 26,567. Holy shit!
    • Law and Order: 2037. Like Star Trek, they split out by the different subseries.
    • Star Wars: 11,828.
    • Lord of the Rings: 37,136. Good grief.
    • Harry Potter: 190,077! If I’d been drinking something when I read this one, I would have done a spit-take. This is beyond comprehensible!

    Those are kind of the usual suspects in fan fiction, what you’d expect… but there are seriously hundreds more different topics people are writing about. Here’s a sample of some of the oddball ones:

    • All in the Family: 4 stories.
    • Bill Nye the Science Guy: 6 stories.
    • Lazytown (a kids show, our kids watch it): 16 stories.
    • Diff’rent Strokes: 2 stories.
    • Saved by the Bell: 13 stories.
    • Moulin Rouge (the movie musical): 1466(!)

    You get the idea.

  • A Fire Upon The Deep

    The latest book I’m immersed in (one of them, anyway) is A Fire Upon The Deep by Vernor Vinge. So far I’m hooked (I’m about a quarter of the way into it), it’s totally compelling science fiction. And it’s a refreshing reminder that there’s really no limit to what you can do, story-wise, with well-done sci-fi.

    Ah, it’s always nice to have the “summer vacation” from TV and have time to catch up on my reading :).

  • blogfringe

    monkeyinabox: “Are blogs really as mainstream, as some of us thought?”

    No. No they’re not. That’s easy to forget for those of us “on the inside,” but blogs really are still a fringe phenomenon.

    They’re getting there, though. The Journal of Accountancy just ran an article called “Would You, Could You, Should You Blog?” which is a decent introduction to blogs for accountants. Now that’s getting mainstream.