Sunbeams illuminating a coastal forest in Port Orford, Oregon

Chuggnutt!

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  • Bulbs

    Part of owning a house means yardwork and landscaping, which I’m sure everybody by now knows I just love (*cough*). This weekend it was planting tulip bulbs in the ground, which should look pretty good come spring.

    Unless, of course, they don’t survive. Since we bought a new house, on recently developed land, a good majority of the soil we’re sitting on is gravel and rocks and fill—basically just junk dirt that the excavation company used to push out and level the lot. It’s basically the worst soil (if you can call it “soil”) I’ve ever seen for planting—I pulled more rocks and gravel out of the ground than dirt, it seemed, when digging holes for the bulbs. So who really knows if they’ll grow here.

    On the other hand, the lawn is (mostly) doing okay, as are some of the plants put in by the landscapers…

  • The Brew Site

    I’m launching a new blog. Okay, well, a new blog on an old site—a site I’ve been “working on” for, like, four years now: The Brew Site.

    My original goal for The Brew Site, when I “launched” back in 2000, was a comprehensive, be-all end-all directory/portal/guide to beer and brewing-related stuff online. Kind of like Yahoo for beer. However, I never really had the time to do this, so I’d work on it a little bit, then real life would intrude. So up to now it’s been my spectacularly unfinished site. Kind of embarrassing, really.

    So I figured I’d better do something with it, and since I’ve been thinking more about writing lately, and making money blogging, the natural conclusion was to turn it into a blog. And I’ll try to make money on it with AdSense. So, it’s my first real foray into blogging for money (aside from the AdSense I’m running here, which is simply a nice bonus).

    Actually, the other motivation I had was that I emailed the guys at Weblogs, Inc. seeing if they were interested in a beer blog, and I figured, why wait? If they want me to write a blog for them, I’m there, and I’ll offer them The Brew Site. If not, no worries, I’ll just use this as the start of my own nanopublishing empire. ;)

    So in the meantime start reading! Subscribe to the RSS too!

  • PHP code rant

    This is a mini-rant on PHP that can be safely avoided by non geek types.

    This post over on PHP Everywhere caught my attention, vis-a-vis programming semantics and practice. Basically, inside a switch statement, someone placed the default block before the case blocks and was surprised when that default condition executed, and the “expected” case did not.

    Some are calling this a bug; I do not. This is the exact behavior I expect switch and default to display, and I always place any default blocks last in the statement, because that makes the most sense semantically and logically. I expect this because that’s how I learned it when learning C years ago; it’s the way the switch construct works and why it’s so fast.

    Relevant snippage from the PHP manual:

    The switch statement executes line by line (actually, statement by statement). In the beginning, no code is executed. Only when a case statement is found with a value that matches the value of the switch expression does PHP begin to execute the statements. PHP continues to execute the statements until the end of the switch block, or the first time it sees a break statement. If you don’t write a break statement at the end of a case’s statement list, PHP will go on executing the statements of the following case….

    A special case is the default case. This case matches anything that wasn’t matched by the other cases, and should be the last case statement.

    Seems pretty clear to me. I would expect PHP to immediately execute the default block as soon as it encounters it, even if this “cuts off” remaining case blocks below it. So quit complaining and write cleaner code.

    Okay, done ranting.

  • Hawaii

    Just watching the new show “Hawaii” this evening (taped since I was out last night), and I was just thinking how cool it would be if the show did a crossover with “Magnum, P.I.”

    There’s a couple of memes you probably never thought I’d hit you with.

  • Bloggers this evening

    We had a blogger get-together at the Cascade Lakes Brewery again this evening, it was a lot of fun and more of us showed up. I’m tired so there’ll be a more detailed post later, but here’s a short version: Simone brought Swiss chocolate. Dane wants a video game based on smashing Coke cans with a sledgehammer. Kasey can’t read blogs at work. Jesse never played Donkey Kong before tonight.

    Actually, there was a lot more going on. More later.

  • Lodging

    On our trip to San Diego we stayed in several hotels while on the road, and with my brother and his wife while there. Here’s some thoughts on where to stay—or not stay—if you find yourself on the same or similar trip.

    Avoid, at all costs, the Best Value Inn just off the freeway in Stockton (California). It’s on our list as one of the top two worst hotels we’ve ever stayed at (the other was the Knight’s Inn in Ashland), and is definitely the skungiest, dirtiest one: the carpet has sticky spots (like gum, I hope), there were some dead ants on the bathroom counter, the bathroom floor just felt wrong—in fact, most of the bathroom just gave an icky vibe. It’s also right off the freeway, so you hear the traffic all night (no biggie for me, since I sleep just fine with white noise).

    On the way back, we stayed in Fresno. The Quality Inn there on Shaw Avenue off Highway 99 was the best of the hotels we stayed at: very roomy, free WiFi, good continental breakfast. And relatively cheap.

    The next night we stayed at the Railroad Park Resort in Dunsmuir, about 50 miles north of Redding. Neat little place, rather rustic, nestled up against Castle Crags State Park. Totally worth it for the kitsch factor, but you might want to avoid the restaurant they have there: I found the food to be entirely mediocre and a bit over-priced. You’d probably be better off finding something in Dunsmuir.

  • Mt. St. Helens

    Of course, the notable news around here while we were away is that Mt. St. Helens started getting active again. Neat. What’s more interesting to me, though, is that at the same time, while we were in California, there were a series of earthquakes near Parkfield, one of which hit 6.0 on the Richter scale.

    Connected?

  • Back to it

    Yes, we’re back from our vacation to SoCal. Actually, we got back yesterday and today was back to work and routine, but I just wasn’t quite ready to “return” to the blog, as it were.

    It was a good trip, but tiring. San Diego is a neat city, but in general I wouldn’t want to live in Southern California; there’s too many people and too much traffic and it’s just too big… I’d go nuts. And it’s too damn expensive. I’m glad to be back in Bend.

    I’ll dole out travel stories gradually, rather than writing everything up in one giant blog entry. It’s easier on everybody that way :)

  • Vacation starts…

    Vacation is about to start. Once I leave work, we’re pretty much on the road, and while we’re bringing a laptop, there’s no guarantee I’ll be online much, so this may be the last post for a while. Or not; I’ll try to update from the road if I get the chance.

    Au revoir!

  • COBOL

    From Tim Bray tonight comes this amazing fact:

    There are five billion new lines of COBOL getting created every year, and there are (wait for it) 220 billion lines of COBOL in production. (Holy cow, now that I think about it, I bet I wrote ten or twenty thousand of them).