Sunbeams illuminating a coastal forest in Port Orford, Oregon

Chuggnutt!

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  • Edgefield History

    This is just a little bit of history and trivia that popped into my head tonight, about McMenamins Edgefield in Troutdale, Oregon (just outside of Portland). The Edgefield is a 38-acre estate that features lodging, restaurants, a brewery, a vineyard and winery, a distillery, and more, dominated by a Georgian-revival style manor. It’s a fantastic, fun place, as all of the big McMenamins renovations are.

    Built in 1911, it was originally the Multnomah County Poor Farm:

    Residents operated a self-sufficient environment, raising hogs, poultry, growing a variety of fruits and vegetables, operating a dairy, cannery and meat packing plant as well as working in the laundry, kitchen and hospital.

    At that time, not long after the turn of the last century, my great-grandfather was a mortician in Portland, and on occasion he would have to make a trip out to the Poor Farm to pick up the bodies of residents who died.

    Yeah, an odd bit of trivia. It’s been an odd week.

  • overLIB

    Pointer to a totally excellent JavaScript library for creating popups: overLIB. I’ve been using it the last few days to put together a dynamic drop-down menu for a Web project at work. And I’ve used it before to create popup context menus and tooltips. It’s simply one of the best JavaScript tools out there that I’ve come across—it’s clever, simple to use, and it just works, period.

  • David Brin

    Ugh, it looks like I’m taking a blogging vacation. Time to try to get back on track. Tonight, since I’m reading one of his latest books, I thought I’d provide some links and commentary on David Brin, one of my favorite science fiction authors.

    The book I’m reading is Kiln People, and it’s really good so far. Brin has a knack for taking some of the most out-there, implausible-sounding ideas and turning them around into fascinating, believable premises. Kiln People is a good example; the premise is that future society will be transformed by the ability to create temporary, clay copies of yourself (called “dittos”) that essentially operate as a proxy version of you, and at the end of the day you can “inload” all the memories from the copy—in effect, experiencing and remembering everything the ditto did without risk or effort to yourself. I put off reading this book for a long time because it sounded a bit absurd, but once I got into it, it’s entirely engrossing and convincing.

    Brin also excels at portraying alien points of view. Brightness Reef is the best example of this I can think of, jumping POVs among half a dozen different alien species fluidly. That sort of writing is hard work, but it pays off when done well. Which Brin does.

    Herewith my thoughts on the essential David Brin reading list; if you haven’t read any of his books, start with these.

    • Startide Rising: This was the first Brin book I read. Utterly fantastic, I was hooked from that point on. It’s actually the second book of his Uplift series, but it’s the best one to start with, hands down. Space opera, lots of aliens, cool ideas—it has it all.
    • Earth: This paints a frightenly real portrayal of Earth in the near future (2038, I believe). Much different tone than his Uplift stories, but very good.
    • The Postman: Forget the movie, the book is totally different, except for a few things. And a thousand times better. As a plus, it mostly takes place in Oregon :)
    • Otherness: The second collection of his short stories. I like this one better than his first collection, River of Time, because he’s a much stronger writer with the later stories.

    And, if anyone’s counting, my least favorite Brin novel is Glory Season. Why? It was just too long for me, and the ending was far too ambiguous for my tastes—it didn’t leave me with any real sense of closure, just left me feeling unsatisfied.

  • The Google Platform

    I’ve already seen several links to this today (the first from UtterlyBoring), and it’s too interesting not to point to.

    The post in question posits this: Google is a platform. Not a “platform,” used in the same sense that Amazon and eBay are platforms (custom Web applications that allow some programmatic user interfaces), but an actual computer/operating system/development platform—something I had suspected for some time, but I’ve never managed to coalesce my thoughts this succintly.

    What is this platform that Google is building? It’s a distributed computing platform that can manage web-scale datasets on 100,000 node server clusters. It includes a petabyte, distributed, fault tolerant filesystem, distributed RPC code, probably network shared memory and process migration. And a datacenter management system which lets a handful of ops engineers effectively run 100,000 servers….

    Google is a company that has built a single very large, custom computer. It’s running their own cluster operating system. They make their big computer even bigger and faster each month, while lowering the cost of CPU cycles. It’s looking more like a general purpose platform than a cluster optimized for a single application.

    While competitors are targeting the individual applications Google has deployed, Google is building a massive, general purpose computing platform for web-scale programming.

    It’s one of the better tech reads I’ve seen in awhile. Very eye-opening.

    Now, of course, my curiosity is taking hold, and I’d love to take a crack at developing for that platform!

  • Portland Spring Beer Fest

    From /dev/beer I just read about the Spring Beer & Wine Fest going on in Portland this next weekend, April 9 and 10. Over a 100 different beers to sample. Sounds like fun, I haven’t been to a brew fest in ages. Too bad it’s short notice, though. Damn.

  • Imperfect end to an imperfect week

    I couldn’t even get myself to post yesterday, I was just done. This last week was the shit week for computer troubles. After spending the first half of the week struggling over my wife’s computer, and Thursday reformatting and reinstalling Windows on a coworker’s computer, Friday was the kicker.

    The hard drive in the boss’s computer at work died. Yeah, the Boss. I get to work Friday morning, find a note on my desk: “Computer says ‘Disk boot failure, insert system disk’ since last night.” Ohhhhhh, how I hoped the problem was simply that there was a disk in the floppy drive.

    There wasn’t.

    Nope. Machine won’t boot; hard disk clicks when it has power. That’s never a good sign. Can’t usefully boot to the floppy; the bootable floppy disk I have is for Windows 98 (yes, almost all of the computers in the office are still running Windows 98), and this is a newer eMachine running Windows XP, so the Win98 boot disk can’t recognize the NTFS partition. Contemplate for a moment running the restore CD, but that will wipe out all the data on the drive, and that can’t happen.

    Of course, like all good, responsible IT persons, I make sure any critical work and files in the office are on the network, right? Right. And the network data is backed up to tape every night, right? Right. So, there really should be no problem, right? Just restore Windows XP (though it’s a bad drive, remember, and really should be replaced), and all the data is safe, right? Well, almost.

    Friggin’ Microsoft Outlook stores all of its data—emails, contacts, events—in a single .PST file on the local machine, not on the network. Uh-oh. And for the Boss, email is the lifeblood of communication in the company; he’ll send out 40-plus emails in any given day. Double uh-oh.

    But no, wait, hold on: like all good, responsible IT persons, I have batch files running on individual workstations that back up the Outlook data files to the network daily, so that they’ll be backed up to the tape each night. This was instituted months ago, after the CFO of the company suffered a major email loss and we identified Outlook as a Major Point of Weakness in the company’s data integrity.

    Whew! Run to the network, open up the appropriate user folder where the Outlook data file should be, check the timestamp on the file.

    Time freezes.

    Somewhere nearby, a cat meows in slow motion. A trillion water molecules in the Deschutes River ricochet off one another in a brilliant cacophany of sound not unlike that of billiard balls on the break. Deep in my brain, a synapse fires and a single drop of sweat languidly rolls down my spine.

    January 30, 2004.

    Not April 1, 2004. January 30. I have never in my life wished more for something to be an April Fool’s Day prank.

    So what happened to my carefully crafted plan of a batch file running at a scheduled time each night?

    The Boss shuts down his computer each night before it can run.

    And that, of course, is the punchline. The rest of my day at work—literally, all but about an hour of it—was spent trying in vain to access the hard drive, just to pull the email from it. No love. A computer place in town that does data recovery was able to see the drive, sort of, but were unable to pull anything from it. The only option left is to shell out up to two grand and have a professional data recovery outfit like Ontrack retrieve the email. I don’t know if we’ll go that route, though.

    By the end of the day, I felt I was about to stroke out. Visions of myself convulsing on the floor seemed oddly appealing. The saving grace of it all is that it was Friday, and the kids were being watched so my wife and I were able to go out to dinner and a movie. We saw “Secret Window,” which was pretty good.

    I’m hoping next week will be better.

  • Bend.com RSS

    Just in case anyone missed it (and unless you’re an avid reader of comments to my blog, you probably missed it :) ), Bend.com now has an RSS feed. Gentlemen, start your aggregators!

  • April Fool’s… Not

    No, I don’t really care for April Fool’s Day on the Web. I find it amusing for exactly 90 seconds when the occasional, well-done, online April Fool’s prank shows up, but when sites like Slashdot and others have every other item an April Fool’s joke, it gets really old really fast.

  • Governator No More

    Sadly, it appears that The Governator Ale is to be no more. Lawyers for Schwarzenegger basically issued a cease-and-desist. I mean, really. Where’s the harm? Arnold should’ve snatched up a bottle and gotten into the fun: like saying, “Hasta la vista, baby” and then drinking it, or, “I’ll be back… for more Governator Ale!”

  • Some nights I just hate computers…

    God damn the computers are pissing me off tonight. All evening our broadband cable connection has just been running slower than molasses, so it takes forever to accomplish anything online. And then I’m trying to get my wife’s computer fixed up, it’s been running really slow lately and locking up a lot. So I rolled back the Windows ME that was installed on it (have I mentioned before how I hate Windows ME??) to Windows 98, which by and large worked well enough, but now can’t get the blasted TCP/IP to work properly.

    It tells me it’s assigned to some 169.* address, and the DHCP server is “255.255.255.255” (yeah, sure), instead of being sensible and using the perfectly acceptable DHCP server and IP address assignment that has worked with every other computer we’ve had in this house. And the worst part is, I’m sure I’ve encountered this same problem at work, and solved it, but I can’t remember what the solution was. I’ve already tried uninstalling and re-installing TCP/IP, so I don’t know. Maybe it’s just time for the straight low-level format route. Son of a bitch.