Month: May 2004

Resizing the US States by Equal Population

What would the US look like if the states were all resized for equal population? Basically makes it so that the mid-west has about four states while California has seven. Link.

May 13, 2004

A Great Parking Ticket Defense

I only hope that if I ever get a parking ticket that I can defend it with this much creativity.

May 13, 2004

Boston Globe Duped by “Iraqi” Porn

WorldNetDaily reports that “Boston residents got more than they bargained for this morning when their copy of the Globe came complete with graphic photographic images depicting U.S. troops gang-raping Iraqi women. Problem is the photos are fake. They were taken from pornographic websites and disseminated by anti-American propagandists, as first reported by WND a week ago.”

Whoops…

Thanks to Barney for the link.

May 13, 2004

More Bend Bloggers or just Teenage Ranters?

Based on my previous post about our meetup, I decided to see if I could find some of those LiveJournal folks on Google. I found not only some LJ users, but a couple other sites as well.

  • Mountaintop.be: According to this page, the site is based in Bend. I’ll see if I can get ahold of the guy, as he’s the only non-LJ site I came across.

Then I came across a pile of LJ sites after clicking on the “Friends” info on a few of them:

Most of the LJ sites are just mindless ranting and talks about sex and drinking and the like, but I’m sure there’s some useful content on some of them. I’ll be checking them periodically, but it might be a bit before I add them to the Bend blogs list.

Dane, you have plenty of targets, it would appear.

If any of you local LiveJournal guys has any comments, feel free to do so here.

May 13, 2004

“Someone’s Gettin’ Egged”

OK, I’m like the last one to blog about it because I had been up since 5:00 AM yesterday, and after our Blogger Meetup last night, I was just too tired to blog. I tried to blog from the site, but couldn’t get a good Wi-Fi connection.

All in all, it was a good time, with a decent turnout. Shannon of There’s Always Something; Jon of Chuggnutt; Jesse of Bring Back the 80’s!; Barney of Bend.com; Roger of High Desert Skeptic; Simone of On the Bright Side…; Dane of Brainside Out; and Kerry of Bend Buzz. It was nice to put faces to names and to meet some of the weirdos that I’ve e-mailed with.

I unfortunately had to leave earlier than most of the folks as I had family obligations — I had to make it Wal-Mart for diapers before they closed. The joys of being a dad.

A few things I learned over the evening:

  • Shannon has the longest commute (Bend to Warm Springs) while Barney probably has the shortest (he works at home).
  • Shannon needs to get out and figure out Bend a bit more.
  • Barney’s as big of a smart ass in person as he is online.
  • Roger likes to take pictures close-up. I’m still seeing that stupid green dot.
  • I wasn’t the only one there with kids (Jon and I are in the same boat).
  • Dane is one guy I don’t even want to piss off, for fear of getting personal property covered with fertilized chicken embryo (eggs). Dane, you are a spaz, but a hell of a lot of fun.
  • Simone is obviously a pro photographer, as she actually climbed up on something to take a picture.
  • Chris missed out on a hell of a good time.
  • Apparently there’s a group of LiveJournal users that hang out and mooch the Wi-Fi from the Barcelona (or Bellatozza? I don’t know downtown at all anymore) restaurant in downtime Bend. Rumor also has it they’re all about 12. Just for kicks, I tried to search for them on the LiveJournal web site, but you can’t search for region without a paid account — and I’m not about to pay for that crap. Anybody know some of their URLs? Generally, I don’t consider LiveJournal users bloggers because their software sucks and it’s generally overrun by pre-teen nit-wits, but there might be some exceptions. Maybe. Probably not.

Some of the local bloggers have entries up already. Jon had a good time, Shannon’s got an entry up with pictures stolen from Roger’s entry. Simone’s got a good picture where I look like a complete moron. Jesse’s got an entry up, and Dane beat us all online because he has way too much time on his hands and his parents were already in bed. If that boy ever procreates we’re all in trouble (OK, I know I’m getting egged for that one). Shannon, are you still coming to get my couch? Better grab it before Dane destroys it.

Update: Barney sent me these photos that he took, so I figured I’d throw them up here:

   

May 13, 2004

Bend Blogger Meetup Tonight

Just a reminder that tonight is the aforementioned Bend Blogger Meetup. Bend Brewery, 7:30. So far I’ve gotten confirmations from seven folks (Chris can’t make it, which is too bad as his blog is very entertaining). Barney might stop by (he’s like me and doesn’t drink, so we’ll be picking on all of you guys who will be). I’ll also be bringing my laptop to see if I can get any Wi-Fi hookups to see if I can get online and blog from the event.

May 12, 2004

Climbers Rise Above the Primates

From rockcliming.com via John Fulwider:

Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo invited five climbers to test out its new ape house and discovered that the “escape-proof” exhibit was not as secure as they’d hoped. The 12,000-square-foot outdoor yard of the exhibit is guarded by a 12-foot overhanging wall. Five climbers volunteered to test the wall and, with bouldering pads at its base, they quickly found six routes to the top, ranging in difficulty from V0 to V4. The zoo now will go back to the drawing board and try to eliminate the small holds on the wall; they’ve promised to invite the climbers back in June for another round of testing before the apes move in.

My money says they’ll escape again. My brother’s a very good climber, and I’m sure he could’ve gotten out of that cage as well.

May 12, 2004

Bill O’Reilly is a Moron

After Terry Gross did a great interview that made Mr. Bill look like a complete ass (which he is), O’Reilly is doing everything in his power to make sure that as few people as possible ever hear him look like a fool.

May 12, 2004

How To Delete An Undeletable File

This is a very handy tip:

Open a Command Prompt window and leave it open. Close all open programs. Open TASKMGR.EXE from the Run command or by pressing CTRL+SHIFT+ESC. Go to the Processes tab and End Process on Explorer.exe. Leave Task Manager open. Go back to the Command Prompt window and change to the directory where the undeletable file is located in. At the command prompt type DEL where is the file you wish to delete [the path to the file]. Go back to Task Manager, click File, New Task and enter EXPLORER.EXE to restart the GUI shell. Close Task Manager.

May 12, 2004

It’s like Voodoo2 SLI, but less sucky

PCI Express, which is debuting within the next few months on Intel chipsets, is the replacement for both the AGP and PCI slots that are used for expansion. The speed at which data travels through PCI Express slots is a ton faster than standard PCI and AGP slots. The graphics PCI Express slots will, at their start, roughly run at the speed of an AGP 16x slot (you can only get a hold of an AGP 8X board now on high-end boards).

Graphics cards are going to fly on this new sub-system, but here’s the best part: AlienWare plans on building motherboards with two PCI Express Graphics slots so you can hook the graphics cards together. This reminds me of back in the day when Voodoo2 SLI configs (two cards running in tandem) were about the best damn thing you could have in your system.

But the trick with this is that you’ll be able to hook together video cards from different companies. Oh damn that would kick ass, assuming you could afford it. Meanwhile, my AMD 1ghz machine with an ATI All-in-Wonder 128 is clunking along just fine at home.

May 12, 2004