Month: January 2005

More Central Oregon Bloggers

I’m in the process of getting a better catalog together of Central Oregon bloggers (including aggregating some content — stay tuned), but in the meanwhile, a couple more local bloggers have popped up on orblogs.com:

The Grumpy Forester

VOIP Now

Forester is based in LaPine, and VOIP Now has GeoURL tags that put it in Bend. However, it appears, looking at their WhoIs, it’s a project of DotMarketer (as they’ve started blogs before), so I don’t know if they’re actually based in Bend or not. Can somebody from that company contact me or comment here to clear it all up?

Regardless, welcome to both of you! Once we start having more get-togethers, you guys are welcome to come (and that goes to any local blogger). Sign up for our mailing list, as we usually discuss that type of stuff there (note that all subscriptions are moderated, so expect a reply back from me before you get on the list).

January 23, 2005

Doom 3 Review

Since Brian doesn’t have a computer that will actually run Doom 3, he decided to write an in-depth review on the box it came in.

January 23, 2005

Free Tax Filing

I’m mostly bookmarking this for my own reference but this page will be handy for anybody in the U.S., so I thought I’d share.

I’ve generally paid money every year to file my taxes with TurboTax (which is so stupidly easy to use, even for complicated returns, that I don’t know why people pay H&R Block $250+ to do it all). But if you go through the links at the above site, you can get a free federal filing on TurboTax and a ton of other sites (you still might have to pay for state tax filing). Since I’ll also be doing my in-law’s taxes, this will be very handy.

Now I just need to get my paperwork from the department of education and from Google (as I have to claim my meager AdSense earnings as income), then I can start filing this bad boy and (hopefully) get a fat refund to completely pay off the hospital (still owe them money from last year’s surgery) and maybe buy a toy or something.

January 23, 2005

Bunny Suicide

How does a bunny commit suicide? It would probably go something like this.

January 23, 2005

Carl’s Jr. Tried To Poison My Baby

I couldn’t frickin’ believe this. Friday, in a spur of the moment decision, we realized we had no food in the house, so we got some Carl’s Jr. through the drive-up window on our way home from errands (we don’t get the kids fast food that often, so no lectures about feeding them fatty food, OK?). Typically, before leaving the drive-up window of any fast food place, we always make sure all of our stuff is in our bag. Glancing in, it appeared that everything was accounted for, so we drove home and sat down to eat our food. Typically, our routine when we get home is to tear apart the baby’s hamburger into pieces so that she can eat it easily. We started tearing it apart, and realized there was something terribly wrong with her cheeseburger: It had Jalapeños.

Carl’s Jr. managed to put a Jalapeño Cheeseburger — full of onions, a pile of Jalapeños, and a spicy sauce — into a kids meal for a one year old.

Needless to say, I was a bit pissed. We managed to scrap up some grub for the kid instead, but she really wanted that cheeseburger, and she would’ve been crying for the rest of the night had she taken a bite of it.

I didn’t have time to go down back down to the place and yell at them (do plan on, however) and I do plan on writing a letter to their corporate offices. Needless to say, I guess I’ll be dismantling all of our food before we bring it home next time.

January 23, 2005

Johnny Carson Has Died

I just heard on CNN that Johnny Carson has passed away. Seeing it on MSNBC‘s ticker across their page, quoting: “NBC reports that Johnny Carson has died from emphysema.” This is a sad day indeed, and I just read an article last week how he was still watching late-night TV via the East Coast feeds, and even occasionally still sent jokes to Letterman that occasionally would be read (just gotta find that URL — I know I flagged it somewhere).

News links to come later when a good obit is posted.

Update: Barney’s feeding me news data. He was 79, died in his sleep. More to come…

Update: Here’s a Associated Press Obit from the local paper’s AP wire feed, obviously was pre-written (common practice) in case this happened.

The only good thing to come out of this is that we’ll be seeing old Tonight Show clips on TV all the time for the next week, and that’s never a bad thing.

Update: Found an article that mentioned Letterman’s Secret Joke Writer (Thanks Barney).

Update: MSNBC has the story. It’s now starting to hit Google News.

January 23, 2005

Backed Up

Backed up at work, backed up at play, backed up with a pile of personal projects. I’ll post more details later when I’m remotely ready to release some of them to the public — at least a couple are getting close to public beta status. I’m just backed up, despite having a bunch of wonderful links to post (sometimes I wish this site had a few other authors so it didn’t sit empty, but I digress).

And it’s just such a frickin’ nice day outside, it’s hard to be motivated to accomplish anything.

Blogging sporadic over the next few days. Maybe I’ll get a few links posted, maybe I won’t — we’ll just have to see (as tomorrow will be a busy day, too). I just need another 10 hours in the day and need to be able to train myself to not need sleep, and life would be good.

January 20, 2005

Do Not Go Here During Work Hours

This is so dang cool. This site makes is possible to play online thousands of classic Sega, Nintendo, GameBoy and Arcade games.

I know I’ll be spending far too much time playing here now. I might as well kiss my day goodbye.

January 19, 2005

Blessed Be Thy Ferrari

It’s not drivable, but the Pope now has a hot-red Ferrari to call his own. Thanks Cheryl for the link.

January 19, 2005

Spammer Sues Spammed Stuler

It’s a sad, sad day when somebody who is getting sick of getting spammed is getting sued by the people who are spamming him:

Jay Stuler is now on the receiving end of a lawsuit from New Hampshire firm Atriks, which alleges Stuler caused financial harm to the firm and caused it to lose contracts. The suit also states that Stuler had been making defamatory statements, including calling CEO Brian Haberstroh a “criminal” and the company “a notorious spam gang”, which the suit denies.

January 19, 2005