It’s a promotion for Hostway, but I have to admit, I had a lot of fun exploring Bob’s Cube. There’s a few Office Space references, and lots of little nooks and crannies to check out (the rear view mirror is funny).
Month: April 2005
City Of Bend To Start Renaming Streets
Let me tell you, this can’t happen soon enough. While I’ve lived here long enough to know where the various streets change names, trying to explain it to people from out of town is damn near impossible, especially now that the parkway has split many of them in weird spots or connected them in others.
They plan on starting off small and just dealing with Hill Street, but Bond street is a mess of names, as is the Portland-Olney-Penn-Neff-Alfalfa Market stretch of road (the Bulletin story forgot Penn in that combo), the 8th-Trenton-12th road that runs up the Butte, the Hwy. 20-Greenwood-Newport-Shevlin Park road, etc… . There are even two or three little weird ones in my neighborhood alone (Jones turns into 12th, and Jones heads off on a completely separate road, for example).
Idiot Crook For The Day
Make sure that when you’re plotting your crime with your buddy that you don’t sit on your cell phone so that it dials 911 so the dispatcher can hear about your entire plan.
Japanese Penis Festival
In Kawasaki, Japan, there’s a festival that happened last Sunday called the Kanamara Festival. From what my cousin (who is living over there) gathers, it’s a festival about sexuality and the penis. Just check out these scary pictures.
Is Your American Flag At Half Staff?
It should be. I’ll have to look around the area to see if any flags are still up full, but I do remember last time that flags were to be flown half staff (when Reagan died, if I remember correctly), we had several prominent flags in the area that were still up full staff.
Google Satellite Maps
Google Maps has gotten that much cooler. Google has integrated wonderful satellite imagery into both it’s Maps and Local products. It’s pretty dang slick, and Greg shows some samples of its power.
Note that I had trouble with the zoom in Firefox 1.01, but after upgrading to 1.02, it all works fine and dandy.
Update at 1:45: Here’s a cool flickr group that shows Google images of people’s childhood homes (inspired by this). There’s also links to the Burning Man Camp site as well as a field in Illinois that says “Dave.” Thanks Waxy.
Bad Dining
This is yet another reason why I’ll miss places like the Juniper Cafe: Some of the local, high-end, trendy restaurants locally that are catering to the yuppie folks around here don’t seem to care when they treat you like crap.
Take Kanpai Bend, for example. Shannon and Simone both had horrible experiences because of wait staff that, for the most part, thought their restaurant was the coolest thing since sliced bread and that because they are popular, they didn’t need to be nice.
You’re a sushi place, folks (and a small one at that), and you’re replaceable as there are probably dozen restaurants here that have sushi as well as a few grocery stores that sell very good stuff as well (I’ve heard that the Newport Market’s is actually very good). In other words, enjoy your popularity while it lasts, as it won’t for too long. Every new restaurant here has a surge of popularity when it first opens, and only the good ones survive afterwards when the customers drop. The previous inhabitant of that space, the Brooklyn Cafe, was the same way: very full the first few months, and then fairly dead thereafter.
So good luck to you: You’re going to need it.
Archive Page Works Again
The calendars on my archives page weren’t working for a while there, and I just now got around to looking into it. The problem? The MTCalendar tag doesn’t support dynamic publishing, which is what my archives index uses. Turned off dynamic publishing, everything works again.
On a side note, my highest-commented post has now passed 175 comments, thanks to people throwing telemarketers numbers into Google.
I’m Going Straight To Hell
Because in all the hoopla around the Terry Schiavo death, I laughed at this.
But really, the whole mess was taken so out of proportion, and politicians on both sides of the political spectrum were trying to use this whole thing as leverage for their own gain. There were so many lies that were spread around about the whole thing that it was just ridiculous. And the media coverage on this, when there were other big events going on around the world, was just asinine. Nevermind that there was an earthquake that killed a couple thousand, the networks just cared about ratings.
One important lesson came about in all this: Make sure you have a living will. If I ever create one, I’m going to make sure it reads something like this.