Month: January 2006

Great Blond Joke, Brought To You By Web 2.0

This is by far the best blonde joke ever (link via memepool).

January 13, 2006

Raffle To Win 2006 Red Porsche Boxster for a Great Cause

Central Oregon Battering And Rape Alliance (COBRA) is an (unfortunately) vital organization that does much-needed work for victims of domestic violence and sexual assault in the tri-county Central Oregon area and they need your support. They’re holding a raffle to win a brand new, 2006 Porsche Boxster from Carrera Motors here in Bend.

Tickets are $45 and they’re only selling 2000 tickets, so you’ve got a pretty good chance of winning. The drawing will be held on February 14th at 5:00 pm at Carrera Motors (who is helping us sponsor the raffle). You do not need to be present to win, you do not need to live in Oregon to win, but you must be 18 years or older to purchase a ticket.

For more information, contact COBRA at (541) 382-9227.

Thanks Cheryl for the information!

Editor’s Note: If anybody reading this wins, they have to drive me to work in the thing a couple times, just for fun. I think that notice in the official rules somewhere, right?

January 11, 2006

Two-Inch Square Computer

It’s not a super powerful system, and you’d (I’m assuming, as it’s in Japanese) have to boot it off a CompactFlash card, but if this thing had another LAN port, I could picture this thing being a portable firewall.

January 11, 2006

Worst Online Advertising Ever

AT&T/SBC/whatever is running an a watermarked ad as wallpaper of this news site. It makes it impossible to read the stories and browse the page. Readers of the site are obviously miffed. Links via Morph.

January 11, 2006

I Am Snarky Bend

He lies, I Am Snarky Bend.

(Inspiration)

January 11, 2006

KTVZ Debuts New Site

It’s at NewsChannel21.com (Barney says ktvz.com will redirect there, too, when they get the email address at that domain all setup properly so that when they move things it doesn’t bulldoze them).

Thoughts? Quick impressions (I’m nursing a bit of a cold, so can’t really dig through it too much) are that is obviously far better than their site before (which wasn’t really a site), the design isn’t half-bad, and it doesn’t have any annoying pop-ups like other local media outlets. So…so far so good.

Meanwhile, I’m going to get some Nyquil and go to bed, but feel free to discuss….

January 10, 2006

Anybody Have A Hookup On A Good Bend Home Rental?

My sister and brother-in-law are apparently getting booted out of the place they’re renting in the Providence subdivisions in Northeast Bend. The owner of the home has decided that he’s going to sell it, and he’s probably going to be asking far too much for them to be able to afford to buy it from them. He’s given them 30 days to get out of there, which means they have to move somewhere else.

Looking on RentBend (will be looking at the Bulletin later tonight), there’s just not a lot out there for median income folks who are renting but need a three-bedroom (or larger, as they have three kids) with a pet-allowed (they have a cat) home. Their credit is recovered after a bankruptcy many years ago, but Bend’s home prices and the interest rates are certainly not supportive of folks who make normal wages (unless you were lucky enough to get in before the boom like my wife and I did). You can’t buy a home for less than $220,000 here, unless it’s on wheels.

Anybody have some leads on a private homeowner who is looking for some renters, and might be open to a rent-to-own arrangement? Contact me at utterlyboring [-at-] gmail [-dot-] com.

January 9, 2006

Google Maps With PHP and No Javascript

Mostly booking marking this for my own use, but it might be handy for somebody else. Basically, on the printable listings for the homes at Sunray’s site, I’d like to include a simple map on printed listings. I tried Phoogle Maps and it never seemed to work right and I didn’t like having all that Javascript on the page (though I haven’t tried the new version 2.0), but I figured I’d throw these out there in case anybody else is looking for a solution as well.

January 9, 2006

PHP Easter Egg

OK, this is pretty silly and stupid, but add “?=PHPE9568F36-D428-11d2-A769-00AA001ACF42” to the end of any URL that’s a PHP page, and you’ll get a funny little picture of a dog. Try it here. There’s apparently a different dog/animal/creature depending on your version: See here, here or here). Of course, you can disable this in php.ini if you’re on the paranoid side, but it’s still kind of fun (and yes, I know it’s been around for years, but it’s the first I’ve seen it). Link via digg.

January 8, 2006

What Firefox Extensions Are You Using?

I finally got around to upgrading my Firefox setup to version 1.5. Why did I do this? Because I tried just doing the quick-and-dirty upgrade to the 1.0 version of the Web Developer Extension and it totally hosed my 1.0.7 install (I need to read directions, I know).

But I figured this was a good a chance as any to just bulldoze my profile and start from scratch with 1.5 (which is the recommended course according to many forum threads I’ve seen over here, versus trying to upgrade on top of the old version).

It was also a chance for me to download and install all new versions of all my extensions, and thought I’d post what I’ve installed here for everybody else to peruse (and so I don’t have to look them all up again), and I encourage folks to comment here and let me know what they’re running so I can see if there’s any other cool little extensions I might be missing (and for anybody who cares, I use the Smoke theme, after using the Noia Lite theme in 1.0.7).

Also of note, I probably will install Greasemonkey at some point as there are a pile of great scripts for it, but I’m going to hold off for now.

So what is everybody else using?

January 8, 2006