Month: April 2006

KFXO News Has A RSS Feed

It appears that KFXO is trying (not a very good attempt, really) to actually get some news content on their site. Because of the poor coding on the articles pages, the RSS feed URL is shown in just plain text. The feed is pretty minimal — headlines and links to story, but it’s a start.

So here’s the feeds that I know exist for local media outlets:

Now if we could just get feeds from The Source and Cascade Business News (and official support from The Bulletin), then that would make life much easier for those of us too lazy to browse the Web.

Are there any other local feeds that should be added to this list or to BendBlogs? Comment here.

April 26, 2006

Sorry KBND, But You’ve Lost A Listener

You know, I was OK with the fact that KBND — Bend’s only decent local radio news source — had seven hours of conservative talk radio on during the week days (between Rush, Lars, and Bill) because I generally wasn’t listening to it anyway as I was at work. I was even OK when they replaced the CBS radio news and replaced it with FOX news. I was still OK when they mixed up the content and syndicated bites they had interspersed in their news hours.

However, I quite enjoyed listening to Clark Howard on my drive home from Sunriver. And he’s been taken off the air during the week and replaced by another conservative talk show host, Sean Hannity. So that basically means from 6AM to Midnight (an 18 hour time span), half of that is taken up by conservative talk show hosts, according to their on air schedule.

And unfortunately, my car stereo and its antenna suck, so I can’t get KRDM (whose site is down) out of Redmond, which would at least get me a little balance in political commentary.

Now don’t get me wrong — I’m not a right winger, but I’m certainly not a left-winger, either. I’m a moderate in every sense of the word, and I agree a bit with both sides on different issues, so I’d like to hear from both sides of the issues — you don’t generally get that with those talk show hosts, and I listened to Clark Howard because he avoids politics and shows us how we can save a bunch of money. Now that’s always a good thing, right?

So other than the bit of news I’ll listen to on the drive home at the end of the afternoon news hour, I’ll be turning it back to ESPN 940 or NPR.

April 26, 2006

Quote Of The Day

Leave it up to former Bendite Dane to come up with this descriptive text: “The Dr Pepper at our local Wendy’s tastes like watered-down Band-Aids.”

Boy does that ever sound rancid.

April 25, 2006

In Case Any Else Locally Uses Unicom’s T1 Lines

Our office has a T1 line through Unicom and the connection has been iffy and slow all afternoon. After running some traces and such, finally called them, and apparently one of their fat-pipe DS3 circuits went dead, so they’re routing a ton of their traffic through one of their T1 lines. They say the problem will be fixed by 5:00PM and it’s only affecting their T1 customers, and if your on a DSL line, it’s not an issue. What that means that if it’s not fixed by 5:00, I get to switch the office back over to the DSL circuits we have upstairs as a backup, as the front desk has a Web-based reservation and management system, and they need a good connection to use it.

April 25, 2006

Completely Removing BoxTrapper In cPanel

This is one of those things I just didn’t want to lose in case I need it again, but basically, if you have a cPanel server and you’re not using BoxTrapper (which you really shouldn’t, as it can cause your server to get blacklisted unnecessarily), follow these directions to get rid of it:

The first step is to modify /etc/exim.conf to remove the boxtrapper sections (there’s around 4 or 5 IIRC), and then run:

rm -rf /var/cpanel/version/boxtrapper

/scripts/eximup –force

/scripts/mailscannerupdate

rm -rfv /home/*/etc/.boxtrapp*

rm -rfv /home/*/etc/.boxtrapp*

rm -rfv /home/*/etc/*/.boxtrapp*

rm -rfv /home/*/etc/*/*/boxtrapp*

Also of note, I didn’t delete the boxtrapper sections out of exim.conf. Commenting them out seems to do the trick.

I was having trouble with some e-mail getting sent via my SMTP server, so I’m hoping that fixes the issue (it didn’t get bounced this time at least).

April 25, 2006

Being Buried In Snow Tends To Destroy Cell Phones

It’s always a joke around here in Sunriver (and Bend, too, but we do be more snow down here) that these large piles of snow that were created by the snow plows in the area are usually here until June. We had a pretty ugly winter down here, and there were some very tall piles of snow (some 10 feet tall, easily). They’re just now totally melting off, and one of our maintenance folks were out where there used to be a very tall one, and found this on the ground next to the driveway of one of our homes:

That’s the LCD of probably what used to be a decent Samsung SCH-A670 phone (photo taken with my the company’s new Canon Rebel XT that I bought for a deal). Needless to say, the thing doesn’t function anymore, as it’s probably been buried under there all winter long.

What I really need is a water balloon launcher or potato gun or something that I can launch this thing off the roof of my building and see what kind of abuse it can take.

April 25, 2006

Somebody Should Do This Through Bend

Back in the 70s, some crazy lunatic drove like a bat out of hell through Paris and filmed it (and yes, those are pedestrians he is nearly running over and one-way streets he’s going the wrong way down). The video was just and underground phenomenon until its recent release on DVD, and now it’s on Google Video.

Now, we just need to find somebody to attach a camera to their vehicle, and haul tail through Bend (the video would only be about three minutes). I nominate this local lunatic.

April 24, 2006

Air Force Hangar Fire Test Gone Bad

If you haven’t seen these pictures of the foam-filled Air Force hangar, you need to check them out. There are more photos here and a full story of the foam test here. Thanks several people for this.

April 24, 2006

Need A Bra In A Pinch?

Just make one out of a plastic grocery bag.

April 24, 2006

Why Thank You Captain Obvious!

Just in case you didn’t know, men and women are wired a bit differently.

April 23, 2006