Month: September 2006

Bend Local Telephone Prefixes

I remember back in the day when it was a long distance call to call LaPine or Redmond from Bend. You could call Sunriver, but you couldn’t call LaPine. When I lived in Bend growing up, I knew if the phone number didn’t start with 38-something (382, 385, 388, 389, and then 383 came along later) or 593, it was a long-distance call. Now that they’ve smoothed things out and deregulated things a bit, Sunriver, Redmond, LaPine, Madras, Prineville, Sisters, Culver, Gilchrist, and Camp Sherman and areas who use phone prefixes from those areas are all local phone calls from Bend. While this is a nice thing, with the area’s explosive growth and the advent of cell phones has made it stupidly confusing to keep track of local prefixes. The local phone books used to have a page for local calling with all the prefixes, but I couldn’t find it in the latest yellow page. And I couldn’t find a master list online publicly anywhere, but had a list that a local company gave me access to behind a password protected interface (I work for a client of theirs). So here you go, this is (as far as I know) all the phone prefixes (area code 541) that you can call from Bend without incurring long-distance fees. I’ll update these if anybody has any additions, but I’m mostly documenting this here for my own reference so I don’t have to log into a password-protected interface to get it.

And if there is an easy way to find this information online that I totally missed, be sure to let me know. But basically I’m creating this as a public service so that folks new to the area know what’s long distance and what’s not.

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What Happened To The Bend Area Transit Web Site?

While I can’t find this in Google’s cache, Gigablast Cache, or in the Web Archive, I could’ve swore that before it made it’s official debut yesterday that the Bend Area Transit Web Site was a dedicated web site that wasn’t under the City of Bend umbrella. The other web site was blue, setup and easy to follow like their brochures, and actually looked fine in Firefox. Now it looks like crap. Did I miss something here, or am I just losing my mind? I know back when Jon linked to it the site wasn’t under the City of Bend’s domain and design.

Please somebody tell me I’m not losing it.

Before somebody asks, no, I haven’t ridden the bus yet (though a lot of people did). When it runs to Sunriver, I’ll start (I’m not holding my breath on that one), but it just doesn’t help me at all right now. Maybe if I ever start working in Bend, but that doesn’t seem possible, either (as much as I’d like it to be sometimes).

Calvin and Hobbes History

Calvin And Hobbes is probably my favorite comic strip of all time, and I know I share that feeling with many around the world. Bill Watterson, the strip’s author, did a lot for the industry and for the medium, and I was intrigued to see this collection of rare Watterson photos, illustrations and history..

If you’re not familiar with the strip at all, read the above Wikipedia entry, and be sure to check out these 25 great Calvin and Hobbes strips, as you can really see what made the strip so good.

While we’ll probably never see a strip like it again, I still do like to read what’s out there. If anybody’s curious what strips I still read regularly, here’s my personalized Houston Chronicle Comics Page (build your own here). I always try to read the strips there (which I really haven’t customized the list in a while), along with Red Meat, Opus, Frazz and User Friendly.

What comics do you like?

Fun With Google

A couple more fun thing for you (in case the earlier ones didn’t kill off your day already).

One is a game where, based on the results displayed, you have to guess the Google search terms. It’s pretty tough if you’re not familiar with some of Google’s advanced search methods.

Another game where you see a land mass from Google Maps and you have to guess where in the world it is. Tough game, but made easier (slightly) if you drag the map around a bit to look for a noticable geographic element.

And speaking of Google, if you’re sick of doing searches where affiliate and price comparison links (like shopping.com, bizrate.com, ebay, etc…) clog up the first several pages of results (especially the case when you’re searching for a specific item number or part), Give Me Back My Google will eliminate some of that mess for you.

Fun Little Flash Game For Movie Buffs

This one is really for movie fans out there: Can you find the 50 dark movies in this M&M’s Dark Chocolate game? It’s pretty dang tough, especially for somebody like me who doesn’t watch a ton of movies. So far, I’ve found 10 12 15 17 20 and need to stop before I waste the rest of my day trying to find the other 40 38 35 33 30. I’m done now. Really.

Thanks Jo-anne for killing off my work day.

Another Movable Type Spam Prevention Method

I get hammered with spam on this site, and for the most part Akismet, Spamlookup, MT Autoban, along with a few other hacks, have kept it from appearing on the site and putting too much of a load on my server. I recently installed a new plugin called NoHarvester, which blocks comment spammers from using zombie computers to do their spamming (basically does an IP address check) as that seems to be a fairly common attack lately.

While so far it appears to be working just fine, please let me know if you’re having trouble or if it thinks you’re spamming by e-mailing utterlyboring [at] gmail [dot] com, as I can only test this so much.

Speaking of spam, I have 10,123 published comments on this site, but the comment table’s auto-incremented ID is set at 55,442. So for every one published comment, I’ve received nearly 4.5 spam comments (and that’s only counting ones that have made it into my database — I’m sure I’ve blocked thousands of others that have never made it to my server).

Update: Yes, I know there is spam on this entry. It’s been marked as junk on the back-end, but it’s still showing up. I’m working with SixApart to troubleshoot the problem, as something isn’t right, so I’m leaving the spam there temporarily as an example.

Network Troubleshooting Sucks

Why no links posted yesterday? I was dealing with troubleshooting Internet connectivity for a local real estate company (and we all know realtors, no matter the company, panic when things don’t work exactly right or how they’re used to), so it tied up most of my day yesterday. And what made it even more difficult was the car mechanic problem: You know how when you take your car to a mechanic and it suddenly stops making the noise you were bringing it in there for? They’ve been complaining about this ‘net connection for several days, but every time I’ve been there, everything’s been working fine. And since I was getting vague “The internet is broken”-types of notes stuck to my desk on my days off, it was like looking for a needle in a haystack.

After several days of troubleshooting and testing I was finally able to recreate the errors they were getting (after basically making an agent in the office my MLS guinea pig and having her run a bunch of tests for me) in a controlled environment (meaning my laptop versus their laptops or desktops systems that typically have 500 icons on the desktop and about a dozen toolbars installed in the browser). I came to found out that there were random packets that were getting dropped between the expensive Sonicwall firewall and the Cisco 2300 T1 router, as I could connect directly to the T1 router and not have the issues I was getting. Taking down their Internet connection for about five minutes sure bugged everybody — boy, what would the world be like without being wired up all the time!?!?</sarcasm> — but that was the only way I could test it was to give all the bandwidth to me temporarily.

To prove my theory, I went in to town and bought just a cheap Linksys router/firewall that would route everything, configured it, plugged it into place, and suddenly things started working again.

At least that’s what I’ve been told — I haven’t heard any complaints today. The router has a basic firewall on it, which is basically all their were using the other firewall for, so it’ll work until I can price out a cheap Smoothwall box to build for them (as I’ve had great luck with my Smoothwall boxes, having installed four of them).

More links coming today as soon as I get caught up from ignoring the world and hiding in a network closet yesterday.

No Surprise Here: Bend Homes Are Totally Overvalued

CNN Money has rated has a story about a study that rates Bend as the second most over-valued housing market in the nation, sharing the top 10 with a bunch of California and Florida towns. Localized story on KTVZ and good discussion as well on the Bend Economy Blog.

This Guy Should Work For Hallmark

I would buy a dozen of these postcards if I could find them on store shelves.

America Has 52 States, and other Typos

According to this press release, America has 52 states.

The new version of the online news specialist website, DailyTopStories.com, now delivers hourly local news from several valuable news resources for the whole 52 states of the USA.

. Fifty-two states? News to me. I guess you could call is 51 if you counted Washington, DC, and then throw in Puerto Rico just for giggles?

Just the same, their site only lists the 50 states, so I have no idea what I’m missing here. Thanks Barney for that link.

While that could’ve been some sort of marketing gimmic, it wasn’t as bad as this political screw-up: I know I’m not voting “Saxton for Governer” [sic].