Vince Genna, a true Bend icon needs your support. Read on for the e-mail I received regarding his condition from a friend of his. I will not put who sent this to me as apparently there are family issues in the Genna family and I don’t want my source to get harassed (as it seems some family members aren’t very supportive of Vince), but Vince has approved the posting of this. Read On….
Month: February 2007
There Are Some Weird Dudes On Bend Blogs
Obviously, BendBlogs.com and the 260 blogs it indexes, is bound to get some oddball posts come through. But this is probably one of the weirdest (and dirtiest) ones I’ve read in a long time (MySpace blog and naughty talk warning). If you read the rest of this guy’s writings, this kind of writing is commonplace.
Weird stuff…
Who Knew Kite-Flying Could Be Deadly?
You won’t see this on the Oregon coast…
At least 11 people died and more than 100 people were injured at an annual spring festival in eastern Pakistan celebrated with the flying of thousands of colourful kites, officials said today.
The deaths and injuries were caused by stray bullets, sharpened kite-strings, electrocution and people falling off rooftops yesterday at the conclusion of the two-day Basant festival, said Ruqia Bano, spokeswoman for emergency service in the city of Lahore.
Link via Fark.
Development Link Dump
OK, I promise this will be the last link dump I do in a while. Really. I promise. Cross my heart. But basically here’s a pile of programmer, web development, and site promotion links.
- Why I don’t get Adobe Flex (this was for you, Jen, as he makes a point I wanted to bring up at the COWPU meeting but couldn’t make it).
- Order pizzas via the command line.
- Six cool things you can build with OpenID.
- How To Make Square Corners with CSS (it’s a joke, people — but a well-written, hilarious one).
- Printing the Web: Solutions and Techniques (will be really handy as I try to make a printer-friendly full catalog for our site).
- 11 Ways to Find New RSS Subscribers for your Blog (my site’s really in need of a redesign, and I need to implement some of these — anybody up for the redesign task?)
- How to generate targeted traffic to your site.
- CSS Speech Bubbles.
- 10 Minimalist Blog Designs.
- Beginner’s Guide to learning Ruby On Rails
- Safest places to put your Web server.
- Lazy SEO Manifesto.
- MiniAjax, nice looking, free AJAX code.
OK, I’m done link-dumping for a while.
Windows and PC Link Dump
OK, following up on the last few days, here are a crapload more links for you, this time all revolving around MS Windows and PCs in general.
- 150+ Free Programs From Microsoft for Windows and Office (there are some cool tools here that I hadn’t heard about).
- I want a Freeware Utility to… . Great list of 450+ problems that can be solved with freeware applications.
- A history of Windows in screenshots (from Windows 1.0 to Vista).
- Build your own home media server.
- Great collection of MSIE 7 tweaks to make it suck a bit less.
- All the great SysInternals tools rolled up into one suite.
- Hiding the text on the recycle bin in Vista (and along the same lines, hide the text for other desktop icons).
- The Most Annoying Things about Vista.
- Free download of MS Virtual PC 2007.
- “I’m a PC and I’m a Mac”, circa 1996.
- Beautiful Vista wallpapers that weren’t used by Microsoft.
- Why you should never run an ATM on Windows.
- Power-up yor Vista Start menu with Start++.
- Customizing Vista’s Send To menu.
- Removing the IE7 built-in search bar.
- I think I’ve linked to this before, but I’m too lazy to look: OldVersion.com, which is where you’ll find old version of software.
- Great BIOS optimization guide.
- Zero-configuration VPN application.
OK, those should keep everybody busy. I think I just have one more major link dump coming up.
Inventions Link Dump
OK, only a few more these before I get caught up, I promise. But here are some … well … we’ll just call them inventions.
- Work from Bed (this would’ve been really handy when I had my back surgery).
- Survival kit crammed into an old watch (though you can probably cram more in an Altoid tin).
- Very cool (and weird looking) lamps.
- Ikea Hacker is dedicated to using cheap furniture from Ikea in creative ways (like this $15 table made into a $1500 Electric Guitar).
- Sound sleeper? This 113 decibal alarm clock should wake you.
OK, just a few more link dumps, and I’ll be all caught up. Really. Maybe.
Lack of Affordable Housing A Myth?
According to Becky Breeze, the lack of affordable housing in Bend is a myth, saying that there are lots of homes under $250,000 in Bend. Now, if you do the math and assuming you have good credit and can get a good 30-year rate at 6% (the lowest rates right now are 5.75% and first-time home buyers aren’t likely to get that low), that’s still a nearly $1500 payment per month, not counting taxes and insurance. I’m fortunate enough that I bought my house years ago and have great credit so that my monthly payment is less than $900 (with taxes and insurance), but considering that most folks here are already not making a living wage, I don’t have a clue how anybody could make that kind of payment on a $250,000 home.
So I used her site’s MLS search, and from what I can tell (and I don’t have raw MLS access, nor am I at an office today with anybody who does, so somebody correct me if I’m wrong here), here is what I see:
- 30 Homes less than $250,000, but all higher than $185,000 (most over priced, a few in Deschutes River Woods).
- 35 Manufactured homes between $250,000 and $116,000, many in Deschutes River Woods or in the Sunriver area, so not really in Bend.
- 24 Condos, priced between $235,000 and $125,000, but many of the lower-end ones are up at the Inn of The 7th Mountain, and those things are pieces of junk.
So yeah, I guess there is cheap housing, but not any that I’d want to live in, and not much of anything under $200,000 in the city limits. And yet somehow the area is full of affordable housing.
I’m just thanking God that I bought my house when I did — it was a total struggle to make monthly payments when we bought it, but there is no way I could afford a house now.
BendBubble2, am I missing something?
Who Cares How He Died…
…I want to know how he managed to have his electricity stay on for 13 months without paying the bill.
Confirmation that a Hampton Bays man had been dead for 13 months, seated in front of a TV set that was still on, came from dates on prescription medications and expiration dates on milk and egg cartons, police said Monday.
Investigators expect by week’s end to have an official cause of death for Vincenzo Riccardi, 70, whose mummified body was found in his secluded home Thursday after he had been dead for more than a year, police said.
Best. Business. Name. Ever.
Business name for a Seattle dog boutique: High Maintenance Bitch. And, naturally, the neighbors of the business hate the name.
Thanks Cheryl for the link.
Photoshop and Photography Link Dump
Here are some more links for you, based on the theme of the last few days.
- Adobe Photoshop Lightroom review — is it better than Aperture?
- Photoshop Automator Actions v3.0 (something I really wish a PC would run).
- Photo Pop-Out Tutorial.
- Use YouTube to learn Photoshop (great collection of Photoshop video tutorials).
- Huge collection of Illustrator tutorials (OK, not photo-related, but still useful).
- Great blog with a bunch of two-minute Photoshop tricks.
- Defying gravity in Photos
- Fake tilt-shift model airplane aerial photography (more of this type of stuff which I’ve linked to before)
- Soviet Russian Photo Corrections (doing this kind of stuff in a dark room is a royal pain in the butt).
- Blink-free photographs, guaranteed.
- Removing objects with Vanishing Point.
If you have any others to share, post ’em here!