Month: March 2007

Follow-Up On “Sunriver Police Can’t Do Anything” Story

I passed on a story a few days ago about how Sunriver police can’t really do much of anything now. The story is now all over the blog world, with everybody getting a laugh out of it. Since, then, and after talking to some folks I work with, they have some concerns, too. For example, I work at a company that rents homes on a nightly basis to tourists. What if we need to evict somebody from a home because they’re being disruptive (which has happened before)? Can the Sunriver PD help us? This was among several concerns that came up, but basically, my understanding was the decision was made because a cop here pulled over the wrong guy: a lawyer who knew the laws about law enforcement on private roads, and it came back to bite ’em.

If anybody’s interested, the Sunriver Owners Association is having a town hall this weekend to discuss the issue. From the announcement:

TOWN HALL MEETING

“Law Enforcement in Sunriver”

Saturday, March 10, 9 a.m.

Pineland/Pathfinder Rooms

Sunriver Resort Lodge

Sunriver Owners Association invites you to attend this town hall for a presentation followed by a community conversation about the issues.

Audience participation is encouraged.

I’m not really in the mood to drive out to Sunriver at 9 AM on my day off (I drive out here every other day of the week), but if anybody does make it out here and wants to share what happened.

March 8, 2007

Will Scooter Libby Be Pardoned?

Want to bet on it?

Thanks Barn for the link.

March 8, 2007

Need: ASP/JScript Geek

I won’t go into the ugly details, but if you know your way around ASP and session/cookie handling, I’m sure this will take you about three minutes to figure out. Comment here or e-mail me using the form to the right of the page. Basically, I want to make a directly call to an ASP page using variables in the URL (a GET request), which the page is setup for, but it doesn’t seem to be working because of a session cookie that’s needed (and passed, if you use another page’s ASP form). Again, probably something really simple for an ASP guy, I’m just not an ASP guy, and don’t have time to become one.

March 7, 2007

Creepy Gun Commercial

Man, this is one trippy commercial…

(more…)

March 6, 2007

The Queen Should Know Better…

…than to let her grandkids mess with her answering machine.

LONDON — Princely pranksters William and Harry have been accused of recording a bogus message on Queen Elizabeth II’s answering machine.

The pair were asked for help by their regal gran when she was baffled by the technology.

But she was reported to be mortified when she heard the end result.

“Hey wassup!” their message said. “This is Liz. Sorry I’m away from the throne.”

“For a hotline to Philip, press one. For Charles, press two,” the recording continued. “And for the corgis, press three.”

Thanks Cheryl for the link.

March 6, 2007

I’ve Been Banned In China

Has your site been banned in China? Plug your URL in here and see. Of the sites I’m in charge of:

Just for giggles, I ran a few other local sites through the service:

I’m sure that pretty much any blog is probably banned or any sort of discussion forum of any sort. Anybody else find their sites banned?

March 6, 2007

Ratings Reign Supreme When It Comes To News

America doesn’t care about real news. We’d rather hear about something stupid or sensational. The guy who runs Fark.com and makes his living off stupid news knows this and wrote a great commentary for the Christian Science Monitor about this subject. People care about crap news and not real news. For cripes sakes, Fox News devoted 12 times more coverage to Anna Nicole than Walter Reed (and this was nearly a month after her death), and while I have my feelings about the bias at Fox News, I still don’t think they would’ve done it had they not felt that it would get them better ratings.

I doubt we’ll ever see the day again where mainstream/major news outlets care as more about good newsgathering then they do ratings/visits to their site or channel. The best sources of news will be the small-town dailies and small-market news shows and blogs. Now if they just weren’t such a pain to find … .

March 5, 2007

Join The UtterlyBoring.com NCAA Tournament Pick ’em (2007 Edition)

Selection Sunday is coming up next week which means that it’s time for offices all over the country to create office pools for the NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship. And it’s time for the readers of this site to compete for bragging rights in the annual UtterlyBoring.com Tournament Pick ‘Em.

While the field for the tournament hasn’t been set yet, you can still get signed up in my group and be notified when the field has been set and you can start making your picks (expect that to happen next Sunday night). Sign up here or if that link doesn’t work, go here, click on the “Join Group” link and use the following info:

Group ID#: 29821

Password: utterlyboring

The group’s page is here, which I think you can only see if you sign up.

Brad ended up winning Last Year’s Tournament and was the winner of a t-shirt from Bend, Oregon Tees. We currently don’t have any prizes lined up (though I’m sure I can find something from my last Bag O’ Crap that might be fun — anybody need 100 floppies?). But if any local companies or individuals are reading this and want to donate some prizes to the winner, comment here. All participants and prize donators will get links on this site and names listed on the group page on Yahoo.

Also, you can fill out up to three brackets per-person, if you’d like. Why am I allowing this? Because, realistically, there are 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 ways a bracket could be broken down, so having up to three per-person isn’t going to help you a ton, but if you have that kind of time on your hands, knock yourself out.

Update on 3/7/07: Now we have prizes! So far, I have the following to contribute to the prize pool (random stuff I found around the house):

  • Virgin Pulse 2.4ghz Cordless Phone (gently used, in box).
  • 100 Recycled Floppy Disks (oh come on, there’s gotta be a craft project for this).

Anybody else have something to donate to the prize pool? I’ll look around and see what I can find.

Update on 3/12/07: The field’s been set, so make sure you get your brackets filled out! And in addition to the fabulous prizes above (quit laughing), we’ve got a couple more to add to the list:

  • Dinner for Two at Jake’s Diner here in Bend. Thanks to Lyle for throwing that in there.
  • A prototype Paizano’s Pizza trucker hat, white with black mesh, thanks to that crazy lady in Baker for that.

Anybody else with something to throw in there (and provider’s of prize can’t actually win said prize, nor can I).

Update on 3/13: Another update to the prize list: A basic will (by basic, I meaning no estate planning to avoid taxes and the like) for the winner, created by last year’s winner, Brad (who is a lawyer, don’t worry). Looks like the prize pool is getting more fun (or depressing, depending on how you look at it), so get your brackets filled out today!

March 4, 2007

I Can Now Freely Drive Like A Maniac Through Sunriver

This will make any driving I do through Sunriver a whole lot easier.

SUNRIVER, Ore. — No seatbelt? No citation. No tail light? No ticket. In to [sic] much of a hurry? Not to worry.

Sgt. P.J. Beaty watches people in this upscale development breaking traffic laws, and sees plenty of them. But he can’t pull them over. A man swerved head-on into Beaty’s lane, and then back out again and Beaty couldn’t lay a glove on him.

For years, he and the department’s 10 other sworn officers could have pulled him over.

But the Sunriver Service District, which governs police and fire departments, voted in February to tell officers to make Sunriver’s roads, which are private but open to the public, exempt from minor vehicle infractions.

This basically puts the cops back to the security-guard status they had for years.

Granted, I want them to be able to enforce the laws here, but they were going totally overboard here on minor things for quite a while, especially picking on the locals. My dad, who has worked out here for over 25 years, as well as my boss and two other people I know, all got pulled over for not wearing their seat belt. The thing is, they were all just moving cars around in a parking lot — they weren’t actually going anywhere. And if you went 26 MPH through Sunriver where it’s 25 MPH all throughout, they would’ve given you a ticket. But whenever there’s a tourist driving the wrong way around one of the 10 one-way traffic circles (which I’ve seen many times), there’s never a cop to be found.

That being said, if a drunk is wreaking havoc through town, they now have no authority to do anything, which is no good at all.

You can read a bit about it in the latest Sunriver Scene, where they talk about the minutes from the meeting where this vote took place. But from what I can tell by reading just the bits I am there (and I can’t read the Bulletin version of this without paying, so I don’t know if they explained this better), they’re doing this basically because of the way state laws work on enforcing laws on private roads.

Update: There are several other blogs and forums talking about this now. And just think: The Bulletin could’ve gotten a bunch of ad revenue-generating traffic, but they decided to lock-down their article instead and send all the traffic for folks looking for this article to a Seattle paper. Their loss.

March 4, 2007

“How To Spot A Jap”

This was your tax dollars at work here, folks. This comic book was given to our soldiers during World War II who were fighting in Asia and the Pacific so they could tell the different between Japanese and Chinese men (as we were friends with one, but not the other).

March 1, 2007