Month: October 2009

I Survived Halloween, and My Wedding Anniversary

As I mentioned in the past, my wife and I got married on the day before Halloween not because we liked the holiday, but because we liked saving money (we got the building we got married in for free if we got married on that day — we couldn’t pass it up). Ten years ago yesterday, my wife — and my best friend — and I tied the knot. How she’s managed to tolerate me all these years is beyond me. Just the same, I surprised my wife with a day-before-the-day-of (so Thursday) overnight trip to Sunriver to stay in a Sunriver home with my employer and a nice dinner at the Pine Tavern, where we went for our first anniversary. I actually got the house for two nights, knowing good and well my wife couldn’t get away for more than a night, so we brought the kids out for the second night (the actual night of our anniversary) and had a good time with all of us in a nice fancy house.

So as per tradition, my wife and sis-in-law decked out our house for our annual Halloween party. I don’t really like the holiday, probably primarily because of it’s timeliness to our wedding anniversary, but I still survived the day. All the nieces and nephews came over, we had far too much food and desert, and bunch of trick-or-treaters that my brother-in-law dealt with. We did have a couple teenagers who were old enough to drive that I just flat-out told to go away (I didn’t dig out the pickled asparagus with the labels). My exterior lights were off, I was enjoying the tail-end of the World Series and the Duck Game, and these guys were pounding on my door with nothing resembling a costume. I just told them we were out of candy. They didn’t believe me, I said I didn’t care and told them to go away. Little punks — I should’ve turned the hose of them.

Otherwise, the kids all had a great time, and that’s really all it’s about. Now I’m going to bed to hopefully take advantage of the extra hour of sleep that I really need.

Seven Questions That Keep Physicists Up At Night

Not on the list are questions like “Will I ever find a girlfriend?” or “Why did I choose this as a major?”

Link/joke via BBspot.

Darth Vader Was At The Yalta Conference?

Apparently so. On top of that, photographic evidence show that Batman, Spider-man, and The Hulk were all in the War.

Arnold Schwarzenegger is Awesome

If I lived in California, I would’ve voted for Arnold. What other Governor would put a hidden “F*** You” (intentionally or otherwise) into a message to the state assembly about how poor of a job they’re doing?

Time Killer For The Day

SkyFyre is a great horizontal pixel shooter where you fly around on dragons, shooting down monsters. It’s simple, chaotic, and fun.

Updated Bend Telephone Prefix List

Years ago I posted a Bend local phone prefix list, because it was getting harder and harder to keep track of what was a local call and what wasn’t. I updated that list today with another bunch of prefixes, and also included the cities they’re based out of for folks like Simone who can’t call to Redmond from Lapine on her home phone without calling long distance, but can call Bend (at least when I first posted the list).

Why was I updating this list? Well I was playing with Google Voice, and looking to try to get a better number as my Google Voice number is less-than-memorable. Since we can’t port numbers to Google Voice yet (though as of today, we can use their voicemail services on our existing numbers), if I was going to be using Google Voice at all, I wanted a nifty number, and wanted a number that was local. While they’ll tell you where the number’s based, it’s nice to have another place to confirm it.

So if you’re in the same boat as me, check out the updated list (and this is going to get even more complicated when the new area code comes to town and 10-digit dialing is required).

Symphony Concert Tonight

If you’re wondering why I’ve been offline for the last few days, I’ve been playing and rehearsing with the Central Oregon Symphony. We had concerts the last two days and have one more tonight to finish the weekend. It’d a good show, concert is free, tickets at the door, hope to see you there!

And hope to get back to the blog later this week.

Geeky Proposal

Nothing proves you as a true geek like hacking a Super Mario game to propose to your girlfriend.

At least these folks know how to play video games, unlike this Home Shopping Network guy who dang near destroyed his demo TV playing the Wii.

Making The Leap To Windows 7?

In case you haven’t heard all the hype, Windows 7 was released today. If you’re planning on making the jump, be sure to read Lifehacker’s Complete Guide to Windows 7 which has a ton of useful tips, tricks, and hints for the new OS.

Is anybody here taking the jump? I played with one of the early betas, but haven’t played since. I’ve heard and read really good things about it, though, and read that its performance is better than Vista. I just don’t know if there are Windows 7 drivers out for everything on this laptop I’m running, and I would need to invest in Windows 7 Professional (most people only need Home Premium) because I’d need XP mode for some applications here at the office that puked in Vista (and they only work in XP with a bit of tweaking — curse you legacy applications). I’d also need domain support, which is only available starting in the Professional version.

Update: If you’re hungry, there’s a Windows 7 Whopper available in Japan.

Time Killers For The Evening

In the middle of a commercial break here on Top Chef, so figured I’d share some simple but fun time killers, all found via the Webgames area of Reddit:

  • The Crossing — never have deer falling to their death looked so nice.
  • Amoebas, a very simple game that will drive you crazy really fast as you get into higher levels.
  • Cover Orange has a simple premise: Protect the Orange(s) from the mean cloud and the rain of spikey balls using a variety of objects. It gets pretty complicated pretty fast.

Enjoy!