Category: Geekdom

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).

October 27, 2009

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.

October 22, 2009

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.

October 22, 2009

Random Stuff Cleanout

Going through some of my old notes and links here…

  • Got this email from the Bulletin a few weeks back, and the archive is the interesting bit, to me:

    We’d like to introduce you to two great new features on our web site.

    Our historical archive dating back to 1907 is now available online. More than 600,000 pages are available today and another 1.5 million will be available in the coming months. To view this great resource go to www.bendbulletin.com and in the search bar at the top of the page type in a keyword search term, then select the “Newsprint Archive” button just below the keyword box.

    Just for fun, play our pro football contest game and you could win a Super Bowl party for 8 in a private room at Scanlon’s Restaurant, as well as great weekly prizes. You can even create a “private contest” and compete against your friends. Just go to www.bendbulletin.com/pigskinpayoff to enter. Be sure to enter before Sunday’s games to be eligible to be a winner this week.

    They’re missing some time in the mid-late ’90s until a few years back as I was in the paper dozens of times for high school-related stuff and they’re not there.

  • You thought you’ve seen everything,Then there’s animals with lightsabers.
  • Everything’s bigger in Texas, including Windows errors.
  • Nothing like a mushroom shaped like a boob (thanks Jen).

More later. Time to watch Monk and Psyche.

October 16, 2009

Google Expands Central Oregon’s Street View Coverage

I mentioned nearly a year ago how Central Oregon had a limited bit of coverage. Their coverage was primarily to major highways 97 and 20 through Central Oregon, but it appears that coverage has expanded quite a bit. I don’t know when this exactly changed, but it was sometime within the last few weeks as I use Google maps frequently and had not noticed this.

Central Oregon’s coverage has gotten quite a bit larger than before:

googlemapsco.jpg

And Bend’s in general has as well:

googlemapsbend.jpg

Now the real fun begins: Can anybody find themselves on there? Or something fun? Or even a rough idea on the date these were done? It does appear that the images this time around not as much snow like the last Street View images, so they must have been taken during a warmer time of the year. I have a feeling they combined images from a couple different times as there’s still snow around Mt. Bachelor but not around Elk Lake. I’m sure there’s a dividing point along there if you “drive” along the highway for a while, as there wouldn’t be snow at Mt. Bachelor without there being snow at Elk Lake.

October 12, 2009

Quick And Dirty Web Site Fixes

Have five minutes? Have a web site? Here are 101 Five Minute fixes to incrementally improve your Web site.

So if you did all of them, and they indeed took five minutes each, it’d take you approximately 8½ hours. Not a bad work day for a much better site.

September 30, 2009

Need Quick And Dirty OCR?

Let Google take care of it. The results aren’t perfect, but it’s free and always getting bette. With Google’s purchase of reCAPTCHA, along with their ongoing book scanning projects, I can see this service only getting better and better over the years.

September 30, 2009

Come Listen To Me Pretend That I Know What I’m Doing

So the folks at Smart Solutions here in Bend run a monthly SmartGroup roundtable/seminar session, and this month’s topic is “Blogging: The Good, Bad, and the Ugly”. They’ve asked me, Jon Abernathy from HackBend and TheBrewSite (he also works for Smart Solutions), Andre Jensen from FreelanceSEM, and Meg Thompson from Audette Media to come and present. I would probably say that Jon = “The Good”, I = “The Bad” and Andre = “The Ugly” with Meg being “The Meg”, but I digress. I’d encourage you to come, as it’s going to be a good panel of pretty smart folks. The Facebook event page is here.

While anybody knows me knows how I can jabber with the best of them and have been directly interviewed several times about blogging before, I’ve never really presented in a setting like this. So I ask you, dear loyal readers (I know there are a few of you): If you were attending this seminar, what would you like to hear from me?

September 28, 2009

BendBroadband Launches Stupidly Fast Internet, Odd Logo, Still Caps Bandwidth

You can read the full press release here, but long story short, BBB is taking advantage of DOCSIS 3.0 to push up to 60mbs download. I would assume you will need a new modem for both the 25mbs and 60mbs products. I would guess that most BendBroadband clients probably have a DOCSIS 2.0 modem that looks something like this, and DOCSIS 2.0 isn’t built for this kind of speed.

While the higher speeds are great (though expensive for me, but competitive for similar services), it just means you’ll hit the BBB Bandwidth Cap faster. They did raise the cap to 150 GB on the highest end 60mbs, up from 100GB on their lower-end plans).

And while 60mbs is fast and all, many servers aren’t serving data that fast. This site is on a true 100mbs ethernet connection, but many aren’t (this site was on a 10mbs connection before), so while the 60mbs speed is a bit more than 400% faster than the plan I’m on, the likelihood of seeing 400% faster download speeds is pretty slim (unless you’re torrenting, which will pull data from a variety of locations, and then you might saturate it).

This comes the same day as their new logo design and branding. I don’t know if I’m a huge fan of “the dog”. I just can’t imagine rebranding all your vehicles and building signage — that can’t be cheap.

Discuss/comment below, with more comments over at DSLReports, mostly from out-of-towners.

Note: I know this happened all a couple days ago, according to the press release dates, but I’ve been out of town. Also note: I like the folks at BendBroadband as well as the folks at other local high-end ISPs like BendTel and Quantum. BBB’s service has served me well for years. They even advertised on this site for years (anybody want that spot?). They’re good folks, I just wonder about the decisions being made there sometimes.

September 23, 2009

Looking Back, The Legend Of Zelda Seemed Like a Bad Acid Trip

I mentioned before that I’ve a bit of an old-school Zelda geek who worked my butt off to finish both quests of the original Zelda. I haven’t touched the game since I was a kid, but it’s fun to look back and remember how hilariously odd some of the items, bosses, characters, and enemies were.

September 22, 2009