I briefly mentioned that my dad had won a raffle for a fancy new playhouse down at the Bend Fall Festival. Since my parents are trying to sell their house, they obviously didn’t want to put it at their house, so they gave it to us. After moving all the firewood out of the way, the trailer was still too wide to get to our backyard, so we had to roll the thing on pipes. Having moved much larger objects on pipes (sheds and hot tubs, for example), it went pretty quick as I knew what I was doing. I had completely forgotten how impressive and cute this thing was — and a little girl’s dream come true. We got some bricks in place and shimmed the thing up to make it was all level, attached the deck, and my little girls couldn’t have been more excited. Read on below and you’ll see why:
Category: Jake
How I Feel About Halloween
Everybody knows my feelings about Halloween, and I’m glad to hear I’m not the only one.
Random Notes
Couple random notes:
- Going to Eugene tomorrow to watch the Duck game. It’s homecoming, so I’m going to try to hit up the Journalism/Emerald alumni tent for lunch. Come find me if you’ll be there (I’ll hit the tent at halftime).
- Did anybody go to the Fall Festival here in Bend this last weekend? Did anybody see that kid’s playhouse they were raffling off? That’ll be in our backyard in a month or so. My dad, who never enters to win anything (but always wins when he does) managed to win this, and is giving it to my daughters. Apparently the guy that builds these things usually sells them for about $1500, so I’m totally floored (as is my oldest daughter) that we’re getting the thing (and very grateful)
The problem is that to get this 7×7′ hand-built playhouse into my backyard, I have to move all my firewood out from next to my house (all 4+ cords of it) so this guy can get his trailer back there so we don’t have to roll the thing on pipes or something.
Leaving Town
I’ll be offline for the next couple days. OK, I won’t be offline, but I won’t be as wired as usual or at least won’t be in front of my laptop as much (though I’ll still have it with me). I’m heading over to Newberg tomorrow night with the wife and kids to visit my wife’s baby sister at George Fox U. She’s a frosh there, and I’ve never seen the campus, and we needed to get out of town for a bit. Today was a long, ugly day at work, with all sorts of stuff going wrong, and it’ll be nice to just get away from technology for a day or so.
I’ll have my laptop with me and will probably check my email (mostly so I can filter out the crap) so you’re still welcome to e-mail me (especially if you have large sums of cash you want to give me for some apparent reason), just don’t expect me to respond immediately (unless you have large sums of cash then I’ll give you my cell number).
What Are Your Radio’s Memorized Stations?
I know I’m probably in the minority here, but I primarily listen to the radio when I’m in the car. I rarely listen to CDs, I don’t have an MP3 player or XM/Sirius. I just enjoy terrestrial radio. Over the years I’m tweaked those six favorite station buttons on my stereo, and after thinking about it, I probably have one of the bigger variety of stations in my six saved on my stereo than most.
So here are my six, in no particular order (some local stations, but some local translators from valley stations as well):
- KKCU 92.7 (new independent rock/pop/whatever station).
- KLRR 101.7 (I remember when these guys were on 107.5).
- KPOV 106.7 (Bend Community Radio).
- KLCC 88.1 (Public Radio from Lane Community College in Eugene — local translator).
- KWAX 88.9 (Classical Music — Translator from station based at University of Oregon).
- KWLZ 96.5 (Classic rock out of Warm Springs — wish it came in better sometimes, as I prefer it over KTWS, as there’s a better variety)
So what’s on your radio speed-dial?
My New Toy
Long story short, a co-worker convinced management that he needed something fancy to keep himself organized. He then gave his two weeks notice after about two weeks of using it, so I’ve inherited his toy: A Blackberry 8703e. Since we’d already paid for the thing, and nobody else really knew what to do with it, I took over the account. I now look just like all the real estate agents in my office with their fancy phones (nearly none of who know how to use them).
Now I’ve never had a phone (or device, for that matter) that’s this fancy. I’ve found some good sites for help and tips on this thing (as I haven’t the slightest idea how to do anything with it, as we don’t have the user manual). I do plan on installing an SSH client, and already have Google Maps installed, and will install Google Apps for mobile (as I use that for the two companies I work for). I’m going to go through the stuff here and see what they have
there.
My one gripe so far? Upon quick glance, I can’t seem to find a mobile blogging app that will work on the blackberry. Found several that work on the Windows Mobile platform, but nothing for Blackberry. I use MovableType, and while Blogger and WordPress have built-in functionality for e-mail to post, I wasn’t really wanting to do that as anything I post via that method will have the generic “Sent via US Cellular Blackberry” footer (unless there’s a way to get rid of that).
Anybody have any useful hints, tips, tricks, good software suggestions, etc… for a geek like me, I’d love to hear it. I have an unlimited data plan, though it’s on US Cellular’s really slow data network (slower than dialup), so Google Maps is really neat looking, but boy does it take forever to load data. Mobile KTVZ is really handy, however (don’t try looking at the Bulletin’s site on these things — looks horrible).
And of course, fun little games to kill the lunch hours are always good suggestions, too.
Does My Business Card Suck?
Like I’ve mentioned before, I’m working on getting a design together for a personal business card. I didn’t realize how hard it was designing a card for yourself. I’ve designed cards for other people and companies (I’m not a designer by trade), but it’s been a bit of a process designing one for myself.
Like I mentioned in my previous post, I was trying to find three words that described me and would sell me on a business card. I was going to use Geek, Blogger, and left the third one up to my readership. I wanted a simple design that incorporated those three words. So here’s what I came up with, based on comments from before. This will be a full-bleed, full color card, and the front and back are below.
I used Adobe’s fun little tool to find a color palette, and that is a subtle watermark of my ugly mug on the card (didn’t want to put a full obvious picture on there and scare the crap out of people).
Thoughts, criticism? I haven’t printed them yet, so thoughts are welcome. Whatever I decide on will become a basis for a design that will get incorporated at some point at my personal site.
Five Years Later, It’s Good To Be Back
Five years ago I finished my last competitive race, the 2002 Hood-To-Coast relay. It was the third time I had participated in the relay, after running nearly 200 competitive races since I started running competitively back in high school (all my high school results can be found here). Little did I know that when I handed off the bracelet/baton of my last relay leg, it would be the last time I’d run until today.
Akismet Hates Me
I don’t know what it is, but Akismet, the popular comment and spam blocking service that’s in use on tons of blogs, hates me. So far, my various simple comments on Greg’s blog, Aaron’s blog, and two of Jon’s blogs have all been marking me as spam, causing my comments to get totally lost, never to be found, or get moderated to be found eventually. I run Akismet on this site as well, and it’s been marking me as spam, too (though I’ve white-listed myself so my other spam filters automatically will override Akismet).
The authors of those sites have since been marking me as “Not Spam” in their respective systems (dasBlog, WordPress, and Jon’s homebrew system) to try to reverse that. I always use the same e-mail address (my first name [at] orty [dot] com) and URL (this site) when posting comments, but somehow I still get marked as spam.
I’ll e-mail the Akismet folks, but I just wanted to post this here for folks whose blogs I might have commented on in recent weeks: check your junk/moderation area to make sure I’m not in there.