Category: Jake

Anybody Need A Graphics Designer?

I just put the finishing touches on my sis-in-law’s Web site. She’s a stupidly-talented illustrator and graphics designer (she designed the site, I coded it, for better or for worse). She’s graduating from George Fox in a couple weeks, plans on coming back to Bend (can’t stand the Valley), and is looking for work. She has a pretty varied portfolio, and is one of the most efficient workers I’ve seen. She’d prefer full-time work, but I’m sure she’s open to some individual projects.

If you want to get in touch with her, or want a personal recommendation, let me know.

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April 13, 2011

FREE: Cascade Winds In Concert This Weekend

It’s cheap plug time again! The Cascade Winds Symphonic Band, Central Oregon’s premier concert band, will present the second concert of their 2010-2011 season under the baton of music director Dan Judd, March 6, 2:00 p.m. at Summit High School auditorium. That’s this Sunday for those of you that aren’t keeping track! This concert is free of charge, although donations are gratefully accepted.

The pieces we’ll be playing this time around (it’s going to be a good one):

Grand Serenade for an Awful Lot of Winds and Percussion by P.D.Q. Bach. If you’ve never seen a P.D.Q. Bach piece performed, you’re really missing out as they’re hilarious.
New England Triptych [Be Glad Then, America; When Jesus Wept; Chester] by William Schuman
Continental Overture by Johan de Meij
Folk Song Suite by R. Vaughn Williams
“The Gum-suckers” March by Percy Aldridge Grainger
With Pleasure [Dance Hilarious] by John Philip Sousa

These concerts are free, open to the public and suitable for all ages — and there are snacks at intermission, which is never a bad thing, right?

For more information visit www.cascadewinds.org or call 541-593-1635.

March 3, 2011

Join The UtterlyBoring.com/CentralOregonAthlete.com NCAA Tournament Pick ’em

Selection Sunday is ~~coming up on March 13~~ here and then it’s time for offices all over the country to create office pools for the NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship (and for workplace productivity to grind to a halt). And it’s time for the readers of this site to compete for bragging rights (and some great prizes) in the sixth-annual UtterlyBoring.com Tournament Pick ‘Em. Last years contest info was here with final scoring here. babbage is looking to defend his title.

This year we’ve partnered up with Central Oregon Athlete to bring more exposure to the whole thing and to try and gather up some more prizes. I’ve known Josh at COA for well over a decade, and he knows his sports better than anybody around here, so I figured this would be a perfect partnership.

It’s free to play, and doesn’t require you to know anything about college basketball. So read on for the sign up information, prizes, and more!

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February 28, 2011

Still Looking For Prize Donations

I’m still looking for prize donations for this year’s NCAA pick ’em. As an added bonus for folks that donate, I’ve partnered up with Josh over at Central Oregon Athlete for this year’s tournament, and your ad/link will go on his site as well (more details to come).

Use the contact form on the right-hand side of this page, comment here, or e-mail me at utterlyboring (at) gmail (dot) com.

February 22, 2011

A Foot Of Snow, Power Outages, and a Dead Router

What a day. A metric crapload of wet snow pummeled the area. All the Bend schools canceled classes, Redmond didn’t cancel their schools, realized their mistake and my power was out for a couple hours this morning. It’s a mess, and it took nearly two hours for me to get my driveway cleared because of all the moisture in the snow (worked on it during the power outage, since I couldn’t work from home, like I planned). I didn’t even attempt to make it out of my neighborhood, as my car is too low to the ground to even try with the thick snow (they don’t plow my street). The power came off and on a couple times this morning, which I think caused a surge to go up one of my lines, as my always bullet proof WRT54GL router (running DD-WRT, of course) is now dead. I had an old wired router that I’m running off now with a bunch of cables running all over the place, but you don’t realize how much you miss wireless on a laptop until it’s gone (I have ethernet running to other computers in the house already, so they’re fine). Looks like I need to get a new router ordered. I’m pretty sure I’ve had that WRT54GL since I had my back surgery, so it’s probably due to be replaced anyway — I can finally get myself an 802.11n router. (Edit, after looking through my records: I’ve had that Linksys router more recently than that. I had an old crappy D-Link prior to that.)

Everybody surviving the storm?

February 15, 2011

Looking For Prize Donations For Our Annual NCAA Pick ’em

I’m trying to get things organized a bit for this year’s annual UtterlyBoring.com March Madness NCAA Pick ’em (our sixth year doing this — see some previous years here, here, here, and here) and am working on collecting prizes for the winners. Does anybody have anything would like to contribute or know anybody (or a business) who would like to donate a prize?

As usual, all prize submitters will get text link on the tourny page (which will be linked from the front page of this site for several weeks as well as bendblogs.com for a couple weeks), and I’ll rotate 125*125 pixel ad banners for your company or blog or whatever during the duration of the tournament.

Anything can be submitted for a prize, as I’m pretty casual, as are the folks who participate in the tournament. If you have anything fun, weird, stupid, interesting or cool you want to throw into the prize pot, by all means let me know (comment here with your email address so I can contact you or e-mail me at utterlyboring {at} gmail {dot} com).

February 2, 2011

Any Home Theater Wizards Out There?

I’m trying to help my parents out with some home theater stuff for the house they’re building (just about finished). I’m trying to find an all-in-one receiver that will play Blu-Ray (or DVD, but preferably BD), as the built-in entertainment center area only has room for one more component (as the DirecTV DVR takes up one of the two). Now that’s not a big deal, as there are hundreds of those types of things out there, but I need one a bit more powerful and specialized: I need one that uses bare-wire speaker connectors (as he has in-wall speaker wire and I’m not using something with proprietary connectors like most of them have) and ideally has dual-zone support (as he has speaker wire running to the kitchen, deck, and bedroom as well).

Does such a beast exist? I have a thread open over on AVS Forum, but I figured I’d ask here if anybody knew of such a beast. Dual-zone support isn’t as crucial, but it sure would be nice.

Update: Made it more clear that I need one of those home-theater-in-a-box type of setups that will play the DVDs as well as power the speakers. Realized I wasn’t as clear as I could be with that. I basically need one box that will do it all. I have an Onkyo TXSR508 so I know all about multi-zone stand-alone receivers, just didn’t have a clue if a HTiB setup was capable of doing this.

January 19, 2011

Post Christmas Wrap-Up

After three days of great time with friends and family, I can’t say that I wanted to go back to work this morning (but who ever really wants to go to work?). I got to spend time with all sorts of family and friends and ate far too much food. A great time was indeed had by all. It was great seeing friends and family who I hadn’t seen for quite a while (some for years). And as usual, we were all spoiled rotten. The haul (not 100% inclusive, but interesting things that were giving to anybody in our family that readers here my find interesting — I’m at work, so I can’t remember the list 100%):

First, my haul from my Reddit Secret Santa
- Homocidal Jungle Cat, a Calvin and Hobbes book.
- 99% Perspiration, a Frazz Collection.
- Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson. I haven’t read a novel for years, and this one is 1100+ pages, so it might be time to start.
- Starter Pack for Arduino. I’ve heard about Arduino stuff, but never looked into them much. This will force me to play.
The Complete Monty Python’s Flying Circus Mega Set.
A 2TB External Hard Drive
Onkyo TX-SR508 Receiver. This was a gift to myself, primarily, using some money from ads on this site I’ve been saving up. I wouldn’t have even pulled the trigger on a receiver, but I found it refurbished at more than 50% off, and I was sick of all the zillions of RCA cables I had behind my make-shift entertainment center. I couldn’t pass it up.
An H20 Mop. My wife must not have thought I was doing a good enough job mopping the floor, as she loves this thing.
Seidio Innocase for my phone.
My kids got a Wii from the grandparents, along with a couple extra controllers. They also gave us Wii Sports Resort, New Super Mario Bros. Wii, Wii Party, and Zumba Wii (that’s for my wife as she’s into Zumba — my body doesn’t move like that).
Board(ish) games were big this year, with Creationary, Balderdash, Scrabble Flash, Mad Gab, Perplexus and Apples to Apples making their way under our tree (we like playing games in our household).
No Christmas should be complete without an Alton Brown book (especially when you don’t have cable): Good Eats 2: The Middle Years.
Several DVDs and Gift Cards (including extensions on both our Netflix and High Desert Museum memberships), and some clothes (which you don’t appreciate as a kid, but really appreciate as you get older).
And some other stuff I can’t remember as I’m work posting this on my lunch break…

Seriously, though, it’s a large haul, and I’m not including all the stuff my wife and kids received (there was a FoodSaver, a bunch of American Girl-sized stuff — some brand-name, some generic — as well as some other toys and things that I have forgotten at the moment). We always clean out the kids toys and closets after Christmas and donate their gently-used stuff to charity, and we’ll be doing that again this year. I’m always extremely blessed and grateful to have such caring wonderful people in my life, and I hope that I’ve been able to do what I can for them, even if I can’t always do so financially and spoil them like I’d really like to (if I had the money, I’d be buying a ton of gifts for people).

I hope everybody had a Merry Christmas!

(Note: Yes, I do have Amazon affiliate tags in some of these links so if you purchase any of the stuff listed above or anything from Amazon via these links, I’ll get a few pennies. If you object to the affiliate tags, I’m sorry, and you’re welcome to just search the Web for these items or block the cookies.)

December 27, 2010

Happy Festivus

It’s Festivus for the rest of us!

If you’re ignoring the fact that there’s a holiday coming up, there are some hilarious videos posted here. If you’re looking for something inspirational, this might bring a tear to your eye.

Seriously, though, here’s hoping you have a great Christmas (or have a good weekend in general, if you’re not celebrating Christmas). I’m signing off until early next week, spending time with friends, family and loved ones this weekend. Feel free to air your grievances below or post any holiday comments in general.

December 23, 2010

Vote For My Sis-in-Law’s PPP Logo

So my sis-in-law is a poor college student who’s studying graphics design at George Fox. She’s tremendously good at graphics design (she has a few of her older designs posted here, but she’s done much more and much better work since I put that site online for her a couple years ago). In an attempt to get a few bucks and some local fame, she submitted a logo for this year’s PPP Logo Contest, Her submission was thus:

Personally, I think it’s far superior to the 2010 logo, but I’m obviously a bit biased.

If you live in Bend, a vote for my sis-in-law would be greatly appreciated. Unfortunately, you have to go to the downtown Bend US Bank Branch to cast a vote (which I guess is fair, since they are the title sponsor of the PPP). But if you happen to have an office downtown (I know many of you do), then just take a walk during your lunch break, and cast your vote.

On a related note, if any of you local marketing or advertising firms is looking for a talented, fresh-out-of-school designer to add to your staff, contact me. She’s graduating this Spring and would like to move back to Bend. Obviously George Fox is one of the more expensive schools in Oregon, so she’d love to be able to start working and paying that down as soon as possible. Contact me and I’ll put you in touch with her.

December 19, 2010

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