Don’t get your hopes up — I don’t have it (like I’d want it anyway — my previous mention of the story was enough for me). But if you’re wondering about the full story, s/he’ll be on Oprah.
Category: Local
Reasons Why Central Oregon Is Starting To Suck And Ideas To Fix It
In the nearly 30 years I’ve lived in Bend, I’ve slowly watched this area go into the crapper. Here is a good collection of the latest reasons things suck (a good summation) and five things that can be done now to help fix things from the two local economy blogs. Some I agree with, some I disagree with, but the moral of the story is that something really needs to be done.
A Pregnant Man In Bend
Yes you read that right. There’s a pregnant man here in Bend and his name is Thomas Beatie. And he’s all over the frickin’ news, and has made international headlines.
Since I know jack squat about transgendered people and sex changes, I’m not going to comment because I’ll undoubtedly say something offensive and/or stupid without intending to do so. So there you go — I report, you comment.
Thus far, nobody’s been able to confirm if the story is a hoax or not, which I guess is my only concern. If anybody knows the guy, feel free to comment here. The story was originally reported in the Advocate by Thomas himself, lending a bit more to the conspiracy theory. But as long as the parents are loving and caring parents to the child, that’s all that matters to me — he’d still be a far better parent than so many deadbeat parents out there whose kids are raised by MTV, MySpace and a nanny.
Update at 7:35: Somebody suggested I check the local phone book and property tax records to see if these people exist. Since I’m sitting here staring a progress bars on a server here at the office (I’m here doing some server software upgrades and repartitioning), I decided to look. He’s not listed in the phone bok, but there is a Thomas and Nancy Beatie that own a home here in south Bend and have owned it for about a year and had an address in southeast Bend, according to Deschutes County property records.
BendBroadband is Giving You More Speed…
…but at the price of bandwidth caps. It appears that starting in July, BendBroadband Internet customers are going to be saddled with bandwidth caps. For most people, not a big deal. But for bandwidth-heavy geeks like me (and I’m sure I’m not the only one), it is, even if I were on the highest plan.
While I’m sure they’ve always internally had these caps, and I applaud them for actually making them public, they don’t seem very generous and they’re forcing users into more expensive plans to make sure they have breathing room.
The biggest problem for me is my nightly online backups, not only to my house but from my house. I have software that backs up local data nightly to Mozy servers and I also have a 400GB file server in my home office that backs up data from the servers in my Sunriver office on a nightly basis. I also download large torrent files of DVD disk images, software patches, midget porn etc… . I can all but guarantee that I’d hit the bandwidth cap pretty much every month (probably every couple weeks).
But the reality is that most of my heavy bandwidth usage is in the middle of the night (between 10PM and 7AM, after which the connection to my server in Sunriver severs as the office is opening back up), where it’s not going to screw with the bulk majority of folks. So should I be penalized when I’m not going to be affecting 95% of folks?
As it stands right now, their page to check your usage doesn’t work, but let’s hope that’s up long before they roll this thing out.
I know Comcast, a major, national cable provider, has these sorts of caps, but I was hoping a local, home-grown company wouldn’t have to resort to this, especially without an option for an unlimited plan (depending on what source you read, Comcast’s cap is between 90-200gb, which is quite a bit more than BendBroadband’s limit, even on the high end).
While BendBroadband has been a long-time advertiser on this site (my agreement with them allows me to editorialize all I want about their service), and I’ve constantly recommended their Internet services, I might have to shop around for DSL services unless some clarification can be made for hardcore geeks (and long time customers) like me. It’s late, and I’m tired from watching all the basketball today, so maybe this has me more riled up than it should, but in this day and age where bandwidth should be getting cheaper and cheaper (and generally it is), it irks me when my ISP for nearly a decade decides to cap it on me.
Update on 4/4: Some good discussion below in the comments. Here is the spreadsheet that one of the commenters put together to show how this can really cost you.
Update on 4/7: Forgot to post this last week: BendTel doesn’t think putting caps on Internet use is moving people in the right direction for utilizing the Internet. I tend to agree (and I like the folks at BendTel, having used their services in the past at my office).
Update on 4/10: This story has now gone national. Feel free to digg this.
I Don’t Remember Ryan Longwell Being Married To Queen’s Front Man
NFL kicker Ryan Longwell is many things (including a former Bend High School standout). But when Wikipedia said that he is married to the late Freddie Mercury and had kids named Skeeter and Dermit, that was news to me (screen shot below as this will probably prompt somebody at Wikipedia to change the article):
It appears that the Freddie Mercury reference was added last month as it was different before. It was changed by somebody at the IP address 69.81.255.220, which is owned by an Earthlink branch in Neenah, Wisconsin. My guess: Since Longwell doesn’t play for Green Bay Packers anymore, it was a crazy Cheesehead who made that edit (even though he was signed by the Minnesota Vikings a couple years ago and the edit only recently appeared).
That’d Increase Sales Of Their Parking Lots
A local asphalt maintenance company has an opening for a “Parking Lot Stripping Position.”
(I’m assuming it should be “Striping” for anybody who doesn’t get why that’s funny.)
Bend Blogs Group on LinkedIn
If you’re registered on the business networking site LinkedIn, you can add me as a contact but you can also now join the Bend Blogs group if you have a local blog that’s listed over on Bend Blogs. I approve all applicants, so if I don’t know you, make it obvious who you are.
Welcome Bulletin Readers!
(Yes, I know I’m bit slow, after the article’s been mentioned dang near everywhere else already. I promise I’ll go and read all your posts, boys and girls, after I get some sleep.)
That’s not the first time that I’ve had that headline on this site, but this is the first time I’ve ever had my ugly mug on the front page of the paper (Julie makes Duncan and I look classier). I’ve now had my picture, name, and a quote on the front of every major section of the paper at point of my life (yes, even the sports section, when I was in high school). Naturally, I was out of town when the story broke, so I couldn’t post something earlier (I really need to setup my blog so I can post to it from my Blackberry — one of these days).
Any who, welcome to anybody who’s here because of that article (feel free to comment below and say “Hi.”). I think it was a pretty well-done article and covered the wide variety of bloggers in the area fairly well (hotlinks in the online version to the various blogs mentioned would help a bunch). It was better than the last article the Bulletin wrote about local bloggers which not only wasn’t even put online (which was silly) it only talked about three bloggers — Jon, Chris, and I. Nice job, Peter, as while I like Jon and Chris, I think all three of can agree that there is far more to blogging in this area outside of the three of us.
A few references from the article:
- That whole Baltazar mess that was mentioned was chronicled pretty well by bloggers here (my post got inadvertantly deleted from the BendBlogs.com database during a rebuild of my RSS feed, so here was my take on it).
- “Sally Heatherton” wrote the blog Marvelous Bend which can be found here (since the URL wasn’t mentioned).
- If you want to know anything about Trader Joes, if anybody will know about it, Jon will.
- Shannon’s right — you don’t need to be a “techie” (though I prefer “geek”, thankyouverymuch) like me to start a blog. Go here or here or even here to check out some free and easy-to-use commercial services to start up your own blog. And then pop me a note when you do and I’ll get it listed over at Bend Blogs.
- And if anybody’s wondering, my shirt says “No I will not fix your computer.” It was a gift from a cool co-worker and I have to think I look dang handsome in it (my co-worker will laugh when she reads this). You can buy one yourself here
It’s been a long day as we drove back from the coast today (the aviation museum was closed today for some wine and cheese festival, so we went to Lincoln City), so I’m buggered. Thanks for visiting and feel free to come back anytime (and feel free to join the NCAA Pick ’em).
Join The UtterlyBoring.com NCAA Tournament Pick ’em (2008 Edition)
Selection Sunday is coming up on March 16 and then 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 (and a few cool prizes) in the annual UtterlyBoring.com Tournament Pick ‘Em. Last years contest info was here with final results here with Scott’s Mad Dribblerz taking the top prizes.
Sign Up Info: While the field for the tournament hasn’t been set yet, you can still get signed up in the group and be notified when the field has been set and you can start making your picks (usually about an hour or so after the picks have been announced). 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#: 450
Password: utterlyboring
The group’s page is here, which I think you can only see if you sign up.
Prizes: First off, here are the prizes we have so far (and if any local business or individual wants to throw a prize into the pot — for first or last or anywhere in between — contact me and you’ll receive credit and a link here, if you’d like):
- First Place: Meals for two (breakfast, lunch, or dinner, as it’s all served all day), plus a copy of a couple books: Worst Case Scenario Survival Handbook and John Daly’s My Life In And Out of The Rough (The Truth Behind the Bull**** You Think You Know About Me) from Lyle at Jake’s Diner here in Bend. Plus (added on 3/20): A XXXL (that’s extra-extra-extra-large) lightweight University of Oregon jacket, made by Nike. It’s a couple different shades of green with yellow trim. It’s got a small Oregon “O” and Nike swoosh on the front and it says “Oregon” across the back. It’s a nice little jacket, I think it’s used, but looks brand new, but it’s frickin’ huge — like tent huge. Thanks to Larry at Discover Sunriver for that.
- Second Place: A baseball cap, stickers, and a women’s fitted t-shirt (size large) from Paizano’s Pizza over in Baker City (plus a free Large Specialty Pizza if you live within driving distance).
- Last Place (Yes, you read that right, see below for rules): You get a t-shirt from the UtterlyBoring.com shop that you can show off to all your friends your inability to pick winners. Wear it with pride.
Rules:
- Only one bracket per-person this year. While there are 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 ways a bracket could be broken down, since we have a dead-last prize this year, it wouldn’t be fair to allow more than a bracket-per-person.
- The entire bracket must be filled out if you want to be eligible for the last-place prize.
- Prizes: Unless otherwise stated, prizes must be picked up from prize providers in person, and prize providers are not eligible to win the prizes they provide (and I’m taking myself out of the running for any and all of the prizes, if I win/lose). Prizes may be added anytime during the tournament, so be sure to sign up.
- Scoring: Since I agree with Scott, Yahoo! puts far too much points into the final rounds, so we’re customizing the default scoring a bit, using some of the numbers from the Fibonacci Sequence. So this is how Yahoo! scored it last year:
- Round 1: 1 pt
- Round 2: 2 pts
- Round 3: 4 pts
- Round 4: 8 pts
- Round 5: 16 pts
- Championship: 32 pts
…we’re going to do it this way this year:
- Round 1: 1 pt
- Round 2: 2 pts
- Round 3: 3 pts
- Round 4: 5 pts
- Round 5: 8 pts
- Championship: 13 pts
That should make for a tighter race this year.
- These rules are subject to change, I’m the final say on everything, UtterlyBoring.com cannot and will not be held liable for anything, nor can Yahoo Sports, prize providers, my family, hamster or anybody else. Do not taunt happy fun ball. Batteries not included. Not for off-road use.
May cause oily discharge. This is casual fun, folks — let’s keep it that way.
That’s all for now, so get yourself signed up and good luck!
Bend Blogger Meetup Followup
Amazingly enough, the local blogger meetup was a huge success. I honestly didn’t know what to expect, and when I got there (late, like I said), I was floored by the sheer amount of people there. I was expecting a few, not the 30 or so that were there.
It just shows how much the blogging community in this area has really grown, and how being a blogger isn’t as crazy as it once was. “Blog” was a word that I could never use as people wouldn’t understand what the heck I was saying. Not any more.
Shannon’s posted a quick follow-up as well as a group picture on flickr (along with some other shots including a flattering shot of me and the not chubby mommy). I’ve added notes on the people I recognized that I know wouldn’t mind. That, and on my high-res, low size screen, it’s hard to recognize some of the faces. Anybody else, feel free to tag your name on that image.
Like Jen, I was happy to meet BORis and Sally (I apparently already knew BORis, just didn’t know that that person was responsible for that site). All in all, an entertaining time, the little bit I was there. Heck, I won a prize for having the best name tag (I won by default with my Sharpie and Duct Tape creation), so that was worth the trip right there.