Surfing The Web So You Don't Have To
Were you in downtown Bend at approximately 8:45PM on 4/28? There was a hit-and-run accident near the Greenwood Laundromat on 8th street, involving three folks who had already had some serious tragedy just a couple days earlier. Read the full (and very sad) story here about some folks who are having some seriously rotten luck and how you can help.
Found via this link on Bend Blogs.
First off, I know that you’re not allowed to sell Girl Scout Cookies over the Internet, but that’s only if you’re actually selling on behalf of the Girl Scouts and you’re associated with them, and I’m neither — I’ll be putting you in touch with the man who is (who will remain nameless, as I don’t want to get the dude in trouble).
But here’s the deal: A buddy of mine here in Bend is getting screwed by the Girl Scouts. The troop he and his wife are involved in took on a bunch of extra cookies for booth sales (an estimated number). Last year they let you return unwanted and extras, but apparently this year (which was a surprise to them and bunch of phone calls hasn’t helped), they wouldn’t take them back. So they’re stuck with over $1000 of Girl Scout cookies.
As it stands right now, he has the following (and each case of cookies is 12 boxes) Update: Total that’s left has been updated as of 5/1:
They usually sell for $4.00/box, but he’s selling them for $3.50/box or $40 for an entire case ($3.33/box). He’ll deliver anywhere in Bend, or ship if you PayPal him shipping.
If you’re interested, contact me, comment here with a valid e-mail address and I’ll put you in touch. You can also email [email protected] and that redirects to his e-mail account.
He needs to liquidate as much as possible as soon as possible, as the deadline to pay this off is coming up fast.
It appears that KFXO is trying (not a very good attempt, really) to actually get some news content on their site. Because of the poor coding on the articles pages, the RSS feed URL is shown in just plain text. The feed is pretty minimal — headlines and links to story, but it’s a start.
So here’s the feeds that I know exist for local media outlets:
Now if we could just get feeds from The Source and Cascade Business News (and official support from The Bulletin), then that would make life much easier for those of us too lazy to browse the Web.
Are there any other local feeds that should be added to this list or to BendBlogs? Comment here.
You know, I was OK with the fact that KBND — Bend’s only decent local radio news source — had seven hours of conservative talk radio on during the week days (between Rush, Lars, and Bill) because I generally wasn’t listening to it anyway as I was at work. I was even OK when they replaced the CBS radio news and replaced it with FOX news. I was still OK when they mixed up the content and syndicated bites they had interspersed in their news hours.
However, I quite enjoyed listening to Clark Howard on my drive home from Sunriver. And he’s been taken off the air during the week and replaced by another conservative talk show host, Sean Hannity. So that basically means from 6AM to Midnight (an 18 hour time span), half of that is taken up by conservative talk show hosts, according to their on air schedule.
And unfortunately, my car stereo and its antenna suck, so I can’t get KRDM (whose site is down) out of Redmond, which would at least get me a little balance in political commentary.
Now don’t get me wrong — I’m not a right winger, but I’m certainly not a left-winger, either. I’m a moderate in every sense of the word, and I agree a bit with both sides on different issues, so I’d like to hear from both sides of the issues — you don’t generally get that with those talk show hosts, and I listened to Clark Howard because he avoids politics and shows us how we can save a bunch of money. Now that’s always a good thing, right?
So other than the bit of news I’ll listen to on the drive home at the end of the afternoon news hour, I’ll be turning it back to ESPN 940 or NPR.
Our office has a T1 line through Unicom and the connection has been iffy and slow all afternoon. After running some traces and such, finally called them, and apparently one of their fat-pipe DS3 circuits went dead, so they’re routing a ton of their traffic through one of their T1 lines. They say the problem will be fixed by 5:00PM and it’s only affecting their T1 customers, and if your on a DSL line, it’s not an issue. What that means that if it’s not fixed by 5:00, I get to switch the office back over to the DSL circuits we have upstairs as a backup, as the front desk has a Web-based reservation and management system, and they need a good connection to use it.
It’s always a joke around here in Sunriver (and Bend, too, but we do be more snow down here) that these large piles of snow that were created by the snow plows in the area are usually here until June. We had a pretty ugly winter down here, and there were some very tall piles of snow (some 10 feet tall, easily). They’re just now totally melting off, and one of our maintenance folks were out where there used to be a very tall one, and found this on the ground next to the driveway of one of our homes:
That’s the LCD of probably what used to be a decent Samsung SCH-A670 phone (photo taken with my the company’s new Canon Rebel XT that I bought for a deal). Needless to say, the thing doesn’t function anymore, as it’s probably been buried under there all winter long.
What I really need is a water balloon launcher or potato gun or something that I can launch this thing off the roof of my building and see what kind of abuse it can take.
Sadly, somebody will end up buying it. This home is for sale by owner on the corner of 6th and Olney in Bend:
What you can’t see very well in the picture is that the asking price is $250,000. The home, at the most, is 600 square-feet, on a stupidly busy road, and is probably the cheapest thing for sale in Bend’s city limits. It will undoubtedly be bulldozed and a three story townhome put in its place. I think this guy needs a t-shirt.
I can’t believe how stupid some people can be.
Two Bend teens were burned, one critically, Monday evening while allegedly “huffing” gasoline fumes, when one spilled gas onto his clothes and the other started playing with a lighter and lit him on fire, police said.
[…]
Firefighter/paramedics put out the blaze and took Michael Davis, 15, and Lee Helms, 16, to St. Charles Medical Center-Bend for treatment of burns, Koester said. Helms was treated and released, while Davis was flown by Air Life helicopter to the burn center at Legacy Emanuel Hospital in Portland, where he was in critical condition early Tuesday.
I just hope these kids never breed.
Just some updates to some previous posts as well as some new news:
Yes, that is about seven inches of snow in my backyard and burying my cars, and yes, it is April 17. What’s funny is my office in Sunriver, which is at a higher elevation and usually gets beaten with snow, only had about an inch on the ground. Mt. Bachelor ended up with about 14 inches in the last 24 hours, and they still have a mid-mountain base of 192 inches.
Is anybody else ready for spring yet? Because, despite what Simone says, it ain’t here yet.
More posts later when I get myself organized, I just know a bunch of people were asking about those items.
I was looking through an old Yahoo! mail account that I keep around just for kicks and in case I ever need it, and found that I had been spammed by a local car dealership. That link is the Web-based version of the spam, that has a functional video and form, but the e-mail I got was actually just a bunch of large GIF files (as you can’t really easily embed videos and forms in email and expect it to work) pulled from this page and this page (just change the 01.gif to 02, 03, etc.. .gif).
I can’t honestly remember being outright spammed by a local business before (except for bendnights.com, who tried to spam the COBlogs mailing list, though they do run a good site), has anybody else? Most of the mail I get from local businesses are from folks I’ve dealt with or I have requested information from before, but I’ve never been to Jim Smolich in my life (and now probably won’t even more because of this kind of crap).
I hate even mentioning them, as it’ll get them more publicity, but I’d rather it be known that they spam.