Snarky has an audience participation post for all you locals. One of Snarky’s: You know you live in Central Oregon when your neighbor is selling his house for $150,000 more than he bought it for the year before. Fun stuff — and the more locals that join in the more entertaining it will be.
Category: Local
Bend Broadband Offering Phone Service, But Is It Worth It?
As I mentioned before Bend Broadband does sponsor this blog. They have an ad right up there on the top right of this page (which is now linked to the service I’m going to talk about). Part of my agreement with putting up their ads was that I reserve the right to post commentary about their services and products, and this is going to be one of those times.
BendBroadband has introduced a new home phone service. Starting at $40/month (assuming you already have cable TV and high-speed internet with them, otherwise the price goes up), you get unlimited local and long distance phone calls in the lower 48 states, caller ID, voice mail, and a whole slew of additional features.
But $40? Yes, it’s a pile of great features, and since it’s the cable company they can probably give traffic priority to your voice calls and there’s always the convenience of having it everything on one bill (which is Qwest’s big pitch). But it just doesn’t seem worth it to me unless you make a lot of long-distance calls (which I don’t) and even then you can get services like Vonage that are quite a bit cheaper and provide just as many features. Talking to the folks at BendBroadband, they’re considering a “lite” option for folks who don’t need long distance access, but it’ll still probably be too expensive for me. I spend a grand total (including all stupid fees) of $25/month on my phone service from Qwest. I don’t need any of that fancy additional services crap — I just want a phone that will work all the time at a cheap rate. Heck, even if you wanted all those features that BendBroadband provides, there are other local phone companies like BendTel that provide all those services over your regular phone line — no special equipment required — at a very decent price.
So for now, this will be a service of theirs I’m going to avoid, mostly because of the cost, but if anybody else has any input or has tried it (they’re currently rolling out in the Redmond/Terrebone area with Bend coming next month), let me know! I told them I’d be a beta tester if they wanted a review, but haven’t heard back on that one yet (not holding my breath).
Local Meatloaf Hits The National Wire
The Blacksmith’s Meatloaf is famous thanks to an article on the AP wire (my guess is somebody down there knew a reporter who owed them a favor). I’ve never been to the place and have no motivation to after hearing from several people I know that it’s totally overrated.
Minus 16°F
It’s frickin’ cold. Simone’s feeling it, and we’re feeling it. Co-workers here at the office live in the same area as Simone (a couple a bit further south) and said that this morning at 6:00 it read -16°F on their thermometer this morning (yes, that’s minus sixteen — that’s -27°C for the rest of the world). We had about eight below when I got to the office this morning.
The company I work for manages 175 vacation homes in Sunriver, and while we inspect our homes weekly, we were concerned about the sudden cold snap and the affect it could have on furnaces, water lines, pipes, etc… in our homes, especially our older ones. We wanted to make sure that if there were problems, we took care of them before the onslaught of tourists hit next week. So we basically sent all our staff today out to check the heat in all our homes and make checks on every faucet, hot tub, and source of heat in the home to make sure things aren’t frozen up — especially in some of our older homes. It’s just now 12:45, and we’ve already discovered five frozen up homes, and the day’s not even half-way done yet (and we’re maybe a third of the way through our homes). Not only that, but some of the main water lines and meters for this homes are buried under snow. We just got a report from a field staff member trying to get to the water meter and he can’t as the local snow plow geniuses buried the thing in a now six-foot-tall berm of snow. Everything’s repairable, and I’m just glad we’re discovering this now and not next week, that’s for sure.
It’s going to be a long few days, like Simone said, this winter is certainly shaping up to be a lot like 1992 (though we had much more snow by this time that year, if I remember correctly).
Anybody Actually Using Clearwire?
I got a fancy marketing piece in the mail yesterday for Clearwire, who is now offering Wireless internet access in Central Oregon. Their coverage of the area isn’t too bad, and better than BendBroadband’s. Clearwire, according to my sources, has a big ol’ antenna on top of Awbrey Butte so, in theory, anybody with line-of-sight on Awbrey Butte’s towers should be able to get internet access (that being said, their system thinks my house is out of their coverage area, despite the fact that I can see Awbrey Butte, but I am awfully close to Pilot Butte). From the bit of research I’ve done, it looks like there are some issues with the service:
- It’s not nearly as mobile as they’d like you to believe. The directional wireless modem they require you to use is pretty decent size so while it’s technically movable, it’s something you need a power outlet to actually be able to use. One nice thing about BendBroadband’s coverage is that they do allow you to use your own wireless equipment in your laptop so you can actually truly be mobile.
- They’ve been known to block VoIP services, and they can get away with it thanks to a very broad TOS Agreement. There have also been reports of TCP/IP ports used by BitTorrent and other file sharing applications and Web and FTP server getting blocked (BendBroadband, last I checked, also blocks Web/FTP servers on their home accounts — at least they used to).
- The prices aren’t clear on their Web site, so I have no idea how much it actually costs, though many reviews’ prices seem a bit expensive.
Sadly, for those folks who can’t get DSL or Cable, this might be an option for them (like my boss, who can only get DirecWay where they live. With a strong enough antenna they could probably get a signal, though I have no idea if it would work with Clearwire or not.
So has anybody actually used their service?
It’s Rodney Dangerfield and Bob Marley’s Love Child
And he was apparently robbing a local liquor store (reminds me of the local Crusty The Clown and Selma Bouvier lovechild from way back in the day).
Bend Schools Closed Today
We’ve gotten a bunch of snow last night with more on the way, so Bend/La-Pine school district schools are closed today according to a note on the District’s site as well as Bend.com (and I’m not linking directly to their story because for some reason the story just mentions local Christian schools, but the front page lists more). That would also include the school in Sunriver. COCC is also shutting its doors today, Morning Star Christian School is Closed, Madras Schools are Closed, Culver Schools are Closed, Gilchrist Schools are Closed, and Redmond Schools are on 2 Hour Delay, Sisters Schools on 2 Hour Delay are closed.
It’s a mess out there folks, so be careful.
COCC Cascade Winds Band Concerts This Weekend
I know I have mentioned the Cascade Winds several times on this site already , but I’m going to mention them again. Why? Because we have concerts coming up this weekend.
Though I’ve yet to see any of you other than Simone actually show up to one of these things <shaking finger>, you’ll need to trust me that this is going to be a great show. The concerts are on Sunday at 2:00PM and Monday at 7:30PM at the COCC Pinckney Center for the Arts. Both shows are free, though seats are on a first come, first serve basis.
Never been to one of these concerts before? This isn’t your typical High School marching band, nor is it the “put you to sleep” crap the local symphony occassionally plays (of which I’m a member, too, so I can say that). Everybody I know who has gone to one has had a great time and never realized the talent that we have around here. The director of the group is very entertaining, as well.
And if you want to see me act more like a spazz, it’ll be worth the trip, as a couple of the pieces I’m playing I’m covering the parts of three percussionists (that’s drummers for you folks who don’t know the terminology).
So what the heck are we playing? A bunch of great wind ensemple pieces, including “Carnival Overture” by Antonin Dvorak, Georges Bizet’s “L’Arlesienne Suite No. 2”, “Prelude on an Old English Hymn” by Robert Sheldon, “Tales of a Traveler” by Sousa and by David Holsinger “One Day, in a Small Town . . .” . It’ll be a great show, and be sure to say “Hi” to me during intermission!
Anybody Up For A Bend Blogger Holiday Party?
Originally, Shannon floated the idea, and now that December is here, it’s starting to get a little more steam. We were all thinking Saturday, December 10th. Any of you Bend Bloggers game? Comment here or over on Jon’s entry. The current idea is to hit up one of the local bowling resorts (I vote for Sun Mountain, despite their hideously ugly site) so that everybody will have something to do.
This is the first major organized meet up we’ve done in a quite a while (we’ve done a few smaller get-togethers, but nothing really big), so let’s see if we can make it worthwhile.
And Snarky, I expect you to be there. And Dane, displaced Bend-blogger emeritus, you’re welcome, too.
It’s Snowing Hard
If you look outside my office, you’ll see it’s a frickin’ mess. It’s been snowing since I got here this morning, snowed about four inches so far, and it looks like it’s only going to get worse. My drive home is going to be a mess, but it still looks better than it does on the Santiam Pass where it looks really ugly.