Category: Local

This is why I’m starting to get annoyed with Central Oregon’s growth. The population in Bend in the last year gained nearly 9% — up 5,150. So we’re up to about 63,000. That amount of growth in one year is insane. Only one city in Oregon grew by more people: Portland went up 6,960, which is only a 1% increase for Portland. That’s scary to me that the biggest city in the state is the only one to get more people. Percentage-wise, Central Oregon exploded with Redmond (8.3%) and Sisters (32.4% — yes, you read that right) sitting on top of the charts as well. Full story.

But that PSU Study also showed that, while we gained nearly 7,000 in the major cities in Deschutes county, the county’s population only went up by 4,000. Huh? Yes, it’s a confusing mess, and, needless to say, the County and PSU are looking into the disparity.

I had been sitting here trying to get some work done, but my laptop battery sucks, and you can’t get much done without an Internet connection. Two hours and 15 minute later, we finally got it back. Apparently it was concentrated in a couple-block radius around my house, as when we called Pacific Power, they didn’t give us a very high number. When we called after the second hour had passed, they didn’t seem to know about any outages. So we reported ours (after checking the breakers) and things turned back on after another 15 minutes.

The wind is Bend is blowing hard today, which is the reason behind the outage. I guess gusts were hitting nearly 80 MPH in town, and I believe it. I have yet to go outside and check out the damage, now that things are calming down (only about 25 MPH now). Granted, I don’t think I can make it off the couch, so nevermind.

Sunriver is a very high-end resort community here in Central Oregon. One thing you need to understand about this community is that there are two groups here. One group of folks are the laborers here — the folks that run the resturaunts, stores, the contractors, etc… . And then there are the folks that run the high-end places that cater to the high-end tourists. The latter group wants to make Sunriver as nice (and expensive and yuppy) as possible, and doesn’t want anything to bring down the image of the area. That would mean any homes that are associated with lower class living.

So when I got an instant message from Barney yesterday, asking me if I had heard about a mobile home fire in Sunriver, I was a bit confused. “I didn’t think there were any mobile homes in Sunriver.” Apparently there was (up in an area I don’t make it to very often). And it was the last one.

Until it burned to the ground.

The cause of the fire is blamed on electrical problems. The best quote of the story was from the guy that owns the stables, which are out in that area. He jokingly said that the blazes were part of an “urban improvement” project. Honestly, I don’t think he’s too far off there, as I know there are some very large homes out in that area (we’re talking upwards of million-dollar homes with airplane hangers), and there are some folks who own a good chunk of land out there. All it would take is a few phone calls and, for the right price, I’m sure that home could “disappear.” I wouldn’t be surprised if something like that did happen, but it will never come to the surface, so I’m not going to worry too much about it.

Jon over at Chuggnutt is getting a pile of traffic to his Matrix Name Generator (which I’m pretty sure I’ve linked to before, but I can’t remember). And by linking it here — again — I’m only trying to do my part to help him out.

I quickly mentioned a while back that Barney had been taken for some cash by a PayPal scam. He’s written up a story about his experiences, and this should be a lesson to everybody: 1) PayPal will never ask for your PIN, and 2) Is it really PayPal? URL spoofing is the most common way of hiding this sort of thing. Looking through my logs, this is the URL that Barney was sent to (but, on his defense, you couldn’t really tell you were going here as it was an HTML formatted message):

http://211.113.186.42/pp/http://www.paypal.com/process.htm?id=65455nbn{snip}

Needless to say, it’s not PayPal, it’s 211.113.186.42 which is an IP address in Asia. That’s a complicated and ugly way of hiding URLs, but there are simplier ones:

http://[email protected]/

You could put (nearly) anything in front of that “@” sign, and get this page:

http://scams_like_this_suck_microsoft.com&[email protected]/

Here’s a good writeup on the various tricks used to obscure URLs. Regardless, make sure you’re really going to the right place. Otherwise, you’ll have to deal with what Barney did.

Because of the ice and snow today, accidents are happening all over the place. I’ve witnessed some of the aftermath myself. A housekeeper here at work just got back from an experience she won’t soon forget.

Her and another co-worker were driving to LaPine (about 15 minutes south of here) to the local Les Schwab to get some tires. On their way back, she witnessed the same problems I’ve seen today. She was passed by and out-of-state-er who was going faster than she probably should (considering how icy the roads are today). A mile or two later, she saw that same SUV roll over and total itself.

The lady driving was able to get out of her car unassisted (despite it being on its roof), but was still taken to the hospital complaining of lower abdominal pain. The housekeeper called 911 to get somebody out there, and helped the lady out. While the lady (not to sound hateful) had the wreck coming for driving like she was, her passengers didn’t.

But let’s talk about her passengers: Four cats (or four animals of some sort — at least two cats). They got smacked around pretty good, but all appeared to be in good shape. Needless to say, the lady in the wreck couldn’t take her pets with her to the hospital, so our housekeeper took them to the Sunriver Veterinary Clinic (after driving around trying to find their new office). Hopefully everybody came out of it OK, but lesson learned: Don’t drive like an idiot, and having an SUV isn’t justification for anything — let alone driving like a moron.

Winter is here in force. Every October, we almost always get a big freeze and cold for (usually) one nasty day. Today was that day, and it was vicious. November 1st is the “Don’t Put Your Studs on Your Tires Until Today or Face The Wrath of Budget Striken Oregon State Police Officers” event, so I’m driving with nearly-bald tires on nasty-slick roads. To put it in perspective, my morning commute from the North-East part of Bend to Sunriver is usually a 25-minute commute. It took me over 90-minutes. Highway 97 was a big skating rink, and while ODOT claims to have been out sanding since 1:00 AM, you sure don’t see any evidence of that on the highway. Before I managed to get close to Sunriver, I guess there were a few over-turned semi-trucks. It was a mess.

But I think the thing that bugs me the most is the idiots that where driving 50 MPH or more on the roads that everybody else was going between 25-30 MPH. I averaged about 20-25 for my morning commute this morning, and was passed several times by idiots flying down the road in their SUVs thinking that their 4-wheel-drive will save them and let them drive better. That just means you scream out of control with four wheels instead of two, morons. I did fell much better when I saw a Suburban that had flown by me (with his out-of-state plates) earlier stuck on the side of the road. Needless to say, many a middle finger were extended his direction.

Barney over at Bend.com has a story up about the weather. The picture was from his wife’s Samsung A-460 A-620 camera phone (she works at the Sprint PCS store in the Prime Outlet Mall). Photo-phones are the next great technology for news reporting, and I’d own one if I could afford it. Don’t believe me about their potential? Just ask Steve Outing, who has written a bunch of columns and articles on the topic.

Meanwhile, I’ll be thawing out by the heater.

OK, here’s the deal folks. I’m looking to increase the amount of bloggers in Central and Eastern Oregon. I only know of five (including me) East of the Cascades, and I’d like to increase that number. Central Oregonians don’t really have a blogging voice, despite the fact that the land we take up is nearly 2/3 of the state. Looking at ORBlogs, Bend is the only city listed over here, and there’s only three listed there.

Hell, I’d be willing to host your sites and everything, if it weren’t a violation of the MT license. So I’ve got the next-best thing: an easy way to get your blog started. I have in my possession three codes to get your blog started over at TypePad — a blog-hosting service powered by the same technology powering this site. What do these codes give you? They give you a 20% lifetime discount on any of their hosting packages. You have to pay for TypePad’s services still, but you’ll get them at a good discount.

Here’s the catch: These will only go to folks who live on this side of the mountains. I want proof. Send me your home address or a picture of your city’s welcome sign, I don’t care — just prove it to me. Or, if you have a pre-existing blog and want to move to TypePad, I’ll send you the code, but the catch still applies.

Regardless, if you want this offer E-mail me privately, and I’ll send you the code. Hell, even if you don’t want the code, e-mail me anyway if you’re over here in the High Desert and have a blog so I can add you to my blogroll.

It’s pretty common for media outlets to be taking stories from one another, but now they’re taking their tips from bloggers?

My buddy Jon has suddenly seen something posted on his site appear in the Bulletin. I posted a note linking to Jon’s original post about video game companies in Bend. He did a follow up story the next day, profiling the company’s founder. And wouldn’t you know it, a story appears in the 10/25/03 edition of the Bulletin entitled “Sony filters out separatist group from Bend designer’s video game.” Go figure.

I wonder how many folks in the Central Oregon media read our blogs? Is there anybody out there? E-mail me privately as I’d like to hear from you.

That was news to me until Jon pointed out a bit of local history. I knew we have some other major tech company offices here. I know Bend has a small Intel office for a few local geeks, and obviously Orcom is frickin’ huge in the utilities industry, but it is cool to know about what other tech companies have done around here.