UtterlyBoring.com

As I mentioned, we took a trip over to Portland this weekend, and I had planned on a long, eloquently-written blog post about our trip, our adventures with the freeways in Portland, about the trials of getting into any restaurant on Homecoming weekend, how train travelers are just different sorts of people than airline travelers (mostly in a good way), and all that fun stuff. But you know what? I took an extra day off (I’m usually at the office on Sundays), and came back to a ton of stuff to do at the office today after getting home late last night and I’m tired. So you may or may not get a summary at some point — I have no idea. Depends on how motivated I am. Or busy.

But I did officially have to shut down another one of my projects after thinking it over a bit: sh.orty. While it seemed like a good idea, all it was being used for was spammer trying to hide their URLs, which ended up causing the subdomain (and subsequently, orty.com, my main business domain) to get blacklisted on some spam databases and my host getting all sorts of nasty mail sent to their abuse department (which they’ve been nice about and just forwarded my direction). I wonder if tinyurl and the like have similar issues? I know I don’t have the time on my hands to deal with that kind of stuff, that’s for sure.

No, I’m not in Bend, as I have no idea if it’s raining in Bend. I’m actually in Portland right now using the hotel’s WiFi, having a little trip with my wife, kids, and my bro-in-law for his birthday. We rented a car in Bend and came up yesterday, saw my sis-in-law, took everybody to the zoo, and had a nice dinner out (it’s homecoming season, so nearly every restaurant was packed). We’re staying here as it’s actually cheaper because it’ll sleep all five of us (while most hotels would require two rooms) and the full breakfast in the morning saves us a few bucks.

So why did I rent a car? My bro-in-law really, really likes trains (he’s autistic). His employer gave him a gift certificate for Amtrak, so we rented the car to get up here and then we’re going to take Amtrak from Portland down to Chemult tonight, where my father-in-law is going to pick us up in our minivan. We rented another minivan to get up here — a fancy, schmancy 2008 Dodge Grand Caravan. I don’t like how the new Caravans look (they’re more boxy like the rest of the Dodge lineup), but it was a nice fit for all of us, and it was a fun car to drive. Anyway, so we plan on taking the hotel shuttle to the Beaverton Transit station and then taking the Max red or blue line to Downtown and picking up the train later. Hopefully we’ll keep dry as it’s raining pretty good right now.