If you want to actually accomplish anything the rest of the day, don’t play this game. Damn you kottke (and indirectly, tien).
Why Do The Cool Folks Always Come To The Office On My Days Off?
One perk about working for a vacation rental company that has a good selection of higher-end homes is that you have a tendency to attract higher-end clientèle. The interest folks never seem to visit while I’m at the office however, like a couple of pro athletes that made an appearance recently.
Like a couple weekends ago, former Olympic skier Picabo Street paid a visit to Mavericks (sorry about the cheap plug, but how else are you going to know what the facility is?). She’s apparently doing some work with Resort Sports Network, and they were doing a feature on Central Oregon and skiing in the area. Or something. Really, I have no idea since, again, I wasn’t frickin’ here. I do know that she looks she’s still all muscle and in great shape. They got here to ride the Flowrider at Mavericks, and somebody managed to get a some pictures of her. Here are a couple:
Yeah, she could still kick your butt.
Speaking of people that could kick your butt, this last weekend MMA stud Randy Couture stayed in one of our homes. He was staying as a guest of the owner of this particular house, so nobody really knew he was coming until he came in to pay for the reservation. Again, I wasn’t frickin’ here. The front desk managed to get a couple pictures with our crappy camera (our good digital camera was in use) so these are out of focus and blurry — I sharpened them in Photoshop the best I could. The one of the left is our carpet cleaning guy (and big MMA/UFC fan) doing the ready to rumble pose with Randy and the one on the left is Randy with our front desk manager:
And, sadly, it was my day off, so I couldn’t at least get some better pictures. I don’t know a thing about MMA or UFC, but apparently the guy’s fairly popular. Carpet guy raved for a while about meeting the guy, so he’s obviously got some fans.
BendBlogs.com Feed Fixed (Finally)
OK, after playing with it off and on over the last couple days, I’ve finally gotten the BendBlogs.com syndication feed totally fixed. In the process, I’ve setup the main RSS feed for the site to go through FeedBurner. While the old URL will still work (for the future, at least), I’ve setup a new URL for the RSS feed so I can (if need be) change back-end platforms and not have to have a new RSS feed URL.
The new RSS URL for BendBlogs.com is http://feeds.bendblogs.com/bendblogs. I’m still working on getting the autodiscovery tags setup properly on the site as well as the redirection code so that everybody will be using that URL, but here it is in the meanwhile.
I’ve also setup a few ways you can show local blog content on your web site, if you’d like. There is more information on all that on Bend Blog’s new syndication page. So if you’d like, you can have a simple little headline ticker like so:
(I am working on tweaking those a bit — suggestions welcome.)
I’ll be setting up a daily e-mail, too (powered by FeedBurner) that will send daily headlines via e-mail, if you so desire.
BendBlogs.com RSS/Atom Feed Is Messed Up
Just an FYI to anybody who cares: For some reason, the RSS/Atom feed for Bend Blogs is totally hosed. The feed has always had 200 items (which is about three days worth of blogging around Central Oregon). The problem is that for some reason it’s only getting 200 entries, sorted alphabetically — which means it’s only getting up to about the letter “K” or so. Long story short, it’s messed up, and I’ll work on it when I get some more free time. But it certainly explains why my site never got listed on the RSS feed.
Update: OK, I’ve sort of narrowed down what it’s doing. It’s taking the first 100 blogs (alphabetically) over there, and push the latest two entries from each of those blogs, regardless of how old they are. I have an open thread on the Gregarius forums, so hopefully that will get some responses.
Update on 1/27 at 10:40PM: Finally found the problem. It ended up being a misconfiguration in Gregarius. The feed works, but I’m working on tweaking it, and will be also be hooking it up through FeedBurner so that it’s a permanent URL, should I ever change back-end systems on bendblogs.com. I’ll post the new feed URL tomorrow, and will see if I can get all of the bendblogs.com feed URLs through FeedBurner. More tomorrow after I get some sleep as my daughter was ill last night and I’m tired.
Fun Photography and Design
I’ve got a soft spot for good, entertaining, and interesting photography and design, and am frequently browsing through popular Flickr photos via popurls. However, I’ve come across some other photography and design related links lately that I’m sure will be of interest to some of the local photogs and creative types that I know read this site:
- Nameexif will rename all your image files based on the date and time they were taken (based on the Exif time/date stamp on the image, assuming that’s correct).
- A designer decided to sum up his last year in the style of an annual corporate report, and the design is quite nice.
- Wartime (or at least, military action) always brings with it chances for dramatic photography, and this photo series shows a lot of emotion, and I especially like the photo and caption here.
- Nick Bradbury’s favorite Macworld photo.
- The NFL has very tight rules on who can and can’t film their games. The Indianapolis Star couldn’t film it, but was allowed to take still photos, So their photographers got themselves a motor drive, and started taking a ton of photos to make a video-like time-lapse audio slideshow. Just don’t call it video.
- More fun wedding pictures (a follow up to a previous article I mentioned).
- These well done what-if photos aren’t obviously real photos, but it’d be entertaining if you could indeed find pictures of George Bush pumping gas, Bill Gates dancing around with an iPod, or of Paris Hilton bribing an inmate. Full “photo” gallery here (a bit NSFWish on a couple photos).
- Speaking of NSFWish, a long exposure of a couple having sex.
Video Link Dump
Several random videos for everybody that have just been sitting here, waiting to be shared (videos after the jump).
Whose Fault Is This?
Since BendCableBroadband is charging the same for their digital cable service as they are for their analog service, we decided to take the plunge and upgrade. They came by yesterday and set it all up. The problem? None of the channels numbers are the same, which I knew going in. The bigger problem? The various TV listings web sites all seem to be using the old Bend Cable channel lineup for their listings. xThe only one I could find that used the right assignments was Zap2It, which isn’t nearly as intuitive of a site to use as all the other sites (and Couchville’s shutting down, anyway, which is sad). The channels are all listed, but the numbers are all wrong, and I’m too dang lazy to cross reference stuff every time.
So is BendBroadband supposed to supply this channel lineup info to these companies or is this some sort of automatic datafeed that they just are ignoring? I don’t know how any of this works, but I’d much rather use Yahoo!’s TV listings or TVTitan to look for shows as the on-screen guide is slow and shows a ton of channels we just don’t get (and with most listing services we can hide channels that we don’t even care to ever watch).
One Seriously Misinformed Dude
I have no idea if this guy is trolling or trying to get a laugh or not, but in a reply to an article about why Linux will not displace Windows in education IT, this was the guy’s comment (copying it here, in case it disappears):
Are you saying that this linux can run on a computer without windows underneath it, at all ? As in, without a boot disk, without any drivers, and without any services ?
That sounds preposterous to me.
If it were true (and I doubt it), then companies would be selling computers without a windows. This clearly is not happening, so there must be some error in your calculations. I hope you realise that windows is more than just Office ? Its a whole system that runs the computer from start to finish, and that is a very difficult thing to acheive. A lot of people dont realise this.
Microsoft just spent $9 billion and many years to create Vista, so it does not sound reasonable that some new alternative could just snap into existence overnight like that. It would take billions of dollars and a massive effort to achieve. IBM tried, and spent a huge amount of money developing OS/2 but could never keep up with Windows. Apple tried to create their own system for years, but finally gave up recently and moved to Intel and Microsoft.
Its just not possible that a freeware like the Linux could be extended to the point where it runs the entire computer fron start to finish, without using some of the more critical parts of windows. Not possible.
I think you need to re-examine your assumptions.
Hilarious! I wouldn’t be surprised if there were morons out there like this (especially in the educational sector). Thanks Ben for that.
EVERYBODY PANIC!!11!!eleven!!!!
This site has your PIN number listed. Check it out, as I can promise you that yours is there. Time to panic.
I Need A Better Furnace
In case you haven’t heard from every other local blogger, it’s frickin’ cold outside, dipping down below 0°F last night and will easily do it again tonight.
Here’s the problem with the cold in the Ortman household: We use our woodstove for heat during the winter, because it just provides much better heat for our house. Our electric furnace only pumps lukewarm air into one room of the house (there are no vents in any other rooms), so it’s fairly pointless to even bother to turn it on. So we use our wood stove to heat the house.
The problem is that with wood heat that you have to have wood, and you have to chop said wood. This isn’t usually an issue when the temperature’s in the 35-50° range as I can easily keep the house warm with not a ton of wood. I can usually chop a bunch of wood and have it last a few days. However, when it doesn’t get above 10° for a couple days, I can’t keep up with the amount of wood needed as we have to constantly have the fire burning hot, and I have to get up in the middle of the night to put wood on it. Chopping wood in 5° weather isn’t any fun, either.
I’m thinking it’s time to start saving for a new furnace and duct work, as I quit chopping wood a couple hours ago and I’m just now able to feel my hands again (and yes, I was wearing gloves and about 15 layers of clothing).