Portland, day 2

Day 2 was a blast.

We tracked down had breakfast at Arnolds (a great local-chain), grabbed tasty munchies at Trader Joe's, found REI and blew some time there, and spent an insane amount of time driving around Hood Mtn National Forest looking for Bagby Hot Springs. (Notice a trend here with the 'getting lost' thing? Me too.) Despite less than ideal directions, and a couple hours of fruitless exploring, we finally found it and it was fantastic! It turns out we weren't that far from it in the first place, and in our exploring, we hadn't actually backtracked enough to find it.

Up next: OSCON 2005 - Day 1

Hello from Portland!

Yay! Am in Portland w/ my darling wife Susie, and we had a great day. We toured the city... got lost... drank a bunch of good beer at the Oregon Brewers Festival... got shaken down by a druggie in Chinatown... (finally!) saw Hitchhiker's Guide at the Bagdad Theatre.

I'm out here for OSSCON this week, and it should be a blast. More on that as it happens.

Remarkable Tsunami pictures

This guy put together before / after pictures of the Tsunami damage.

Tsunami - Receding waters, Kalutara Beach, Sri Lanka

You really get an idea of how bad the damage really was looking at these. What would your town look like after this sort of damage?

-Bill

Second Life: Your World. Your Imagination.

Sheesh, I am soooo hooked. How did it get to be almost 1am???

Grocery Store Wars - And there was much silliness...

Finger on the trigger...

Dear Senators Dole and Burr,


The judicial filibuster is critical to the continued balanced democracy of our country!


Justices of all levels should not be picked and inserted based on partisan choices. They're important enough that a simple majority won't suffice - they need to be balanced enough to achieve a super-majority. I'm deeply, deeply disappointed at the Republican's wranglings to rewrite the rules so they can seat their appealing-to-less-than-the-majority candidates.


To me, it's simple. If a judicial candidate doesn't appeal to the super-majority, then they're not balanced enough to be a judge.


Sincerely,

-Me


Make your opinion heard while there's still time.

tasktoy

Busy morning round here? No, not really. I just had a small pile of worthy sites to mention and am just getting around to doing it.

tasktoy

This is my new home page (at home, and soon to be at work as well). It's not gorgeous, but it's damn functional. It's a list, link, and project manager, a la GTD (David Allen's Getting Things Done, a fantastic book I'll be writing more about as I get going with it.)

-Bill

Plogress.com

Here's a tool that let's you keep track of what your Congresscritters are up to. It's extra nifty in that it provides RSS/Atom feeds as well., so you can keep up on what they're doing from your own news aggregator.

Plogress.com!

I wonder if they tell you how your Senators and Reps voted on recent legislation?

Boogie Bra

Okay. Why am I posting about how to make a bra out of guy's tightie-whities? Because it seems like such a cool, creative, makeish thing to do.

Boogie Bra

There's a pretty interesting textile-oriented blog to back it up as well.

-Bill

Time

What happens when you let a designerish person loose with Flash? This does.

Time

It's cool, hypnotic, and does a great job representing a lot if information in a pretty compact and understandable format. Edward Tufte would be proud... or at least I think he would be.

-Bill

Password generator - cool tool!

Nic Wolff has come up with very slick tool for managing passwords across all the gazillion websites that each require their own. Using this Password generator tool you only have to enter your own master password. This script does an MD5 hash of the site url and your master password to give you a secure, unique, junk-looking password for each site. John Udell over at InfoWorld did a little 2.75 minute webcast on his blog about what it is and how to use it that's a far better explanation of how useful this tool really is.

For you Firefox junkies there's a greasemonkey script here (although I got an error every time I tried to install it).
And, finally, there's a bookmarklet for the same thing here.

All this originally found at LifeHacker.

80's Dance Night at the Cradle!

Hey y'all! Saturday was WXYC's 80's Dance Night at the Cat's Cradle. And other than mistiming our entry into line, such that we lost the rest of the hashers out of boredom (then Richard too!), and that most of the kids there coulda been half my age, we had a absolute blast. I really don't think the kids that were there seeing this as a fun novelty retro thing get this at the same level as those of us who had the 80's as our formative teenage / college years. Costume wise, no Seychelles flags this year, but (my personal) most original costume prize went to two guys who had white jumpsuits and helmets strung with lightning wire so they looked like Tron. So, Susie, Bill and me had a great time, dancing in the 500ish cozy crowd, singing and screaming songs that we knew from heart from the first time they were out. We left at midnight, hoarse, sweaty, ears ringing and very happy.

Cheers!
-B