Month: July 2004

Decompression

Michelle, Barley and I went to Manzanita yesterday to relax on the beach. The public beach is quite nice, and you don’t have to pay the day use permits like at State Parks. Plus, no one is checking to make sure dogface is on a leash.

The town seems to have changed quite a bit since last year. There are several new businesses, some missing, and it seems to have fallen to the Portland crowd. This is too bad, because previously we thought we could afford a place here. Shame.

Barley had a blast in the water. He always does. He was less enthusiastic about sitting in the sand while we read, but he’d had plenty of fun.

The water was cold – too cold to bother putting on a swimsuit. Michelle just avoided the water and I waded out to throw Roo’s ball for him. Its actually a tennis-ball like ring, but we call all his toys “ball” to avoid confusing him. He’s not dull or anything, we just keep some things simple.

Now that the Bar is over, we’re hoping to enjoy summer a bit more.

Cheney visits PDX

Vice President Cheney visited Portland briefly to raise funds for local GOP candidates. His rather windy speech included some very poignant and appropriate words:

“What this President has accomplished in three-and-a-half years is remarkable, but the danger has not passed. The threat remains…”

I’m sure I’ve taken his words out of context. What he’s accomplished is the danger. What he could do is the threat.

Sadly, the wording of the questions in the Q&A session that followed the speech were so tightly crafted that they’re nearly impossible to make fun of. The only truly funny part is when the VP answers a question about the No Child Left Behind Act and how it “harkens back to the President’s experience in Texas.”

What a gem of a corporate fraud reference – Harken … President … Texas. Did some speech writer have a freudian slip, or were they so exhausted after writing both the questions and responses for the event?

Michelle take the Bar

Michelle just left for her 2 day Bar exam extravaganza. She’ll be done on Wednesday night, at which point she’ll finally be done with all this law school stuff. Preperation for the bar was intense, and she’s been spending 10-15 hours a day studying for the last couple weeks.

Its hard to console a person when you’ve got little idea what they’re up against. So I’ve wished her luck and health, as have many of our friends and family. Including one who felt it was important to point out that her friend failed the Oregon Bar exam 3 times before finally passing. I told Michelle this tidbit, figuring it was kind of funny in the non-inspiring kind of way. She looked like she was trying to chuckle and not vomit at the same time.

Estacada Cliff Diving

A sizable entourage from up north (Matt, Sadie, Ben, Troy, Justin, and Goode) made their way down to Portland to see the Oregon Brewer’s Festival. There was plenty of time in the schedule this morning for another activity, and the general consensus was that it needed to include swimming. This is a tall order for Portland, with very few watering holes you’d want to immerse yourself in. Luckily, the internet is awesome, and we found a cliff-diving site that suggested a place outside Estacada.

We piled into the cars, brought the doggies, and drove for 45 minutes. We found the place quickly and easily, and tried out the water – it was perfect. Just cold enough to be refreshing, but not too cold to keep you out. We tried a few different spots, Barley played lifeguard, and generally enjoyed the small spot. Troy and I both braved the 40′ (according to the site), and we would have spent some time on the rope swing (they had everything!), but the larger group of high school kids weren’t worth dealing with. Now we’re refreshed, showered, fed, and ready for OBF.

Borne queasiness

Last night Jason, Michelle and I saw the Borne Supremacy. Despite arriving half an hour early, we could only find seats in the third row, off to the side. Had the movie not been shot by a drunk person on Parkinson’s meds with a handi-cam, it probably would have been fine. But since this was the case, it was one nauseating ride. Good, but nauseating.

ex-designer – shut-it

A former design department head from Apple is suggesting Apple get out of the PC business and focus on multimedia devices. The designer, now working for HP and Microsoft, is afraid that Apple will repeat its failures of the last decade.

Shut-it, sellout boy. Just because you’re making windows more mac like doesn’t mean the mac can’t improve. As far as I can tell, its improving at a much quicker rate than the horde. Hell, if Apple dropped out of the PC market, who would you copy? Oh, and who would be proof that you weren’t a monopoly?

Internet Explorer 5 for Solaris

While looking at CSS quirks in IE, I somehow googled across an IE for Solaris discussion. The concept intrigued me – mostly out of the irony of the product. After some digging, I found the Microsoft is no longer developing or distributing the program, but I found an archived copy.

Installation was really simple, and the command line script asked if I wanted to make IE my default browser. Uh… no. Then it asked if I wanted to install Outlook Express for reading e-mail. Again – no. Amazingly, it allowed me to install and run without ever using root.

After installation, I fired it up, got the standard EULA, accepted the terms, and IE promptly died. I messed with the files and tried starting it with different parameters, then gave up. Who really uses a GUI with Solaris anyway?

IE 5 for Solaris

Well, to try out our new network, I fired up WinaXe and connected to Solaris. I clicked the internet globe icon and IE started. So I went to my homepage. I didn’t think about checking to see how the design looked in IE5 for Solaris, but here it is – nearly identical to IE for windows. I almost have to give them credit for consistency.

rooftop in IE5 for solaris

Crystal Lite Culture

I left my nalgene bottle with a little bit of crystal lite peach tea in it over the weekend. When I returned to work this morning, there were several floating colonies in it. How the heck does mold grow in a liquid with almost no calories? Is the artificial sweetener so good that the mold thinks that its real sugar? Should I wash my bottle more often? Maybe running the bottle under the Hot Tap doesn’t really qualify as cleaning.

WebVisions 2004

I was fortunate to attend this year’s WebVisions conference with a couple other coworkers. Most of the presentations were good, and some were great. Anil Dash told us not to be ashamed of blogging, and that he too hates that word. Jason Fried shared a few brilliant yet simple tips for interface design followed by a few examples of really bad error pages from commercial sites. I really would like to meet the person who created the double-clicked error page.

It was quite nice to see such a plethora of mac users at the conference. Some using keynote, other using powerpoint, and one with a dock icon that bounced anxiously until the speaker explicitly told the application that he didn’t want to update to the latest version just yet. It would have been interesting to have used a Rendezvous enabled application open at the event to see who stumbled upon you. Something akin to a million monkeys and their typewriters – a million mac users using SubEthaEdit to pen a classic. Being mac users, you could at least expect something intelligible.