Whoa, been a long time…

…but I’m back and with the new year will do a better job of keeping this up.

Just got back from an extended visit home to Salt Lake City, which was great. All my siblings were in town and we had a really good time together celebrating the holidays, eating & drinking, and staying up to the wee hours of the morning.

We had a bit of a damper put on the vacation (and reason to stay a couple of extra days) because, unfortunately, while we were there, my Grandpa passed.

His health has been in decline for several years now, so it wasn’t unexpected, but death always ends up being sudden. He was a kind, gentle, and witty man and many good stories were shared at his funeral service by his children and grandchildren. We were lucky in that we stopped by to see him the day before his death, the first time I’d seen him in a year-and-a-half, so at least got to spend some time before it was his time.

My heart goes out to my Gramsey, Mom, and Ron. Take care all of you, and Rest In Peace, Grandpa.

Vibe of Portland

Gen is on the Board of Vibe of Portland, a non-profit organization that a music-school friend of hers (Laura) is starting up, and so we attended their first fund raising event tonight in North Portland. Laura did a great job of putting it together, with a silent auction, local Jazz quartet, good eats, and all in a beautiful setting. Here’s just a quick (and totally inadequate) sample:

Good luck to Laura, Gen and the rest of the board to get Vibe off the ground and helping Portland kids get some music in their lives!

Super Size Me

First, great movie. Entertaining and enlightening with a lot of ’state of health in America’ sub-themes. But more about that in a minute. The cool thing? I just went to Netflix, and with my 2-movies-at-a-time subscription, found out that I can “Watch Movies Instantly on [My] PC” for free! How cool is that! Sure, it’s a limited time offer, but to get on-demand over broadband is pretty sweet. I was highly skeptical because of long download times for movies, but Netflix seems to have done a really good job with their streaming implementation. I watched the movie from start to finish without a single ‘hiccup’ in the broadcast. Yippee! I’ll be watching more movies this way for sure. (edit: the only thing better would be if they would show which movies are available online in your queue.)

Now back to the movie. You’ve probably heard the premise: a guy, interested in obesity in America on the heels of McDonalds being sued by two teenage girls, decides to eat nothing but McDonalds, three times a day, for a month. He gets three doctors to monitor him, has multiple lab tests & weigh-ins weekly, and at the end of the month the doctors are amazed that the diet could’ve had such a negative effect on him. Interspersed with facts & figures, interviews with food-industry representatives & school lunch ladies, and concern expressed by his vegan girlfriend, his downward path is amazing to see.

Two big thumbs up from me. He stretches and over-generalizes at points, but overall does a good job of indicting the food industry & the American culture of excess and the obsession with ‘big’. And if you want more info on the food industry in America, Eric Schlosser’s book “Fast Food Nation” is a good read too. If you eat meat, be prepared to want to give it up after that read.

Little, tiny, small soldering

{Update: Sweet! Got the pics working. Got to link to the actual picture instead of the webpage, duh.

Sorry the pics don’t work yet…I’m new at this and will get it working soon}

It’s harder keeping up on this blog thing than I thought…But. I’ll. Keep. Trying.

Well, I bought me one of them-there soldering irons and fixed my cat-chewed Bluetooth headset charger.

Boy! The package sure does look nice! But holy cow, getting that thing open is a whole other story. This was after about 10 minutes of poking & tearing at the thing. I’m all for keeping your products secure and whatnot, but getting into packaging is tougher than shelling out the money to buy the damn thing!

Now that the iron is free of its prison, let’s get to work. I coated the two wires with fluxed solder.

Then wrapped the wires around themselves, and soldered again.

Tape each DC line separately to electrically isolate, then tape the whole thing to protect, and Voila! Good as new. Almost. Stupid cat.

Repairs, repairs, repairs

Well, the cats have finally driven me to it…I love small & wireless electronics, but that typically means its battery powered, which also means a battery charger. Well, that happens to be the perfect size of wire that Somi-cat loves to gnaw on. Stupid cat. So far I just use a twisty cap to put the wires back together, but the wires to charge this Bluetooth headset I just got are just a few strands of copper.

So – I bought a soldering iron. Haven’t soldered before, but seems like a clean way to do the repair the right way. Repaired it this morning & took a bunch of pics – will update with a post soon.

I also plan on documenting my forays into working on our house. Should be fun!

save some power, save some $

Check this out for the advantages of using standby mode…Even for an ‘always on’ or file-serving home computer!

A little Poland in Portland

One of the great things about living in Portland is the constant availability of non-mainstream films and several great film festivals through the year. Shawn Levy of The Oregonian gave a nice talk (worth listening) about Portland embracing the independant and international film genres

The Portland International Film Festival is currently playing and Gen took me to Retrieval last night, a movie out of Poland. It was a slow-paced, photo-journalistic style movie of a young man’s stuggle to provide financially for his new-found family and his moral struggles to do so in a poor country. There’s a good review on IMDB.

The festival runs through next weekend, so I’m sure I’ll have another movie to report back on.

Update: househunt

Well, we saw 4 houses yesterday, 2 of which were very interesting, 1 was a dump, and 1 was big, spacious, had a killer 60’s bar with keg refrigerator, tap, and black lights included, but was a stone’s throw from a major thoroughfare. Ugh.

For the two candidates, both were updated, immediately livable, and we wouldn’t have to do a thing. Biggest difference is location – SE vs SW PDX. SW is closer for both of us to work, but SE is a much more livable, younger, neighborhood with more going on. And walkable (once we’re home). We both like that a lot…

But – had a realization that if we don’t move to SE now, we’re really not likely to later, so we should give it a shot. SE here we come, just got to find the right spot.

Whoot! Whoot!

The Househunt

Since the first of the year, Gen & I have been spending about all our free time looking for a house…Being very deliberative people, you can only imagine the amount of this-and-that, pro-and-con, and “what the hell are we doing?” that’s going on. We’ve gotten through the glut of houses that have been sitting on the market, so things are getting a bit easier – just reviewing/touring the new listings.

We did put an offer on a house…unfortunately they had severely overpriced their house, and we came in pretty low…they moved a bit, but in the end, couldn’t come to terms. Maybe we’ll try it again in a month (it’s already been on the market for 100 days, it’ll probably be there a bit longer), cause we really like the house and location.

Well, taking off ealry to look at a few more houses this afternoon before it gets dark. Hope we find a winner!

laser tag!

I was skeptical…haven’t played laser tag since at least my high school days. But a co-worker organized an offsite team-building today with lunch and laser tag. 10 minutes of running around, ‘tagging’ your friends/coworkers/enemies – it sounds like 10 minutes is too short, but  it’s not. I was sweating through my shirt by the time we were done and the maze must have only been 50°. Good stuff.