Last weekend we took a quick trip out to Eastern Oregon to stay with friends at a home in the Black Butte Ranch resort community. It’s in a beautiful location, and we always enjoy getting out of town to spend quality time with friends. All of our lives are so busy these days, I really look forward to these little getaways.
We took a Saturday afternoon hike on the Metolius River from the campground to the Wizard Falls fish hatchery. Along the path we saw the awesome sight of a natural spring dumping out of the side of a hill into the river.
The Metolius is sure a fast-moving river.
Lillian found a cool wizard stick, proceeded to throw it into the river, and it came back to her. I think that we wore Andre out running to catch up to it.
A quick Star Wars Girl impression.
And the stick goes back from whence it came.
Finally, some of the semi-wild fish at one of the Wizard Falls hatchery ponds.
Groovy sushi. Good stuff. Not cheap, but really good. Now if it were only closer to Moscone Center. It’s quite a walk, and on per diem, I’d rather not spend money on a cab to eat dinner.
So PETA has spoken. They’re looking for someone to create Frankenmeat™ for us to eat instead of yummy, yummy animals.
Here’s my prediction. If this succeeds, we’ll soon find after many years of eating replicated meat that we’ll find that our bodies do best when we’re given a variety of proteins, not just one singluar variety. It’s like a clearcut forest in that if all of the trees are of the same age that there will inevitably be a disease that only strikes trees that are of that age, and thus wipes out the entire forest. Plague of the future, I tell ya. Granted, our current lack of biodiversity in the food supply isn’t the best either. Bigger, badder, dumber and caged up doesn’t make things better.
If you’re like me and deal with moving text around from one document to the next, you’re intimately familiar with the Copy and Paste functionality of most applications. If you’re extra savvy, you might even know all of the keyboard command shortcuts:
Copy - Ctrl-C (Win) or Command-C (Mac)
Paste - Ctrl-V (Win) or Command-V (Mac)
Well, since I’m consistenly moving text from one application to another, it’s quite frustrating when an application thinks that it knows what I want. For example, when I copy text out of a PDF file, and then paste it into a Word document, by default I automatically get all of the formatting that was in the source document (font, size, color, etc.) More often than not, these selections do not match the target document. Thus creating many more formatting clicks just to have the pasted text match the rest of the doc.
Lo and behold, Microsoft must have gotten enough complaints about this that they instituted the “Paste Special” command where you can past a copied bit of text into your document without all of that extra baggage. Hey, wonderful, I like that.
Oh, no, but wait, it’s actually not all that easy to use. You are required to select the item from the menu - there are no keyboard shortcuts for this sucker. And, every time you choose “Paste Special” you get an annoying dialog box that never has the right default selected. So that means more annoying, time wasting clicks. Speed is definitely not what this is built for.
This could be easily fixed in a couple of ways.
Allow me to choose a default paste style. If I always want to paste as unformatted text, by golly you should allow me to do so. Don’t muck up the works with extra baggage.
Give me a keyboard shortcut. Ctrl-Shift-V or Command-Shift-V would work well.
Took my car in to get fixed yesterday, and the repair shop is nice enough to provide free MAX tickets to get me to and from work while the car is in the shop. Problem is, well, these tickets don’t fit into the validators on the MAX platforms! On my way to the office, one validator was broken, and the other, after 5 minutes of stuffing folding and such, the train came and I had to get going - without being able to validate my ticket. Fortunately, I wasn’t approached by the MAX ticket police. I definitely would have had words with them about the sorry state of their technology, and how I’d tried to do the right thing.
On the way back to the repair shop, I got to the platform just as the train arrived. Yet, unfortunately, I had the same situation with the ticket not fitting into the slot. While fiddling with it, I missed the my scheduled train. Yay.
There were about 5 yellow jacket Tri-Met police there, who I asked for assistance. They were very polite, but in effect they told me that these tickets were badly designed and that you had to “rip them to make them fit into the machines.” Yeah, that’s a great solution. I can see Grandma Jones with her arthritis trying to tear an eighth of an inch off of the side of her ticket.
It’s a basic principle of good design here. You’ve got to design your product to fit the need. Somewhere along the way this design process broke down - the graphic designer, printer and validator manufacturer should have all caught this. Time to fix it Tri-Met.
Female Wasteoid: Man, Gresham cops is mean. That’s where I was tasered the first time.
Male Wasteoid: Man, I wish that I could get tasered. You know, just to know how it feels.
Female Wasteoid: Next thing I knows, they’re takin’ my DNA. Don’t know why they needed my DNA. I didn’t even do nothing!
Walking on the beach in Oceanside yesterday, we noticed that something looked different at the north end of the beach. There was a tunnel! Since it was low tide, we were able to walk over to and through this 30 yard long tunnel to another beach! Pretty darn cool. Here’s the beach that’s on the other side of the tunnel.
The beach has always been special to us. I asked Lillian to marry me in Manzanita, and now we’re spending a long overdue weekend in Oceanside. It’s even starting to get somewhat sunny. Here’s the view from our hillside cabin/cottage.
Let me start off by saying that I really appreciate what all of the folks over at the City of Portland do to keep our city streets in good repair, and our parks beautiful. They’ve been working hard to update the park by my house, and I just know that it’ll be gorgeous when it’s all done.
That being said, there are areas where the city could improve. Mostly it’s in the area of efficiency. With all of the talks about how the city and state are strapped when it comes to diesel fuel costs, you’d think that the city would take a proactive approach to utilize the assets that they do have as well as possible.
Today when out on a short walk to get some lunch I spotted three trucks parked on the side of the road with their engines running. There wasn’t a city employee in sight. No one in the trucks, and no one using the bucket on the crane. The flashing lights were going round and round, which seemed unnecessary since the workers had also put out orange cones to warn passing traffic. Why waste diesel fuel that now costs over $3.50 a gallon. And heck, couldn’t those lights run off of a battery? Sheesh.
Check these three trucks out:
And, a half an hour later two of the trucks were still there. No workers in sight. Still idling. Wasteful.
I took this video a couple of weeks ago from a conference room at work. I was struck by how beautiful and sunny it was that day. Typically it rains and/or is overcast in Portland pretty much all winter. I uploaded this video to Vimeo to test it out. It’s got a nice, very clean interface.
So 
