Category Archives: Bad Times

Things that make us feel bad (and usually they should).

The Most Interesting Thing Ever

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And you can’t see it. What if that most interesting thing ever were the internet, or whatever it is that you were trying to find on the internet today? This censorship would be the reality.

SOPA and PIPA are two bills made by old congressmen who don’t understand young technologies. Lots of money has been thrown at them by special interests who are trying to make money by limiting access to information. That’s anti-American. If you think the government has no place telling you what you’re allowed to read, see or think, then you should be aware that these bills are an audacious and insane over-reach of power.

Here are some places where you can find more information about them and other sites supporting the SOPA/PIPA blackout and awareness day today:

This Efficiency Is Killing Me

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Efficiency (noun) \i-ˈfi-shən-sē\

(1) : effective operation as measured by a comparison of production with cost (as in energy, time, and money)

(2) : the ratio of the useful energy delivered by a dynamic system to the energy supplied to it

(from Mirriam-Webster’s)

Has modern efficiency created the capability to attain levels of perfectionism such that their attainment leads to more hours working than had we not been enabled by the efficiencies to begin with? And is attention to detail in a world of intricacies a new form of artisanship or just the new tediousness of production line work? Continue reading →

Craplogo – the supnah edition

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I couldn’t resist. I just had to see what my logo would look like if I’d paid hundreds of thousands of dollars (at minimum) to some big branding agency to remake me…

Wow. That’s just great. You can go here to crap up your own logo if you want! >> Craplogo.me

Read here for more information about what this is all about:

Angry Cows vs. HTC (hint: HTC wins… kinda)

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I am here to tell you how angry cows proved 1) that the HTC Incredible is built pretty damned well, and 2) that the new features of Google Voice and calling from within Gmail completely useful and disruptive of the traditional relationship between customers and mobile telephone service providers. For more details about those telephony features and their disruptive nature, check out my earlier post about Google’s disruptive telephony features, but this one is all about the angry cows…

Last weekend I went to a wedding in Bend, OR and decided to stop and do some fishing at Black Butte on the way back to Portland. Unfortunately, the herd of free range cattle that sometimes graze there were out, and I didn’t notice them at first as they were in the distance and around the corner from some trees and brush that blocked the view. My girlfriend and I were on a small outcropping of land into an area where the stream widens out quite a bit when the herd came around the corner. They were all business with bulls out front – ears and eyes up, horns sharp. We were already boxed in at this point – the bulls were past us and drinking at the water’s edge downstream from us. The rest of the herd was upstream from us blocking the path back to the stairway that runs over the fence.

Continue reading →

How to Unsubscribe From the Bend Ultimate Listserve in 4 Easy Steps

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Unsubscribing is easy. In order to keep our listserve from being spammed by all these requests to be taken off, I thought it would be a good idea to put up a nice little tutorial on how to take yourself off the list. I can only hope that from now on, anyone who asks the list to be removed will receive a deluge of links to this page…  Ahh… what a world that would be.  On to the business at hand. Continue reading →