Category: blahblah

o’connors

When the waiter set our beers down, I noticed the odd phrase the place had chosen to represent itself. Then I noticed that it was much to light. Then I noticed that my eyes hurt from the deceiving brightness of a cloudy Portland sky. Maybe we’d left too early for dinner, but we were hungry, and pub faire sounded good.

We thought O’Connor’s was supposed to be an Irish type place, but the menu and the decor suggested that maybe it was southwest. Regardless, we got the fish, chips, and pints we’d come for, even if I had to squint with each sip.

Afterwards, we hit up John’s marketplace for a couple brews. Chatted with one of the wonderful owner’s and headed home. We watched Iron Chef because I wanted to make sure Iron Chef Chinese kept his title, then we listened to music. Laying on the floor, guitars, fiddles, mandolins, dobros, and voices. I think Manzanita would be a wonderful name for a daughter. Bluegrass music is a thing of the past, and the same for rock & roll. But we’ll enjoy it once more tonight.

Staircase II

This weekend was the third annual First Floor Spring Campout. It was at Staircase again, which is a beautiful location with no fees (yet) and few people. Many people got there during the week, but I didn’t get there until Friday evening. When I got there, everyone was out hiking, so I killed time by riding my bike, chatting with the neighbors and sipping beer. It was shaping into a nice evening when some boy scouts from down the way ran into camp asking if there was a lady with shoulder lenght black hair in our party, because she just passed out in the road by their camp. Well, there were possibly too, and the hike they were on was quite was quite strenuous, so yes, we did possibly have someone who fit that description in our party.

It turned out to be someone else, but we helped the lady back to her camp. She’d been in an car accident recently, and had a serious concusion at the time. She was driving to meet her friends at Staircase for the weekend. We invited her down to our camp and she drank PBR with us until we started heading for bed. While we were walking her back to her camp, she commented on a sudden change in her condition, and pitched forward. Once we rolled her onto her back, she started siezing. We ended up taking her to the nearest ER some 45 miles away because she refused to ride in an ambulence, and when the Dr. released her after a CAT scan, we drove her back to her camp spot. We finally got to bed around 7am.

Made for an eventful weekend. I hope she doesn’t hate us now for making her pay for a CAT scan, but we didn’t really like the condition she was in, and had doubts about her ability to drive to the other side of the Peninsula where she was supposed to meet her friends in the first place and such. All in all, it was an enjoyable trip, but not as care-free as one would hope.

Twins, Online Exams

Advice from an online instructor: Don’t let twins take your online course at the same time.

Its kind of funny though, on several quizzes, the twin who took the test second got the better score, and somehow finished the exam much much more quickly. coincidence?

E-mail Record

11,005 e-mails!
Today was a record setting day for my inbox, 11,005 messages. The story behind it is quite entertaining.

An instructor sent a message to his class e-mail list. One student, who works at a local frozen food manufacturer, had set up an out-of-office reponse, so her e-mail program responded accordingly. The list server took broadcasted that message to everyone on the list, including the student, so when the message that said she was out of the office came back, her e-mail program responded that she was out of the office, again. This is what is called an infinite loop. It will keep repeating until interruped.

The side affects included most students on the list got their e-mail accounts pushed over quota, so the mail servers all sent me a notification of the failure, which I got at 10AM this morning. The whole thing is quite hilarious, and the moral is: Don’t use Out of Office type auto-responders.