Warren Miller has been producing snow inspired films since 1949. This year was my first year going to one of Warren Millers shows. If you've never had the oppurtunity to experience a Warren Miller show and have any interest in skiing or snowboarding, you're missing out big time!
The locations around the world that these people get to experience are enough to make even more than the most dedicated employee think of turning in the desk job for cheap motels and long days on the slopes. From making fresh tracks in deep country Alaska via helicopter to exploring the big cliffs of Switzerland, these guys are all over some of the most beautiful country around the world.
If you have a chance, check out the show. No telling how many more shows there will be... don't miss out. You'll regret it.
You can find out information about Warren Miller and his productions here.
Every year on Sauvie's Island, The Maize organizes a giant corn maze for familys to wonder through. The organizers of the event come up with a clever design that reflects something about the location or whats going on in the country. The maze I visited was laid out with a discover Oregon theme. As was the case last night, the mazes can be quite perilous, not from the many volunteers hiding through out the maze to scare the life out of you, but from the weather. Now to some, tromping aroud a corn field in the pitch black up to your ankles in mud may not sound like much fun, but I had a great time! The lines were short and there wasn't a lot of screaming kids or roudy groups of teenagers. Just me, my friends and our mission to complete the maze.
To help you along the way, there are placards with numbers on them. When you enter the maze your given a trivia card with questions corresponding to the numbers. They have a large variety of trivia to choose from appropriate for all ages from toddlers all the way to those enjoying their golden years. When you encounter a number you look at the question, and depending on your answer you are told to go left or right. It's not as simple as it sounds, find the numbers is half the challenge and fun, especially in the pitch dark in mud up to your ankles!
Information about the mazes and finding a maze near you can be found here.
Enjoy!
For those wanting to get a season pass to Mt Hood Meadows and have been living under a rock for the past few months, Meadows is running a deal on season passes. Get three friends together and buy all your passes at once and you get them for $425 a piece. Now all we need is about 6 feet of snow...
In this day and age where identity theft runs rampant its important to protect your most precious asset. Here is an internet broadcast that explains what exactly an identity is and what the future holds for digital identities and the internet. The present does an excellent job of getting his point accross without resorting to super technical terms. Highly recommended. Watch it here.
Find a penny, pick it up, all day long you'll have good luck.
What happens if you find a nickel?
If you fancy yourself a riddle solver. Here is one for you that took a co-worker and I over an hour to solve.
You may ask as many Yes/No questions as you like.
The sun rose, a man died. What happened?
If you figure it out, please don't post it here, let everyone enjoy the feeling of victory.
Over the past few months I've been hearing about a challenge at Salvador Molly's, a local restraunt here in Portland that serves pirate food (aka Caribbean food). The challenge is to eat five cheese fritters. Doesn't sound to difficult does it? Ohh ya, their stuffed full of habanero peppers, the hottest peppers grown. Now I was a bit nervous when I ordered the Great Balls of Fire due to the many stories I heard of people hallucinating after eating them or the intense abdominal pain felt afterwards, but I put reason aside and put on my stupid college guy hat.
The first three went down with relative ease, mainly because I ate them really fast. When I started on numbers four and five I could light cigarettes with my breath and it was painful to close my mouth. But I succeeded, and what did I win? My picture on the "Wall of Flame" and the admiration of all those around me. Unfortunately the hallucinations of Mayan cities and spirit wolves running through the Amazon jungle I was promised never came. Oh well...
A while back some friends and I participated in an event at the Oregon Coast Aquarium where we were allowed to SCUBA dive in the exhibit tanks trying out various SCUBA equipment. This was a really cool oppurtunity to see things from the fishes perspective. One of the things we got to do was use their underwater digital cameras to take pictures. Well, the organizers of the event have finally posted some of the better pictures taken on their website. The pictures can be viewed here.
There are plans of inviting some of the divers back to participate in a volunteer tank cleaning program. Hey, its a dirty job but someone has to do it and any day underwater is a good day.
I went to Panda Express for lunch today. When I was done I opened my fortune cookie that I think was left over from the cold war. The fortune was "An adventure awaits you". Now this is interesting because I've never been one to turn down an invitation for anything that could be construed as dangerous, like sky diving for example. And since I'm heading up to Mt. Hood this weekend; I'm very curious if anything adventursome will take place.
If your considering getting Voice Over IP there is a free tool you need to try out over at Bandwidth.com. It will list latency of your internet connection, speed and esitmated number of concurrent calls supported. I have FIOS by Verizon at my house which has an advertised speed of 15Mbit down and 2Mbit up. You would think that VoIP would be no problem, but when trying to run the tests, the SIP and MGCP ports came up as blocked, which makes me wonder if Verizon has those ports blocked as well as incoming HTTP and SMTP traffic. I ran the speed test on the website and came back with a estimated 20 supported concurrent phone calls. This warrents further investigation.
Stay tuned...
The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in anyway.
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