Its on!

The Covenant shall pay for their hubris!


I'm back online. Cyberninja5000 if you're in the know and on the case.

Three things of note:

1) Walmart is a frighteningly creepy and sad place at 6am on a Tuesday morning.

2) If you sign up for the free ("silver") xbox live membership they automatically give you the "gold" membership (where you can co-op the game with your buds) for a month.

3) Once you sign on to xbox live, it will download any "patches" or "extra content" for the games you are playing, which inadvertently erases all your saved games! That's a fun surprise.

In any case, look like for the next month the Haloz is a-goona be cookin' here at the Technodojo.

Visit from the Folks

So last week my folks flew out here to visit us. It was my dad's first airplane ride in 35 years (other than space flight, of course). We went to King Estate winery to taste their fine vintages. King Estate is the largest winery in Oregon and well worth checking out if you are in the area (see amazing view above). It was pretty quiet there, but in a few weeks, they will be harvesting and crushing the grapes. Here's me among the tanks they use to ferment the wine, holding the bottle of wine my mom bought me for my birthday.



We also went to the Coast. My mom had read about a great seafood place in Winchester Bay so we headed there. We've been to the coast several times and each time we select a crappy place to eat at (in Florence: avoid Mo's and the ISC). It especially sucks since we are generally with friends and they have to eat the subfar food with poor service. So based on Coastal Living's recommendation, we headed to Fishpatrick's Crabby Cafe. I can't speak for everyone else's fish 'n' chips, but my clam chowder was excellent, as was the marionberry cobler a la mode that I split with Cory. From there we traveled farther south down the Coast to the Umpqua Lighthouse...



...then on to Horsfall Beach, which is in the Dunes National Recreation area.



My mom even stuck her foot in.









We also took my parents to hike Spencer's Butte. Pretty much everyone who visits us will have to hike it, but it is a nice walk through the woods...



...with big, big trees...





...and a great view at the top.

Oregon Football

So as some of you know, I've recently started enjoying watching football ever since the last Superbowl. Well, now that I'm in Oregon I decided to watch the Oregon games on the weekend since I have four channels anyway (the other three featuring golf, tennis, and PBS cartoons). I gotta say, I have been pretty impressed with the duck's fighting ability as of late.



The football team is pretty good too.

Note: The mascot duck got suspended from the next home game for that little incident.

Strange findings on a camera phone

You know how when you first get a camera phone and you take a zillion pictures? And then you never look at them again because its too much of a pain to figure out how to email them to yourself?

Well, I was cleaning out my image gallery and came across this little beauty:


GenCon was a good time.

Happy Scanniversary!

As some of you may recall, Cyberninjet and I got married on labor day weekend a couple hundred years ago, and we decided then that our Scanniversary would always be on the lovely calendar-jumping Labor day weekend (for the WHOLE weekend), and not whatever specific date it was we actually got hitched by the most honorable Jedi Master Delp. Mostly she agreed to this because it would ensure I would remember the date. Like most men I'm okay with normal math, but terrible with girl math.

On Saturday morning we went downtown and checked-out the Saturday Market here in Eugene, which is also known in some circles (my circle) as "Weekly hippie-fest 3000," complete with crusty jugglers and organic dog biscuits. Nevertheless, the fruits and veggies were Scanlicious, and the difference between organic/local beef and store-bought beef really must be experienced to be believed. We bought some flat-top steaks (only because I'd never heard of flat-top steak before), and it was fantastic. For some reason the store-bought beef around here always gives us both stomach pains shortly after eating it, which is disconcerting to say the least (so we stopped eating it). Fortunately, the organo-hippie local beef from the market really is better and non-gastrointestinally destroying (though we still fondly remember mid-west beef as being the best-tasting beef ever). We also got Mary some organic locally-grown gluten-free flowers.

Then we sat down and watched the entire second season of Weeds that Mary got off of Netflix, a fairly strange show that I'm not sure how we got into but its pretty funny. I mostly watch it for Kevin Nealon. Today (Sunday) we went for a long bike ride around town and checked out camp stoves and sleeping mats at the local overpriced survivalist supply store (G.I. Joe's), and now we're going to watch the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy until we fall asleep.

Tomorrow we plan on having a picnic at the nearby park and drinking wine outdoors like a couple of hobos in love, which will be totally rad to the max.