If you’ve been following my family’s housing saga (which you haven’t been), you’d know that my wife and I have been looking for a modest house to rent, rather than buying a mediocre house in Bend’s current seller’s market. We just aren’t ready to pull the trigger, so we figure we’ll get set up in a little house and continue exploring the market.

And today, I think we found our rental. It an eastsider, close to Butler Market and right off of Purcell, so we’d still be close to Delaney’s Nana (grandma) and Grammy (great grandma). It’s got a nice deck and a lot of yard to take care of an play in. It’s also still in my ‘hood - I’m quite partial to the eastside. My parents moved over to the eastside in the early 70s when it was the cool place to be. Anyway, this little house has everything we’ve been looking for, in the right area, and within our budget. Best of all, it’s owned by an old Bend family much like my own, so we wouldn’t just be buying the house for some prospector type. It’s amazing when looking for rentals how many brand new and barely used houses are for rent, run by property management, for owners living in CA or AZ. (You can check out who owns a house and a lot of the assesment info here: Deschutes County DIAL. It’s a great way when shopping for a house to check past property taxes paid, last tax assessment value, et cetera.)

It makes me feel a lot better to be renting from a Bend family. My mom even knows the people who we would be renting from. We’ll hand in the application tomorrow morning, and we should be all set to start the move. We’re terribly excited, we’ve been living at my mom’s house for the past 9 months or so and most of our belongings are in boxes. There’s nothing too special, but it’s all ours, and it will be great to get it back out and see what we’ve been missing.

Happy day!

http://www.mibasoft.com/podquest/podquest.html

So these guys make software to download Mapquest and Google maps directions onto your iPod. Please, hand to a passenger if you intend to use this software.

Sometimes, a decision to save a little time ends up costing much more time.

Upon release of Mac OS X 10.4, I foolishly decided to “Upgrade” rather than “Archive and Install”. There are of course scenarios where that isn’t that big of a deal, but with all the software I run and customizations I make to the system, it’s not the best idea. That was not the only foolishness of the day, since for the first time in history, I upgraded a Mac to the newest dot-release of the OS. Everyone knows that the best idea is to wait until at least newestrelease.1. But i digress…

My G5 seemed sluggish upon upgrade install of 10.4, but seemed better upon installation of 10.4.1. However, I have experienced things like QuarkXpress 6.5 crashing, reminding me of the days before the mighty X. My fonts are beginning to be bothersome as well, nothing shocking there, really, as fonts tend to be a pain in the ass anyway. Moreso these days with the Mac’s new .dfonts.

Up until this point, this G5 had been one of the all time best Macs I have ever had/used, second only to my G4 667 PowerBook. However, cutting the corner on upgrade seems to have cost me. So I’m going for the full on rebuild. I just received a new WDC 250GB SATA to install and start the rebuild. As long as I’m going to the trouble, I figure I’ll go all out and start from scratch. Then I can be certain everything I need is there and working before a client calls and needs a “insert crazy fire-drill client request here”.

Plus that gives me the opportunity to reload only the necessary DV files from the company reel, instead of all the mess that’s in there now. It’s so nice to have enough disk space these days to be able to keep tons of GBs of DV files right on the machine so that I don’t have to load them from the camera or the clamshell everytime I need to build a custom reel.

So as you can tell, I’m not totally unhappy about having to rebuild. A new, freshly installed and config’d system is so nice, after all. Especially when you’re getting paid to do it.

I have a new friend. Full Sail Brewing likes to call it Session Ale.

Full Sail Press Release

Normally, I’m not much of a fan of Full Sail brews. I find them less flavorful and satisfying than many of my favorites (Deschutes, Stone, Rogue, Mendocino). This one, however, I find quite choice. If you can’t tell by looking at it, it is very similar to Red Stripe, though more flavorful without being imposing. I first found it while I was at the coast, and couldn’t stop drinking it. And I was in the land of Rogue! Don’t worry, I put down plenty of Dead Guys too.

Nice work Full Sail! This is an amazingly easy drinking beer, that doesn’t leave anything behind. Very crisp. I also love stubby bottles; I think that’s what first drove me to Red Stripe. And best of all, I’m seeing it in stores for about $1/bottle, and even when the ‘Stripe is on sale, it’ll cost you more than that.

Whew, I’m thirsty.

Okay, I post this because of a letter to the editor I read in Automobile Magazine. (note: the letter is talking about an F-16 jet that was featured in the magazine.) The author of the letter was asking about the magazines claim that Mach 2 equated to something like 936MPH. He stated that he believed that since Mach 1 is equivalent to the speed of sound, Mach 2 should equate to about 1500MPH, since the speed of sound is about 761MPH.

That sounded right to me, so the answer given boggled my mind. Paraphrasing, the response read:

“A Naval engineer gave us that figure. Since the speed of sound varies by altitude, the figure given is adjusted.

What!? We have a unit of measure that varies by altitude? Yes, indeed we do. From the US Centennial of Flight Commission’s page:

The Speed of Sound and Mach Numbers

The following breakdowns have been generally accepted to classify speeds:
M less than 0.8 subsonic
M = 0.8 to 1.2 transonic
M - 1.2 to 5.0 supersonic
M greater than 5.0 hypersonic

I think we need a better unit of meaure than the Mach numbering system. I mean, imagine if the “inch” was tied to altitude. It would be completely useless.

What the hell. A unit of measure shouldn’t be tied to a variable.

/rant