Social networking: Neural prosthesis or harbinger of the End of Days?

I spend my day mining the interweb. It’s what I do for a living — I’m looking for interesting nuggets of information about the machines that provide the information. It’s very meta – a concept which is an abstraction from another concept, used to complete or add to the latter.
In my travels today, I came [...]

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Oregon Coast Photos: November 07

Monster tides, long weekend, a trip to PDX amounted to this short series of maritime themed Oregon Coast photos, including shots of the Willamette, Astoria and Fort Clatsop:

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Lessons learned on the Elk River: Matt 0, Salmon 2

Yesterday marked my second trip to the Elk River this year for Chinook salmon. The river was low and clear, its characteristic green coloration. The Mule and his buddy Dan and I drifted the run from the Elk River Hatchery to the pullout before the 101 bridge and it took forever. At least, that’s how [...]

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Thankful for undiscovered nature writers

There are lots of things to be thankful for this year, but the coolest one so far is how many new nature writers I’ve stumbled onto in the past couple weeks. I’m using the term “nature writer” pretty loosely, as someone who tries to write about man’s relationship to the natural world in a narrative [...]

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My dad the monsoon magnet blows out all Oregon salmon rivers

I haven’t seen rain like this since, well, since last November when my dad came out from Ohio to visit.
This weekend my dad came into town to fish the Elk River — which according to reports just the day before he’d shown up, there was barely enough water in it to float a boat. So [...]

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New lens for the Canon: EF70-300mm

Here’s to more bird nerd activity! I picked up my first telephoto lens today, a Canon EF70-300mm. I tried to get out to Fern Ridge Wildlife Refuge to take some shots, but the entire damn place is shut down in the fall. I can’t explain it, but it probably has something to do with bird breeding [...]

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Photos: Decompressing in Florence, OR

After a few days of hardcore real estate decision-making, KP and I headed to the Oregon coast to decompress. No plans, just drove west to Florence and decided to check out the Siuslaw Pioneer Museum – which has a bizarre collection of stuff, a lot of it seemingly unrelated to Oregon or Pioneers. It was a bit [...]

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Inspector descends on the potential homestead

The inspector showed up today at the prospective first home here in Eugene. He pointed out a lot of scary shit:
A. There’s mold under the roof. They’ve got OSB board under the shingles and it’s black with mold. He couldn’t find any specific moisture, but the mold is coming from somewhere. Cost to rip the [...]

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Fly fishing blog inspires lofty rants on the industry

I’ve been reading fly fishing blogs for a while now, and I’ve been like a kid looking up to some old timey, bacon-y dudes that mostly talk about stuff that’s not fishing. Sometimes it’s drinking Rainier, sometimes it’s weird Americana crap music, somtimes its about how hardass it is to swing flies and not catch [...]

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This Old House: Upstream in Oregon goes domestic

We just bought an old house in Eugene, Oregon (1924), wavy plaster walls, hardwood floors and a nice backyard. We won’t get keys till next month, but it’s pretty much all over except from the screaming. I’m documenting the interior design of the new place in the blog:

We have almost no furniture since we moved here in [...]

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