Alright cave-dwellers, time to explore beerdrinking venues for the merit of their tunes rather than their ales. And lagers if that’s what you’re into. The Musicfest NW is going on, and there are a lot of great acts to see. Last night the Black Keys rocked. That’s the only show I saw, getting a late start and opting out of the Dandy Warhols. Tonite, there are so many bands conflicting that I am a bit conflicted myself.

After running Gentoo Linux on my personal machine for several years, I’m leaving it. Done. Not looking back. I’m installing Ubuntu right now. I’ve battled Gentoo with every significant upgrade. I like to do things the right way, but I found myself reconfiguring my wireless LAN and video card way too often. Nothing fancy, but with every upgrade, samba broke, I could no longer print, and usually I had to figure out a cascade of failed dependencies.

holy cow, this is amazing!

After hiking the other week, I found myself lacking skin on my heels, a condition which makes exercise with shoes less appealing. In an effort to keep on keepin on I found a new activity- yoga. Bright-eyed and barefoot I followed Ann to my first class, some Asstangle or something. Halfway through sweat was just pouring off me as I struggle to go from downward dog to somehow unsuccessfully jump my feet in front of my hands.

These are pics from our hike in the Bull of the Woods Mountain wilderness area. The story is below for you wordy types. This came out alright. Me and dave pretequila. I don’t think he’s that much taller than me…? This is me as the Kool-Aid man. Oh yeah. Dave post-tequila Here I was fishing. Those trout are lucky there’s just one of me. This is at the fire lookout on top of Bull of the Woods Mountain.

106 degrees (41C for you euros out there) in Portland. A bit cooler at the coast, and frickin hot in the gorge and the Cascades. Sounds like the perfect weekend to get back into backpacking and beat the crowds. So I’m figuring a solo trip into the gorge, but I got my buddy Dave into it. He’s experienced and we hit the Bull of the Woods Mountain area. Which is huge, diverse, and has a bunch of lakes.

ugh…my machine went down hard last week. Problem turned out to be a bad stick of RAM and is fixed now, so I should get stuff back up. Still recovering because some system stuff was upgraded during the bad memory time and now some things are hosed. In the meantime I got me a new friend, a MacBook.

woohoo! found a really cool script called bbipsto handle scaling down all my images. I’ve replaced all the big ones from before with blog-friendly pics, so scroll down and take a gander at them all happy on one page. And I’ll get some more up here asap too!

holy crap, two days without soccer! In a row. It’s not my fault, I suppose they’re giving the teams a quick breather before jumping into the quarter-finals. Yesterday I travelled for someodd 24 hours from Hamburg back to happy Portland town. Nice to be home, but I miss the adventure some. Now I have to mow the lawn and go back to work and watch the games on tv with maybe 20 people instead of tens of thousands.