Kuro5hin has a neat-o article on guerilla gardening, which is basically to sneak out somewhere and turn some unused plot of land into something useful or beautiful. I have enough trouble maintaining my own little chunk of dirt, so I likely won’t be engaging, but it’s still an inspiring idea.

Well, despite the sucky aspects of the weather, there’ve been some really positive outcomes also. In case you’re reading this and have no idea, East Portland has been pretty much closed since Monday night. I’ve been working from home, because I can and because it’s been pretty nasty out there. So, N and I are getting a bit of the ole cabin fever. But we’re also meeting our neighbors, which is cool.

via Slashdot, Yahoo has an article reporting about companies moving jobs overseas. This is nothing new. It is scary though. As executives demand higher and higher salaries, those on the bottom get axed and replaced by cheap foreign labor. This is a scary trend that needs to be regulated. The lobbyist arguments that the problem is that tech workers are not willing to work for the low wages, and that makes moving the jobs overseas okay is simply not valid.

Yes, I suppose that it is a necessary evil. And a very profitable one for him, the closing of companies, trashing of dreams, the dismissal of incompetence, but Martin here looks like he’s carrying quite the big stick.

David Mamet has written a nice little piece on names. It’s a bit rambling at times, but he’s trying to express some pretty abstract concepts. Not too long, and it addresses something that’s interesting to think about in a way that applies to our lives on several levels. via the albatross.

The good people over at Portland Brewing have released a no girlie-man beer in honor of California’s latest governor, who I’m guessing isn’t much of a beer drinker. I wish they’d release some of it here though. props crafty girlie.

Testing a feature that makes blogging easy. Here’s a link to beerdrinker.org is a beer drinker here. As you might guess, I’ve just upgraded the software! Don’t be scared! I’ll have the beerdrinker.org that y’all love and drink beer and wassail soon enough. cheers! Oh, that and the ruckus wrough by holiday mayhem is unrucking.

Just thought of something, N and I didn’t send out xmas cards this year because our wrists were already exhausted from all the wedding invites and thank you cards. Since this is pretty much the same list as our xmas card list, just grab you card, scan it into your OCR-capable computer, as merryxmas.txt, and then run perl -pi -e ‘s/Thank You/Merry Xmas/’ merryxmas.txt and that should fill the empty space in your heart.

oi…I’m back from my California trip. It was pleasant, but we got stuck at the Siskiyou pass coming into Oregon. It was an adventure worthy of an entry, so you’ll hear about it. woo. In the meantime, here’s a little twitcher from the Dept of Homeland Security, vi Abrichar, beware of people carrying almanacs. That probably includes Thomas Guides, beer lists, and the Guiness Book of World Records.