This is the (hopefully temporary) location of Another Portland Blog until I can find a solution to problems my server is having with Blogger. Over five years worth of archives can be found by clicking here
I guess they went with Young Indy over Old Indy because...eh, I don't care. I'm just overjoyed to hear that area Albertsons stores are stocking their shelves with food products slathered with Harrison Ford's face for the first time nearly two decades. In addition to cereal, they're also apparently selling Indiana Jones-themed fruit snacks, Pop Tarts and malt liquor.
I made up that last one...or did I?
A "thanks" goes out to Shanna for passing this info and photo along.
Today I learned that one of the great things about dumping hours of time into fixing your blog and writing dull posts about dumping hours of time into fixing your blog is that people will send you emails offering their condolences (I received three today. Three! This is very exciting because this blog never garners email). And that some of these emails will include videos of zombies chasing people around forests while riding unicycles.
Yeaaaaaaaaaah, you're not going to want to click that play button if you're at work, squeamish or think the whole zombie thing is "totally played out." As for myself, every time I start thinking that every conceivable twist on the zombie genre has been done, I see something like this. Plus, I'll sit through just about anything zombie-related until I finally see something, be it a movie or a graphic novel or whatever, featuring the undead using hot air balloons to attack their victims. Wouldn't that be somethin' else? Zombies in hot air balloons? With unicycles now out of the way, I think that's the last original thing that can be done with zombies.
It should also be noted that the video above includes a not-so happy "happy ending" that is going to keep me away from anything nature-related for at least the next two hours. This includes the "Little Tree" air freshener in my car.
Kudos to the Filmed By Bike (link) entrants that created the video and to Kim for passing it along.
If you can believe it, I spent three hours tonight trying to find a way to fix this blog. The obvious solution would be to move everything over to Movable Type or WordPress but the interface on both of those is roughly 1,000 times more confusing than the one found at blogger.com. An experiment with WordPress' "5 minute install" quickly led to 70 minutes of frustration. The first of possibly many roadblocks with Movable Type is that it refuses to work with a customized template.
So here I sit, fighting with HTML code instead of writing posts about Portland, bars and movies. Just think, if none of this had happened I could be linking to things like this right now.
Like a fool I didn't buy tickets several days in advance so I didn't catch Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation at the Hollywood Theater over the weekend. Still, after rummaging around on this site I think I probably know more about the movie than those that have sat through it. The first nine minutes can also be found on You Tube:
Not impressed? This BBC clip will better explain everything.
If this is all news to you, here's a quick rundown (a long one can be found here). In the '80s a group of kids in Mississippi spent seven years recreating and filming nearly ever scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark (they couldn't quite pull off the airplane fist fight). During the course of their odyssey, they nearly burnt down a house, almost killed one of their actors, broke a limb or two, learned how to make pipe bombs, conned someone into loaning them a real submarine and went through five prop boulders. From what I've been told, their recreation of the truck chase is amazing.
It's all an inspiring tale of geekery and indomitable determination. The makers are now in the process of trying to get their careers going in Hollywood. Supposedly, there's also a movie about the production of The Adaptation in the works. Until then, here's hoping the real-deal comes back through town again. As I understand it, it can only show it at charity screenings due to innumerable copyright issues.
Here's a few photos and shaky-cam footage from last week's Portland Timbers season opener. It was Timber Jim's final game as the team's mascot. They scored a goal in the final minutes of the second half so he did get a chance to saw one final slab off the team's log. The Timbers won 1 - 0 over the Puerto Rico Islanders.
Last Thursday I wandered into my cottage on the edge of Tyron Creek State Park bleary eyed and exhausted from the Timbers 1-0 victory over the Islanders. I loaded up a few photos onto my Yahoo Small Business account and set about writing a quick blog post to go with them. I hit "publish" and...then nothing happened.
I hit "publish" many more times over the course of the following two days, all to no avail. For the first time in over 5 years and 1700+ blog posts I could suddenly no longer subject the world to my scribblings and craptacular photography skills.
I spent three hours on Saturday trying to solve the problem. 29.5 minutes of a 30-minute call to Yahoo Support was spent listening to hold music before I finally hung up in disgust. Still, at least Yahoo has a support line. I still have yet to find a way to report the problem to Blogger. Their site only offers an unhelpful forum and nary an email address for support. If there is one I can't seem to find it.
Based on what I've read online, there's some sort of strange SNAFU between Yahoo and Blogger that has halted Small Business customers' ability to publish posts about super important topics like the retirement of a medium-size American city's soccer mascot (see above). After spending hours talking to a customer service rep far more sympathetic than the one I dealt with, one user found a workaround that, of course, didn't do jack squat to get Another Portland Blog back up and running.
I can still write blog posts. I can even still use my URL. What I can't do is to get everything working like it once did in the woebegone days of...last week. Thus, the new, stripped-down and hopefully temporary format you now see before you.
