Portland, why do I love thee?

I recently relocated again; this time from the Seattle area to the Portland, Oregon area. Lake Oswego to be precise. No, I am not rich, but we got a deal on a small condo and love it. As a result we have be exploring.

My wife loves to walk in parks and explore, so we have been doing a lot of that, including ogling beautiful and expensive homes that are totally our of our price range. Portland is full of parks and urban woods.

This is an example from the Tryon Nature Park near our home. There is Washington Park in Portland, the Lake Oswego Iron Fence Company site in Lake Oswego and many others. They are accessible, green and well kept. These are very nice features of this city. Portland downtown itself has riverside parks, city center parks and the unique park at Mount Tabor, an extinct volcano cone located right in Portland.

The area we live in called Mountain View is park like with lots of green space, paths and trails throughout the area. These are well maintained and surrounded with trees.

More pictures to come.

Just something for you to read. They are truly fucking Seattle up. Here is a great opinion piece from the Seattle Times.

Will the last middle-class person leaving Seattle turn out the lights?

The entire city is being taken over by geek hipsters who could give one fuck about anyone else. The dive bars and small cafes are closing, the local flavor being bulldozed and the middle class being driven out. Much like San Francisco.

Holy fuck, it has been a long time since I posted here. I forgot all about these blogs. I will be trying to post more and new things. Live has thrown me a lot of curves and I have made major mistakes, read that fucked up, but I am recovering.

I thought you would like this. The new, harder me. Less fat, less nonsense, more something else.

All on-line all the time

This last month I moved into a new apartment. So far the only bill I cannot pay online is my apartment rent. Now, I could pay it online, but that would simply be bill-pay and I am not certain it till arrive on time, so I am not going to do that. The cool thing is that everyone has online payment options. No running to the post office or finding a place to make the payment. I may have to talk to the management at the apartment complex about setting up an online payment option. It should be more efficient than what they are doing.

Been preoccupied

Well, I have not been posting, as I visited the wife for a weekend and then got into apartment hunting, found one and moved. Spent lots of money and time doing it all, but I am now settled in pretty much. Pictures to follow.

The place is in Auburn, right across the street from the Muckleshoot (yes that is their real name) Indian lands. They have a large shopping center and a huge casino there. I have not had any time to gamble yet, but have visited the QFC, which is a nice little store.

The apartment is a small one bedroom but I have room for more furniture.

The day I moved in Comcast came by and installed my Internet. Well, I was supposed to get 6 MB download speeds and was getting very slow speeds and called their tech support late at night, like midnight and got help. Needed to reset the modem; did almost nothing. It turns out that the cable I got with the modem was the main issue and now everything is great! Fastest downloads I have ever had and good service, too!

Oh, put in a new Linksys router and it is working great too. I needed a firewall and I hate software firewalls.

Hmmm... not much more to say. Check me out on Twitter; just signed up.

Stupid Networks are the smart answer

OK, I think I know a lot. In fact, I know I know a lot, but every once in a while something comes up behind me and hits me in the back of the head and I am surprised. In this case, I am talking about an article about "stupid networks" by David Isenberg.
This may sound silly, but the Internet is a stupid network. The old telephone network (well, the network that we still use for voice calls, or at least most of us do) is an "Intelligent Network". Follow me so far? The whole point of this discussion is that the Internet takes the control of routing, the destination and the transmission of data away from the network and puts it in the hand of the user or the "client" as computer people put it.
Think of the Internet as a system of highways with cars on it. Drivers decide when and where to enter, where to go and there to get off. Think of the old network at a railroad, with the trains routed by the network from start to end. Railroads are intelligent networks, highways stupid networks.
Well, enough of that analogy. Read the article linked to above if you want his take on this. It is from 1997, over 10 year ago. This came up when reading an article on the Economist about Internet neutrality. What goes around comes around... or something like that.

More Interesting Sights

OK, I like Fry's, the huge electronics store in Renton. I noticed this sign last time but the spot was occupied. Now, I have to wonder about a place that
has to have a spot reserved for the police.

This is in the parking lot, the closest space to the front door. They must have a lot of shoplifters. I do know it looks like they have a ton of security features in the store.

Lowe's is right across the parking lot from Fry's. This is the coolest idea: a rental truck for hauling your purchases home! I love it. One less reason for everyone to have the old pickup sitting around the yard. This is quite the innovation in my opinion. I saw a Home Depot van of the same type, but did not get a picture of it. Note that there was not a space reserved for the local police at Lowe's.

So, new sights around Seattle.