Incursio

Official Email Addresses Have you ever wanted to send an email to a couple local elected officials, but all you can find is stupid web forms for comments and no actual email addresses? No? Oh. Well, for those of you who might have or might some time in the future - (which may only be me I guess) - I found this site which lists many of the cities in Oregon and has the actual emails of their mayors and councillors and that sort of thing. AreaGuides.net And for those of you who are not in Oregon - it look like you could get to other states and cities too... Try clicking around. :) They seem like they are good addresses too, as I found the site doing searches for email addresses for a city. I had found one email address for a city that was in a format like "first.last@city.gov" and I knew the names of officials so I started searching for "official.name@city.gov" and found this site. In comparing the sites email addresses to official city sites that do

American diesel fans get screwed... OK, maybe we don't get screwed. But we do have it tough. After having owned a Volkswagen TDI diesel for three years, and enjoying the torquey motor with regular mileage in the 45 to 50 mpg range - I really like my diesel cars... Currently we drive a Jeep Liberty CRD, which is powered by a 2.8L common rail diesel engine. It is a great vehicle. Extremely capable in many areas, it's 30mpg on the highway is not too shabby for a vehicle of it's type. And it's 300 pounds of torque really make towing fun. In fact, the CRD simply feels like it is not happy unless it is climbing or towing. Now, where am I going with this? Well. What do we have currently for diesel options in the USA? Mostly big trucks - which not only are really big - are expensive since the diesel options only come in the heavy duty versions. Volkswagen offers diesel in several of their passenger cars. There is the Mercedes E 3 series with diesel power, althou

Statistically Irrelevant 83% of statistics quoted by blogs are incorrect. (What do you expect? I am busy this week...)

An Inconsiderate Bitch Some of you who read that title might assume that I am speaking of a woman who does not think of others. Well, in a way you would be correct. However, the actual point of this post is to bitch about people who are inconsiderate. in·con·sid·er·ate ( ĭn ' kən-sĭd ' ər-ĭt ) adj. Thoughtless of others; displaying a lack of consideration. Tonight we ate at an italian restaurant, Amalfi's in North Portland, on Freemont street. The restaurant was nice, had reasonable prices, and the food was very good. All in all, I would recommend it - even despite the experience we had while dining there. We waited quite some time, approaching an hour, for outside seating. Outside, between the main entrance and the sidewalk there are two very neat tables with a gas firepit in the middle of each. We had walked past the restaurant a couple of times and thought it looked quite nice so we decided to try. We got our table and my family sat down to enjoy the

Night Ride around Mt. Hood Last night I took a motorcycle ride, from about 10pm to 2am. I rode east on I84 along the Columbia River to the city of Hood River (which sits at the mouth of the Hood River as it dumps into the Columbia in the county of Hood River ) and onto Highway 35. I headed south on Highway 35 around the back side of Mt. Hood to Highway 26 where I turned West. At Government Camp I split off and climb up to TimberLine Lodge , then back down to Government Camp and back onto highway 26 and towards home, making a complete loop around Mt. Hood. The trip was about 175 miles total. Going up into the gorge on the freeway was very quiet, very few cars for a Tuesday night... A few barges on the Columbia looked like iridescent ghosts with their couple lights shimmering from the tugs and the big black barge they push. The moon bounced off the small waves that are ever-present on the Columbia. On Highway 35 I could smell the forest fires, especially since Highwa