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The Old: an amazing cover of the Queen song “Stone Cold Crazy” by Metallica. This is, of course, when Metallica was still a metal band.

Metallica - Stone Cold Crazy

The New: Lamb of God has caught my attention lately. You’ll mostly find younger punks (not the good kind) listening to this stuff, but I like it anyway.

Lamb of God - Redneck

I knew the Houston Astros would be a mediocre team this year, however I wasn’t prepared to see them lose 7 games in a row. It’s too early in the season to give up on them, but Berkman and Lee (and pretty much everyone else) need to kick it up a notch or two.

According to ouside.in, the Pearl District in Portland is the 6th “bloggiest neighborhood” in the U.S. This is not a big surprise given the hipness of that neighborhood.

We went bowling on Saturday at the newly renovated Mt. Hood Lanes in Gresham. I did surprisingly well, with scores of 172 and 190. I think it was the lack of pressure, since it wasn’t a league situation. Unfortunately, I took no photos.

On Sunday, we went to the Gresham Earth Day celebration at City Hall. There wasn’t a whole lot there, and it was mostly for kids, but it was enjoyable nonetheless. I’d say the highlights were seeing an owl perched on a man’s arm, and petting some snakes (including a python). I took some photos with my phone, but they aren’t uploaded yet.

My parents visited us in Gresham this month. We took an Amtrak train to Seattle and watched the Mariners beat the Rangers. We also did the usual Seattle touristy things, like Pikes Market. Upon returning to Oregon, we went to the rhododendron gardens in Portland. There are photos on flicker - here.

I cam across this article on the OregonLive.com website: Portland in 36 hours: Story on City of Roses hits heights on NYTimes.com. After a bit of browsing around, I found some more interesting write-ups on this fine town of ours. See links below…

From the New York Times:
36 Hours in Portland, Ore.
In Oregon, It’s a Brew Pub World
In Portland, Ore., Where Trees and Imagination Are Evergreen

Food Network:
Delicious Destination of the Year (this one is suprising to me)

Today I offer up three fine punk songs. These are three well known artists, so I won’t go into a description of each. Use google if you really need to know more about them.

NOFX - Bottles To The Ground (party song)
Suicidal Tendencies - Institutionalized (80’s rebellious youth)
Bad Brains - I Against I (a classic)

According to Business Week’s “World’s Top 100 Most Livable Cities”, Portland is the 46th most livable city in the world. I’d say that’s quite impressive considering that there are only 8 U.S. cities in the top 50. It looks like Switzerland is really the place to be.

I’ve been working on a new Ruby on Rails project for the past week. What I’m aiming for is a well organized, simple, easy to use code snippet library. There are plenty of community code snippet sites out there, but I found that I needed my own personal collection of code since I know what I’m likely to need. When I first started this project, I heard about Ext JS, which is a toolkit for Ajax and UI components. It’s basically a wrapper around Yahoo UI, script.aculo.us, and prototype. I decided to learn more about Ext by using it with my Rails application. So far I’m quite impressed. The documentation is way lacking, but if you’re familiar with Javascript. Html, and some Ajax, then it’s not that difficult to figure out. In a matter of hours, I’ve managed to throw together the following rich interface - fully functional. The tree on the left supports in-place CRUD and drag/drop. (click screenshot to see more detail)

After years of waiting (literally), the second season of Twin Peaks has been released to DVD!! I got my copy in the mail today, and I can’t begin to express how excited I am. I now have every episode and the movie on DVD. I guess I can finally get rid of my VHS box set.