My beer league team skated to a 6-2 defeat in the semi-final round of the playoffs last night, ending our “spring” season. I’m nursing nothing worse than a bruised arm from a nasty cross check in the first period. The season had to be extended by a week, because of some rescheduled games due to unforeseen scheduling conflicts—like Easter and an annual figure skating event.

The league is run by the rink (not my usual rink), and while the facility is real nice, modern and clean, I don’t care for their attitude, not to mention their scheduling ineptitude. I shan’t return.

So my 7-week off season has begun. See you in September, hockey fans!

As reported in the LA Daily News, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation just granted $7.9 million to a private charter school group in LA to transform a public high school in Watts into ten charter schools. As messed up as things have become in Portland, at least it’s not as bad as in LA.

Is there any doubt that Melinda Gates is being disingenuous when she says “We’re not trying to dictate a solution. We don’t think we have all of the answers…”?

Of course, California has fourteen year head start on Oregon in their public schools disinvestment. It’s not too late for us to come to our senses.

Update: here’s a more in-depth article in the LA Times about the school in question.

Well, it happened again, almost exactly a month after it happened before. Seven hundred-some Portland General Electric customers lost juice in North Portland, this time on the hottest day of the year. We didn’t have the multiple power surges like last time, and we managed to get all of our stuff unplugged just in case. The only casualty was the Wacky Enterprises blog farm, which does not function without all those electrons wiggling around in the copper, and was consequently off-line for five hours (from 4:30 PDT to 9:30 PDT).

So two lengthy outages in two months is making me think more and more of moving this whole enchilada to a hosting company. Anybody got good suggestions? Requirements: WordPress (and all its requirements, e.g. MySQL, PHP, etc.) , ssh/ftp access, reasonable rates, 24×7 rock-solid reliability, decent customer service. Local would be nice. Maybe I should just collocate, since I’m kind of anal about running my own servers.

The bonus of doing it here by myself is that it’s basically free. Maybe I’ll just keep it that way, and consider PGE’s monthly outages a cost of doing business.