After a filling breakfast at Heidi’s, we headed east out of Portland along the very scenic Historic Columbia River Highway for some beautiful views of the Columbia River Valley.

Washington state is on the left and Oregon is on the right. That tiny building on the right is the Vista House at Crown Point. A beautiful lookout point with stained glass windows and a wrap around balcony for 360 degree views.

This is also the place where Eric shot this panorama from…

(click here to see the large panorama)

Just a short ways further down the highway are a bunch of stunningly tall waterfalls, some you can see right from your car… more photos coming soon!

We’ve been touring around the Willamette Valley visiting a number of wineries and vineyards and we haven’t visited a bad one yet. The weather has been near perfect- sunny, upper 60’s- and the fall colors are beautiful. This photo of Lemelson Vineyard is a good representation.

At the end of last week, I spent two days in Raleigh hobnobbing with a ton of great non-profit organization people from all over the state. I gave out a bunch of business cards, but more importantly, got to meet folks who do some truly wonderful things for people in all walks of life.

The biggest draw for me were the talks on technology. Social media is a pretty confusing concept for a lot of non-profits and I think three of the speakers, Katya Andresen, John Kenyon and Kivi Leroux Miller did a nice job of taking away some of the mystery. I served as the sole technology representative this year for the Curbside Consultants sessions which allowed people to sign up for a 25 minute slot where they could pick my brain for design help.

Overall, I think it was a good investment for my business and I would be honored to work with some of these people over the next year!

Every year our neighborhood gathers for a pig pickin’ hosted by the resident Pig Man, Don (on the left).

It’s a great chance to say hi to the neighbors we see only briefly during walks with pup or driving by and connect with people who have moved in over the past year.

Plus, the bbq is delicious!

I was pointed to a great article today entitled “The Things He Carried” in The Atlantic, where the author details the ease at smuggling liquids and other prohibited items through security checkpoints, using forged documents, and generally doing all the things the security hassles are supposed to prevent. The following quote sums things up pretty well:

“The whole system is designed to catch stupid terrorists” [Bruce] Schnei­er told me… “Counter­terrorism in the airport is a show designed to make people feel better,” he said. “Only two things have made flying safer: the reinforcement of cockpit doors, and the fact that passengers know now to resist hijackers.” This assumes, of course, that al-Qaeda will target airplanes for hijacking, or target aviation at all. “We defend against what the terrorists did last week,” Schnei­er said. He believes that the country would be just as safe as it is today if airport security were rolled back to pre-9/11 levels. “Spend the rest of your money on intelligence, investigations, and emergency response.”

It’d be funny if it weren’t so sad - read the rest of the article for even more anger-inducement.

I just finished reading “Earth: The Sequel: The Race to Reinvent Energy and Stop Global Warming” and I came away from it really inspired by all the different ideas people have to limit, and even end, CO2 emissions. The authors argue for a carbon cap and trade system and spend most of the book laying out their rationale. I was particularly impressed by their arguments that we currently ignore the health and environmental problems of using certain fuels in many current cost analyses.

Even if you don’t care about the politics, funding mechanisms, or even the rationale for cleaner energy sources, their descriptions of the entreprenuers tackling these problems is still a great tour of small to medium-sized startup companies. In doing so, the authors demonstrate how it can be very profitable to go green, and how rewarding market forces is the key to solving many energy related issues. Definitely a recommended read.

The first time Riesling met our friend’s mini schnauzer Pasha she was tolerant but generally uninterested in the new puppy. Pasha has been over a few times since and this weekend, we kept her overnight.

How could you say no to this face?

They spent most of their time playing independently with us, but we managed to get both dogs to participate in a little tug of war on Saturday morning.

This is the first time Riesling has done this with another dog… I’ll bet it will be more fun when Pasha learns to get a better grip on the rope. :)

Remember that new roof we got a few weeks back?  Our two Dish Network dishes were taken down as part of the process, with a scheduled reinstallation the following day. Thus began two weeks of problems…

The tech that showed up Tuesday morning told Leandra there was no way he could install the dishes on the ground or even back up on the roof because of the treeline. Surprising, since they’ve worked on the roof for the last two years. He refused to reinstall the two dishes, said a new dish might work, and left. As you might imagine, Leandra was not pleased. I called Dish customer support back that night, who apologized, comped the reinstall fee, and made a new appointment for Friday morning.

This time I stayed home to talk with the installer. I told him that I’d prefer a ground install due to the new roof, and he said that the new 1000.4 dish would work on the ground. The wrinkle: because it is a brand new dish it is only supposed to be used for new installs. He worked the phone talking with both Dish and the installation company. I even offered to pay for the new dish if it wasn’t too expensive, but nobody could even give us a price! After about 45 minutes we finally got someone to approve the exception, so he went ahead and put in the new dish on a pole in the backyard. A little while later we CNN HD running.

As he was finishing up the paperwork on the install I happened to change the channel to ESPN… and got nothing. No error, no warnings, just a black screen.  A systematic check showed that about a quarter of our channels were blacked out. After an hour of troubleshooting, and a call to the Dish tech support desk, we still had nothing. Since we needed to leave for our weekend trip to Charleston, I agreed to let the receiver run an update over the weekend and check back on Sunday.

Of course, things still weren’t working on Sunday, so I was back on the phone with support. They seemed confused as to which satellites I should be receiving a signal from on the new dish, but in the end they decided to send a third tech out on Tuesday afternoon.

The Tuesday tech spent a hour and a half testing the dish, making adjustments, etc, and finally decided that the HD receiver itself must be the problem. Two days later a replacement receiver arrived via UPS.

So last Friday night I was elbow deep in wires, and after a call to tech support and several restarts got the new receiver working. And ESPN worked! So the receiver was the problem.

Of course, we still had a bunch of unwatched shows on the DVR. While it is possible to transfer shows to an external hard drive, we decided that we could get all of the shows on DVD or over the internet, so we watched a few and let the rest go.

So three tech visits, several hours of troublehooting, and two weeks after our new roof we finally had our Dish system fully operational after replacing every major component. Hopefully things will last us at least another two years!

This evening we are attending the 30 Threads Blogger Bash at Broad Street Cafe in Durham, and meeting a bunch of local bloggers - pictured are Wayne and Ginny from 30threads.com.

We enjoyed the beautiful day yesterday visiting with other mini schnauzer owners at SchnOctoberFest, the NC Schnauzer Rescue’s annual big fundraising event. Last year, Riesling won for biggest ears and I donated a custom pastel painting. Eric was able to attend this year, so we took lots of photos since only one of us had to dogsit. :)

As always, Riesling’s favorite part is the car ride anywhere.

At the park, she was perfectly happy to sit in the sandbox and chew on a bone… all the while covering herself in sand.

We didn’t have a costume for pup, but plenty of folks did, including this great cops and robbers entry.

And an escaped dragon. Who I think looks more cuddly than dangerous.

The rest of the photos are posted on Flickr.