travis johnson

Rachel and I decided to order a pizza and salad from Mezza Luna this past Friday, like we do most every week. After giving my order and phone number on Friday, the girl on the other end told me she had something good to tell me when I came in to pick up my pizza. When I made it in, she showed me that the cooks named a pizza after me. Apparently they’ve seen my name come through week after week and my name came up when they needed to name a new pizza. If you look closely at the picture below you’ll see a caricature of me endorsing the slice.

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Tags: Eugene

December 7, 2008

Bill O’Reilly was Jon Stewart’s guest on last night’s The Daily Show. He’s pretty hard to follow because you never really know what he’s talking about, but the last 30 seconds of the clip sum up Bill O’Reilly.

Billo the Clown tries to call the bear he’s holding a panda bear. It’s clearly not a panda. When Stewart tried to tell him it wasn’t a panda, O’Reilly then insisted it was in a tone that said, “I’m right, you’re wrong and stupid.” This is the way O’Reilly runs his show when discussing matters that actually matter, too. He’ll ramble on and make no sense and then when the guest states something contradictory to him, O’Reilly will belittle, mock and tell them they’re wrong. He’s hard to watch, but sure makes good comedy.

On a somewhat related note, my arch-nemesis was on the treadmills at the same time as me tonight. Hopefully Rachel will post about her nemesis someday in more detail, but hers is this old guy that kind of looks like Wolf Blitzer, smells really bad and uses her favorite machine for two hours at a time. Two hours is not a joke - in the time since he’s reached nemesis status, we’ve seen him lose about 20 pounds. I digress, my nemesis is also old and is usually on the treadmills and loves watching Fox News. Before getting on a treadmill he will always change the channel to Fox without even asking if anyone was watching what was previously on the TV. I know, the nerve of this guy. One time, before he had the chance to change the channel, I had to speak up and say I was watching a rerun of The Steve Harvey Show just so he wouldn’t change the channel. In actuality I wasn’t watching the program (although I’m sure I saw it the episode ten years ago, for some reason I was a big Steve Harvey fan), but it was worth lying just to keep Hannity, Scarbourogh or whatever off the TV. Well tonight, he was there before me and already had Fox on. I watched a little and it was awful. Long story for something that was already known.

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November 14, 2008

Chelsea and Scott sent me a birthday gift and included in it was a button for Crusher.

Crusher really likes Mr. Obama and is very happy wearing his new gift.

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October 19, 2008

I had a great birthday this year. It was so good I had two cakes!

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Tags: birthday

October 17, 2008

Rachel and I volunteered this afternoon with the Obama campaign for a couple hours. We met downtown, learned a few of the rules about canvassing door-to-door and we headed out to Springfield. We headed pretty deep into Springfield, actually.

With all that’s been going on between the current Wall Street bailout and the election I’ve been thinking a lot about where I stand on “the issues”. We need a major change in the direction this country is headed. We’re not in our current state of recession because of some bad luck, we got here because of the last eight years of poor decision making by the Republicans. They’ve proven that turning a blind eye to the financial sector doesn’t work. They’ve proven that without a solid plan (or any plan for that matter) we can’t fight a war we aren’t prepared for. And they’ve proven most of all that caring for the top 1% leaves the remaining 99% of us is awful shape.

We knocked on 26 doors today and by the end of our list Rachel and I were pretty depressed. We weren’t asked to talk to any Republicans - just Democrats, Independents, Greens and those not affiliated with any parties - and we only came across five people that had decided to vote for Senator Obama. We walked through the very neighborhood that would benefit from Obama’s tax cuts and saw kids playing that would have a chance thanks to Obama’s early childhood education and college tuition assistance credits. The school vouchers that President Bush has wanted and McCain continues to propose would do nothing positive for these kids.

I’m voting for Obama because I believe it is the government’s job to care for all its members, not just the President’s friends. Providing better education and assistance to those in need will make this place better for everyone. I see this as a very crucial election. Do we want four more years of what we got in the last eight or do we want real, honest change that will put this country back on track?

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Tags: obama, politics

September 28, 2008

When Buzz opened to all publishers last night I decided to throw together a Wordpress plugin to easily put Buzz badges on my blog. I then and put up a quick tweet announcing the plugin. Pat tried it out and put up a post about Buzz and the plugin. A few other blogs picked up the plugin, too. I finally created a page for the plugin tonight so people could link back to a page with updated info on the plugin. I also updated the plugin tonight with a much-improved admin page and a few more configuration options. Check it out.

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August 19, 2008

Despite my lack of updates here, I’ve been having a great summer. If you follow me on Twitter this will all be old news and if you don’t follow me there you should.

Summer kicked off with me and Rachel getting a puppy. Crusher is a Boston terrier / chihuahua mix. He’s only five pounds, but has a big personality. He’s fitting in to our family very nicely.

Softball and basketball were both very successful this summer. Our softball team finished 2nd and I think I had at least 10 home runs. Dunkamite also finshed 2nd. We lost our first game and won out the rest of the season. We had a stretch of three games that we won by 80, 60 and 40 points.

We went to the Oregon Country Fair again and it was as interesting as ever. We brought along a few first timer friends and their reactions were mixed. I always enjoy it but can only take a few hours of it before I need to get home and return to my everyday life.

Other than that, my summer has been filled with work. Lots and lots of work. I haven’t been traveling much which has been a welcomed change. I have really enjoyed working on such an ambitious project. I really like working for a company that I believe in. I think yahoo is doing lots and lots of things right - across all parts of the company - and I can’t wait to see it all come together.

My parents are coming out to visit us in a couple weeks and I think we’re going to try to plan a camping trip before summer escapes us.

I’m posting this from my phone without proofreading what I’ve written. Just roll with the typos and I’ll try to fill in a few links tonight.

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Tags: life

August 17, 2008

I’ve been running the iPhone 2.0 software for a couple weeks and think apple has definitely improved their mobile phone offering, but I have some issues with the entire platform.

I was most excited for the new apps to be able to use my current location. I was hoping for social applications to take advantage of this feature and none of the ones released so far have gained the critical mass necessary. For instance, I’m on loopt and have half a dozen friends but only one has updated their location in the last couple days. I also check twinkle a couple times a day for tweets within 10 miles of me and it’s always the same few people writing. I think yelp will be pretty cool when I go somewhere outside of Eugene, but I don’t really consider it a social app.

Is anyone using any good iPhone social apps that have a solid user base yet?

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Tags: iphone

July 23, 2008

I’ve been trying hard to figure out the right mix between posting here and on Twitter. Over the past few months I’ve clearly been giving preference to the latter. This morning I discovered the wordpress iPhone app that looks to be a pretty good tool to post to this blog from by phone. We’ll see if that helps my output here any.

The app even integrated nicely with photos from the phone.

I’m going to try and post more here for those that don’t care about every last detail I share on Twitter. Maybe I’ll even start with a little blogging from the bench tonight as Dunkamite takes on whoever is next.

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Tags: iphone

July 22, 2008

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June 8, 2008