Matthew LaVelle’s weblog

So, I’m living with this guy right now and he’s been feeding this stray cat. His name is…well, he has no name, because he’s orphaned. Maybe. Anyway, the cat is in pretty bad shape. He’s mostly black with a bit bit of white and brown markings, I think. Actually, it’s kind of funny but I can’t really remember what Scruff’s markings look like. Of course, I’m not to good with details…as you may or may not know.

Oh yeah, and the cat’s name: Scruffy McFuckenutts. Born in Ireland, Scruffy imigrated to Roseburg at a young age and worked at local lumber mills through high school while supporting his two illegitimate children (like so many in Roseburg). We also call him Scrufenuffuless, which came from, well, I don’t quite remember where it came from. Me…details…bad. So, Mr. McFuckenutts has had a rough go at life, like many here in Douglas County. After a struggle with drugs and several failed relationships Scruffy found himself running from creditors. Before he knew it he was out on Pine street with Trixie and her twins turning tricks by day and sleeping passing out on the red, white and blue plastic chairs down at the local Greyhound station whenever it struck him convenient. It was rough times for the Scruffster.

So what does my friend do? He buys a bag of dry cat food and a few cans of wet cat food and mixes up a little breakfast lovin for the Scruff-o-matic almost every day. This cat, that walks like he’s been hit by a truck (or splayed out by a Roseburg Fatima), was probably like two seconds from the end of it’s miserable life when my friend, patroned saint of felines, started feeding her and in one fell swoop changed a life…forever.

He’s done way more than that for me, and I can be a pretty needy person. What’s he doing in Roseburg? I don’t even think he knows. But I know I appreciate him and everything he does for me. And everyone at work is lucky to know him.

It’s been a while. I know. I’ve got more meaningful posts coming, I promise. But until then it’s hot here and I’m at the local My Coffee cafe.

I’ve learned in my travels that there are many things in this country that can make you fat. Until my move to Roseburg there seemed to be a concentration of these fattenings in Texas. We here in the northwest however know how to fatten ourselves up with the rest of the United States. Coffee drinks are probably near the top of this NFL (Northwest Fat List) along with our microbrews and clam chowder. Read the rest of this entry »

For our first ever Creative Images Adventure club (CIA) we decided to go wine tasting! What’s a good way to hang out on friendly terms with the same people that you’ve spent the last 40 hours of your week with? Drunk, of course. So the CIA has been born, and it will serve as a plethora of uses for Creative Images:

• A great way for our team to have fun together and blow off steam


• Serves as a group way to experience all the stuff there is to do in the Umpqua valley


• A team building exercise that we can’t learn in the office


• Building friendships that will last


• Since the CIA is open to most people, it’ll be a great way for us to all meet new people outside of work

Our first stop was at 10am in the morning at the Zegers’ pad for brunch and a quick meet and greet for those of us who weren’t already aquainted. What a spread! Geno’s parental unit (Linda, which I now know and will ever remember her name) made two whole quiche. One with bacon and spinach, and the other with crab and mushrooms. Patrick and Karen brought a ginger cake, and the rest of us brought various fruit, muffins, olives, and cookies. So, we ate…a lot, and then took off down the road for Henry Estate, our first winery stop.

We hit Henry’s, and they were ready. Dan the man and Scott Henry were waiting for us and gave us a little tour of the facilities before we hit the collective bottles. I learned that not only is Henry Estate the largest producer of wine in the Umpqua Valley, but also that they will soon be almost doubling their production to 30,000 cases of wine this coming year! I also learned that Geno and Sherry really like their wine. They had a special that day where wine-goers could buy a case of Henry the fifth and receive an extra case of merlot. Geno and Beth took advantage of this deal and started the day by quickly becoming a couple of hundred dollars in the hole…for a good cause, of course! So then, after a few more tastes we made a quick hop over to Palotai Vineyards.

I’d never been to Gabor Palotai’s winery before so this was bound to be a treat. We called in advance to all of these places and let them know that we were coming. Being involved in my Dad’s winery up north I knew that there was still a chance that some of these places might not be prepared to handle a large group. But everyone on this day was well prepared (and stocked) for our visit. Gabor is hungarian by heritage and he gave us a very warm welcome and even turned on some traditional hungarian music when we stepped into his small winery that had a very homey feeling. Gabor poured quite a few different wines, which was surprising since he is a very small producer of around 1,000 cases per year. The way that he talked about his wines made me feel like he was very proud of them, and after tasting them I knew why. I bought three bottles of wine at this stop which included a bottle of Dolcetto, Bulls Blood (a Palotai favorite), and Meritage. Meritage was an interesting wine that was a bit harsh, but I bought a bottle for my Dad because I thought he might find it interesting. Meritage is a specific blend of 50% merlot, 40% cabernet sauvignon, and 10% cabernet franc. something had me thinking that this wine till taste great in six months. So everyone tasted and I think almost everyone bought wine from Gabor. We then headed on a bit of a trek over to Hillcrest Vineyards, the first registered winery in the state of Oregon.

Now Gabor warned us that Dyson, the owner of the small Oregon winery and vineyard, would know what he was talking about when it came to wine. Man does he have the gift for gab! I think Dyson is by far one of the most knowledgable people I have ever heard when it comes to wines and vineyards. He’s also one of the most opinionated. He did a great job of letting everyone know when something was his opinion and when something was a fact. By the end of his tour (and barrel tasting, which thanks to Sherry calling ahead, he set up for our group) we were all a bit smarter and wiser in the ways of winemaking. Hillcrest does their tastings a little different in that they taste their red wines first and then follow them with their whites. Dyson explained that not only was this historically the way most people used to do tastings, but that their white wines contained quite a bit more bite than most and that they would do fine following up their reds. And they did. All in all I think we spent the most time at Hillcrest. By the end of our stay there we were all practically begging Dyson to teach a class!

I can’t wrap up this post without giving everyone a little glimpse of our greatest companion Nash, who was about as excited on this day as he is with most things in life:

Some say he’s lazy…I think he just sniffed out some wine and had a little too much to drink! So in a nut shell that was the Creative Images Adventure Group’s first outing…a major success.

I’d had a particularly tough Monday at work today. Ten hours of work and then a little after 7pm I leave work and nature gives me something to smile about.

It’s been almost 15 years since the last time I used a Macintosh machine. I was raised a Windows baby like most of the rest of us. However, as of last week I’ve ended my three year quest of research and fund raising to finally get back to Mac. You can ask any of my friends and coworkers and they’ll be quick to back me up that the search has really been three years. Three very long, very annoying (especially for my coworkers) years. In fact, the only thing more annoying than my search for an affordable Mac has been trying to find a weak spot in Apple’s pricing matrix.

I’d love to meet some of the people that price out the current, refurbished, and sale items on Apple’s website. Talk about having a lock on pricing, sheesh! I’m quickly reminded of a couple of months ago when a good friend called me all excited about some department store going out of business. His excitement ended up being warranted in that he had found some 30 gig video iPods on sale at a liquidation sale for $240! $60 off! I mean, that has to be the best deal I’ve ever seen on an Apple product. And it literally takes a store going out of business to be able to discount it’s merchandise that much.

Anyway, enough about Apple’s pricing matrix and their ability to hold on to a key niche in the professional computer users market. I have, finally, bought my Mac and although it’s an older refurbished model iBook, it’s mine! And, I’m loving it so far for several reasons. Reasons? What reasons? I’m oh so glad you asked:

• Superior industrial design: Until recently I was using a Toshiba Satellite notebook. Although Toshiba does make a nice notebook machine, it’s no where near as cool looking as my iBook. Two obvious points goes to Apple for the coffee shop/cafe factor.


• OS 10.4 Tiger: Windows XP may as well rollover and play be dead…seriously. That OS/kernal/NTFS is in dear need of an overhaul. There are too many things to list them all here, but the fact that programs can run independent of the operating system alone puts OS X miles ahead of the competition. Score. Apple.


• Dashboard: Ok, at first, I thought “Oh great, a collection of memory hogging programs that runs at startup!”. Although Dashboard does hog a bit of memory it is a very neat little widget board. At a glance, I can check my ever-fluctuating Google stock, where the cheapest petrol in town can be found, search for something on Google, and post a quick weblog entry through WordPressDash. Muy bueno, Manzana.


• iCal: As Apple boasts on it’s website there are over 200 new features in OS 10.4, so I still have a lot of exploring to do. So far the most Ubercool tool I’ve found has to be iCal. I’ve played with Microsoft Outlook a little bit in Windows world (just enough to make me want to open up my PC case and take an ice pick to the motherboard) but it’s not intuitive and doesn’t let me handle events, alarms, and to-do lists the way I want to use them. So, until recently I’ve been using 37signals Back Pack web application. A great application, to be sure, but I’ve gotten so entrenched in iCal that I’ll be using that program from here on out.


• Quartz Extreme: OS 10.4 features a graphics rendering system that provides superior anti-aliasing of fonts to any other operating system. Apple has harnessed the power of the OpenGL to render surfaces in OS X. Quartz 2D works to render screen fonts, images and the Aqua UI to show off the best looking group of pixels you’ll ever see in an operating system.

So that about sums up my first 10 days worth of experience with Apple’s OS X and my new iBook. The only thing I have left to do is go buy some stock in AAPL.