WinterFest (2012)

Bend WinterFestIf you’re looking for something to do this weekend, you’re in luck: this year’s WinterFest starts tomorrow, and spans four days of activities down in the Old Mill District (from the 16th through the 19th)—and frankly there’s so much going on I’m not even sure where to start. So instead I’ll just copy the links to all the different things on their event details page:

The only drawback is that it’s been such a warm winter so far that I hope it works out for them—the snow and ice sculptures especially. On the other hand, the Polar Plunge should be easy this year!

Posted in Events | Tagged Winterfest | Leave a comment

Deschutes’ Chocolate Beer Dinner rescheduled

Heads up to anyone who was planning on attending Deschutes Brewery’s Chocolate Beer Dinner event tomorrow night (February 11th)… they’ve rescheduled it to Saturday, March 10th. I don’t know a specific reason but this gives you a chance to attend if you couldn’t make it tomorrow!

Posted in Beer | Tagged Deschutes Brewery | Leave a comment

Ignite Bend 8 Speakers and Tickets

Ignite BendThe speakers for Ignite Bend 8 were announced yesterday, and online ticket sales are going on “sale” today at noon! Here are the details (from the press release):

Justin Iverson – What is Ignite? Lisa Flynn – Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Do These Big Girl Panties Make My Butt Look Big? A Fairy Tale for Our Modern Age Timmy Crawford – I’ve Got 99 Cents and Not Going to Give You One Spencer Dahl – Mirror Pond: History and Future? Kelly Pofahl – The Secret Life of Metaphors Rachel Wente-Chaney – Broncs, Barrels, Bulls, and Beer {Rodeo for Beginners} Amanda Stuermer – Inspire Me… In Search of the True Source of Inspiration Dan Gilmour – The Slow Way Across America and the Slow Way Home ShanRae Hawkins – Austin Powers Said It James Jaggard – Lichens: A Breath of Fresh Air Sean Anderson – Roundabout Etiquette

General admission tickets for Ignite Bend 8 are free and will be available at www.ignitebend.com beginning at noon on February 10, 2012, and at the door beginning at 6:30 PM the night of the event. Ignite Bend 8 will also be webcast live thanks to our multimedia partner, The Media Geeks. Presentations may also be selected for inclusion in the O’Reilly “Ignite Show†which highlights a different talk from Ignite events around the world for weekly broadcast at their site.

Volunteers are needed to help Ignite Bend run smoothly. Please contact Greg Bolt (volunteers@ignitebend.com) if you wish to help at the event on February 23, 2012.

And, an additional note about tickets: last time, they sold out really quickly, and a lot of people missed out, so we’ve reworked how the ticketing will go this time around. (Disclosure: I’m on the Ignite Bend Committee and I’m handling ticketing.) To make it as fair to folks as possible, we’ve scaled back the ticket limit to 2 per email address (this will be in effect on the EventBrite page), and have a few more available this time around.

And, we want people to know that even if you don’t get a ticket online, we’re reserving 20 tickets to give out at the door—so if you don’t get an online ticket, come down to the Tower anyway. The first 20 people will be guaranteed entry with the reserve tickets, and for the rest we’ve never yet run out of seats—so even if you don’t get the online tickets or a reserved ticket, we should be able to get you in. (The only caveat is that it’s first-come, first-served, so prime seats will be taken already.)

So come on down—we’ll do our best to get you in!

Posted in Events, Free | Tagged Ignite Bend | 1 Comment

Typhoon! is closed

Typhoon!Of course the big news over the weekend is that downtown Bend’s Typhoon! Thai restaurant closed—and in fact all five of their locations are closed. It had been rumored that something like this was happening, and news hit over the weekend on Twitter first (I believe Shannon twittered it first that we saw). KTVZ followed up with a detailed story on the closing(s), which cited the death of its co-founder last year and a state labor investigation against the restaurant for alleged civil rights violations.

And the Bulletin’s article yesterday further answered another question I was wondering about: Bo Restobar, the other restaurant run by Typhoon’s owner Bo Kline, is also closed—and the restaurant was just around the corner from Typhoon, also in the Franklin Crossing building.

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New Hack Bend calendar

If you’ve gone to the Hack Bend Calendar recently, you may have noticed some changes: I’m in the process of switching it over to a new calendar app (a WordPress blog plugin) and moving away from Google Calendar.

Not that there was anything wrong with Google Calendar (and you can still access that one here for the time being), it’s an amazing resource and easy to use. But this new calendar gives some more flexibility that I wish Google would offer, namely:

Events are listed by category, and you can filter to only show a specific category (or categories) on the calendar; Automatic lookup of addresses on the admin side, and integration with Google Maps (of course Google offers this, but I have the option of turning it off); More logical event entry, able to break out fields like price and contact infomation separate from the main content.

And, this new calendar lets you add it to your own Google Calendar, or subscribe to events in your own (other) calendar app—look for the “Subscribe” buttons to do so.

I’ve not pulled over any event history from Google, though, so the events on the calendar are only for February 2012 going forward. And at some point I’d like to integrate an easy-to-use event submission form for people to offer up their own events.

Take a look, let me know what you think!

Posted in Events, Hack Bend | 2 Comments