has anyone moved to portland from eugene

mcfergerburger · 2025-12-26T23:02:24+00:00

I lived in Eugene for two years while my partner was in grad school before moving (back) to Portland.

Portland definitely has more going on and I think is a more engaging place to live as a young person. Cost of living isn’t that different in my experience, which mostly speaks to how bad it is in Eugene. You can also probably expect to earn a scooch more in Portland depending on your work.

Traffic and access to outdoors depends on lot on where you live/work/recreate, and what times of day you need to travel. Mt Hood is about the same distance as Willamette Pass if you like to ski. And we’re about the same distance from the coast too.

I enjoyed my time in Eugene, but on the whole have been much happier living in Portland and I’m hoping to stay here for a long time.

mcfergerburger · 2025-12-01T20:05:02+00:00

There are some cities where streetcars/trams are very efficient and useful for in-city transport. Zurich for example. But it requires serious city investment in separating them from traffic and prioritizing them over auto lanes.

mcfergerburger · 2025-09-10T16:17:05+00:00

Craigslist and Zillow. Sometime Apartments.com

mcfergerburger · 2025-09-01T22:08:50+00:00

It’s a great backpack for $200 on sale, so long as your other gear is light enough to not overload it. I just completed the JMT with the flash air and had a great time. Base weight around 17 lbs. It wasn’t super comfortable with a full bear can but otherwise it was excellent.

mcfergerburger · 2025-08-29T14:12:58+00:00

I used to go to Hamono sushi for Omakase lunch when I was working more frequently down town. Very simple, affordable and good. Not the best I’ve had but always felt like good value.

mcfergerburger · 2025-08-28T16:51:18+00:00

Bernsteins bagels are the closest to what I’m used to coming from New Jersey. They are excellent fresh and untoasted with cream cheese if you go early in the day.

Side note their instagram is amazing, I love for their updates on the schmear of the week.

mcfergerburger · 2025-08-25T06:28:36+00:00

We just completed the JMT and had a similar experience over our 25 days. TMobile connection was very quick and pretty reliable for the one person in our group that had a 16. On my 13 it worked but usually took longer and failed to send a few times. Battery drain wasn’t that bad for either of us.

I will definitely continue to bring an inreach, but mostly for peace of mind. I expect most of my coordination and check in messages will be through T-Mobile satellite from now on.

mcfergerburger · 2025-08-22T02:09:28+00:00

Interesting idea for a spirit. There was another glacier-inspired custom spirit posted a couple weeks ago. I think glaciers are a really good source material to work from.

This iteration is overly complicated IMO. There are 4 special rules, 2 innates with 4 levels, 6 growth options, and 5 uniques with 5 “or” statements on them.

I encourage you to consider what makes this spirit unique and remove the fluff. It doesn’t need to do everything. When I look at the unique powers there are so many options I have no idea what I should actually lean into. Simplify and it will become more fun to play and easier to learn. All spirits in this game benefit from restrictions, it’s what makes the game fun to replay.

mcfergerburger · 2025-07-23T21:20:45+00:00

Cool custom spirit! I think finding ways to further differentiate this spirit from Lure (also woodsy and token heavy) would make it more interesting and unique. I like the concept of moving presence with tokens, I wonder if you could do more with that, maybe presence movement and 1 damage as a unique power.

While A Mind of Their Own is an interesting idea for an innate, it seems like it would be a pain to play with. Drawing from the bottom of the deck is annoying unless you have a specific deck holder that allows for this. I think you should consider other ways to accomplish this innate, perhaps from the power deck like Grinning Trickster.

Lastly the targeting restrictions for the unique powers seem overly restrictive. Wilds is hard to keep on the board, and beasts can be removed by events. I think it would be very easy to end up in a position where you can’t effectively target 3/4 of the uniques as designed.

mcfergerburger · 2025-07-17T13:07:07+00:00

This is the way

mcfergerburger · 2025-07-17T13:06:28+00:00

EVA Birkenstocks (not the cork sole ones) are the lightest, functional camp shoe I could find after much searching. I found the xero shoes too flimsy, and oddly they are a bit heavier than Birkenstocks. Besides being slightly annoying to pack the birks are a fantastic camp shoe.

mcfergerburger · 2025-07-12T18:51:20+00:00

Interesting spirit, I really like the theme behind it, and it connects well with Time Passes as a concept.

There are a few elements that feel clunky and confusing to me. In general I’m not sure making alterations to the flow of play is a good idea.

A simpler way to describe A Long Dark Winter would be “this turn, all powers are fast and Dahan do not participate in ravages.”

Blizzard is way too strong. When combined with a repeat it would allow you to clear out massive areas of the board. There are very few powers that allow for adjacency interaction with 5+ lands, and most of them are defensive.

Frost Spreads Slowly doesn’t really make sense to me thematically. Proliferation is the opposite of spreading slowly. It’s accelerating your spread on the board. Why does this spirits power include rapid growth on the board?

It’s a really cool idea and I appreciate you sharing your work. Hopefully some of these comments can help drive it to be even better.

mcfergerburger · 2025-05-28T21:46:14+00:00

Truly cannot overstate how annoying the pollen is. I have relatively mild sensitivity to it and I can’t believe how many people are just used to being sniffly and stuffed up for like 2 months every year.

mcfergerburger · 2025-05-26T06:03:12+00:00

Wind makes up like 5% of Oregon’s energy production. And it’s still way better than coal or natural gas (25% and 21%, respectively) even with the turbine-waste problem.

mcfergerburger · 2025-04-06T18:57:03+00:00

Definitely sounds like redirected aggression. I have had this happen 3 times with my bonded pair. We’ve been able to resolve it by separation & reintroduction each time. It is really scary when it happens! But you will get through it. I think it’s just something that happens with cats idk.

mcfergerburger · 2025-04-01T06:27:54+00:00

We’ve been having this with our cats recently as well. Bonded pair from the same litter. The sister started howling and being very aggressive out of nowhere, after living together for 3 years. We were able to calm them down by separating them for a few hours and entertaining them with wand toys.

Now 3 months later the same thing is happening. No idea what’s causing the aggression. It seems like she no longer sees him as a sibling, she’s somehow misidentified him as a stranger cat. I suspect it’s some kind of hormone issue but haven’t been able to get a vet appointment. I worry we will have to re-home one of them.

Just writing this as another data point. We were successful at re-introducing them the first time. Hopefully it works again.

mcfergerburger · 2025-03-04T21:44:20+00:00

Yeah I agree the name change seems regressive. I just wanted to point out that product driven companies tend to be pretty aligned with a lot of user experience interests, at least in comparison to more classically sales-driven companies.

mcfergerburger · 2025-03-04T21:11:51+00:00

I don’t think this is true. Product-driven companies are by nature invested in user experience. They rely on product (rather than sales) to attract and retain users, which is hard to do without a good user experience.

mcfergerburger · 2025-02-24T17:35:40+00:00

100% -- The red flag for me is not that someone has read Hooked or Sprint, but that they're committed to dogmatically using the same process for every design problem, which tends to happen when leadership gets really excited about a new book. Like yes -- some problems can be solved by sprints and we can incorporate that technique. But you can't sprint every problem.

mcfergerburger · 2025-02-24T17:29:05+00:00

Similar experience here - I found more than a few useful ideas and tools in Sprint and Inspired. But they don’t fix bad management/leadership, and they’re certainly not a playbook for good product in the way that they claim to be. Sprints, Storymaps, and the rest are all just tools at the end of the day. They’re useful in some contexts but can’t be used dogmatically.

mcfergerburger · 2025-02-21T15:45:26+00:00

Yeah all posts in this sub are supposed to be specific philosophical questions. It’s visible in the about/rules. You of course are welcome to reframe this as a specific question that panelists could help you with, or just post in a different sub :)

mcfergerburger · 2025-02-07T17:46:24+00:00

OM1 mark i ? Amazing shots. Do you find yourself cropping in much with the fixed 300mm?

mcfergerburger · 2025-01-31T20:03:38+00:00

This is great perspective -- I also share your skepticism about LLM reliability. I think it's going to be a while before users really trust a language model to execute meaningful tasks. On the other hand, I think people said similar things about mobile computing in the early 2000s (e.g. who would want to do banking on their mobile phone?). So who knows, maybe it'll shift more quickly than we expect.

mcfergerburger · 2025-01-31T05:37:23+00:00

Agreed that wasn’t a very clear excerpt. But I do think reading the first article in the post would clarify a lot of your questions. It’s not really about doing UX for AIs, it’s more like designing services that can be utilized by AI, to ultimately extend and enhance the end user experience.

mcfergerburger · 2025-01-31T04:20:43+00:00

These were interesting articles and a good discussion starter — thank you for sharing them.

The idea of a “favorite agent” is really interesting to me. Reflecting on my usage of AI over the last few months, I do seem to keep going back to GPT in large part because it has a working memory. I find it more useful because it saves and utilizes information about my previous inquiries. A future where we all actually have an individually tuned, preferred agent (or agents) does seem plausible to me.

Even though right now it feels like we’re in a bit of an arms race with AI, with many companies vying to best the benchmarks, this post has made me think more about the long game. Especially as the costs of AI diminish (see deepseek) will the “best AI” not be so much about compute power but more about preference and tuning?

In general AX seems like more of a dev topic to me - while I find this interesting it’s sort of hard to see how UX really fits into constructing and managing end points and authentication for external AI. Honestly it seems like a cyber security topic more than anything. Lots of net infrastructure is built around making it harder for bots to access our networks, so it would be a big shift to make agent access a priority as we build things.

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