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About The Bulletin. (Bend, OR) 1963-current | View Entire Issue (Jan. 10, 2021)
INSIDE: DEAR ABBY, HOROSCOPE, PUZZLES & FEATURES C1 B USINESS THE BULLETIN • SUNDAY, JANUARY 10, 2021 bendbulletin.com/business Central Oregon business Financially fragile Local businesses struggle, sacrifice in order to survive the pandemic Rita Dunlavy works on straightening a piece of art on display at the Red Chair Gallery in Bend. BY SUZANNE ROIG • The Bulletin Ryan Brennecke/ The Bulletin G etting through the pandemic for The Red Chair Gal- lery required Rita Dunlavy to take a hard look at her finances. The owner of the downtown Bend gallery asked her- self some hard questions: Did she need property in- surance, utilities, the water cooler and the advertising items in her budget? Where could she cut and how could she keep her artists paying to display their art even though no customers were allowed inside? Dunlavy slashed her budget and emerged this summer with a cleaner, freshly painted gallery and a healthy budget that will enable the business to carry on for another year using the cash on hand. Businesses have faced the fear, the uncertainty and the doubt since the pandemic or they restructured and have emerged stron- ger, reshaping their business. Still others have failed to stay afloat. “I have enough cash stashed aside that I’m confident that unless we completely close down or go to only by appointment, we can last another year,” Dunlavy said. “By the end of January, we plan to have online shopping on our website.” Red Chair Gallery in downtown Bend fea- tured the works of photographer Sue Dougherty, pictured, along with acrylics and monotypes by Michelle Lindblom during the month of June. Member art- ists also took pains to paint the group gal- lery’s walls during the spring 2020 closure. See Fragile / C8 Submitted photo The ‘Star Trek’ futuristic technology that exists today L ike many of you, I was a huge fan of the TV series “Star Trek” as a kid, and all the spin-offs as well. After a total of 726 episodes (including all the spin-offs), this ground-breaking series is forever tat- tooed on our collective consciousness. It’s creator, Gene Roddenberry, foresaw (or was the seed of) many of the technologies we use today. Star Trek influenced such luminar- ies as Bill Gates, who dressed up as Spock on stage to launch a new ver- sion of Windows. Other famous fans EDGE OF TECH By Preston Callicott (“Trekkies”) include famous tech CEO’s such as Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX, Boring Inc., Starlink, Neuralink) and Steve Wozniak (Apple). My favorite Trek- kie was Steven Hawking, the great physicist. He even starred in a “Star Trek – Next Generation” episode (“Descent, Part 1”), where he appeared as a com- puterized version of himself, the only guest star to appear as himself in the entire series. To be fair, nearly every- one in tech is a fan, because of its in- fluence on tech innovation. Here are some of the show’s futuristic technol- ogies that came to fruition. Communicator = cell phone Captain Kirk flips open what looks like an old Nokia flip-phone and talks to his crew. However, the mighty iP- hone or Galaxy can do so much more. You can thank a hardcore Trekkie fan, Martin Cooper. He was an engineer at Motorola when he decided to recreate Captain Kirk’s communicator, and he made the first cellular phone call on his invention in 1973. PADDS = laptops and iPads The Personal Access Display De- vices, (PADDs, HoloPADDs) were used by Starfleet and many alien races. Today, its progeny are laptop computer and iPads. Considering that the computers of that era were massive, football-field-sized behe- moths with very limited capabilities, the idea of a PADD was an amazing creative spark, well out of the realm of reality. Tricorder = handheld medical monitoring devices “Star Trek” grumpy doctor, McCoy (“Bones”), carried around a tricorder, which could diagnose all sorts of physical and mental illnesses. See Preston / C3