Category: Seattle

My inlaws came in yesterday and we had a great relaxing outdoor dinner with them (though it started to get pretty cold toward the end of the evening). We’ll be doing some fun things with them (when we aren’t working) over the next few days, and then they’ll keep Lisa company while I fly East for the family reunion and Rough & Tumble.

I was a bit panicked earlier tonight; I came home and the Power and PC Connection lights on the cable modem were blinking in sequence, then stopping, then restarting. Usually a sign that someone somewhere has screwed up my cable modem service. Tonight that would have been a very bad thing. No video chat with Lisa and her folks, potentially a full day of Weblogs.com data missed, no blogging tonight…

After a bit, I stopped hyperventilating, called Lisa the old fashioned way on the phone, watered the garden, ate dinner, and watched a bit of This Old House. When I picked up the computer later, everything was working again. Bliss!

Hanging out
In the street
The same old thing
We did last week
Not a thing to do
But blog and try to parse XML

…er, something like that.…

And for once I don’t mean that literally. After a somewhat frustrating day at the office, I got home and got the following done:

1. Conducted our first two way video chat with my in laws and Lisa (who airlifted a new iSight camera out to them).
2. Talked Lisa through using the DVD player on their computer to watch the DVD I made from last year’s Italy trip footage—my first iDVD project, and done in about four hours start to finish, including screening over an hour of footage to pick the least motion inducing clips; building the DVD menu including chapter headings; and burning the disc.
3. Figured out how to use our MiracleGro dispenser to allow me to feed and water 30 tomato plants in less than ten minutes
4. Figured out why my cron script to download changes.xml from Weblogs.com wasn’t working—see next post for details.

Plus a variety of things around the house. And I’ve only been home an hour and a half.

I know this won’t last and by Thursday I’ll be moping around again, but it’s nice to be up to speed for a change.

I just saw Lisa off to the airport for another week of business on the East Coast. If past trips are any indication, this will be another low sleep week for me. Expect insane raving by Thursday.

Just kidding. It is going to be a monster week at the office, though.

Or mini vacation, anyway. Lisa and I both took today off from work to get a few things done around the house before she leaves for the east coast for the rest of the week tomorrow, and I took off from the blog this weekend. We drove out to the Olympic Peninsula yesterday; spent some time at Lake Crescent. Good time, really. Not a lot else to say.

The word yesterday and today was get the heck out of the house. So we drove to Mt. Rainier, through construction around Tacoma (it has never taken two hours to get to the south of Tacoma before. Don’t want to go through that again). There were, naturally, some compensating factors, like driving through a gap and finding Riffe Lake spread before us like a far flung arm of the Mediterranean.

But finding parking at Paradise? For the birds. And finding out just how out of shape I was as I huffed and puffed my way up the hill was no picnic either. Two thoughts kept running through my head: “I’ve got to get out from behind that desk more often and exercise” and “Thank God that Jim Heaney is there to hike the Appalachian Trail for me so I can live vicariously through him.” But finding the world spread out below me and around me—ringed about by impossibly craggy peaks, a meadow at my feet for miles around filled with the most beautiful flowers…and that giant heaving glaciers into the sky until fully half my vision was blue ice and brown dirt… totally worth it.

Today we got up early and drove down to the Agua Verde Paddle Club in the U-District to meet Arvind and Kim. We kayaked down through the Cut, past the shores of the Arboretum, through the lily pads in bloom, past ducks, waterfowl, an elegant blue heron, and even a startled beaver, before returning back to the dock. A quick lunch at Mama’s (since Agua Verde’s café wasn’t open), a stroll through the Market for tomatoes, basil, a whole Alaskan salmon cut into steaks for us at $4.99 a pound, and an enormous bouquet of gladiolas and we were back home…napping. So much for adventures.

I’m not the closest follower of state politics out here in Washington. (After all, neither is the local media—a far cry from Boston’s baying news hounds.) But I was a little surprised that Gary Locke declared that he will not seek a third term as Governor of Washington yesterday. It leaves me wondering about his next act. Senator? His profile is a little too low to throw his hat into
the presidential ring for 2004.

I will note that coming from eight years of governing a state with one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation might make it a little difficult to do battle against Republican opponents on the national stage.

Esta pointed to this WaPo article identifying a potential genetic cause of post-traumatic depression; if you lack the gene, the studies’ authors say, “traumatic experiences are like falling off a bicycle, but genes determine whether the person is wearing a helmet.”

I can’t say that I find that analogy especially compelling, though I will note that during depressed times I find my brain function slowed, almost as if I’ve been trepanned. No, that’s not quite right; more like someone has put a felt barrier between my thoughts and myself.

Had a really good time last night at the Meetup. Beth Goza did, indeed, attend, and I was more than a little surprised and chagrined to learn she worked in the same building I do. I really outta check that directory more often.

Had a great talk with Jerry Kindall. We were comparing stats engines, and we noticed that we both saw exactly one hit from the meetup listing today. He said, “We should pool our logs and track people’s hits from one Seattle blog to another.” I pointed out that you’d need comparable data from every log, and it wouldn’t work well if one person had Apache logs and another had SiteMeter. I then suggested that someone ought to implement a tracking pixel beacon and host it on a central location like Seablogs, so we could get fun stats like “how many readers of one Seablog read more than one.” I was mostly joking. Of course you’d have to make sure that the web bug couldn’t be cached. And to make it worthwhile, we would really have to make the stats consumable and publishable by everyone.

The evening wouldn’t be complete without the obligatory “huddle round the gadget.” Beth had brought a Tablet, and at one point we realized that we had three Nokia 3650s at a table of 10 people. But of course it all ends up around the PC:

Almost forgot: Jake has the full list of attendees with links.

A coffee under my belt, a little jagged on caffeine. And already I see what Jake meant about the volume of the music.

Looks like it will be a good turnout tonight for the Seattle blog meetup—and for once I won’t be the only Microsoft blogger there. It’ll be good to meet Beth Goza, who’s legendary for having her blog picked on by people all over the blogosphere. Probably because they made the same mistake that everyone does. Just because you’re a Microsoft blogger—or employee for that matter—doesn’t mean you’re any less an individual.

It will also good to see Anita and crew again, although I’ll have to leave a little early to pick up Lisa at the airport.

Just returned from taking Lisa to the airport for a five-day East Coast visit. I’ll be batching it for a few days while she does some work with her boss in New York and helps her parents get set up with a new G4 iMac (the 15″ model, not the 17″ one). I will hopefully be home in time to test out Timbuktu Pro—we’re really hoping we can use it to provide better remote support than we can offer unaided over the phone. (Too many of our conversations with her parents go, “Okay, now click the Apple menu… yeah, the one in the upper left corner… What did you say you saw?” and then we find out fifteen minutes later that what we thought was the problem was really something else entirely, and that although her mother had given an accurate description of the problem, we had heard something else. How I was ever able to do tech support with my limited skills I’ll never know.)

The rest of the weekend? Well, Pernice Brothers tonight, yardwork and hang out with some friends tomorrow—and maybe get a chance to catch up on a few DVDs that have been sitting around waiting for a quiet weekend. Plus hopefully finish reading Dhalgren, which if anything is underhyped.

With Esta off to Louisville with my mom for the Presbyterian Women’s Gathering, and with the rest of the blogosphere seemingly paralyzed by the summer heat, it’s a quiet week in my aggregator. At home it’s been a little more frantic; Lisa leaves tomorrow for a pleasure-n-business East Coast trip, I’ve been consumed with my new role at work, and we’re trying to finish getting all the new ground cover planted before it gets really hot.

So go check out Greg’s blog, where it looks like some things are actually happening—like trying to start up both a group blog about Atlanta living, and a group blog devoted to Southern politics. Plus, he’s really been tearing the administration several new ones over the revelation that the President cited bogus “proof” about Iraq’s purchases of uranium from African nations during the State of the Union as justification for the war, and other acts of high stupidity.

I have my tickets for the Pernice Brothers, Friday night at the Tractor Tavern. Anyone else on the Seattle blog circuit going? Could be a fun evening in Ballard.

We spent some time yesterday in the Bellevue Botanical Gardens, which were more impressive than I would have believed. With a dedicated ground cover garden, a low-water-use garden, and a huge array of perennial flowers and trees, the gardens were gorgeous. I got a few pictures with my phonecam. Unfortunately, I didn’t get a picture of Ciscoe, who was there prepping for a show and looking over the garden. Actually, it was probably just as well.