Category: Seattle

I tried to post something from Houston, but I lost my draft. Just as well; I was teed off about the funky Internet access there—a Wayport access point with no DHCP, and a four-point access station that offered paid wired connections but no wireless connections—and that would have you swipe your credit card to pay for an electrical connection.

But all of that is irrelevant, since I’m home now. I’m sorry I wasn’t able to spend the rest of the week with my relatives and my uncle’s friends, but getting to spend the rest of it with Lisa more than makes up for it.

Discovered through my referrers today: Seablogs, a Seattle Weblogs Portal. I appear to be included (though not with my RSS link).

I’m missing a charity pub crawl in Kirkland today (no direct URL because I’m disconnected, but Google will find it handily). A shame, because I would love to learn more about my neighbors and the businesses in my new home town, and the pub crawl would be a great way to do it. (It also seems like a really smart way to drum up local business in a recessed economy.)

Blogdex to the rescue: next time I want a pub crawl, it looks like I can try using the Up My Street Pub Crawl service to put my own together.

…to welcome Tara (of Cairine.org) to Kirkland. Looks like a lot of lawn to take care of… which reminds me, there are some dandelions I haven’t killed yet in ours…

I scored some great tickets for the Mariners from a co-worker last week (thanks, Kathy!), for today’s game. It turned out to be a gorgeous afternoon in Seattle: mid-sixties, no humidity, sunny with patchy clouds in an enormous blue sky. The Mariners were up four-three at the top of the eighth, we had just had finished hot dogs and beer and were working on garlic fries and peanuts.

Then someone’s back went into spasm. (I knew that trying to dig in soaker hoses right before the game was a bad idea.) We got everyone home, appropriate backs were medicated, and feet were propped up. Now chips, salsa, tea, and relaxation.

I think someone was trying to send us a message about the proper use of Sunday afternoons. Relaxation is key right now.

Drove into work this morning in my wife’s car. She’s taking my in-laws down to Mt. St. Helens, which is about a two and a half hour drive, so we figured she should have the newer, bigger car. This makes the second time she’s driven my car, the first being yesterday, so I hope everything goes well for her.

In the meantime, instead of my 2003 Passat, I have Lisa’s 1993 Geo Prizm. (Insert your own Will Smith Men in Black II reference here. (Number of hits Google returns for the query “old and busted” “new hotness”: 228.))

But I think it’s a pretty good day. The sun is shining, I just lined up plane tickets to see my family in a little under two weeks, it’s Friday, and despite the funk on my MP3 player there’s another silly song running through my head:

Was a sunny day
Not a cloud was in the sky
Not a negative word was heard
From the people passing by
’Twas a sunny day
All the birdies in the trees
And the radio’s singing song
All the favorite melodies

He was a Navy man
stationed in Newport News
She was a highschool queen
with nothing left to lose
She was a highschool queen
with nothing left to lose

Her name was Lorelei
She was his only girl
She called him “Speedoo”
But his Christian name was Mister Earl
She called him “Speedoo”
But his Christian name was Mister Earl

The Register: “Washington State to ban sales of violent games to minors.” Retail employees who sell violent games, particularly games featuring violence against women or police officers, will be subject to heavy fines. Guess high schoolers playing Grand Theft Auto is out.

It’ll be interesting to see the enforcement strategy on this one. Could a clerk selling Diablo II to a 17 year old be in violation? (The game has women, albeit demonic women, as bosses—major villains—in at least two dungeons.) Where’s the line? They can’t just profile GTA, unless they want to get sued by the makers of the game.

I’ve only been posting in fits and spurts for the past week, and I think I know why: I’ve had a ton of deadlines that have kept me from writing anything good (even when I wanted to); and whenever I want to write something in the morning, the specter of the war raises its head and makes me want to write something else. Anything else.

I need to write something most days to jump start my brain, but writing about the war, or about the domestic and international politics that surround it, either enrages or depresses me most days. I’ll keep working on it. If history is any indication, I’ll suddenly have a bunch to say after I finish my next deadline.

Lots of things going on this week that will probably keep my blogging to a minimum. While I’m sidelined, check out any of the fine folks in the blogroll.

1. No matter how wet and nasty the previous night was, I’ve been waking up each morning to sunlight and a world washed clean. There’s a bit of a wet green glow everywhere I drive. (Never mind that much of it might be dandelions.)
2. I discovered the world’s scariest parking lot in downtown Kirkland last night: not in terms of violence but just in terms of gravity. The lot is on a steep (about 40°) hill, and rather than have the cars park with noses facing toward the bottom of the hill, they have the spaces along the contour of the hill, so that the parked cars have their drivers side about two feet lower than the passenger side. I swear, I was afraid the car was going to tip over on me as I got out. Pictures soon.

New York Times: “Pacific Northwest keeps watch on many vulnerable points.” In which it is pointed out that a state with 2400 miles of shorefront and a long, forested international border might have a lot to worry about from terrorism, even were it not in the midst of a massive economic crisis that makes adequate staffing of security posts impossible.

Makes me wonder whether the two healthy businesses in town—Microsoft and Starbucks—could find a way to step up and help the private sector.

It’s concert week again, and there are lots of rehearsals all week. The Cascadian Singers are doing an ambitious program of song in the Bellevue Art Museum on Saturday night, called “Doppelgängers,” where the concept is that we alternate between different settings of the same text. I think there are five or six “Doppels” in the concert, most in the first half with liturgical texts around the Byrd Mass for Five Voices (though there are two really cool settings of the Pater noster at the end of the first half, including the most chant-like Stravinsky I’ve ever sung). The concert is also the premiere of the winners of our annual composition contest, including a very cool setting of some Blake poetry and a new setting of the text of “The Silver Swan.”

It’ll be a very cool program and well worth the travel to the east side (hint, hint, all you Seattle bloggers!!).

To get there, though, I have two more long rehearsals. Thank goodness Lisa is out of town this week or she’d be really grumpy with me.

—Except that today I turned down a job as a tenor section lead in a local choir because it would take up too much family time. Does that balance it out? Probably not.

Heard on our NPR station’s local news update this morning: with the USS Carl Vinson carrier group deployed, many businesses in Bremerton, WA are shortening their hours and laying off employees. Another news story estimated there are as many as 19,000 military dependents in the Northwest.

I am currently burning off some consultancy karma. Or to look at it another way, I’m getting paid back for every time I misunderstood a client’s requirements and delivered something they didn’t ask for, couldn’t use, and wouldn’t pay for.

My job is to define business requirements (from the perspective of the marketing team where I sit) for various internally-facing tools. Today I had someone from the IT group on the phone explaining to me that, in the course of developing the estimate for building one of these tools, they had scoped the effort as including a data warehouse, OLAP capabilities, and a custom report builder. “!!!!” I replied. “All we really want is some easy reports with standard parameters. And the data set only has four dimensions; how the heck could we even get anything out of an OLAP cube?”

“Oh,” came the reply. “That’s good; that should drive the estimate down quite a bit.”

Sigh. I know I’ve done the same thing more than once to my old customers, but it doesn’t make me feel any happier. It still feels like a game of telephone.

We saw Shel, Vik and Kris off a few hours ago. We spent today at Stevens Pass. The snow was granular to icy, but still plenty ski-able, if you don’t mind the occasional slip. Lisa and I chickened out: no snowboards for us. Instead we spent the day on blue runs until we accidentally strayed onto a black diamond that wasn’t clearly posted. After that it was back to the bunny slopes to hang out with our friends (and continue to be thankful we were still alive).