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Figures on the first weekday I don’t have to be at work, and haven’t even set an alarm, I wake up at 05:40.
And wide-awake wake up, not just stir-and-doze-off-again wake up.
Ah well. I’ll get to see the sunrise! :-)
The day dawned clear and cold, which coincidentally describes my eyes as I stared down my now ex-boss when I handed her notice of my immediate resignation at 09:16.
Continue reading "I quit my job today" »
AIM IM with Katharine
11:30
Don: I didn’t hear my phone last night, but I wasn’t online either, so I didn’t look at the site you sent.. what was up?
Katharine: I wanted someone else to look to see if the match.com link was showing
Don: Were you working?
Katharine: No - but I promised one of the people who works on that site that if it wasn’t showing I would go in and work on it
Don: ah ha
Katharine: Can you see it?
Don: I deleted the message, I don’t remember what the site was
Katharine: latino.msn.com
Don: yep, it’s there
Katharine: Oh good.
Don: You can’t see it?
11:35
Katharine: No I can, but I was worried that it was cached and even though I cleared it all and checked it from 3 different computers...
Don: When you worry like that, it’s proof positive that your assimilation is complete
Don: You are now a Borg
Katharine: lol
Don: Mind if I post this exchange on my web site? It’s mildly amusing
Katharine: no go for it
Katharine: It’s even more amusing cuz my co-workers use the same terminology
Continuing a theme, some other words I’ve discovered Firefox 2 doesn’t know how to spell in its default (no-words-added-by-user) English configuration:
Hello, product line? Can we learn to spell our own names, please?
Downloaded Firefox 2 on both my PC at work and my Mac at home yesterday. So far I’m pleased with it, though in truth apart from the minor visual tweaks and the fact that it has a built-in spelling checker, it doesn’t seem much different to me.
Well, that’s not entirely true. It did disable several of my extensions, among them Tab Mix Plus which I’ve grown to adore for its handy tab-handling functions. But then I noticed many of the functions I liked in TMP are now built directly into Firefox, first among them the killer session-restore function (it reloads the tabs you had active if Firefox crashes), which is most prized for my PC at work.
So I’ve been using the spelling checker and it’s saved me a couple of times on stupid errors in email messages and whatnot, but I noticed tonight as I was doing some HTML editing on a couple of other posts here and on other sites that Firefox’s spelling checker doesn’t know how to spell many HTML tags. A lot of them, like blockquote and ul and pre, get the little dotted underline indicating Firefox thinks they’re misspelled.
Odd that a program so intertwined with HTML wouldn’t know how to spell so many of that language’s tag names.
Directory blog Boing Boing has a post about how Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team sent a cake to the Firefox team by way of congratulations on the launch of Firefox 2.
Boing Boing reader Fred has way too much time on his hands, as evidenced by an update to the post:
The IE-team cake looked suspicious, what with the irregular white and black marks. The conspiracy theorist in me made me think about Morse code. I saw in the comments on the original blog that some people had looked at it and that there is no obvious morse code there. I couldn't be bothered to write a perl script to parse it depending on the starting place and direction of the message (cw or ccw), but it sure looks like some kind of message. I see, starting top left going cw, 'S E S / A T / (D:N:B) (U:V:A) / T N' I assume that someone else could properly decode this, so I suggest sending this as a challenge to all the would-be cryptographers and lovers of codes. What message has the IE-team hidden in the icing on the Firefox cake?
Via Bug
“What’s the name of this medicine you gave me?”
“Allerclear.”
“Alloclear, got it.”
“Allerclear. Like ‘allergy’ and ‘clear’.”
“Oh, Allerclear. Got it. [pause] Tastes like happy.”
“[pause] I don’t think we’re taking the same drug anymore.”
News story on the radio as I drove to work this morning: 7-Eleven is pulling an energy drink called “Cocaine” (marketing: “The Legal Alternative”) off its shelves following complaints from parents that the product would encourage drug use among teenagers.
The newsies quoted a 7-Eleven spokeswonk as saying (paraphrased), “We don’t want to be associated with a product of that type.”
Which begs the question: How did such a product get onto 7-Eleven shelves in the first place? Surely it couldn’t be the usual corporate mantra—they were absolutely fine with the association until complaints and news coverage put them in the position of having to spin things.
I’m absolutely sure such a cynical take on the story is completely unwarranted.
There is a muscle atop my left leg, just above the knee, which has been twitching mildly for the last four hours or so. I first noticed it when I stirred awake just after 06:00.
It’s driving me insane. I know why it’s happening: Yesterday’s bout of nausea etc. left me entirely unwilling to eat anything, and I expect I’m experiencing a magnesium deficiency. The bunch of bananas sitting on my kitchen counter looked alternately delicious and horribly nasty yesterday so I stayed away from them all day.
If this keeps up I’ll end up running to the Top grocery in Woodinville for a banana or two, or maybe some cashews.
argh.
Freshly grilled fish of any kind
+ Wine in quantity (more than a couple glasses)
——————————————————————————
Writhing hideous gastric distress 12 hours later
Ablution music.
Song — Artist, Album
About music sharing
Music I'm willing to share is linked directly from this page. No link, no sharing—don't email asking for files.
So here’s a poser which I’m going to leave stuck to the top of the main page for a little while.
I use my iPod in playlist mode far more often than not. I have a slew of Smart Playlists defined by rating, play-count limits, days-since-played, and various other criteria, the idea being to make it easy to find some music that will fit my mood without having to define much in my iTunes library beyond the typical genres and ratings I assign to my songs.
Today I fired up my iPod for the first time in a few days. I saw I’d paused in the middle of The Fat Lady Sings’ “Arclight”, which was in turn about halfway through a 109-item playlist. So I just hit Play to finish the song and continue the list.
Then I wanted to see what other songs are in the active list, and that’s where I run into my problem. When I was listening to the iPod a couple days ago, I remembered I had also navigated all the way back from the song info screen to the top-level menu so I could look at other sections of the iPod’s functionality. I can get back to the song-info screen easily enough by navigating to the top-level menu and choosing the “Now Playing” item, easy enough.
The bigger problem, however, is there’s now no easy way (that I know of, anyway) to determine which playlist is active. I could go back through the menu structure, looking into all of the individual playlists for the telltale speaker icon that indicates the song that’s playing. But there are 50 or more playlists on this iPod; this would be a time-consuming and annoying way to figure out something that should be easy enough to find out.
This only occurred to me because I wanted to see what other songs are in this 109-item list, but the only way to do that is to skip back and forth among the songs since I can’t figure out an easy way to find the now-playing playlist. It’d be easy enough if the iPod also used the little now-playing speaker icon next to the playlist that was playing, but that doesn’t happen on my iPod.
Anyone know how this might be done more easily?
The Seattle Convention and Visitors Bureau unveiled their newest marketing campaign, an effort aimed at encouraging continued tourism in Seattle’s non-peak season.
They had to invent a stupid word to do it:
Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Seattle’s cold-weather tourism is heating up
Luring visitors to rain-swept city? Try conventions and a brand-new word
The clouds are rolling in, and the cruise ships are sailing out on their final voyages for the season. Ticket lines dwindle at the Space Needle just as foot traffic tapers off at Pike Place Market.
It’s the end of Seattle’s peak tourism season and the beginning of an annual challenge for the city’s marketing gurus: how to break through the national perception that this is a rain-drenched outpost and get people, and their money, to visit.
“Winter tourism is sort of interesting because locals think, ‘Why would anyone come to Seattle?’” said Seattle’s Convention and Visitors Bureau spokesman David Blandford. “But they do.”
Even as the weather changes, new hotels are popping up all over downtown, and room bookings are setting records.
In fact, officials plan to announce today a new marketing campaign that will serve as Seattle’s image to the world, bureau President and Chief Executive Don Welsh said Thursday. It took about a year to develop and cost $200,000, he said.
The bureau will spend $300,000 promoting the brand, which includes a newly invented word—“metronatural”—and the concept of a metropolis juxtaposed against natural beauty, Welsh said.
The trademarked word will replace the current logo designed in 1999, which features an eyeball, the @ symbol and the letter L. (See-@-L.)
In the gray months, Portlanders and Vancouverites stay overnight to see the opera, cheer on some football and holiday shop. But even those vacationers aren’t enough to close the seasonal tourism gap.
Instead, the city fills its hotels in autumn by selling conventions and marketing the Washington State Convention and Trade Center, a hulking state-owned building on the corner of Seventh Avenue and Pike Street.
Since it was built using public bond money in 1988, the convention center has grown to become one of Seattle’s tourism staples, last year contributing $13.5 million in revenue to the state. In 2005, the center’s 507 events drew almost 400,000 attendees.
That’s why the biggest portion of the tourism bureau’s $8.2 million operating budget is spent selling meetings and conventions. It’s not that tourists aren’t welcome, say officials, it’s just that business travelers and convention delegates spend more—about $640 per trip, compared with the average tourist’s $474.
The tourism bureau’s job is to sell the city to meeting planners and tourists. It holds contracts with the city of Seattle, the Port of Seattle and about 1,000 dues-paying businesses, including hotels, airlines, cruise lines and attractions.
“We operate very much as a business because tourism is a very competitive one,” Blandford said.
Differentiation is key, he said. Seattle’s convention center promises that delegates can be in lectures by day and on ski hills by night, boasts a chef that hails from the Four Seasons and puts visitors steps away from shopping and restaurants.
Conventioneers also get a discount—hotel room rates fall 15 percent to 25 percent in the fall and winter, according to the Seattle Hotel Association.
All that, with some help from positive national press clippings and the cruise ships, helped King County post a record 9.1 million overnight visitors in 2005.
Tourism is a $12.4 billion industry in Washington—which puts it on par with aerospace, software and wood products in terms of its contribution to the gross state product, according to state research. King County is the state’s travel engine, accounting for more than half of the total spending and room sales collection, according to the state tourism office.
Seattle covets conventions that will fill 1,000 hotel rooms. Downtown has 6,000 hotel rooms within walking distance of the convention center, according to the bureau.
Just about every U.S. city has a convention center. . The tourism bureau employs two people in Washington, D.C., to push Seattle to the 20,000 associations located in and around the Capital Beltway. A third marketer works full time in Chicago to cater to the 9,000 associations based there, Welsh said.
Seattle’s advantage over big-time convention cities, such as Chicago, is the lack of bitter cold.
“We have a bit of a challenge in convincing meeting planners that that’s the way it is,” Blandford said. “People mistakenly believe it’s snowy, too. It’s satisfying to say, ‘No, it doesn’t snow in the city.’”
About one-third of the conventions are health care related, according to Michael McQuade, the convention center’s director of sales and marketing. As medical associations become more specific—recent conventions included the American Association of Blood Banks and the American Society of Colon and Rectal Surgeons—more delegates will be heading to Seattle, he said.
Other conventions vary—ranging from international trade groups to professional societies to niche groups such as the Brewers Association, which held its beer conference in Seattle in April.
Convention season peaks from now until Thanksgiving and picks up again in spring, according to the bureau.
The winter holidays always have softer demand and more vacancies. To combat that, hotels turn to rate cuts and packages. For example, The Westin Seattle offers a $3,000 Seahawks package that includes a limo ride to the game and high-end tailgate food, said Elisabeth James, general manager of the city’s largest hotel.
Also, hoteliers change their marketing philosophy to promote holiday shopping and eco-tourism, rather than spectacular views, said Karl Kruger, president of the Seattle Hotel Association.
“The one thing that we need to work on as a destination is to create an event which will highlight our city in the shoulder and low periods,” he said. “Perhaps a festival in January, maybe an art fair in November. There needs to be some attraction where we can market ourselves to our 500-mile radius.”
The tourism bureau also plans a campaign to encourage people who live elsewhere in the Puget Sound region to come into the city to see the attractions.
People like Tukwila resident Kathleen Davis-Wright, 63, who wandered in the rain outside the Space Needle this week after viewing the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit.
“I’m doing Christmas shopping,” she said, holding up a key chain souvenir marked at 30 percent off. “It’s fun to go to the different places. Little rain drops won’t hurt anybody.”
Survey of car-owning college students indicates that how they view their cars’ “personalities” may be a better indicator of how likely they are to get into road-rage incidents than their own personalities.
Maybe the world is more like the movie Cars than we realize.
Full story after the jump.
Continue reading "My Escape is fairly even-tempered" »
A few random anecdotes from my six-day jaunt in Utah’s capital city (and my hometown).
:: • :: • :: • :: • ::
We flew north out of SEA, banked into a right turn at the north end of Lake Washington, and continued southeast from there. As we were passing Mount Rainier, which looked to be about 150 feet off the tip of the left wing, the pilot made an announcement:
Those of you on the right side of the aircraft will have a beautiful view of Mt. Saint Helens in a few minutes. The mountain is smoking today, really a spectacular view.
A couple minutes later, the pilot came back over the PA: Time to crane necks to the right, there’s the beautiful Mt. Saint Helens and its column of smoke and steam.
The plane immediately entered a left turn, banking the mountain out of view just as we all turned our heads to look out the windows.
:: • :: • :: • :: • ::
We drove up Mill Creek Canyon to see what remained of the autumn colors. As it turned out, nothing remained of the colors, save the evidence of their existence sometime in the last weeks as indicated by the bare trees.
We were at or below the speed limit the entire time both up and down the canyon, but we got yelled at a couple times by bicyclists who exhorted us to “SLOW DOWN!”
This usually happened as the cyclists rushed past us at about 50 mph, 20 over the posted limit in most parts of the canyon.
Memo to cyclists: You’re no good at estimating your own speeds, so shut the fuck up!
:: • :: • :: • :: • ::
Squatters, probably my all-time favorite brewpub, opened a new restaurant in the Park City area recently. They call it Squatters Roadhouse Grill, which for me is a name that conjurs images of home-style cookin’ amidst a rustic décor that happens to have beer taps in several spots.
In reality the menu is a duplicate of the menu at their main Salt Lake City location, and the décor is fairly spare. And there are booths, which is the single most pronounced difference from my previous Squatters experiences (only tables at the main pub). And the higher elevation makes the servers slightly... well, “loopy” would charitably describe the server we had. I think he was trying to be friendly and outgoing but he came off as a bit detached and elegantly wacko. He addressed me as “the gentleman” the entire time, an affectation I haven’t even encountered in the couple of truly high-end restaurants I’ve visited in recent years.
:: • :: • :: • :: • ::
I had a couple of relatively pleasant airport/airplane experiences on this trip.
On the way down last Thursday, I cleared security in about 15 minutes. It wouldn’t have taken that long had the four people ahead of me not stuck bottles of water or juice or wine in their carry-on bags despite the one TSA agent’s repeated droning reminder about restrictions on liquids in carry-on bags, and the man directly in front of me who first forgot to take off his shoes—I think it was an honest mistake, he seemed genuinely flustered when the TSA agents shouted him down as he started to walk through the metal detector—and the man in front of him had a small knife on his person which necessitated repeated trips through the detectors before he was taken away by a three-person TSA squad. By that time my backpack, shoes, and laptop were through the X-ray machine and sitting unattended on the other side of the security checkpoint and there was no way I was taking my eyes off my belongings even to spot a straight path through the detectors and the knot of security folks on the other side.
Thank God I didn’t set anything off. I’d have bounced off walls, people, TensaBarriers, whatever else to keep my backpack in sight—it had everything in it so I could avoid problems.
So I was through security, walking toward Concourse A (my flight was departing from gate A13, which is 30 miles away from the security checkpoint in south Tacoma), when I remembered I was going to call Mom when I got through security so she’d know the flight was still on track. Quick call, the “Hi how are ya see you in a couple hours” type, and then I flung my phone across the corridor and snapped its hinge.
It now makes this plaintive clicking squeak every time I open or close the flip, and when it’s open it doesn’t have the perky stiffness it used to display. It just sorta... flops there, like a distracted drawbridge.
Anyway.
The flight was aboard an MD-90 that wasn’t quite full. I was on the two-seat side of the aisle, no seatmate so the entire row was mine. Apart from the minor bobble of the sightseeing-but-wait-we’re-turning-instead moment, it was entirely routine, and when I got to the bag-claim area in SLC the bags were already circling on the carousel.
I scored a first-class upgrade on the return flight. The airplane, an MD-88, had 5-abreast seating in coach but the 3-and-2 sections were reversed, and my original seat assignment put me about halfway back on the aisle of the left-hand side. When I got through security in about 5 minutes flat, I hot-footed it to the departure gate so I could be among the first in line to acquire about available first-class upgrades, and I snagged the only one that was available.
The captain turned off the seat-belt signal promptly when the hard braking indicated we’d arrived at the gate, and we all rose like pop-up sprinklers to retrieve bags from the overhead bins and get the hell off the plane. But the ground crew had a hell of a time lining up the jetway and the airplane door, so we on the left side of the aircraft enjoyed the spectacle of the jetway’s lunging forward and retreating and shifting left and right and upward and downward like the operator was playing Pac-Man on crack.
Apropos of nothing, I think airplanes also need light-and-chime signals for Don’t Kick the Goddamned Bulkhead and Headphones Are the Universal Signal for Shut the Fuck Up.
The SEA bag-claim experience wasn’t quite as pleasant as the SLC had been. The bags didn’t appear for about 20 minutes after I arrived at the carousel, for one thing, and my bag was I think the 10th to last up the ramp, but it made Katharine’s timing of her arrival at the pick-up area much better—no looping the airport endlessly as she had done when I flew back from Denver in February and the Alaska Air ground crew dicked around for more than hour getting the bags off the plane.
I got home about an hour ago, unpacked, surveyed the manse to be sure everything was in its proper place. Cats are good but want to be in my face all the time, I imagine that will last through the night, and tomorrow it’s back to the job I absolutely adore at the lab I love beyond expression.
How was your weekend?
Broke its hinge thoroughly. Now the flip just kinda flops around when it’s open.
In my work email just now:
Would you check this document for speling error’s and grammer?
Looks like the lab’s entire national senior management crew just walked into the building over the last 10 minutes or so. We’d been told a month or so ago that we were going to get a senior-management presentation sometime in October about the direction of the laboratory, strategic plans and whatnot, but in the usual fashion no specific date was given.
I guess the day has arrived. I wonder what fresh horror it will bring?
I am flying to Salt Lake City Thursday, and within the last few days I’ve found myself besieged with offers of rides to SEA on Thursday afternoon and rides home from the airport when I get back to town.
I like to drive myself, if for no other reason than I won’t inconvenience anyone else. I live 30 minutes north of Seattle and SEA is another 20 minutes (give or take) south of the city. All my family and friends who live in the Seattle area live and work south of me, so anyone picking me up for a jaunt to the airport would have to drive north first, in some cases a goodly distance north.
So I’ve deferred until tonight, when I told Katharine via IM (she’s at work) that I would in fact like her to take me on Thursday and pick me up when I get back:
Kat (23:01:16): I am glad you realized that me driving you was the right choice. ;)
Don (23:01:44): pshaw
Don (23:02:08): I wonder what this weird thing is people have against long-term parking
Kat (23:02:38): Nothing except the cost and possibility of car damage/theft
The theft/damage angle hadn’t occurred to me, but the cost part had. I’d looked into several off-airport parking companies, some of whom bested the airport’s weekly parking rate by 40% or more, but the undeniable convenience factor of parking in the airport’s own lot and being able to walk to and from my car without having to think twice about it was a big draw.
Also I was trying to keep Katharine (and everyone else) from having to deal with the headache of the closed return-to-terminal ramps and the associated detour, which I imagine will cause endless difficulty for the first 364 days of the year-plus they’re supposed to be closed. But then I thought, the hell with it, she can deal with a longer loop or two, and anyway if she waits half an hour past my plane’s landing, I should be outside waiting on the curb so she only has to make a single trip around.
So Katharine’s taking me and picking me up, and my car will sit forlornly in my own garage at no extra cost.
On the plus side: No futzing with the airport parking lots’ annoying self-pay machines, which I think are designed primarily as torture devices to remind you of the joy of flying as you’re finally concluding your trip.
I was looking at my Netflix queue a moment ago. I wanted to see if any upcoming releases in the “Saved” section of the queue had moved into the regular part of the queue, as they usually do a few weeks ahead of their actual release date, so I could shift things around if I wanted.
Then I looked at the three flix I have out now:
All three of these discs shipped to me on 09/14/06, which means they probably arrived 09/15 (I usually get one-day service; most of my movies ship from Netflix’s Tacoma facility). Which in turn means I’ve had them in my possession for 25 days.
I have absolutely no desire to view any of these movies. When I get home tonight I will pack them in their return envelopes so I can fling them into the void at the post office on my way to work in the morning. I will experience a momentary pang of annoyance at once again having held onto a set of DVDs I likely knew from the moment of their arrival I wouldn’t get around to watching or, worse still, would actively not want to see, because that’s the sensible approach to a monthly membership of this type: Rent movies you don’t care about and return them unwatched a month or so later. The best way to get your money’s worth.
I couldn’t even remember the last Netflix selection I actually did watch, so I checked my rental history and found that of the 7 DVDs I’ve had out in the last 31 to 90 days, I returned six unwatched:
I am thinking maybe I should radically pare down my 188-movie queue (though about half that number is television-series DVDs, which represent multiple queue entries per season) and probably drop my membership to one of the two one-at-a-time options, since that best represents my real activity with Netflix over the last several months.
Comcast doesn’t sell high-speed connectivity to telecommuters any more.
Now they offer “teleworker solutions.”
Quarter to eight and I’ve been awake three hours already. And not just awake, I’ve already been to Seattle-Tacoma International Airport and back.
Second Sunday in a row I’ve been up with the goddamned roosters to take a friend to the airport.
Last week, though, it was my friend Derek and his family, and their flight left at 11:00 or so; we met early for breakfast at Hurricane Café, sat around drinking coffee for 90 minutes or so before we made the quick jump down I-5 to the airport.
Today it was my friend Corey (Derek’s brother—I’m sensing a pattern here) on his way to Reno at 07:05, which meant he had to be at the airport no later than 06:00 for the 06:30 boarding.
Round trip of 70+ miles and I was back long before the sun rose. Weird.
Fascinating animation of some of the many processes occurring inside a cell.
Crazy musical stylings of six people who steal their way into a couple’s apartment while the residents are out walking the dog.