It’s been raining here in Seattle. No surprise there, it rains here quite a bit, but this has been record-level. Here are a couple of pictures that show just how much water we’re dealing with out here…

(Deception Falls…this is by Skykomish…the bridge crosses a creek)

(from the Seattle P-I)

This reminds me of a site I saw a while back, which (coincidentally) I just got notification has been updated. Flood Maps uses the Google Maps API overlaid with water level data to show the flood effects of a rising sea-level. Striking.

Categories: Seattle, Uncategorized
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It’s the time of the season to start thinking about making a family holiday card.  Last year I found Vistaprint, and they did a GREAT job on our cards (for a fantastic price).

Nice things about these guys are:

• you can upload your own pictures (nothing new there, a lot of sites do that)
• you can upload your own drawings (sure, a JPEG is a JPEG, but this is a nice idea - last year we had a drawing by Alex on the back of our card)
• they have an online design tool that is powerful and easy to use
• their prices are amazing (much cheaper than Snapfish, etc. last I checked)

These guys will be getting our business again this year, and I recommend them to you.  Please click here if you are interested in using this service - you will get 25% off your order, and I will get some savings off our upcoming order.  It’s a win-win! 

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…for starting your holiday wishlist. Last year I looked all around for a good online wishlist tool, and didn’t find any I really liked. My criteria included:

• ability to import my Amazon.com wishlist
• ease-of-use (when I found something I liked, I want to be able to add to my wishlist with a click, and then get back to the page I was viewing — no copy/paste form stuff…)
• shareable (make some items easy to share with family and friends)
• private (keep other items to myself or limit who could see them)
• respect (respect for my time, as well as the privacy of those who I shared my list with - I did NOT want everyone who I shared my stuff with to have to register with the service)
• flexibility (wishlists are good, and is the main driver in my list, but a service should also be able to manage other info for me)

I think I’ve found all of that at Kaboodle (thank you again Ask MeFi).  The ones I tried last year are MetaWishlist.com and TheThingsIWant.com.  I also looked at Wists.com, but will stick with Kaboodle for now (even though it has a silly name).

(p.s. in case you wanted to get me a present, you can see my wish list here.  They also have an RSS feed in case you’re into that stuff…

Categories: Geek
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