Archive for the 'Uncategorized' category

Windy in Seattle

December 26, 2006 2:49 pm

Now that the great “pre-Christmas wind storm” has come and gone in Seattle, life has gotten back to normal for the most part for us.  Luckily, we were only without power for about 12 hours, which is great considering that there are folks on the Eastside that are still in the dark.  Our roof lost a bunch of shingles, so I climbed up there and tarped it over the morning after the storm, while I called around to roofers in vain attempts to get the roof patched up.  Needless to say, we were at the bottom of the list behind folks who lost whole sections of roofs to fallen trees, etc.

anvl_roof-1-1.jpg

Luckily, I found a local company (Lau Construction through Judy’s Book) who came out on Monday to inspect, and then had a crew out here on Tuesday to repair.  They did a fantastic job, and now my roof is good as new (well, as good as it was before the storm) — just in time for the next weather system to come through the area.

anvl_roof-2-1.jpg

A wee bit ‘o rain

November 7, 2006 10:24 pm

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.

Holiday Cards

November 6, 2006 6:57 pm

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!  :)

Fancy Schmancy

September 18, 2006 11:08 pm

Just a quick note for those who might wander here - I think we’re up and running with the new look.  It’s based on the vSlider theme for WordPress and Gallery2, integrated by WPG2.  So far so good.  Please let me know if it doesn’t work for you, and why.  Any suggestions welcome!

Golden Gardens

August 14, 2006 11:18 am

For those of you who don’t know, Golden Gardens is one of the 2 parks in Seattle that actually has a sandy beach (the other being Carkeek - another of our regular haunts). I took Alex and Leah yesterday, and we had a great time. The water was a little too cold to swim (although some people tried), but the kids had a ton of fun trying to dam up the stream flowing into Puget Sound, and I enjoyed sitting on the beach watching them. I helped too… :)

Zoomr

July 18, 2006 9:09 am

First_Frost_2005-1
First_Frost_2005-1
Hosted on Zooomr

I’m a pretty solid Flickr user, but Thomas Hawk tells me that Zoomr is the NBT, so here’s my try-out. :)

The Contemporary Theory of Dreaming

July 16, 2006 5:02 pm

Sometimes we remember, sometimes we don’t, but we all love to dream.  Or is that a gross generalization?  I love to dream, since my dreams are some of the most exciting adventures I have.  Don’t get me wrong, my waking life is pretty awesome, but it doesn’t hold a candle to my dreams in terms of sheer adventure and excitement.  However, I know that it’s not the same for everyone - there are many people that I know who would almost prefer not to dream based on their typical dream content (stressful dreams full of anxiety).  So, why do we dream?

Scientific American: Why do we dream?

(correlary - how do we control our dreams?)

John Lasseter and Pixar

May 23, 2006 10:07 pm

I’m very glad that this man is in charge of Pixar/Disney - not just the creative/movie side, but the Disney Park Imagineering side as well. From the PR release,

“Pixar Executive Vice President John Lasseter will be Chief Creative Officer of the animation studios, as well as Principal Creative Advisor at Walt Disney Imagineering, where he will provide his expertise in the design of new attractions for Disney theme parks around the world, reporting directly to [Bob] Iger.”

After reading this quote from his interview, I think the Mouse is in good hands - and I can’t wait to see what John thinks of next (for movies and especially for the parks):

“I believe in the nobility of entertaining people, and I take great, great pride that people are willing to give me two or three hours out of their busy lives.”

What are the odds?

May 16, 2006 10:16 pm

What are the chances that a real earthquake would hit at exactly the same time as an earthquake warning test? More importantly, is this some increase in activity in the ring of fire? Yikes!

The latest, a magnitude-5.8 earthquake Wednesday morning, rattled Tonga at the same time that emergency authorities on the country’s islands were broadcasting simulated earthquake alerts as part of the Pacific-wide simulation.

Chron.com | Earthquake Strikes Near New Zealand

Related : Recent Earthquakes in the Pacific Northwest

Seattle Mind Camp 2.0 Brain Dump

May 2, 2006 4:04 pm

In semi-chronological order from this past weekend:

Jack Bell says that Vivace on Capital Hill has the best coffee. Apparently, the guy/owner there “wrote the book” on espresso. The secret? Fresh roasting. Jack showed us how to roast our own beans during Coffee Hacks 2.0.

Learned about the Kids Programming Language (KPL). Open-source, freeware (at least for version 1.0), and pretty neat. Not sure Alex (he’s 6) is quite ready for this, but someday. The demo of the texture mapped 3D spaceship written in <50 lines of code was slick.

Two links from the random whiteboard : Dorkbot Seattle and HackerFriendly.

During our session on “Del.icio.us Inside the Firewall“, we discussed the “del.icio.us lesson“. Personal (selfish) use comes before shared use (which leads to personal value). Dave had some comments here.

A random hallway chat with H.B. Siegel from IMDB.com educated me that Shred-it hosts hosted a “community shredding event” at local Walmarts. Hope they do this more often - besides backing up our data and computers, shredding our personal docs (and random credit card solicitations) is one of the most important things we don’t do…

During a great dinner-time conversation with Lion Kimbro we discussed:

The “Good Thing Rapid Discovery Slam” was great:

During our session on GTD software/solutions, we talked about:

  • Is there a way to leave yourself voice notes and have them “magically” turn into text? Personally, this is a bit of a holy grail for me (and others voiced the same desires). I think the speech-to-text capabilities are close, but maybe not all of the way there. We talked about Evoca and GotVoice during this conversation.
  • We talked about idea/task collection strategies, and Buzz suggested stamping blank 3×5 cards with your personal data. Then you can give them away with notes to other people. Another idea was to use a highlighter to color-code the edges of your 3×5 cards to denote categories. A color-coded HipsterPDA!
  • Buzz also commented that he would like to “meet” the guy who designed Outlook to only support 1 Exchange server for a single profile (as in “meet in a dark alley…”). I’d like to participate in that - I don’t grok the limitation, and it’s a royal PITA!
  • Mike Wilkerson showed us his GTD solution using MindJet MindManager and ResultsManager. Looks great - wish I had won one of the licenses they were giving away at the end of MindCamp…$350 is a bit steep for me at the moment. Guess I’ll stick with the GTD Outlook plug-in

During Alex’s session on Attention we talked about:

Then, Sunday morning at breakfast, we discussed how to use Tor to support access to Gmail outside of a corporate firewall (among other uses).

At the geolocation/mapping session hosted by Brady, we talked about getting topo data for a Google map mashup from WAGDA.
I also noted these sites:

The Go Game looks like something to investigate too.

Finally, Dave Winer told us that OPML 2.0 is getting closer, and feeds.scripting.com is going to make a comeback.

(Also, Chris Pirillo told me that gada.be was working on a very-cool-earth-shaking new piece of functionality, but wouldn’t give details. Guess I just have to wait…but if you need a beta-tester Chris, just holler… :)

That is all.  Good times, and I’m looking forward to the next one.  Big props to Andru, Stuart, Justin, Nancy, etc etc etc for pulling this together.

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