General

Back in 1905, before the city was annexed by Seattle, Ballard had different street names (original). Different and better. This is OK as creepypasta but it’s great as a parody of forum culture. “Please keep all pet-related talk confined to the appropriate subforum! Thanks!” For my own reference, this is where you express interest in Letterboxd features and this is where you express interested in TMDB features. Letterboxd has a tricky tightrope to walk: more social features are good but would require more moderation and I think it’s a little bit undermoderated as it is. There’s a very slight spam problem. ...

The format of these is likely to change, but I do need someplace besides Twitter to dump random thoughts. We’ll see how this works. Thanks are owed to my pal Ginger for demonstrating the value of this sort of thing. If you like music, Elizabeth Nelson’s piece on Marquee Moon is a must read. It’s such a perfect album made in such weird, imperfect circumstances. I learned not too long ago that those two “pantheonic instrumentalists of the 20th century” she mentions finally united on Matthew Sweet’s great three albums of the 1990s, starting with Girlfriend. Assuming that she meant Richard Lloyd as the first. It’s also worth checking out her band, Paranoid Style, which is as one might expect from the name. ...

The fine folks at Canlis, the only restaurant in Seattle where you have to wear a tie, ran a scavenger hunt last week as part of their Canlis Community College project. Prize was a $5,000 gift certificate. This attracted the attention of some of my Ingress pals, since driving around the city trying to figure out someone else’s plan is basically our core competency. The first four challenges, we did relatively horribly. But the final challenge, the one for all the marbles, that went differently.

Lots of photos after the cut. Click on one of the galleries to expand and see captions! Or if you’re reading this on Dreamwidth, well, you’ll just get all the pictures at once. See also this post for my notes on the cruise.

It’s a personal blog, so it must be time for some minutiae of my personal life! Gonna get all 2005 around here. I’m gonna tell you about my socks. Last year I picked up a bunch of Solosocks (original) by way of Kickstarter. The gimmick is that they come in packs of 7 socks, and each sock has a slightly different pattern in the same general theme and color scheme. When you lose a sock in the dryer, it doesn’t matter. ...

As always and forever, thank you.

For nearly 20 years I didn’t have to do much business travel. These days life is different. When my trip frequency rose above once per month I evolved a bag strategy which is both imperfect and functional. It is also very heavy on the Tom Bihn gear, because I like his bags and I tend to stick with things that work well enough. Other companies also make great stuff; my former boss swears by WaterField bags, for example. Choice is awesome. My general theme is simplicity. Painless packing is the single most important aspect of this whole thing so keeping it simple is important. Particularly when it comes to cables, I’ve often just bought an extra cable so I don’t worry about remembering to pick one up and carry it with me. This is useful to me because I’m really forgetful. I am, obviously, fortunate to be able to make that tradeoff.

Awesome first six weeks! At which point we had a major reorg at work and I went from doing architectural work and consulting to managing an awesome team of 20 people. No regrets, but it does mean I can’t work from home as effectively, particularly for the first couple of months as I get familiar with the team and vice versa. Thus, no more Friday AM sessions and I’ve had to drop out of the course. ...

I got into CopyrightX! I’m very excited about this; it’s a subject near and dear to my heart and admission is competitive. The course begins this week with readings, a video lecture, and a discussion group on Friday. The syllabus is online (original), for the curious. My discussion group looks fairly amazing. We have a couple of techies, at least one lawyer, an academic – really varied group in terms of age, careers, and especially location. Unsurprisingly, it’s a bunch of people who are good at expressing themselves with the written word. I’m finding myself excited about interacting with this bunch, which I didn’t really think about or expect. ...

As always, thank you.