Author: jrwren

Oil Storm is the docu-drama from FOX about a series of “what-ifs” about the oil situation in the US starting Labor Day 2005.

Forget the bad acting, lame stories, lots of lameness, it is still a facinating premise.

There is already a pretty good discussion and summary. After watching the first episode of The Power of Nightmares on the plane yesterday, my mind is somewhat impressionable.

It seems to me that instead of just talking about solutions and continuing to live the selfish American lifestyle, that I should start taking some kind of action to improve the situation. What action can I take?

We ended our Seattle visit with a bang. Or, well, I did anyway.

Long Island Iced Tea is strong as hell in Seattle. I drank 4. They are very delicious. They are served in a pint glass and I guess its not technically a long island since its supposed to be 1.5 times the sour mix as there is amount used for each liquor. This was more like a splash of sour mix and a splash of coke. So we went club hopping and met more of the locals.

The people were cool. We danced and talked smack. Met some guy named Gregg who was awesome. Just a damn cool down to earth guy. Bumped into John, who we had met on Tuesday. He is a freebsd and python lover. Its always fun to run into computer nerds at Industrial clubs. It just so 1999 “Matrix”, but I don’t respond when I’m addressed by my handle or nickname.

The flight home is really unmentionable. It was very comfortable since we were on a A319 in seats d and e, and no one was in seat f. We spread out and Janice is small so she laid down. We switched chairs whenever we were feeling stiff. It was one of the more comfortable flights I’ve been on.

Being back home in Michigan in great. I like the heat here, Seattle is just too damn cold. Its also nice to be buying groceries and eating at home. We are very tired of eating out and the produce is looking very nice at the market right now. mmm…. fruit!

Was that Andy Richter in the bear suit in the Dasani commercial?

The last couple of days have been cool. A lot of lazy time, but that is what I do on vacation. Went to Mercury, which totally reminds me of Labrynth in Detroit, except it is nice and upkept.

I don’t remember what else we have done. Slept, drank, walked around. Wandered aimlessly. Went to the library (which is crazy). The Seattle public library is very strange. The most strange thing is not the spiral book floors, it is the fiber to each computer. These IBM desktop terminals look plain enough, but why fiber? I’m guessing they were ATM25 cards, because fiber ethernet would REALLY be silly.

The aquarium kicks ass too. Went there last night. Otters are cool and cute. If you really want to be a chick magnet, get a pet otter.

more pics

We found the best bar in Seattle last night. We were walking down from Capital Hill and looking for a bar with teevee’s in which to watch the Pistons game. The first place we found was Clever Dunne’s. There were more Detroit area and Michigan people in that bar than I could believe. The bar tender had lived in Saginaw and Grand Rapids. The guy we sat next to had toured with his band and played at the Magic Stick (openning for Wesley Willis!). Another fella had a Tigers hat. Another guy had family in Farmington Hills. Then an hour or so later, another guy walked in who had lived at 5th and Cass in Detroit.

The crowd vibe at the bar was all Detroit. I felt like I was in Detroit watching the game. It was awesome. Excellent beer at a great price too!

Our hotel is in the ultimate Seattle location. The Summerfield suites are on the outskirts of downtown. If we want to walk downtown, we can. It is also nice because it is all downhill walking to get downtown. We are also only a few blocks from the Capitol Hill area. It is a great location. We can mix our downtown vacation, with the artsy, hip and young offerings of the community college vibe of Capitol Hill.

We went shopping on Broadway and got the low down on clubs. We haven’t gone yet, but we have an invite to the invite underground goth industrial club here. Maybe tonight or tomorrow we will go.

I forgot my camera yesterday, so no photo today. Maybe if I get to intarweb tomorrow, I’ll have some good photos.

I wanted to post some pictures of our view of the city from the hotel suite. Unfortunately they all look like this…

It is quite pathetic. I was disappointed that my camera messed up, until I realized that this gives me some reason to think about a new camera.

I’ll get some more pictures. The hotel suite is awesome, and the view is pretty good. It is amazing that we got a good price that is so close to the convention center. Not that we are here for the convention center. I am just surprised that it was among the least expensive options for us.

Seattle is a very cool city. I haven’t been too many places, but the foot traffic, shopping and vibe of the city on a Saturday afternoon seems stronger than even Chicago.

I wish I had emailed or blog replied some Seattle folk before I got here, but I also think I’ll have no problem finding things to do in this city.

No good information on seattle wireless project. I know its not internet, but I’d still like to try it out and see what I can browse sometime while I’m here. I hope kinkos still has free internet if you BYO, because there is one only 3 blocks from our place.

One thing I was expecting (I should have been) from Seattle, was the hills. This place as city streets like San Fran. I walked around the block and I was tired walking the first quarter, it was up hill at what seemed like a 45 degree angle. Admitedly, it was probably only 20 degrees, and I’m the most out of shape skinny guy that you’d ever see.

I’m in Seattle, a tech mecca, TY, MS. I’m a linux guy for ten years now, but I still love Microsoft products lately. The Seattle Mono Users Group meets alternating Sundays, and I’m missing the alternation this week. I’d love to soak in some of the tech while I’m here, but so far, it just seems like hip town, and not so much tech mecca. Am I spelling mecca properly? oh well. I’m on vacation, and I’m six beers into my 2nd day of vacation, which is also my 1 yr wedding aniversary. Its early Sunday night 9pm localtime, but that is 12am in the EDT I’m used to. My spelling will not be up to par.

whiprush posted a while back about the requirement of Administrator access on a Windows 2000/XP computer to mount a USB memory device as a drive.

I’m wondering if setting the “Load and unload device drivers” security setting policy to include users instead of just administrators would allow this.

update: and maybe Perform volume maintenance tasks. And the security option “Devices: Allowed to format and eject removeable media”.

I’m back online. Changing network configuration on remote machines is painful.

I’m not going to detail what happened, but I’ll say that it is related to a debian 2.0 time period way of doing things. I didn’t even know that I still had that /etc/init.d/network file in place and linked to execute on boot. Oops. No wonder that /etc/init.d/networking file wasn’t making things work properly. br0 was set to start on boot, but it used eth0 which was being configured by the networks script. The inconsistent state was making things barf. And it made me cry.

Calling my Dad and walking him through linux server configuration isn’t the easiest, but what did help was logging him into MSN and using the Remote Assistance piece.

… in the end, it turns out that… the default gateway on the linux server wasn’t set. ;[

Because buying new running shoes is more fun than actually running is an interesting and very complete kind of background conversation one could walk into and learn all about this popular online trend (more later) about getting things done. Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen seems to have really sparked some technology. I’m not sure if I buy it all.

Palm Pilots have been wide spread for well over 7 years now. I don’t understand how web based versions of the common PDA applications are going to help people get more organized. If anything I would think they would be far more difficult to use. The power that the web does bring to the table is that of colaboration. Imagine a network of your coworkers or colaborators (think soccer moms) all communicating, not just with email, but with flexible and beautiful web tools such as SproutLiner, Ta-da Lists, Trumba, , Basecamp, and/or a good old Wiki.

I don’t understand the cost associated with these web services. It seems that for any team or moderately sized organization the cost of configuring similar tools, could easily configure tools themselves. Maybe that is just the nerd in my finding it easy to roll out nearly any web application. Such tools have been available for years. Wiki’s, bulletin boards, email lists, and other online tools, help teams work more efficiently.

All of these tools seem to be supported and advocated by a seemingly large GTD community. These are the Getting Things Done people. With a subtitle of all your tasks are belong to you, how can you resist the nerd in these organizers? (Also, I wonder if the nerd twenty-somethings of yester-year who loved all your base are now the late twenty-somethings of getting things done) Joel Spolsky wrote that the most important thing about getting hired at his company is “gets things done”. So maybe nerd everywhere are realizing that just being able to code, or knowing how things work is not enough. The 43Folders wiki has a nice summary of GTD. The strong focus on “Next Action” sounds appealing. I’ve been in a hell of a rut lately, and I’ve blamed it mostly on my tiresome comute and boring job. This type of thing may be good for me.

Does this mean I will purchase and read this book? Probably not anytime soon. But I’ll file it away in my brain, so that I’ll remember that it exists when I need to. But I’ll have absolutely no idea what it is called, or how to retrieve these details.

Harshy says he went clubbing in Windsor on Saturday. Hey, Harshy, did you happen to go to The Loop up stairs fro the Couch an Hourse bar? If not, check out the Loop next time. It is kind of an older crowd with retro music, but it is awesome. It is especially good in Windsor if you are looking to escape the typical dress to impress bad techno and hiphop clubs.