Month: June 2009

sweet seattle stuff #1

What is there to do near Seattle? Well I’ll make a running list, since I have unlimited publishing rights on this, the website of me. I’ve been here for 2 weeks really and haven’t done as much as I should have. I’ve been busy. But I have found at least three really sweet places on the Eastside.

: Denny Park. Wow. It was day 1 and I was just walking through my neighborhood when I found this little street. There’s a trailhead there that descends into deep old-growth, fern-covered forest. As I hiked down, it got prettier and prettier. I got to the bottom to find large moss-covered trees hanging over a stream. I walked for about a mile and found myself at Lake Washington. Hadn’t seen a single person until then. Great suburban hike.

#2: Marymoor Park. Huge park near Redmond. The thing that brings me here often is the free rock-climbing structure. I go there on way home from work occasionally to miss the traffic and boulder around. You can lead-climb here too. It’s actually really cool. It’s made of concrete and rock so it actually feels pretty authentic. There are also RC planes flying nearby every day if you’re into that.

#3: St. Edwards State Park. Ok enough with the state parks already. This one has ~12 miles of fun mountain bike trails. I went on them one morning to check it out and had a great time. There are even some jumps and stuff. Good forest views.

#4: Random lookout. This little pad has a sweet view. You can see Rainier if you go to the far left on a clear day. Good view of gas works park too. Enough to inspire me to go check that out, which was also cool.

Restaurants:

Virginia Inn – Ate outside. Slow service, but I wasn’t in a hurry. The food was good. How’s that for a review?

Thai joint by the AMC in Pacific Place – Mmmmm Thai food. Delicious. Good for before a movie.

Hector’s – mmmm. Fun atmosphere. Got big dinner and bottle of wine to hear some really weird story here. Loved it.

What the Pho? – Pho is in. It’s the new sushi. They heat up meat in broth, where it cooks. Get the well done stuff though as the rare is like, really rare. It was good but not quite as good as sushi. It’s pronounced “fuh,” by the way.

I also had more Thai and conveyor belt sushi and some other stuff but nothing really blew my mind as much as these, as described above.

don’t politicize nuclear power

I just saw parts of this release of the senate republican conference roundtable (1hr, 30m) recently, and was happy to hear reasonable talk here about using nuclear power to get us off coal ASAP. Can’t say I disagree. I am, however,  a little worried about nuclear power becoming a partisn issue (haha). This proposal is in line with McCain’s campaign promises of new nukes. I know plenty of people back in Ann Arbor who passionately hate Republicans and will blindly go on hating nuclear power for no reason other than to smite them.  Of course, those people are borderline insane. I think most people are actually reasonable: Rod Adams didn’t pull all support from nuclear power, but then again he’s the most pro-nuclear person on Earth. What about the people who have yet to decide how they feel about nukes?

You know what killed the early hippie subculture? It was the summer of love in 1967 when every 17 year old suburbanite became a hippie. And what killed the original punk movement? Hot Topic. Clearly, to undermine a group’s claim to identity, mainstream society has to claim its unique characteristics for itself (tie-dye shirts of the hippies, dog collars of the punks, and nuclear power of the Republicans). So, in order to keep nuclear power from being politicized, I’d like to see some non-Republicans voice their support in a way that identifies them as a non-Republican. For instance:

I love universal health care AND nuclear power!

or perhaps:

Boy, smoking bans are a great idea. So is the expansion of nuclear power!

Finally,

Ayn Rand sucks. Say, don’t you think making nuclear power plants is a good idea? I heard that if we recycle all the nuclear waste we have sitting around the USA, we could power the whole country for 90 years.

And you pro-nuke Republicans, recognize that it isn’t beneficial to the planet to try to tie a power source to a political ideal. So, when you rally for nukes, try not to demonize Democrats or anything. Sure it may be difficult not to sometimes, but rise above temptation and promote it as something too elegant to be automatically tied to abortion rights, gun control, and small government.

By the way, since nuclear power utilities are counting on large loan guarantees, doesn’t it seem like the nukes are more in line with Democrat’s “spend more tax dollars for the betterment of society” idea? Huh. Backwards.

If Al Gore endorsed nuclear power today, as a founder of Greenpeace has, we’d be this much closer to solving our energy problems.

Dear Al Gore: Please endorse nuclear power. Thanks  -Nick

online happiness

I’ve found four excellent things online recently and think I should re-share them to all zero of my faithful blog readers. Hi friends! Anyway, I just posted a rant about Twitter, so no need to go there again. That’s the first one.

My friend Adam showed me this excellent free PDF book by David MacKay called Sustainable Energy – without the hot air. It is straight talk about all the crazy myths and misconceptions going around about renewables and other energy issues. The first few items on that link are raving review one-liners by high-profile peeps. Well written with much infused sarcasm.

And from Slashdot, I read a bit of this pdf (A Mathematician’s Lament) on the status of the USA mathematical education system. It’s twenty-five pages of welcome truth. Again sarcastic and wonderful.

Finally, there’s the DropBox. I’d heard about it earlier, but at work in Seattle where I’m actually using 2 computers, it’s become invaluable. It seamlessly integrates into my file managers (My Computer in windows, Nautilus in Ubuntu, and I think Finder in Mac). When I drag or change a file in my designated drop box folder on any computer, it automatically synchronizes across all computers. It’s superbly wonderful. As a bonus, it’s web interface keeps versions of every single update. So if you want to go back to the file you overwrote 2 days ago, no problem, there it is. Click this link to accept my referral and give me 250 extra MB! Or this one to sign up without giving me a bonus.

the value of twitter

OK, I used to think twitter was stupid. I imagined it as just a big collection of facebook status updates. Personally, I couldn’t care less about you going to the grocery store. But then I went to the ANS conference in Atlanta and realized what the big deal was. You can embed tags in your twitter posts, using the # symbol. For instance, at the ANS conference, if you say something and put #ans09 in it, everyone who searches #ans09 can see what everyone who said #ans09 has posted. So you go there and it’s like: “hey a group of us here at #ans09 are going to max’s down the street. come on by!” You try #fremontfair for the solstice parade happening in seattle tomorrow and it’s all “PCC RT @amyhale: Getting prepped to live-blog, tweet tomorrow’s #Fremontfair the “Center of the Universe”! Watch 4 updates + audio too!”

Another feature: you can do it all on SMS on your phone. So imagine a group of people going out. If they all set their phones to “follow” the same person, he or she can just say: “ok going to Brown Jug now.” Or “going to Bab’s now.”  and everyone will get texts with that info. That’s actually new and useful communication right there.

So sign up for it. Do some searches for stuff you’re interested in. Up-to-date collective knowledge is at hand.

Actually the real reason I checked it out was all the buzz about the Iranians using it to organize protests. Apprently the US state department asked twitter to delay a scheduled maintenance window so the Iranians wouldn’t be left in the dark. Cool.

BTW, if you’re all interested in whether or not I’m at the grocery store, I’m partofthething on twitter.