Yahoo! News – 108-Year-Old Man Starts Smoking Again

If I make it to 108 there are a LOT of things I’m going to start doing including smoking, drinking, riding without a seat belt, and tearing the tags off of mattresses.

CNN.com – ‘It’s Raining Men’ singer dead – Sep 29, 2004

Remember the C&C Music factory hit album back in the early 90’s? One half of the weather girls sang on that album, even though they had the skinny, sexy girl in the video. She got screwed out of a bunch of money off of that deal I think. Anyway, they other half of the Weather girls died today. I’ll bet they’re be a lot of tributes this weekend at the dance clubs. Bring your umbrellas!

Thanks to Damn Hippies!

The Seattle Times: Business & Technology: Blogging guru stops, for a while, in Seattle

Cool, I got a mention in the local paper. Here is the post mentioned in the article.

Seattle Weekly: Food: Summer Food: Masters of Barbecue by Zachary D. Lyons

Oh yeah, I love this list. Growing up near Kansas City (3 hour drive away) can turn a person into a BBQ snob. I’m not quite a snob, but I love good BBQ. My wife grew up in Houston and knows a well cooked hunk of meat when she tastes it. I’ve heard good things about the Pecos Pit from another ex-Kansan. The only BBQ I’ve had here was Floyd’s BBQ over in lower Queen Anne. It was alright, nothing really special. I’m definately going to try Jones BBQ in Crossroads mall the next time I’m over there.

WANE-TV Coverage You Can Count On: Sinead O’Connor pleads for people to stop calling her crazy

Taking out an ad to tell people that you aren’t crazy is a sure sign that you are.

Current Electoral Vote Predictor 2004

Wow I had to post this one. On a day when I’ve seen two posts from Democrats proclaiming Kerry in the lead, the EVP has Bush leading 311 to Kerry’s 217. Of course the Democrats were only counting the Zogby polls.

I’m still not convinced that the EVP is realistic, that could be because I’ve had my head in a Statisitics book the past two weeks and I’m relearning the reasons for the quote, “There are lies, damn lies, and statistics”.

Maple Valley Forum

Consider part of Glenn Anderson’s (R-5th District) closing remarks tonight, which were delivered to a room full of people over the age of fifty:

“Prescription drugs was brought up tonight. Do you know why people are against having prescription drugs from Canada? Because it’s dangerous. The reason Canadians get good drugs from Canada is because the law requires Canadian pharmacissts to provide it to them. The law does not require Canadian pharmacies to provide it to Americans. I have personal experience with this, with my mother-in-law. On the internet, the FDA, the DEA, and the customs service have done numerous evaluations of this – 100% of the internet imports are tainted. Canadian pharmacies are importing from Iran, from Pakistan, and Mexico, and they pass over the border. They’ve proven this.”

response:

“My wife’s family is in Canada, some friends are in Canada, and they’re not dropping like flies from dangerous Canadian presciption drugs.”

My reading of the quote says that the Canadian pharmacists are only required to provide the good drugs to Canadians, which would explain why members of your extended family aren’t dropping like flies. The Canadian pharmacists can use any source when they are giving the drugs to an American. Maybe they use cheaper sources, e.g. Mexico and abroad?

That being said, my wife is a clinical pharmacist, I’ll have to ask her what her views are on the matter, but as far as I know all our prescriptions, even the asthma inhailer for the cat, have come from American sources.

photoSIG � Mambo Squirrel
Dance, DANCE with the mambo squirrel.

Political Wire: Where The Race Stands

Democrats only link to it when it shows Kerry in the lead. Which is usually right after a Zogby poll.

Previous to today the EVP had Bush leading by 329 to Kerry’s 215

My whole point in linking to these polls no matter who is leading is to try and dilute the party lines in a Google Search. Of course I don’t have much of a shot with my pathetic little Google rank. I’m just tired of the political parties manipulating everything, from bringing up past performance in war time to forging documents this campaign has been the worst one since I think I’ve been alive(1971) .

Julie Leung ponders,

which side of Puget Sound is God’s side?

In my opinion, there is no competition for the best side of Puget sound. It’s obvious that God favors the Olympic Peninsula. It’s at least the most awe inspiring.

Me? I’m a transplant. A Wannabe. I’m one of those people that are ruining Seattle for the natives. I do have a little bit of Pacific NW cred. My grandparents lived in Steilacoom while I was growing up. My dad went to high school around here and remembers playing “Smellingham” in football. I’ve always wanted to live here. Back when I was job hunting to get out of Wichita, KS I looked in Seattle. Interviewed a couple of times for contract positions at Microsoft. Never got a bite. I finally got a job in Albuquerque, NM at triple my existing Wichita salary. That was an easy sell, although I had never been to Albuquerque before. After each successive failure of a dot com I worked at in Albuquerque, I revisited the Seattle job market. Then I had to go and meet a girl who wasn’t ready to move just quite yet. After we got married, I mean the DAY we got back from our honeymoon, I was laid off from my last job in Santa Fe. We still weren’t quite ready to move yet, Kim still had some time left on her contract. After 6 months of futile looking on my part, I finally took a leap of faith and flew up here, giving myself one month to find a job. Hoping that Seattle wouldn’t let me down, well I had faith in my professional experience too. Seattle provided for me. I was able to find a place to rent, move up my wife and the cats (sadly not in that order).

Everyday I stop and look out of the window near my office or go out on the view deck and look across Lake Union. I marvel at a body of water that you can’t walk or jump across. I see Gasworks park, Queen Anne hill, the Fremont bridge. I drive past Husky Stadium to and from work. I can see the Space Needle when I get on the bus. I think about where we’ll go eat that weekend; if we’ll try a new place, there are hundreds, or if we’ll go to one of our favorites. The Kona kitchen. Varlamos. Dicks. Chinooks. Primo burger. The Ram. If we’ll just pick somewhere on “the ave”. If we’ll head over to Larry’s market or Safeway and pick up some fresh seafood and cook it at home. As soon as I drive somewhere new in Seattle, I can always find my way home and I always see new places I want to eat or shop or just look at.

Now, as of tomorrow, I’m an official Seattle homeowner. I’m sure kids will follow (twins apparently run in my wife’s family, a fact she failed to mention until this year ). My children will be true Seattle-ites and will wonder about where mommy and daddy used to live and look over our pictures of Kansas, New Mexico, and Arizona with wonder. They’ll be shocked by the lack of green and the over abundance of brown in New Mexico and wonder where the mountains are in Kansas (“See that bump, that’s the tallest hill in Wichita.”).

There are some things I’ll miss about New Mexico and Kansas. But Seattle is, and always has been, my home.

n.b. I originally wrote this article back in June when we returned from San Francisco, but I had some issues with the image gallery

Last week Kim and I went to San Francisco for her old college friend Elizabeths (sing sing) wedding. We stayed in Milbrae, CA about a block from a BART station. We didn’t know it was that close to a station when we arrived at the airport. Kim couldn’t remember if we were staying at a Quality Inn or Quality Suites. So we tried to find their hotel shuttle, couldn’t find it. So she called “Quality Inn at the airport” and apparently got the Quality Inn down by Union Square or something who told her “We don’t have a shuttle, just grab one of the downtown SF shuttles.” We tried to find one of those, but the helpers by the shuttle bay kept telling us different places to go. Sheesh, so I finally just said “ok, where can we catch a cab?” “Downstairs”. Great, fine. A cab will take us right where we need to go. We get a cab and tell him “Quality Inn here at the airport” He says in a thick russian accent, “yeah, yeah sure Quality Inn.” . We get in his cab and off we go.

Ten minutes he pulls into the Holiday Inn by the airport. We explain that we wanted to go to QUALITY Inn and off we go again. Meter going “tick tick tick” the whole time. We get to Quality Inn and they tell us that we don’t have a reservation there. They call the other Quality Inn and Quality Inn Suites hotels in the area and find out we are at the Quality Inn Suites in Milbrae. Great, where’s that at? They end up sending over a limo to pick us up and take us there. Great, then we notice the BART station a block away and remember the BART station at the airport. We were only ten minutes by BART from our hotel and didn’t know it.

We get to the hotel and I decide that I want to take the BART to downtown SF and have a look around. We got out on Powell street and wandered around, Kim was on the cell phone trying to find us a ride out to the wedding in Belmont. Finally I decided I’d like to sample the local cusine and beer. We went into Lefty O’Douls and I ordered and Anchor Steam and got perhaps the best roast beef sandwich I’ve ever had. We ate, drank, listened to the piano player and his audience belt out some songs and then headed back to our room.

The wedding was nice. It was a catholic wedding so we were popping up and down like a whack-a-mole game. The funniest part for us was how everyone just jumped right into the ceremony with their cameras and video cameras. No shame, “with the ring, I thee wed.” “{clickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclick}”. Afterwards we went to a Chinese restaurant they had booked and had a nine course chinese dinner. They just kept bringing out food.

Monday Night at Morton’s – 12/20/03 – Page 1 of 3

Great article by Ben Stein, the LAST article by Ben Stein, on who the real stars of today are. Hint, it’s not anyone with a byline or listed in the credits of a TV show or movie.

news@nature.com – specials – us election

Always interesting to hear what the candidates have been told to say about science. It’s also interesting to see the questions prepared by actual scientists instead of journalists.

Scripting News: 9/21/2004

If Dave had gotten here in the summer, he could have taken the water taxi from downtown over to Alki for his morning walk. Whoops, looks like he can until Oct 1st.

Yahoo! News – Top Stories Photos – AP

niiiiiiiiiiiiiiiice, that’s a class act right there. Gotta love the Dems.

ooooooh, Tom points out an article that says the “dad” has set up this kind of situation before. I guess a jackass is a jackass.

Miss Washington 2004 is pre-med, boxer, violinist and more

Jebus Friest, I had two weblogger meetups in the past two days. One was the big Seattle one, the other was a smaller one that Steve Maine and I set up after Rory’s MSDN event.

The Seattle meetup came on the heels of my “Seattle Survival guide for Dave Winer” post, which gets second place for “most comments on my blog”, the first being the spongmokey post. However the quality of the comments is much better in the survival guide. I spent most of the evening talking with Tom and Andy. It ends up that Tom worked with a guy I worked with while I was in Albuquerque. Andy is was responsible for my favorite FireFox extension. Dave Winer showed up and I thanked him for the two links. There was a reporter from the Seattle Times there as well. It turns out she is starting a blog and wanted to see what the whole scene was like.

Thursday I went to a MSDN event over in Redmond. I hate trying to drive on the eastside. As bad as people think the traffic is in Seattle , it’s far worse on the eastside. Luckily, the event location ended up being about 3 or 4 blocks away from where Brian used to live so I remembered the area and found it with no problem. I posted earlier on my other blog asking if anyone else was attending the event and wanted to get together over there for an impromptu nerd dinner since there was no way I was trying to drive home on Hwy 520 at 5PM. Turns out that Steve Maine had been thinking the same thing. Wesner Moise responded, Steve got in touch with Rory and we were off…errr…on.

Rory did a great job during his presentation, even fending off vicious Mortlocks (nod to Rory for the new term). He appeared calm, cool, and collected but wore black pants just in case. The talk covered Infopath, custom controls in ASP.NET 1.1, and some of the new controls in ASP.NET 2.0. The 2.0 stuff wasn’t anything I hadn’t seen before, neither was the Infopath. We invesitgated Infopath as a target application for our data abstracting interfaces for the application I’m working on at the Hutch; But after we estimated the amount of time it would take to create an Infopath based application that would suit our need against the time it would take to create an ASP.NET application, we decided to go with the ASP.NET application. The main reason being the lack of a Macintosh client and the other platform requirements. If Microsoft is targeting large corporations and governments they need to tackle the platform issue first. I made an encouraging comment on Rory’s blog when I found out that he was presenting at the event I was attending, “try not to suck. ”. It was supposed to be a friendly jibe. I TOTALLY used a “winkie” at the end, but it still came off as snarky. I’ve been getting a lot of that lately, my winkies aren’t working. I need new winkies. That being said, Rory really seemed to be in his element and enjoying himself and it showed in his presentation and in the way he fielded questions. I gave him higher than sevens on my eval.”

The dinner at Crossroads was fun. Steve, Rory, and Wesner are all really smart guys and the conversation was lively. I do have one thing to say to a certain QTPi that Rory USED to know.

upgrade

I guess you just have to wait until the right technology comes along.

nod to Tom