seattle, the place to be

Seattle earns top marks. Truly the place to be.

Smarter Cities Rankings

to the big fellow in the locker room

1. There is no reason to glare at other people who happen to glance over when they first notice you in the room. It's a natural human reaction (the looking, not the glaring).

2. I understand that your locker was right in front of my shower stall, but please, cover yourself. Instead of spending a minute meticulously laying out your towel on the floor (to keep your feet clean? where were you standing while laying out the towel?) maybe you could use it to cover yourself. And no, I'm not sure the profile view is better or worse than the full frontal.

3. I'm not sure why you needed to stand there naked for an additional minute. I'm even less sure of why you needed to turn directly towards me for that additional minute. I'm pretty sure I don't want to know.

itunes is brilliantly shitty

I made my attempt to update my iPhone's firmware to 3.0.1 today. Still in progress several hours later because iTunes is ridiculously idiotic.

Fail #0:
Apple finally patches a known security hole because the people who made them aware of it months ago are about to tell the world about the SMS exploit at a conference. This motivates me to try to update the firmware.

Fail #1:
iTunes failed to install the new firmware. Bricked several times with error #14. I've been that error before trying to install a firmware and the previous time I got around it by updating to iTunes 8.2.1.

Fail #2:
Still fails to install the new firmware. Thankfully, I have the old 3.0 firmware laying around and I'm able to restore to that. After that restore it has the firmware and functions, I try and restore my backup.

Fail #3:
The restore of the backup aborts. iTunes claims that the iPhone disconnected (of course it wasn't). At this point, none of my apps have been restored and the thing looks jacked up (the Google Talk logo is just a blank square). At least my contacts and bookmarks are all there.

Fail #4:
Upon reconnecting the iPhone, iTunes immediately backs up my iPhone, replacing the good backup with a bad backup.

Fail #5:
I sign up for a trial of mobileMe, thinking it would be a sure easy way to back up my contacts and bookmarks. It backs up my contacts. When asking it to backup my bookmarks, it tells me I can only sync bookmarks if I delete all of them. What's the point of that?

Fail #5:
iTunes refuses to recognize the iPhone at all. A reboot is required.

Fail #6:
Even after putting the phone into DFU mode (don't ask), it still won't take the new firmware. Fantastic.

Fail #7:
iTunes now refuses to install the 3.0 firmware. Seems like I'll brick my phone doing a minor update while I never bricked my phones while jailbreaking. Brilliant.

Fail #8:
After three tries (and two different new error codes), 3.0 installs. Great! Then in my endless optimism, I try to install 3.0.1 again. Fail.

to be continued...

wtf, iphone

the weather

I finally tuned into the weather coverage today, mostly to see how hot it got during my 18 mile bike ride home (which was fine, by the way). It got up to around 107F where I worked and was around 104F where I live. It honestly didn't feel that hot though. I'm sure the low humidity helped. Tomorrow I'll be biking home again, but it's forecasted to be a much more pleasant 100F for that ride. I think we'll be taking the 28 mile route, and I'll probably be carrying my laptop with me. Yes, I'm that brilliant.

An interesting thing I noticed about the weather coverage is that for the ticker at the bottom of the screen they were showing information about "cooling centers" that were set up around the city for people to go to if they were getting too hot. Most people here don't have air conditioning (because it's totally unnecessary), so it makes sense. Anyway, time to shower, hydrate, and get to bed. I'm aiming to get to work early again tomorrow.

Oh... and another random heat thing - the a/c units for the buildings at work can't handle the extreme temperatures. It's about 10-20 degrees warmer than it usually gets in the summer and the we're exceeding the cooling capacity. End result is that the cool air is diverted to labs and the offices may not be cooled. It was getting pretty humid and toasty in one of the buildings I was in. Thankfully we're still getting pretty good coverage around where I sit. One of the advantages of a garden unit.

seems like another good day to bike home

the fedex wallet

Cheap! (free!!!)

keep trying, aa

My mail from American Airlines since March or so. At least they upped
the incentive 5,000 miles, but dammit, I am not getting your damn
credit card!

rush hour in cleveland

...

just saw the third aztek. sigh...

why cleveland???

beauty is in the eye of the beholder

cleveland traffic

Now that I live in Seattle, Cleveland rush hour amuses me.  Some perspective – the SR520 bridge in Seattle gets 106,000 cars on it every weekday (and 87,000 on a weekend).  In Cleveland, you’d find similar traffic volumes on I-271 in Mayfield or on I-90 on the west side.  The SR520 bridge has two lanes, meaning 53,000 per lane during the week.  I-271 and I-90 both have 10 lanes, or 11,000 per lane during the week.  This morning I was guessing that typical weekend traffic in Seattle was 4x the rush hour traffic I saw this morning.  I guess I wasn’t too far off.

Summary:  10 lanes in Cleveland serve the same amount of traffic as 2 lanes in Seattle.

knees locked and fully extended. seat 5f is like first class, just much much cheaper!

i class it up

wifi galore

My router died while I was away.  It served me for about two years before goofing off.  What happened?  If I connect the router to the cable modem the thing shuts down.  That makes it worthless.  My backup router’s wireless doesn’t really work so I ended up spending my $50 commute bonus on a new router.

The new router is from TP-Link, the leader in China, as it proudly boasts on the box.  Not to be confused with D-Link.

Checking whether I had picked the right channel, I did a scan to see whether I remembered correctly which one to choose.  I recalled channel 6.  Looks like channel 5 is better.  No, 5 is not a channel I should be using in the US, but Chinese router lets me do what I want.  In my situation, it probably is for the common good.

i am special

Israel gives me special treatment. It's like a lover who at first
doesn't want me and now doesn't want me to leave... kind of... sort of.

I initially had no problems getting in, heading to the West Bank, or
getting back into Israel. After visiting Jordan, things got more
interesting.

Coming back from Jordan I was held up for 20 minutes as they checked
my documents. No questions, and allegedly "no problem."

Leaving Tel Aviv's airport was a bit more complicated. At the passport
check before getting to check in, I was passed along to a more senior
guy who asked me about by travels to Jordan, Egypt, and Morocco,
checking the dates on my passport as he listened. He also asked why I
went, who I traveled with, and whether they were traveling with me or
in the airport.

Afterwards, he directed me to a specific x-ray machine, which then led
to an inspection which as basically if j had a camera in one bag and
why I decided to buy the one guide book that I had ("Jerusalem and the
Holy Land" by Eyewitness Guides from amazon, if you are curious) as
well as why and from where. That was it. Odd.

After checking in, I got to go through the second security checkpoint.
Once again, I got the special treatment - lane no. 1. The lane wasn't
open, but they were happy to open it just for me, x-ray my stuff, and
then ask me to unpack most of it so they could check for explosives.
None found.

I am finally through all of this and waiting at the gate. I wonder how
much of this PMA had to endure with his new passport...

day 9 - back to israel

I'm writing this entry while sitting on the floor of an Egged bus. We
got a cab back to the Aqaba/Eilat border for 20JD, which is much
better than the 60 we paid to get to Petra (my bad). The border
crossing there was as dead as it was the first time we crossed. We
only saw one other party the entire time. After passing through eight
stations (four on each side), we were eventually able to get through.
For some reason the Israelis spent literally 20 minutes inspecting my
passport, but the only comments were "no problem" and "Have a good
time. Welcome to Israel."

We then skipped multiple offers for taxi rides back to Eilat so that
we could hike back to the main highway where we could catch the bus,
and catch the bus we did. 140 of the 157.20 shekels on the bus fare
and standing room only for us. Ok, I took a seat on the step at the
back of the bus.

day 8 - petra

Final day at Petra. Three days was probably bit much, but definitely
worth the excursion. It's been a great trip so far, but sadly it's
beginning to wrap up. After today, we are headed back to Israel and
then back to the states shortly thereafter.

I was initially writing this entry from somewhere mid-mountain behind
the ampitheatre. There were a ton of unescavated tombs and stuff up
there that made for good exploring. Surprisingly, Petra wasn't totally
overrunby tourists. Yes, there were definitely quite a few, but not on
the same scale as sights in Egypt, Europe, or the US. Given that and
it's size (only about half is on the main drag), it should be ok for a
while.