PewPew 2.0 - Blogs about seattle

RIP Edith Macefield.

A while ago, I talked about the little old lady (Edith Macefield) whose house was being eaten by a proto-Trader Joe's. Edith has passed on. All she wanted was to spend her days in her house. Congratulations Edith; you got that.

There are some charming post-scripts to Edith's story. The company doing the new construction make some preparations for absorbing Edith's lot into the building; should it become available. I'll be very interested to see how that works out. Second, a construction manager took care of Edith (groceries, errands) and she may have left the house to him.

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Ballard News.

We live in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle, which has a rather interesting history including lots of Scandinavian fisherman, an independence from Seattle, and acting as a smuggling drop off point. (I'm told that "Snoose Junction" was how 19th century smugglers referred to Ballard; where they could drop off illicit cargo before going to Seattle.) With all this history, Ballard feels like it's own little community, and here are some of the community issues floating around lately.

First off, there's the Trader Joe's that's being built around the Little Old Lady's house. (It's the teeny brown house in the pictures at right. ) Well, it's not only a Trader Joe's, it's actually “a Trader Joe's supermarket, a health club, and a 468-stall parking structure”. There's a whole block of construction there, except for a chili joint, and one little house. According to folks on the bus, the owner of the house (a Little Old Swedish Lady) was offered a price three times the market rate, but simply wouldn't sell. It's a bit sad, actually, to see this one house, surrounded on 3 sides by another building three stories high. But the husband and I will be rather glad to get a TJs in our neighborhood.

Secondly, there's the saga of the old Denny's. (Also covered on the AP Wire.) These article contain most of the relevant details. I wonder what will happen to the little blue house with the boarded up windows near the Denny's? According to family history, the husband's grandfather and grandmother rented a room there when his mother was born.

Lastly, there's the this satisfying conclusion to the smashed cars that we saw after picking my mom up from the train station last week: Suspect Tasered in Interbay after wild ride, carjacking.

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The Year in Review.

I 2007, I got very very good at CSS. I considered myself a CSS beginner at the beginning of the year, and now I'm certainly an advanced CSS coder, with a focus on flexible, semantic, standards based, accessible code.

We added the Wii to our collection of consoles. We had to stand in line for it, but it was "free" since we used some gift cards earned through Visa Points to buy it. I later sold the GameCube and GBA Player on Craigslist.

I now understand the basics of football (American football). I understand downs, and point structure, and can even recognize when a team might want to go for two on the extra point. (There's actually some interesting math occasionally.) I'm even getting excited about the post-season. Since I'm a Seattlite now, I'm feeling a strong loyalty towards our home team Seahawks.

We bought a new townhouse in summer. The best $600 we ever spent was on paying movers to haul our furniture and boxes out of the old apartment, up two flights of stairs, into the truck, and then up 3 more flights of stairs at the new townhouse. Doing so made moving day tiring, but not impossible.

I did a lengthy study on IE6 solutions for alpha transparency .PNGs, and tutorial for easy .GIF creation in Photoshop. This probably bored to tears those of you whom I know in real life, but it does bring in one Google click a month or so.

We finally got our kittens. We do try not to be crazy cat-people.

I started learning Silverlight. I am beginning to feel competent with it. Hopefully next year I can report that I'm moderately skilled with it.

Recently, I've been working on a new backend for Pew Pew Laser Blog. A significant part of the work is done, but I need to finish some features still, and make it a bit safer from hackers. But I promise, and upgrade is coming! Tags, databases, Google Ads, comments! It'll be pretty frickin sweet. I guess I better be getting back to work on that...

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Time Flies When You're Coding.

I figured I'd spend a minutes doing just a bit of coding for the imminent version 2.0 of Pew Pew Laser Blog. Here I am, two hours later and needing a shower. At least I got the authentication query written.

As for the news in brief, the kitties survived their trip down to the Portland area - they only meowed for the first hour. Christmas was very pleasant, and disaster was avoided on all counts. The husband likes his new lens, and I'm looking forward to going to Teatro Zinzanni.

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Does that Make Al Gore Right?

For the first half of this week, I attended the Silverlight Workshop in Seattle's Capitol Hill district. I did not like the studio space that was used for the workshop; it was very ghetto. Speaker Shawn Wildermuth was very knowledgeable; although his notes were missing some apostrophes. I was excited to go back to work and play with all the new code that we'd gotten, but unfortunately I had actual work to do. On Monday and Tuesday next week, I'll also heading offsite for another conference. There's an NDA involved, but let's just say it will involve a long bus ride and a company sponsored cocktail mixer. Woot!

In other news, that storm was a hell of thing, huh? It started snowing big fluffy snow flakes on Saturday afternoon at the beginning of the party we were throwing. Everyone said that the snow wouldn't stick, so of course the snow stuck. I love watching it snow - watching snow is the reasons I first tolerated football on T.V. The snow kept coming for 4 hours, and then turned into rain all night. On Sunday morning, it was snow and rain, and it turned into a non-ending torrential downpour in the afternoon. I was beginning to get worried about the small pond developing in the backyard.

The rain kept up all of Monday, with heavy winds. I didn't have too much difficulty commuting to the Silverlight Workshop though - bus shelters are plentiful around here. But many folks in less urban areas had a tough time of it:

• My mom moved to Tillamook this summer; which is famous for it's cheese and tendency to flood. She's just fine, but is quite done with Tillamook, thank you.
• I5 in Centralia is flooded. Did you hear me? Interstate 5 is effing flooded, man! Many houses flooded, and not all the cattle survived. Even the Walmart's flooded.

Our temporary backyard water feature is gone now, but the news says that another rainstorm might be coming. Dandy.

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