Behold, the wall of anime!

I'm visiting a friend in Arizona right now. This friend is the only person I know who surpasses my youngest sister in Anime-fu. Normally, getting married would tone a fellow down, but it happens that his wife is quite the fan as well ...

To be fair, He's actually a lot more moderate about his anime habits than my sister, but what he lacks in present fanaticism he makes up with raw experience. He's my age, and has been playing the anime game since he was in high school. He was watching anime back when most of it was still being passed around on worn out VHS tapes, with translations scrawled on the back of a dog-eared sheet of paper wrapped around the outside.

Today's photo is his wall of anime. It's actually a pretty slick dining room decoration. The picture shows perhaps half of it. Each of the pictures is from an anime they like, and they've all been carefully cropped and covered in glass.

I suppose my only news is that I arrived in Arizona safely. I had to go via Denver, and there was a lot of turbulence on the way there. I don't usually get motion sick on flights, but I was sort of border-line on that one. I had a burger for lunch in the Denver airport, which I cannot recommend for burgers (I'll go with McDonald's next time), and then went onward to Tucson.

The highlight of the day, other than meeting up with old friends, was that we went and had sushi for dinner. And it was good sushi. Halibut nigirizushi, An eel-and-avocado caterpillar roll, and a rather interesting vegetable roll with pickled bits in the middle made up the bulk of the evening's menu. We've spent much of the evening playing with computer stuff (hopefully the game will get somewhere!), which is also good fun.

On Crane Simulators and Game Creators

Attached here is the last of my Seattle pictures. I took this out of the car window while being driven to the airport and having a lengthy conversation about the incompetence of Seattle's administration. The woman who was driving had strong opinions about the general inability of the government to get anything done -- they always had to commission byzantine and expensive studies to convince themselves that it was a good idea before they could actually do anything.

The picture is of the docks, and was taken as we were driving along a raised highway. The huge bird-like orange contraptions are cranes; they're probably about 15 stories high, and are used for unloading the enormous containers used on cargo ships. This photo was taken the same day as the one below -- as you can tell, the weather got a lot worse.

Anyway, I was a little surprised to find myself chatting about cranes just a few days ago. I was at a housewarming party for my roommate's uncle, and several of the people there were game developers, ranging from professional to amateur. One of the guys developed crane simulators for his day job. Now, you might hear "crane simulator" and think of something like a flight simulator -- and you'd be close. The difference is that the crane simulator is huge. Think of a giant dome ten stories high, with an actual complete crane chassis sitting inside, complete with vibrators to simulate high winds and enormous projectors to cover the interior of the dome with a virtual harbor to practice on. I showed that guy the picture I took in Seattle, and he sort of smiled and said "yup, that's them."

Of course, most of what we talked about was making video games. There's an indie game developer night coming up sometime in April, and I'm trying to have something ready to show off for a change. Ammon has most of next week off, and we're going to stick our collective heads together and (hopefully) develop something fun. We'll see.

That is, if I can persuade him to tear himself away from dofus for a little while...

Psychedelic Cough Syrup

This is for those among us who believe that it never stops raining in Seattle. Actually, this is pretty poor proof, since it rained so hard a few hours after taking this photograph that it knocked out the power for large areas of the city. Nevertheless, this was my last day in Seattle, and the first one in which I actually got a view of the sky, so naturally I took a picture. This was the view from my hotel room.

And for those of you who complain that I never warn anyone before going places, I'm going to Arizona from March 28th through April 4th. Got it? This means there will be no Dance Dance Revolution at my house on March 29th. If you want to play DDR, you can visit Mckay, or you can try and catch me a little earlier (like, say, the preceding weekend). For those of you in Arizona, I will be visiting you on March 28th through April 4th, got it?

I might post a blog update from Arizona. If you're lucky.

I got sick this week. Mostly just a sore throat and lots of being tired. The sore throat lasted long enough that I went and got it tested, but nothing interesting showed up, so they stuck me on a heavy-duty cough syrup and some zinc lozenge thingies. The zinc lozenges have way too much sugar in them and are unpleasant to eat; the cough syrup works wonders (and is ever so mildly psychedelic). If it seems like I don't have anything interesting to talk about, that's probably why. Sick people don't think of interesting things as often.

Portable Posting

This post is something of an experiment. I'm actually posting it from my Palm, which makes it difficult to "type." It also makes it difficult to impossible to include images. I have some more Seattle photos to stick up, but you're just going to have to wait until I get around to posting from a proper computer before you can see them.

I wonder how many readers this thing gets? My estimate is three. 'tis a queer form of exhibitionism to put one's life in a readable format for the sake of the three people who will read it, but such is blogging. For some reason, it is terribly popular, and disovering the reason underlying that is one of life's key little mysteries, I think.

Today I had a St. Patrick's day meal at a friend's house. I'm a fan of corned beef and cabbage, and probably over-ate a bit. St. Patrick's day is a largely American holiday in which we celebrate how wonderful it is to be Irish. We are not Irish, of course, but there's quite a bit of Irish ancestry scattered about (I have an Irish great-great-granddad I believe).

Actually, on that subject, I have a small observation: American English pronounces terminal R's with a thick, round emphasis. In our English, butter doesn't rhyme with Calcutta, but in nearly every other nation in which the British have set foot, it does. I've occasionally wondered why we picked it up. A possible answer struck me while listening to an actor speaking with a thick Irish accent--there it was! The terminal R! I could be wrong, but it seems that this little piece of our linguistic spice was conferred upon us by those long gone outcasts of the Emerald Isle. So next time you order a hamburrrgerrr from a fast-food place, you're echoing the voices of a folk who would more likely have asked for cabbage and potatoes. At least you can get it with fries.

In Search of the Ultimate Fish

At left, we have a not very good picture of the Pike market, which is right next to downtown Seattle. If I were to turn around and take a picture (I didn't), you'd see rows of skyscrapers filled with offices and pricey shops. Pike market is very old, and is a large open-air fish market. It's about 6:45 in this picture, and the market closed at 6:00, so I wasn't able to actually purchase any fish, but I did walk over and take a look.

You can't see it too well, but directly behind the building is Puget sound. Seattle isn't really on the ocean, but there is a huge inland lake of sorts that eventually connects to the ocean, with the freshwater flowing from the mountains and gradually getting saltier as it gets further along. Much of the lake was artificially built; a local tells me that this was so the U.S. Navy could harbor battleships in the Seattle area, and there is a massive system of locks that raises the ships the requisite twelve feet to go between the bodies of water.

The market (and the whole downtown area) is nearly two miles from my hotel. There's a two-mile-long monorail line that was built for the world fair back in 1962, and it runs from the fairgrounds surrounding the space needle to the big downtown shopping center. So you can take the monorail from the needle all the way into downtown, rain pattering off the windows, gazing down at the miserable looking pedestrians shuffling through the gray streets below. Or at least that's what I would have done if the monorail weren't down for repairs -- instead, I did the shuffling thing and walked along underneath the tracks so that I wouldn't get lost. I picked up a few things at the shopping center, mostly gifts for people before I go. I might give away some of the stuff when I get back; it depends on who is nicest to me ;-).

Although I wasn't able to get any from the market, I did finally pick up a bit of seafood. I dropped by our hotel restaurant and got the salmon plate. The waitress pointed out that they do their salmon "medium rare," and if I want it a different way I should ask. I took it their way, and they served it up on a fancy square dish with a vinegary yellow sauce drizzled artistically over the top. The salmon was seared crispy on the outside and soft on the inside, and was really, really good. Being close to the ocean really does make a difference, it seems.

It's still raining. The sky is still gray. Hooray for Seattle!

It's raining, what a surprise!

It rained today around lunch time. It's been overcast the whole time, but the rain has been sort of on and off. The guy I work with joked "Hey look, it started raining. In Seattle. What a surprise." Welcome to the land of rain and coffee, as Ammon puts it.

The whole programming team decided to use my visit as an excuse to go out to lunch at this great Italian restaurant. The pizza was excellent, and the salad was good too. It's funny how good things taste when you drench them in enough olive oil. As an aside, though, the pizza we got in Brooklyn is still better. I swear, the first person who figures out how to make Brooklyn-style pizza outside of Brooklyn is going to be a billionaire. Anyway, the not-quite-Brooklyn pizzeria claimed to be a "certified Neapolitana" -- apparently there's some kind of international organization that sets standards for genuine Italian pizzerias. One of the coders commented "it's kind of funny that they're trying to claim that the pizza is genuinely Italian. I mean, in Italy, pizza is crap food. You just stick whatever you have in the fridge on the pizza." Well, there you go. Maybe it's like claiming that a burger is good because it's genuinely American (Arctic Circle, anyone?)

As for everything else -- I still haven't had any seafood yet. I'm not sure if I want to go to a proper seafood restaurant, or if I want to spring for sushi. There's also a Bulgarian restaurant off to the east somewhere ... ah, there just aren't enough meals between now and then to try things out, and I'm going to blow my diet to the moon this way. I think I'd probably just better plan on coming for a longer visit some other time. I mean, it's not like it'd take more than about two days to drive here.

There's a big show called the "Experience Music Project" that someone recommended highly. I went by, only to discover that they're only open during my working hours. I don't know what the point of closing at five is, but they close at five. Humph. Of course, the guy who recommended it is someone that I'm working with, so I'll just have to see if it's worth skipping out on some productive office hours to go. The show itself is in a really crazy-looking building. I was too cold to take a picture, but if you want to take a look, point Google Earth at 47 degrees, 37 minutes, 17.44 seconds north and 122 degrees, 20 minutes, 53.54 seconds west. Oh, and I really wish there were a good way to link to Google Earth.

Today's photo is of the needle again, this time from the top. It was actually taken yesterday. I would really like to get a good photo across one of the inlets -- there is a gorgeous shot of all these brightly colored, three-story European style buildings nestled among tons of trees on a hill that slopes down into the water. Great postcard material. It's a pity that all I have is my phone. I should probably purchase a real camera.

Searching for Seafood

I'm in Seattle this week for business. The business in question is hanging out with a bunch of developers to learn how their software works so that we can integrate with it better. This is well and good and hopefully helpful for the company. It also means I get to hang out in Seattle.

Of course, the biggest stereotype about Seattle is that it rains a lot. It hasn't actually rained since I got here, but everything is soaking wet, so it must have been raining before I arrived. On top of that, the weather has been slate gray and cloudy, with a promise of snow in the next couple days. So rain: check. Mind you, only the sky is gray. Seattle is built around Puget sound, so you have these long fingers of deep blue water running through the city, which is a combination of European style crammed-like-sardines buildings and huge masses of greenery. It's really a very nice looking place. The people seem friendly enough, though a bit on the quiet side.

The other thing I've heard about Seattle-landers is that they are heavy coffee drinkers. This is, in fact, true. The folks I'm working with have a coffee corner in their company, there's a coffee place across the road, there are piles of Starbucks coffee shops all over (apparently the chain started here), and even the Space Needle sells "Space Needle Coffee" in the giftshop. The coffee announces itself as being from "the coffee capital of the world." I had to speak quickly to avoid being served a friendly cup of coffee just as I arrived (though they do have hot chocolate, so I can pretend to fit in ... if I feel like it). Suffice it to say that the caffeine addiction runs long and deep.

The photo is the space needle itself, of course. The top part is an observation deck with museum-like exhibits. There are telescopes, binoculars, touch-screen video tours of Seattle, and lots of kidsy science-museum type things. It's about 540 feet tall (that's what, 200-ish meters?). There's a fancy restaurant 100 feet up, but I haven't tried it yet. The gimmick is that the restaurant s-l-o-w-l-y spins, and that you get to take in a varying slice of the skyline while you eat. I took this picture from just across the road, right next to a McDonald's which sits beneath it. The McDonald's announces that it serves "Seattle's best coffee" on their glowing marquee, and for all I know, they could be right. Don't expect me to bother finding out.

Flying Two Spaceships Simultaneously

This post is making fun of my roommate, though hopefully in a nice way. This is a shot of his desk, where he is playing video games on two computers simultaneously. And you thought you were coordinated because you can play just the one -- no no! He can do TWO!

You'll also note that it's the same game on both screens. Well, perhaps you won't, but it is. In this case, the game is called Eve Online. It's an MMORPG (that's a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game, for the acronym weenies), much like EverQuest or Worlds of WarCraft. Except that this isn't your older brother's Tolkienesque MMORPG -- no, this one takes place entirely in space, and sends its players zinging back and forth across some giant starfield, where you mine asteroid belts, play the intergalactic stock market, build corporations and space stations, and (very importantly) blow each other up.

The roommate has made some effort to get me to try it, but so far I've resisted. The economics look interesting, but I'm not a huge fan of cyberpunk. I am really excited about this game, though. I love the idea of decent procedural and player-generated content, and Will Wright has got me all excited now. I met Will Wright at SIGGraph 2002 (mostly at Demoscene events), and you'll notice that he gives the Demoscene a plug in the video that I linked to.