Voices in the News

I almost always fall asleep to NPR. The BBC World Service is my favo[u]rite program to fall asleep to. There's just something about the British accent that's so soothing. Most of the time I end up shutting it off right about the time that I'm really falling asleep but sometimes I let it go for the entire night. Sometimes I partially wake up (just barely) and I hear a montage of voices that I like a lot. I finally figured out what it was, it's the Voices in the News segment at the beginning of NPR's Weekend Edition. I don't know what it is about that segment, but it feels like everything there is so important when I'm listening to it while mostly asleep.

No WiFi Weekends

It's interesting that Victrola recently stopped providing a WiFi signal on weekends to keep their cafe culture alive. It sounds like a really good compromise between the "third place" that coffeeshops have become on weekdays and their old culture. I wonder what's going to happen when Seattle city-wide wireless initiative is finished, I guess Victrola won't be able to keep their customers from accessing the internet. Maybe they can put up blocking signals. Well, it doesn't matter to me because I'm lot allowed in that coffeeshop anyways (not really), the baristas look at me like I'm not cool enough to drink there.

Dialect

About a year ago I my dad mentioned that Laurel and I seem to talk the same now and he didn't know where it came from since he hadn't heard that way of speaking before. He said that we finished sentences by going up in pitch. He thought that it might be some sort of northwest way of speaking. I know that I've changed my way of talking before. I got back from band camp (yes, start the jokes now), which was in Austin Peay in Tennesee, with a southern accent. I had been living in Kentucky for several years but I didn't pick up the accent until I was around only people that spoke that way. I still have a southern twang that comes out every now and then.

Last week I read an article in the PI that talked about the northwest dialect and my dad just sent this site that breaks down linguistic differences by state. It's very interesting to see where you fall. You gotta wonder where an ligustic differences you have come from. I used to saw the name "John" drawn out like it was British maybe like "Jwon", I have no idea where that came from.

Uncontacted Tribes

Wow, what exactly does it mean to be uncontacted tribe? Does it mean that they've never seen anyone other than the people in their tribe? What do they think of the helicopters and airplanes flying over their heads? Do they have any comprehension of the size of the world and the technology in a modern city? What would it be like for one of them to be plopped down in the middle of Manhattan or Tokyo?

Art of Travel

Back in 1995 when I first had access to port 80 on the internet I did a lot of reading of what was out there on the internet and I became enamored with the idea of taking off a year (or more) and travelling around the world. I guess the web was full of travelling hippies (or wanna-be) back then. One of the sites that I really liked a lot was Art Of Travel. It sounded like lots of fun. It still sounds like lots of fun. I've been saying for ever that I want to do this, but unfortunately this isn't a blog entry about how I'm going to take off a year and travel, it's a blog entry about how cool it would be to do it.

One of the things that really interested me about that sort of travel was that you didn't carry with you everything that you have at home right now. So, it might seem that you don't actually need all of that crap you own to live a good life. I'm a packrat, I admit it, and having a house is going to make it a lot worse for me. But I still like the idea of finding the minimal amount of stuff that's required to be comfortable. I wonder what the list would be. Let's think about it.

Well, first I want to start off an say that I'm not talking about what a peasant from a third-world country would think is comfortable, I'm talking about what a normal middle-class person thinks is comfortable. Also, you should think about the fact that you'll be in a different country, so it doesn't matter if your friends see you in the same t-shirt two days in a row.

Well, let's see, two pair of pants, a few shirts (some short sleeve, some long), a bunch of socks and underwear. Ok, all boring stuff. Some toiletries. Boring too, but I actually accomplished the task of reducing my travel toiletries a few years ago when I was visiting my friends in San Francisco for the weekend.

Ever since I was a a teenager I had a toiletry kit (I call it a nessesare but I'm not sure if that's the right word) which was huge. I had wet wipes, and regular cologne, and cologne samples, and band aides, and lotion, and a bunch of different shaving things, and lots of other shit that I never used. When I started flying down to SF for the weekend I only took my normal bookbag so I could run around the city before my friends got home from work. Since it was only for the weekend I would only have a zip-lock bag with my toothbrush, a small tube of toothpaste, and anti-perspirant. No comb, no shaving supplies, no pepto, nothing else. And then I would also pack a book, two t-shirts, two pairs of socks, and two pairs of underwear. That was it. My backpack wasn't even full. It felt so liberating to be in another city with just the stuff on my back not having to worry about anything. When I was tired during the day I would find an open lawn and take a nap.

Just imagine living with just the stuff on your back. I've been thinking about how cool it would be to travel around the world with Laurel and actually get a furnished apartment in each city so we could stay a couple of months and really get to know the city and the country. It seems like it would be a lot more comfortable than normal travel where you change cities every few days. I guess you don't really need to live out of your backpack during that time, maybe you could also have a suitcase, but the point is that you would be able to move to another city without hiring a moving truck.

Everytime I take clothes to Goodwill I realize that I only wear like 20% of my clothes on a regular basis. I really don't need that many clothes. The rest are there for times when I'm lazy and haven't done laundry or holloween or something. I obviously wouldn't need to travel with all of those clothes.

Let's see what other things do I have that take up lots of space. Hmmmm, my books. Yeah, well, I have a lot of books, but I'm usually not reading more than 5 books at once, and I could probably get by with just 2 at a time. And I don't really need a dictionary anymore since I have my computer. Ahhh, yes, the computer. That's would be one of the more important things for a long term trip. It could take the place of many things. It could be our TV, we could easily carry around all of our DVDs in a one of those CD folders. We could also have an external hard drive, and the are at like half a terabyte so that's a lot of movies.

You can get thousands of books from Project Gutenberg.

It seems like you could have a pretty comfortable trip without taking too much.

The Size of the United States

I've been reading this lady's blog about being an Austrialian expat in America (Seattle actually) and it's really interesting. It's in the similar style the BBC's "from your own correspondent". I've also been very interested in this type of discussion. It's really interesting to hear about things such as their perspective on the size of the country:

When people talk about the United States being a lot bigger than Australia, they are saying the society or the economy is bigger. I guess it is obvious, but I had to experience it for myself to really get it.

Here's the deal. Say, Australia has 20 million, and the United States has 280 million people. Then the States has fourteen times as many people. That's fourteen times the number of people engaged in, presumably, fourteen times as much activity. That's fourteen times the number of songs being written, debates taking place, inventions being created, art being hung in galleries, cafes being patronised, sports tournaments being played, clubs having meetings, and so on.

I can't really comprend the country the size of China or India, but I bet it would feel like that to live in these countries.

I've heard Bolivia's say that they don't understand why people in the United States don't know more about what's going on in the world. And I would certainly agree that a lot of Americans aren't engaged with what's going on in the world I also think that part of that disconnect is for a reason. The United States is 30 times larger than Bolivia. There's 30 times more news that comes from our own country that we need to read about.

West Side of Queen Anne

I'm getting pretty excited about the stuff that's going on in Interbay, it's a pseudo-neighborhood squeezed in between Queen Anne and Magnolia. Our house is officially in Queen Anne and if you're looking eastward it certainly feels like Queen Anne. But if you walk west down the hill it starts looking shady when you get to 15th Ave. That's why we've been joking that we live in the ghetto of Queen Anne (even though we know that there are no ghettos in Seattle and certainly not in Queen Anne). While our part of Queen Anne certainly isn't the most prestigious, it's getting better very quickly. Because there are a few apartment buildings around the population density is high enough to support a coffeeshop and a small yuppie convenience store just a block away from our house. My new nextdoor neighbor who bought the house for over half a million is putting in probably half a million more in improvements (the house has been stripped to its bones). And there are million dollar condos going up on my block. And one of the houses on my block that looks like shit won't make it past inspection and will need to be torn down when the city inspectors working on the million dollar condos (since it's on a slope) walk by it every day, heh heh.

Oh yeah, I was going to talk about Interbay. Interbay is kind of a sore spot, a little dilapidated. But that's all changing right now. It looks like we're now getting a Whole Foods, which is my favorite grocery (I currently make a monthly trip across town to go there). The Port of Seattle which owns most of the land has a Framework Plan for development in the Interbay. Amgen's location at the south end of Interbay means that people are going to start putting good restaurants there. The monorail is going to start off with a station on the north end of Interbay (at Dravus) and there are plans of putting a station at Blaine, which is right down the hill from our house.

PSP

The night before we flew to Miami I went to Pacific Place to buy Laurel some Bose Noise Reducing Headphones just like mine. On the way out I decided to stop by the gaming store just to see if they had any PSPs. I've been drooling over the PSP ever since I first saw pictures of it a few months ago and I knew I'd eventually get one. But I'm not the kind of person to go out and buy something right away, especially something as frivilous as a portable gaming system. But, I was thinking that since I'd be spending a lot of time on flights from Seattle to Miami, Miami to Indy, and Indy to Seattle, that it might be a good thing to have when my brain can't take any more reading. As a side note, never take only two serious non-fiction books (Godel's Proof and Anti-Intellectualism in American Life) to a beach vacation. While it may seem like a good idea at first, you don't want to spend your entire time on the beach thinking about esoteric meta-mathmatics and the subtle effects of our puritan ancestors on our psyche. So, I stopped by the gaming store and didn't see a PSP display, I was sorta pissed, why would I spend $300 on an item that I've never seen. So I told the guy there that I might just buy a PSP if I first got to see it. So he went in the back and brought out his personal PSP and showed Ridge Racer and a video for me to see how nice the screen was. I was pretty frickin' impressed. So I ended up buying it with Ridge Racer.

The screen is nothing short of amazing. Everything looks good on it. When you watch a movie on the PSP it looks like a miniature version of an expensive flat screen monitor. The decision to go with a wide screen format was great. All new TV shows and movies are going to be on this format. The battery life was pretty impressive too, the PSP lasted way longer than I needed it to for my 8 hours of flights on the way back. The graphics of the games are pretty amazing for a portable, but they aren't at the level of the PS2 yet. I think that the PSP is capable of having better graphics than the PS2 but it might take a while for game developers to get comfortable with the architecture, just as it took a while for PS2 games to get to where they are today. What I didn't expect to here was that Sony is intentionally keeping the CPU and bus speeds at 2/3s their max. I guess we'll be seeing much better graphics in the future. The feature that I thought was really amazing was the inclusion of 802.11b wireless. It's becoming ubiquitous. I thought is was really cool that I could just turn my PSP on, click over the the wireless access icon, and it automatically connected to my hotel's wireless connection and checked for a firmware update. The only thing that I'm dissapointed in is that I can't use the wireless connection to move files back and forth between my computer and the PSP. But, the USB port works pretty well. I just plug it into my computer at it shows up as a removable drive. I then just drag movies, music, and images over to certain directories and they'll show up on my PSP. It comes with a 32 MB card which is good enough for saving games but definitely not enought to store music and videos so I just ordered a gig sized card. Even that's not large enough to bring out the full potential of the PSP. Wouldn't it be really cool if you could hook up your 60 gig iPod to your PSP and then store a shitload of movies and TV shows for long flights. Even though the PSP is great for games I really see the potential for the PSP to be a platform for a lot of other things that would require its awesome screen.

I suspect that non-gamers will eventually buy PSPs for its many other uses.

South Beach

Laurel and I are in South Beach (Miami) right now. We arrived last night sans luggage and our hotel didn't actually have our reservation. I called expedia and they said that I never clicked 'reserve', but my itinerary from them says that I was 'reserved for late check in' and the hotel was on it the itinerary, why would you put the hotel on the itinerary if it wasn't actually part of your itinerary? Fuckers. So, that hotel was full so we couldn't stay there. But the guy in the lobby was really helpful and got us a reservation with a very similar hotel just down the street. In fact, we're staying a block away from my dad's old apartment in South Point (the southern tip of South Beach). It's a really nice hotel. What I think is great is that I'm sitting in my bed with my Powerbook surfing the web while Laurel takes a nap. The last time I was in Miami two years ago I would have had to goto an internet cafe to check my email, which probably wasn't worth doing. But Wifi is so standard now that I just expected it to work when I turned my computer on. That's so amazing. This hotel didn't need to install expensive cat-5 in the walls, they just put a cheap-ass LinkSys wireless router in the lobby. They don't even advertise it, it's just there.

VoIP

Gavin has a really good article on VoIP. I've been thinking about moving that direction, especially since I'm currently paying two different people about the same amount of money each for basically the same service, but I've been sorta scared because there haven't been any other articles explaining how easy it is to setup. It seems pretty amazing that we went from having all internet access from the phone line, to having separate connections for the computer and the phone, to having just one connection again.