carbonado, wa

river, originally uploaded by leff.

Went up to Carbonado this weekend with my friend Brent and his friend Doug, met a bunch their friends up there, then slogged through the mud to find this ghost town.

It was a town, called Melmont. The ghost town label is a bit of stretch though. That implies some standing buildings and stuff.

What we found were the ruins of Melmont. They consisted of a rock wall that may or may not have been part of a building, the ruins of a dynamite store house, and the ruins of the one room school. Each separated by a quarter mile slog down a very muddy trail.

Still, it was a bunch of fun. An Adventure, you know? There's a ton more pictures on flickr.

importing contacts

Hi. I'm just popping my head in here to say that it's time for social networks to expand their 'import contacts' features. Specifically, they should import from other social networks. Email is so passe; I would have tons of friends on yelp right now if it would import from facebook.

yes, I'm voting for Obama, now STOP CALLING ME

I guess I've learned my lesson. Never, ever, evereverever, put your phone number on anything. No matter how much you're behind it.

I couldn't be happier to vote for Obama. But seriously, enough with the calls. The count is up in the thousands now. At least two phone bank calls reminding me to vote, a robocall from Michele and at least one from every dem candidate in the state. Including "special commissioner for the appreciation of billiards" for all I know; I've kind of stopped paying attention.

it's been a weird couple of weeks

It started with the normal "crazy busy" that leads up to a release. Rakka's been getting prepared to go to rural appalachia for a week (she's in TN now). Then... well, not to put to fine a point on it, layoffs. Luckily I'm still here, but it was just luck. I just happen to be the only full time employee in my "department" (the 'Content/UI' team doesn't officially exist, but it sort of describes my position) so here I am.

It's very relieving to be on this side of it, but there's no joy. More than any other job I've had I really like the people at Redfin. All of them. They are why I ignore all the recruitment messages that plague me on every social network. They are why I forget to blog for weeks at a time. They are why I work so hard.

So to have 20% of them gone. It's difficult. I miss them.

“To those who left, I can only say thank you for all that you’ve done for Redfin, and I’m sorry. It wasn’t your fault that you had to leave, and we will do what we can to help you take your next step. We’ll miss you, and we wish you the best of luck.”

Glenn said that, in the blog post. I second it. Seriously, anything you guys need.

delicious library sale

Hundreds of people, tens of thousands of books, all jammed in an old airplane hangar out by the sound garden. Yes, the biannual SPL library sale can be a bit overwhelming.

Aaaaahhhhh!

One of the things that happens a lot is I go there, and come back with twenty books that I already have. This year I had help. It starts with actually inventorying all the books I actually have. A pain in the ass that was lessened a bit by delicious monster's library.

screenshot

It has a lot of cool features. Like isight barcode scanning that looks your stuff up on amazon and fills in the details for you. It keeps track of loans. And most importantly for the library sale, ipod export.

ipod icon

It sticks a note in your ipod notes directory for each of your things. It even includes a snapshot of your 'smart shelves'. So while you're being jostled around by a crush of bookfans and trying to remember if you own "Cause of Death" or you just read it from the library, you can look it up. (And without lugging your computer around, or having to find a printer)

oh, I do already have it

So, delicious library is pretty useful. It's not the best thing ever though. It is buggy; I didn't mention the web export feature because it crashes the program for me (I suspect Japanese characters are the problem).

The worst thing about it though, is its tendency to make the wrong assumption when scanning old barcodes. Every week it picks a new movie to default to import when it can't find the book I'm looking for (this week, a best of Victor Borge vhs, last week it was something about Marilyn Monroe). To mitigate this a bit, you can make it speak the results (using the default mac os x voice), so you can move on to something else and it will tell you if it found the right thing.

Another bad thing. The UI for picking the exact edition you have, when you have to search by hand, is terrible. You type in "Murder Most Foul" and it shows you 50 titles, dates and covers (mostly blank). No option to search further. You can get more details, but it opens up an amazon window in your browser, which I don't want to do 50 times per book. My feature request was met with (paraphrasing) "we have to make the software more stable first; we'll think about that later". Not very encouraging for software that I actually paid for.

Update
If I had checked my mail before writing this post, I would have found a patch waiting for me for the web export (to folder) bug that I mentioned earlier. Which I just tried and it works.

I only filed the bug report this weekend. Quick work guys! Thanks! (Can we talk features now *grins*)

err... wamu tower? [architecture friday]

By now we've all heard, we've lost wamu. A perfect time to talk about their skin-crawlingly ugly tower.

JPMorgan Chase Tower

[where: 1201 Third Ave., seattle, wa]

Washington Mutual Tower screams 'eighties'. Which, despite the fashion industry's success at selling it to the young'uns, I consider to be a bad thing. The eighties were ugly when I lived through them. They still are. Evidence:

they can have it, it's awful

There are a couple nice bits. The trees in the courtyard are nice. The art, if you wish to call it that... well, I'm embarrassed for them.

silly courtyard, but nice trees

The little lights on the side are nice. Wish they were on some other building.

ooh, one feature I kind of like

Right on the next block is WaMu center. It's much better. I actually quite like it. It's all boxy and blue and shiny. Ground level is kind of ugly, but as soon as you get to the second story: sweet.

wamu center, much better

And from a distance it's this nice big blue monolith. It stands away from other buildings just a bit, which makes it even prettier.

yums

WaMu Center, FTW!

[where: 1301 Second Ave., Seattle, Washington]