In something very fitting to do on the last day of the World Cup, I went with one of my friends from MS to go see the Seattle Sounders play FC Dallas down at Qwest Field. Not only was it my first time at the stadium (I of course have been to Safeco before, but not for a sporting event), but also my first sporting event period to attend at all in Seattle. I figured it would be a good game to go to because I’d be able to be happy regardless of which team won. Well, in typical soccer fashion, it of course had to end in a tie. Does that mean the one situation happened where I’m not allowed to be happy?
Looking at my calendar, this week is just about as empty as the last one was, but ideally this is a good situation. The idea is to have our first round of spec writing done by the end of this month, so in an ideal world, the features will be decided on early this week so I can spend my vast amounts of free time to do said writing. If not, well, I guess Lost is available for streaming for a reason. 
Personal - Seattle
After multiple postponements, I finally started redoing JG.com this afternoon by wiping the site and starting with a brand new WordPress installation. I still have to decide on my theme and get everything set up so currently there’s just a maintenance page up. However, given the rate I’ve gotten this far at, it’ll be August by the time I’m ready to do anything else.
This morning I was woken up to the sounds of a parade outside of my apartment (yeah, I was quite confused), but apparently it’s a thing that Redmond does every summer with floats that various organizations build. It was cool, I just made a really big loop around the parade path and took some pictures. Then, an hour or so ago, I start hearing fireworks go off. Unlike the 4th where it was a “heard but not seen” situation, I actually had a decent view out of my bedroom window of the fireworks going off next to what seemed to be near the city hall. So, when my parents will get back with pictures of water and ice, I’ll have some pictures of my own to show off.
Personal - Seattle
I had a week of real summer over Memorial Day and another week this past one, but it appears that starting tomorrow everything is dropping to being back down in the 70s for a high. Don’t get me wrong, that’s a great temperature, but it’s not “summer”. Spring or fall maybe, and perhaps even winter if you look at the Texas take on that season can be like (the alternative being 30 and snow, but that’s just the way Texas rolls). I will grant you that with the lack of AC, 75 is much more comfortable inside (and fine, outside also) than 95, but something just seed wrong about it being summer and it not being within at least 10 degrees of a triple digit number.
Andrew is off to Europe tomorrow, so I won’t have someone to IM with daily until he gets back around the beginning of August. If you look at my IM logs, Andrew is probably 95% of my IM traffic, and on many occasions the only person I talk with via IM on any given day. This tells me one of two things: either I need more friends (who use IM as a primary communication method like Andrew and I), or we’re just both waaaaaaaay behind the times and need to move onto the next fad for communicating. Twitter, anyone?
Personal - Seattle
Seattle, I’m going to say this, and say this once: at 3:00 in the (four letter word)-ing afternoon, your freeways are not supposed to be places where I could walk somewhere faster than I could drive!! Seriously, it’s not that hard of a concept. Either get new freeways or new people who can drive because the current combination isn’t working out too well. If you need some suggestions for the latter, I have a full state of people that would even regard this weather as being cool for this time of year.
Tomorrow I have to suffer through driving downtown again, but that should be the last time for…well, ideally ever. Unfortunately, I don’t think that will be the case. Tell you what, Seattle; I’ll make you a deal. Invent a low cost, environmentally friendly (since I know this is important to you) personal flying transportation device, and then I’ll happily travel downtown. Until then, let’s just try to keep rush hour traffic to the actual time of rush hour.
Personal - Seattle
This post is going to go over their heads, I know it. What is Facebook? They don’t know. (Ok, this is the one part of the post that isn’t entirely correct – they know what it is, but I don’t think either of them have ever used it.) What is a Facebook tag? They don’t know. Is that a good or a bad thing? They don’t know. What happens when you get tagged? They don’t know. Is it worth it for me to explain it to them? I don’t know. I doubt it though.
Apparently along with warm weather, my parents also bring the odd desire to go see movies, especially when staying in a hotel downtown. Knight and Day was the movie of choice this time (at a different theater than the one we saw Star Trek and Angels and Demons at, but just right across the street basically). It was good, not as good as I felt it had the potential to be, and I can definitely understand some of the criticism of it just jumping from location to location. There was an effect that was being aimed for, but they way it was done just fell a little short. My score: 6.5/10.
Personal - Seattle
How did my easing back into the real world go? Well, I had absolutely no meetings today, so it turned out to be a big day of own office entertainment. Let’s see, look ahead I have…oh nothing tomorrow. Hmmm, nothing on Thursday. Look at that, nothing on Friday either. So, Microsoft, while I guess I in some way appreciate being paid to sit in my office, you think I might be able to get a little bit more work? Not a ton, mind you, but just a tiny bit more would be appreciated.
So, with what I’m doing tomorrow (and the rest of the week) pretty well known, I guess I can look ahead to the weekend? Man, it seems so early to be doing that since today was effectively a Monday for me. I guess one interesting thing to note is that my parents are coming in tomorrow and bringing some Texas weather with them, much to the joy of Seattle residents who are ready for summer it would seem. Of course, that doesn’t really help out my parents who I’m sure would like to escape from the Texas weather, but they’ll have a week on a boat of looking at ice to do that.
Personal - Seattle
I got around to using my Roomba for the first time this weekend, and I must say, it’s a really cool device. Yeah, I have to remember to make it run manually (the higher end versions can be scheduled), but it can do my whole apartment in about an hour. It also forces me to keep my floors clean of little wires and things that would otherwise get it trapped. In the three times I’ve run it, there’s only been one incident which was an easy fix. I can totally see having a whole fleet of these go off and do their vacuuming thing during the day when I own a house.
It’s been a good three (that you could argue was really more like four) day weekend, but all good things must come to an end. That said, it isn’t like I’m going to be pounded with work tomorrow. Hopefully tomorrow will act as a nice way to ease back into the real world with a shorter week before I get to enjoy the pleasures of the weekend once again.
Personal - Seattle
One thing that has always bugged me about Windows Media Player is it’s complete inability to handle metadata for any videos aside from (presumably) WMV. Since my entire collection is AVI and MP4, this means that I can do basically nothing else aside from some filename manipulation in order to get the level or sorting and organization I want when there’s no folder structure in place. However, because of the cool Play To functionality in 7, I’ve been willing to put up with it. Well, armed now with the knowledge that basically Play To can be implemented in anything via some existing API calls, it introduces the real possibility of me sitting down and writing my own software that can handle everything I’d like. Of course, the better solution is to find some already existing media player software that can just do that for me.
My little embedded starter kit come on Friday, so I spent yesterday playing around and making something similar to but not exactly like one of the tutorial projects. There’s not a whole lot of interesting stuff I can do at the moment, but hopefully that’s just a trip or two to Fry’s and a good online tutorial away. Give me enough time and maybe I’ll eventually make a little box that I can then write software for that will handle all my Play To needs.
Personal - Seattle
So when I actually started to research how this WordPress upgrade would go, I ran into the unfortunate reality that powering two blogs on different domains isn’t really something it can handle out of the box. While I might be able to make it work if I got cute with rewrites and the like, I think I’m just better off having my two installations. Unfortunate, but perhaps it’s for the best that way.
So, what’s my plan for the 4th? Well, I’ll be at my apartment, playing video games, watching TV, and likely browsing the internet. And you know what? I’m very thankful that I live in a country where I have the freedom to do such a thing. 
Personal - Seattle
So, Blizzard, I totally understand why I wasn’t invited to be a part of the Burning Crusade beta considering that I didn’t even have an active WoW account at the time. Getting to play in the Wrath beta two years ago was a big surprise, and at least when the servers were up, fairly enjoyable. Today, a mere three days after the Cataclysm beta starts, you send me a notification that I get to play in it also. At this rate, you’ll be asking for my opinion on how to design future ones. Not that I’d mind that job at all; feel free to do so.
By pure dumb luck it seems, it was quite beneficial for me to work from home today because of the aforementioned situation. Granted, Blizzard could have made the installation/patching process a bunch easier and not make just the latter take over two hours to complete. I need to make sure that I balance my playing evenly between the beta and live servers so that a) I don’t get totally burned out on the new content before it even releases, and b) I hopefully have more than one character to take through the new content once it does launch.
Personal - Seattle