nini’s blog

Originally uploaded by nanananini

I was thoroughly confused by Seattle streets at first (and I must admit that they can still be very puzzling), but I think I have some of it down.

Avenues run (mostly) North-South, and Streets run East-West. Streets are prefixed with a compass direction, being NW, N, NE, W, E, SW, S and SE. Avenues are suffixed with these same compass directions. For example, where I’m staying right now in Ballard is near the intersection of NW 67th Street and 15th Avenue NW. This really messed me up, because I’m entirely unused to numeric streets intersecting each other.

The other oddity is downtown. A large chunk of streets follow the Elliot Bay shoreline, those being the streets on Denny’s land, whereas outside of downtown, streets are oriented on the cardinal directions. I’ve found that there are a lot of strange intersections in Seattle because of streets running both N-S/E-W and diagonally.

Another interesting tidbit of information I learned is that Ballard (the neighbourhood in the Northwest of Seattle) was comprised mainly of Scandinavian immigrants in the early days. The weather here is apparently quite like that in places like Norway and Sweden, and immigrants wrote home to tell their families of the opportunities here.

Last of all, I went on the Seattle Underground Tour yesterday. It was well worth it, and I was amused at how shocked some of the more elderly members of the tour group were. The most interesting thing I learned was that after the great fire in 1889, when the city was being rebuilt, the land had to be regraded, since it was built on mud flats. Being built on mud flats, the city had some serious problems with not only sewage backing up, but also potholes so big that people drowned in them.

Many businesses rebuilt far before the city was finished regrading the streets, so street level was 8 to 32 feet above the level of the sidewalks in front of stores (since the sidewalks were owned by the storeowners). Initially, ladders were in place to get down to the stores (on which apparently 7 people died of “involuntary suicide”), but at some point, the sidewalks were covered over to the level of what is now street level. This left underground passages underneath the new sidewalks, going around what used to be the first floor of businesses. There are skylights in these passages, like the one in the picture here. Eventually, it became illegal to operate businesses in the underground, so illegal business such as speakeasies and brothels flourished. The underground was condemned in the early 20th century, and reopened for the Underground Tour in the 60s, as part of a movement to preserve the historical Pioneer District of Seattle.

Check out the rest of my pictures (including the fabulous architecture of the Seattle Central Library) here.

Couch street

Originally uploaded by nanananini

I’m sitting in World Cup Coffee and Tea across the street from the HI-Portland Northwest hostel, having a latte and some breakfast noms. When I was planning my trip to Seattle I decided I’d take some sort of a side trip, either to Vancouver or Portland. I settled on Portland since I’d never been here before.

I had a really kickass day yesterday — here are the pics. I met up with Orion in the late morning, and we took the gondola up the hill. Apparently it was somewhat controversial when it was being built, as the regular public transit infrastructure could have used some improvement.

After that, I had some great sushi, and proceeded to spend several hours in Powell’s bookstore, both the main location and the tech store.  It is the most amazing bookstore I have ever visited, and I could have spent several more hours and dollars there. The technical store was especially awesome. It had a wall devoted to old computers, including an Apple IIe, Commodore 64s, a Macintosh Portable, a TI-99, and several more, including some really old boxes with switches and lights. There was also a large shelf of programming manuals for the computers. On top of that, since Powell’s sells new and used books, their selection of tech books, especially in computer science, was phenomenal. There were all sorts of nifty programming books, going back to old ones on Fortran and Cobol. I wish I’d caught a picture now.

Going along with the theme of geek, Orion and I stopped by Ground Kontrol after dinner.  It’s a bar/arcade, with a large selection of arcade cabinets from the 80s and 90s. I played gems like Discs of Tron, Frogger, Q*bert, and Tekken Tag Tournament (where I kicked a Panda’s butt with my seductive red dress-attired character).

So far, I think I’ve been lucky with the weather here. While I’ve been walking around outside it’s been sunny and relatively warm. Apparently it gets pretty rainy here too, so I’m glad to have escaped the wetness briefly. I’m heading back to Seattle around noon today, where I expect it to be at least drizzling.  Now, I depart for the Oregon Historical Society, with my heavy load of books.

The Troll

Originally uploaded by nanananini

Sunday consisted partially of relaxing, partially of doing touristy things, and partially of being really, really wet. I didn’t realize how wet I and my worldly belongings could get until now. My copy of Frommer’s Seattle 2008 and The God Delusion are really beat up, but at least my electronics are okay! If I lived here I’d invest in a good raincoat and boots.

The statue featured in the picture is called The Troll, as you may have guessed. This is a stone carving under a bridge at the dead end of a street we happened to be passing by. Definitely reminds me of something out of LOTR. You can check out the rest of Sunday’s pictures as well.

Speaking of water, and wetness, Duncan invited me to come along with the group on the boat on Lake Washington. It was gorgeous and sunny in the morning, but when we set out, it started to rain. But never fear, the rain wouldn’t ruin our day! We ventured out onto the lake anyway. There was a good view but I don’t have any pictures because it was too rainy. In fact, my coat soaked through. And my pants. And my backpack. Duncan and Steve were having a blast — they were wakeboarding. It was pretty entertaining to watch, but I am still quite in awe of Seattle-ites resistance to rain. I saw no umbrellas while I was hanging out downtown, and very few hoods or hats.

Instead of going home to relax in the hot tub (which I ended up doing before bed anyhow) I decided to go downtown after boating. I checked out the Experience Music Project (the grunge and riot grrrl memorabilia was cool, as was the instrument demos), REI (to buy myself a stainless steel water bottle and to drool over the gorgeous waterproof jackets that cost a fortune and which I didn’t end up buying), and the Pike Place Market (which was mostly closed at that point, but I did get to go to the very first Starbucks, as well as a really funky, obscure Italian restaurant called the Pink Door, which is recognizable only by, surprise surprise, its pink door).

I made it a fairly early night, in order to get up to catch the Amtrak to Portland the next morning. As I type, I am sitting in the common room in the gorgeous downtown Portland HI hostel after spending a really awesome day with Orion, a friend of mine. I shall hopefully have time to post some more pictures and blog again about Portland tomorrow. Good night all <3

Vote Pig!

Originally uploaded by nanananini

My friend (and former coworker) Eric invited me to his brother’s annual pig roast, and since I was planning on being in Seattle around the same time, I took him up on the invitation. This roast is a big deal, about 100 people showed up, and the pig was massive. There were two kegs of beer (a pilsener and a pale ale), and a gigantic table full of other delicious eats.

I found the process of roasting the pig fascinating. It really sunk in that I’m so used to having my meat nicely packaged and cleaned and sold to me in the grocery store. Really, it shouldn’t shock me that the pig was being roasted with not only its head, but its eyes and teeth still intact. In any case, it served to remind me that the nommy pork I was eating was once running around in a pen.

Unfortunately, I had to go to sleep really early, because I was starting to wobble like a weeble, which I haven’t been witnessed doing since, oh, the Christmas party at Hurley’s. And, sadly, it wasn’t because I was happily inebriated, but alas, was very much jet lagged. I think I’ve recovered now, but I’m getting up extra early tomorrow to take the train down to Portland for a day. I think that will throw me off a little again. I shall update you all on Seattle happenings of today at a later point. In the meantime, enjoy the rest of the pictures from the pig roast.

I’ve been thinking about this for awhile now, and I’d like to have a weekend where I make copious amounts of tasty Polish food.  I pulled out my mom’s old Polish cookbook (published by the Catholic Women’s League at St. Stanislaus Parish) and am flipping through some recipes right now.  Many of these dishes remind me of Wigilia (Polish Christmas), since that’s usually the only time of year I get to eat them.  I’d like to remedy that!

First, there is Barszcz.  This is a beet soup that we will generally eat as a broth, or with just grated beets, and occasionally Uszki (dumplings).  The image shows one of the more vegetable-y varieties.

Next, there are Pierogi.  These take the better part of an afternoon to make, but are well worth it if you’re making a large batch which you can freeze for later.  It’s also fun (and convenient) to make these with two people.  My favourite kind are just plain potato and cheese, but there are also tasty cottage cheese, meat, and vegetable varieties.  I’ll usually add some sauteed onions on top, and some people will fry them up along with the onions.

There are also potato pancakes (latkes).  I wouldn’t generally serve them at the same time as pierogi, since there would be too much starch.  They are fairly quick to make.

Some other tasty dishes are Gołąbki (cabbage rolls)

Kapusta (saurkraut) and Bigos (hunter’s stew)

At Christmas, we’ll often have Śledzie (pickled herring) and Kasza (buckwheat) with mushroom sauce on the side.

For dessert there are a number of things that can be served. Chruściki (little bow ties) are a delicious deep-fried pastry that are also fun to make.

Makowiec (poppy seed cake) is also tasty, and goes well with coffee.

Finally, there is homemade hot krupnik.  This is traditionally served around Christmastime, and I personally enjoy having a cup to warm me up in the winter.

I’m sure I’ve missed a few more delicious things, but these are generally my favourites.

As OLS draws to a close I’m going to go over some of my favourite bits of the week.

First of all, there was the Women in Open Source BoF, led by Terri Oda.  We talked about the various community groups available for women (including LinuxChix, which I am a member of, though not actively these days).  There was some discussion about how well women get by in a community varies by group.  My personal feeling is that the more ‘hardcore’ the group, such as kernel hacking, the more difficult it is for women.  I personally have not encountered terrible resistance in any online community, however I haven’t delved into anything as hardcore as kernel hacking, and there is also the fact that I am not a well-known name. Terri mentioned death threats that female Debian developers had been receiving recently.  I hadn’t fathomed the possibility that things like this happen these days, so it was a rather low note of my day, to be sure.  Otherwise I was very happy to have gone to this BoF, if only just to meet other women in the FOSS community, especially Terri, who is really awesome.

I had also been very excited to see the keynote on OpenMoko by Werner Almesberger.  He covered the two iterations of the hardware so far (the 1973 and the FreeRunner), and future additions (like quad-band, EDGE, faster USB, and nicer case) that I entirely agree would improve the device, though I wonder how difficult it would be for OpenMoko to support 3G.  On the software side, the current GUI uses GTK+, and is extremely slow and heavy, despite an update from the GUI on the 1973 (which doesn’t surprise me, as running X on a mobile device seems like a very bad idea).  The August update will use a use a Qtopia base, with some EFL thrown in there.  Qtopia looks pretty slick (and of course, does not require X), but in the words of Mr. Almesberger, is very ‘incestuous’, and OpenMoko will likely be leaning towards a FreeSmartphone.org + EFL solution.  I did get to play around with a FreeRunner, and was not very impressed, to be frank — it was slow as molasses and had a far-from-intuitive interface.  Still, I honestly believe that OpenMoko is moving in a good direction, and if I could get my hands on a Neo I would love to hack on it.

I had a pleasant surprise this morning.  I had posted this status on Twitter to no one in particular about a Firefox 3 bug I was experiencing.  I got a reply from Firefox Answers with a fix.  Not only is this pretty neat on its own (because the borked location bar had been bothering me for awhile), it also illustrates that microblogging can actually be used for more than just to tell everyone that you had sausages for lunch.  I hadn’t paid much attention till now, but search.twitter.com seems to be pretty powerful these days.  It looks like it has pretty much obsoleted hashtags.org (yes, laugh if I am way behind the times).  I think I will test drive it some more later today.

Today was day 1 of CS summer camp.  I’m volunteering in the Game Guru track.  As has been pointed out to me, I am not a game programmer by trade, but nevertheless, as it is mostly an introduction to game development I have a good enough grasp of everything to help the students along.

The kids are working on a side scrolling spaceship/asteroid game, and today they were introduced to the API in order to program some AI into it.  It turns out programming AI is very mathematical/geometrical (at least for this game).  You could come up with some pretty intricate algorithms to solve the problem, and yet, simple ones work fairly well in the simple cases.  The best part is really that only minimal programming skills are required to do the exercise, and solving the problem mostly hinges on how well you can map out cases.

Later on in the afternoon we took a tour of the EA office in Place Ville-Marie.  I was pretty excited to be there, as we got to walk through the area where a team was working on Spore for Wii.  To take this post off on a tangent briefly, I’m just going to mention that I’m pretty excited about Spore.  I saw a small demo of it at E3 a few years ago, but was a bit worried that it would turn into vaporware.  Not so, apparently.  Now I need to decide which platform I want to play it on.  Apparently it will even be released for the Mac, which I didn’t know before.  Sadly, I don’t think my Macbook will be beefy enough to run it.  Is it time for me to get a Macbook Pro? I don’t know.  I want to play Spore when it’s released, and would be really impatient to wait for the 360 version.

Back on topic, I’d never been to a game studio before, and it was neat to see EA.  The workspaces looked pretty sweet, with good ambient lighting and large open spaces.  I rather wish my office was like that.  We also got to speak to a few former McGill grads who now work for EA and they gave us a rundown of what kind of people are involved in the process of making a game as well as what stages game development goes through.

I’m looking forward to seeing how the kids progress through the rest of the week.  It’ll be fun to see the competitions on Friday, for sure.

First off, Mr. Icon and I will be heading to the Ottawa Linux Symposium in July.  Some of the sessions look a little daunting, as I’m not a kernel hacker, personally.  But, I think it will be fun to branch out a little, and of course there are several sessions that interest me, including Cloud Computing, Linux WLAN, Linux Robots, and, of course, Women in Open Source.  There are also the keynotes, one by Mark Shuttleworth, and another on the topic of the OpenMoko Neo.

Last year Steph and I were ogling the OpenMoko Neo before the iPhone had come out.  Steph ended up getting an iPhone, and I suspect that that will likely be the case for me as well.  Though it looks like it might be released in early July, the official website doesn’t seem to support this prediction very well, considering July starts, well, tomorrow.  Even last year, when I was originally looking at it, it was “coming soon”.  Basically, I can keep waiting and waiting, or I can satisfy my urge to have a new toy to play with _right now_.  Who knows, though, perhaps I will be pleasantly surprised.  I am certainly looking at Android as well.  And maybe the Rogers’ iPhone rate plans will hold me off on buying an iPhone for a little while, at least in Canada…

Thank goodness this update came out.  It looks really promising and the thing I’m probably happiest about is (from the WP blog):

Friendlier visual post editor — I’m not sure how to articulate this improvement except to say “it doesn’t mess with your code anymore.” We’re now using version 3.0 of TinyMCE, which means better compatibility with Safari, and we’ve paid particular attention this release to its integration and interaction with complex HTML. It also now has a “no-distractions” mode which is like Writeroom for your browser.

I have had so much frustration with the post editor that I’m really hoping this will make it a lot easier to format posts.  I’ll have to test it out later and see if I can get anything to break

Adding media and extra metadata to posts also looks pretty sweet, and again, I will have to play around with that.  I just need to play around with WordPress more, period.