*scottstuff*

My driver’s license expired a few days ago and I’ve been meaning to go in and get it renewed, but I was dreading the experience. The last time I had to renew, I had to take time off from work so I could sit for an hour in a hot DMV building full of crabby people. I had no desire to repeat that.

I bit the bullet today and walked over to the downtown Seattle licensing office at 3rd and Union. I was expecting a wait, but the room was almost completely empty, so I was back out the door with a new license in under 5 minutes. The whole process, including the walk from my office and back again took me under 10 minutes.

I’m having a run of good customer service experiences today. First my DSL got a free speed upgrade and now my driver’s license. I don’t really know how to top that.

I’ll have to call this a personal first: I had dinner at Chinoise yesterday with a group of people that I’d never actually met in person before, all arranged at the last minute via blog trackbacks.

Besides finally meeting Boris, I got to meet Chris, Lee, Kris, Amanda, and Silas. I’d never been to Chinoise before, but I’ll be back soon–great food, wonderful presented. The conversation was enjoyably geeky; Boris and I double-teamed Lee and Chris on the “you need a Nokia N91” front while the other half of the table discussed photo management software and backup strategies. Here are a couple pictures from Boris’s Nokia 6630, uploaded directly to Flickr during dinner. I really need to get a better phone.

No matter how much you like Fry’s, 4 visits in a single week is just too much.

I think I’ve ODed on Fry’s. At this point, all I see when I walk in the door is a Walmart with their core demographic switched from rednecks to rabid gamer wannabes. When looking for a cheap, non-tacky PC case on Saturday, I asked a wandering sales guy about cases without plexiglas windows in the side and he replied “we don’t have a lot of demand for those. Pretty much everyone wants to show off their mods.”

Hmm. Looks like both modfree.com and modfree.org are free. I see a merchandizing opportunity here. If anyone wants to pick them up and run with them, let me know–I’ll be first in line to order the “my PC is beige” t-shirt.

Today’s weather for Seattle, WA:

60°F, mostly cloudy

Today’s weather for my office:

72°F, light rain.

For the fourth time in the last two years, the air conditioner hiding above my office’s suspended ceiling is dripping, sending a stream of water onto the floor of my office. Fortunately, my current office layout doesn’t have any critical hardware setting underneath the leak.

The really annoying thing is that the leak seems to follow me–my previous office had the same problem, and it was in a completely different building.

The Seattle Ruby users group is meeting tonight. David Heinemeier Hansson and several of the other Ruby on Rails folks will be present. If you aren’t familiar with Rails, it’s an up-and-coming web framework that has been getting a lot of attention lately, even from outside of the traditional Perl/Python/Ruby communities. Oreilly’s ONLamp has a nice introduction.

If you’re interested in Ruby, this will almost certainly be worth attending.

We’re meeting at The Omni Group’s offices, near University Village. The Seattle.rb page has directions.

ProLab, Seattle’s second-largest pro film lab is closing their film processing and printing business. According to the Seattle P-I, the shift to digital has gutted not only their film processing, but also the demand for custom prints. Apparently people have noticed that a $2 8x10 from Costco with Dry Creek Photo’s profiles is pretty much the same as a $10 8x10 from a pro lab. With film, you’re pretty guaranteed that cheap places like Costco will scratch your film, screw up processing it, and leave it coated with gunk, but with digital that’s irrelevant.

So where does this leave the pro labs? For ProLab at least, they’re sticking with larger-format printing for advertising displays. Both ProLab and Ivey have been concentrating on this market for years, and it’ll probably serve them well for years to come, while traditional film printing fades into memory.

A friend just sent me a link to this week’s ads for Fry’s Electronics in Seattle. This has been a long-running irritation for both of us–unless we go out and buy a paper, we don’t know what Fry’s is selling this week. It seems ridiculous that they don’t post their sales online themselves; instead, this link above comes from one of the two major Seattle papers; they’re both hosted in nwsource.com.

While it’s nice to see their ads show up online, it’d be even nicer if they were actually usable–as it is, you get an unreadably small image of the ad; you can click to zoom, but the zoomed image only shows a single segment of the ad, usually one or two items. So, to read the whole ad, you’d have to load at least 100 distinct images. Nice work, guys.

One of the things about startups is that you tend to outgrow office space fairly rapidly. At Internap, I think I had 5 different offices in my first two years, and my current job hasn’t been far behind–we moved into office number 4 last week, just in time for my 2-year anniversary. This is the first time that we’ve been in our own space, though. The previous places were all in Regus’s temporary office space in the Bank of America Tower in Seattle–the tallest building in town, and a pinnacle of impersonal 1980’s corporate architecture. It’s full of lawyers and bank workers. I’m glad to be out.

The corporate website hasn’t been updated with the address of our new office, so I won’t mention it here, but it’s a nice art-deco building from the late ’20s. We have a floor to ourselves, and room to spread out. It feels like home, which Regus never did.

The combination of the move and a couple big projects at work have kept me from blogging much over the past few weeks. Hopefully the next few months will be more productive on both fronts, now that we’re settled in at work and back into the normal flow of work.

Once upon a time, I loved localfeeds.com. It was a great little RSS service that collected blog feeds, sorted them by latitude and longitude, and sent you a list of your neighbors’ blog postings.

Unfortunately, while it was very useful, it wasn’t very well managed, and it was apparently destroyed in a disk crash. I’ve been pining for it since February. The author has been promising to resurrect it for months, but it’s been a long, slow process without any obvious progress.

Until today, that is, when I noticed that Localfeeds is collecting data again. Ross has a post on the topic. He started the crawler back up in August. According to my logs, it started reading my blog in earnest on September 13th. At this point, NYC and Harrisburg are working; hopefully the Seattle area will return to life shortly.

Remember Infinium Labs, the makers of the Phantom game console, which has been total vaporware for at least a couple years? Their latest quarterly report filing says that they’re almost out of cash. While a lot of people online don’t seem too surprised by this, I have a slightly different perspective, and what I’ve seen doesn’t look like a company that’s about to implode.

As mentioned before, Infinium’s Seattle R&D office was right next to my office, and I saw their people daily until they moved into bigger offices on September 1st. They certainly weren’t acting like they were broke–the employees were working long hours right up to their move-out date. I saw glimpses of Phantom prototypes and production samples from time to time, but I never got a demo. One of their managers had a wall-mounted countdown clock, set to trigger in November–they were really focused on getting their product out on time.

Personally, I expect them to ship the thing, perhaps on time, perhaps a bit late. I don’t have high expectations for their product, but I don’t expect them to implode before they ship.

(via Gizmodo and Firing Squad)