*scottstuff*

The P-I has a nice little article on VoIP on their website today. It’s much more positive then I’ve come to expect–basically, it presents VoIP as an up-and-coming way to save money on phone service. They talked to Skype and Vonage users, as well as some industry types, and generally gave a spin-free picture of what’s possible with current consumer VoIP services.

There’s no real discussion of business VoIP usage, or anything like Asterisk, but that’s really out of scope for most newspapers anyway.

I just saw one of the Infinium Phantom consoles. One of the Infinium guys was carrying it down a hallway at work. Did I mention that we’re right next to their Seattle offices? About all I really have to say about the Phantom is that it’s a nice, glossy white–pretty similar to an iPod. If someone feels like plugging one in and letting me play with it a bit, you know where to find me. I doubt that anyone will be able to convince me that the keyboard/controller combo isn’t clunky and unworkable, though.

After working yesterday evening, Gabe and I stopped by the grand opening festivities at Seattle’s new central library. Gabe’s still a bit unclear on the difference between bookstores and libraries, but either way, he thought this one was cool. It’s a lot bigger then I expected, and it doesn’t seem as complex in person as I’d expected. A couple pictures:

I finally made it down to Salumi for lunch today. I’ve been meaning to drop by for most of the past year, ever since I saw it plugged it on Food TV.

Salumi is an interesting little shop–it’s small and crowded, and even at 11:30 there was a 15 minute wait to get food. There are only a couple tables, so you’re best off getting things to go. The salami looked very authentic–nothing in the entire place looked packaged, processed (cured–yes. processed–no), or refined. There wasn’t even a hint of marketing or franchising. They crawled through sandwich orders; the programmer in me kept looking for ways to speed up the line and eliminate redundancy, but that doesn’t quite seem to be the goal here. Everything I saw looked delicious, and in the end, the experience of waiting in line just made me want to order more food.

I had the lamb sausage sandwich, which was good, but fairly subtle, and not exactly what I was looking for today, but I’m a sucker for lamb. I also grabbed some gnocchi, raw sausage, and salami for dinner tonight. I have high expectations.

Even wonder who has the Washington personalized license plate with Microsoft’s stock symbol? I saw it this morning on my drive to work. I’m willing to bet it’s not a Microsoft manager–the plate is attached to a mid-90s burgundy-colored Geo Metro, in need of a bit of body work.

Localfeeds is still down. That’s not exactly breaking news; it’s been down since February. I was really starting to enjoy Localfeeds–it did a great job of showing me what other people in Seattle were talking about. Sooner or later it’ll pop back to life, so NetNewsWire keeps polling it every hour, hoping for something to turn up.

The thing that amazes me is that no one else has jumped in and implemented this themselves. The basic data is all available; it’s just a matter of database coding. And a lot of bandwidth. Still, there has to be a way to make money at this, and I’m amazed that no one has stepped into the void.

Well, it snowed today. They were calling for up to 6 inches, but I can only see 3 inches on the ground here. As usual, the forecast overstated the amount of snow to expect.

They didn’t overstate the traffic problems, though. I drove in to work around 9:00 today, and it was a piece of cake. 405 was clear and mostly dry, and 520 was only a little slow. 5 was slick, but there was no traffic. It wasn’t until I got off the freeway that the real fun began–I tried driving down Columbia. From 6th to 5th I mostly slid, but there was no one in the way, and I managed to stop only slightly into the crosswalk. From 5th to 4th I did a bit better, but I was still sliding slightly sideways by the bottom of the block. I had a green light so I continued through the intersection and stopped to see what to expect between 4th and 3rd. Good thing I stopped–there was a 3-car wreck sideways on the road, leaving only one lane open. Fortunately, there was a metered parking spot open right in front of me, so I parked and walked to the office.

I was the only person in the office. Everyone else was working from home today, apparently. Around noon, I checked on my car, and the wreck was clear, and the road was closed. There was a freezing rain rumor going around, and the snow was still coming down hard, so I decided to get out of downtown before I was stuck waiting out the storm. The commute home was mostly uneventful–I slid down Columbia to 3rd, which was a little slick, and then took University back uphill to 5, then on to 520. The bridge was deserted–at one point, I couldn’t see anyone in front of me or behind me–but the traffic picked up as soon as I reached the east shore. From there to 405, it was stop and go, on ice. Every time I started, I slid a few inches towards the divider. Great fun. 405 was bumper to bumper as well, at least through Kirkland.

So, what does this prove? Seattle can’t drive in the snow. Except for the downtown hills, none of the roads seemed particularly bad. The real problem was all of the other drivers, and the accidents blocking lanes and causing rubernecking. More plows would have helped, too.

<rant on>This has been killing me for about a year: I hate my parking garage at work. They find new ways to irritate me about every other week. I tend to work late hours, leaving work after 7:00 at night. The problem is that my garage closes for the night at 7:00. Since I pay for parking monthly, I have an access card to get me into the garage, but once or twice per month I manage to leave it at home, or in my car, and inevitably I find myself locked out. Half of the time, I can just wait around for someone else to show up with an access card and follow them in, but I hate having to do that. I mean, they obviously have a pile of customers that leave between 7:00 and 8:00 PM, but they don’t seem to think that it’d pay for them to stay open any later.

Even when I have my card, it sucks. This garage valet-parks everyone’s car, which is okay during the day, but it sucks at night. This is an ancient, dark, ugly building on the edge of Pioneer square (read: not a great neighborhood), and they tend to hide my car at night. So, I have to run up and down the stairs and figure out which dark cranny they hid my car in. It’s usually in the bottom corner, slalomed between building support posts, occasionally blocked in by someone else’s car. On Veteran’s Day, it was even better–the garage was closed, but half of the offices downtown were open. It wasn’t that bad parking in the morning, but at 6:00 when I picked up my car, the entire building was pitch black, and I had to run up 5 flights of stairs in the dark, using my cell phone for light. By the time I got to my car, I could only see car-sized objects 2 feet in front of me–it was DARK, and phones don’t make the best flashlights.

Like I said, the garage closes at 7:00. Usually. I’ve been locked out a handful of times by 6:55 or so, even by their punch-clock inside. Now, if you can actually catch them there, the staff’s okay, but the place just doesn’t work for people who work late nights. And find me a programmer who doesn’t work late every now and then?

So, tonight, what did they do? They left my lights on. I finished some server work around 8:15, walked the three blocks to my garage, got in, found the car, and nothing. The dash lights barely glowed at all. It wouldn’t even pretend to turn over. There’s no one around to jump me at 8:30 on a Friday, and I can’t push-start my can uphill, so I’m screwed. I’m on the bus right now; I’ll figure out how to get my car back later.

At least the bus stop is close to work, and there’s a direct run to the park-and-ride closest to my house.

Well, Fry’s Electronics finally opened a store in the Seattle area. Bizarrely enough, I had a easier time finding unusual computer stuff in Bellingham then I’ve had in Seattle. A lot of that is me not knowing where to look, but Seattle seems to suffer from too many CompUSAs and assorted office supply stores, and not enough actual techie-oriented computer stores. Example: I wanted to find a PCI Ethernet card that was supported by a specific kernel build that we were shipping as part of our product at work, and I ended up having to raid my closet at home, because no place in town seems to sell anything other then $20 tulip clones. I don’t know, Intel and 3com have stopped making real Ethernet cards or something, but it’s kind of irritating when you’re only a few miles down the road from The Evil Empire, and you have to mail-order Ethernet cards.

Anyway, Fry’s is here. It’s in Renton, which isn’t my ideal location for an electronics store, but it’s better then Portland, which was the closest Fry’s.

Cyn and I drove down on Saturday. That may have been a mistake, because it looked like everyone else in the entire state was there as well. They had 66 registers open, and the backup from the checkout lines was screwing up foot traffic in about half of the store when we got there.

All in all, it’s not exactly God’s Gift to Geeks, but they did have a lot of stuff in stock, including around 20 different motherboards (including 2 ITX boards), spools of Cat 5 (didn’t look for 5e or 6), multimode fiber with at least a few different connectors (but no singlemode), CPUs (including a couple speed grades of Opteron, although I didn’t see any motherboards), and so forth. Their drive prices weren’t great, but I was able to get a DVD/CD-RW combo drive for $49, which is about $50 cheaper then CompUSA. Not like that’s hard or anything–last time I was there, they wanted $30 for IDE cables ($2.99 from Fry’s, probably $0.17 in lots of 1,000 online).

In the end, I suckered in and spent too much money. My wife has been wanting a new computer for a while, and talked me into getting her a small-form-factor IWill XP-4. With a 2.4GHz Celeron, 512MB of RAM, 80GB drive, wireless keyboard and mouse, plus a 15” LCD, it came to just over $600, which doesn’t seem too shabby. I added a DVD reader and a wireless card that I had sitting around, and we now have a computer in the kitchen, running Linux. I’ll get to that rant later.