Fall-Line

This is awesome. My winter driving skills really need some work if I’m ever to drive like these guys:

Technorati Tags: Winter Driving, Winter

Today, much to my horror, I discovered that there are exactly 47 Starbucks locations within 5 MILES of my house in North Seattle. Now, many of us have been complaining about the rampant expansion of Starbucks here in Seattle for quite a while, so this may not come as much surprise. Upon further examination, I realized that most of the fealing of horror that I’m experiencing comes not from the huge number itself, but from the fact that I’m not at all surprised by this finding.
People across the rest of the country are coming to this same conclusion. Find your own Starbucks density here.

For some comparison, there are 99 stores within a 5 mile radius of my old apartment on Capitol Hill. Even this figure pales in comparison to some of the major urban areas.

While I’m generally in favor of capitalism and agree with most of the tenants of a free market economy, this is just beyond crazy. I think someone just needs to tell the world that there is better coffee out there than Starbucks.

Technorati Tags: Capitalism, coffee, Tycoon, urban jungle

I woke up this morning to find a beautiful winter scene in the neighborhood after a night of temperatures in the low 20s and freezing fog. Despite the back-pain I’ve been experiencing since throwing it out (following a snowboard incident) I hauled myself out side to snap some quick photos before the temperatures warmed.

The back is starting to feel a little better now after two days of struggling to even sit up or stand from a laying position. This is one of those things that happen to you as you age that makes you realize you aren’t as young as you’d like to think. 5 years ago, I would have popped up after taking a fall like I did on Friday and maybe been a little sore the next day. Now, I’ve had to miss a flag football game which I’ve been looking forward to for weeks, and am relegated to laying on the sofa, watching football this weekend.. a fate which, now that the Seahawks are out, has been disappointing.

I’ll stop my complaining now though since I’ve had plenty of time to read and catchup on the tv shows recorded on the DVR. Now that getting up to eat and let the dog out doesn’t involve crippling pain, I’m actually enjoying the afternoon. Now if only Robbie Gould had have missed that field goal…

[Music: Chargers vs Patriots in the other room]

Technorati Tags: photos, Seahawks, winter

Seattle has been hit with a mild dose of winter weather and as expected, everyone is freaking out.

I‘m personally quite happy to frolic in the snow with my dog, stay in my sweat pants and work from home today, but really people.. it’s not that bad.

Enjoy the white stuff while it lasts. We usually only get a few chances a year (if that) to enjoy a taste of winter. Tempuratures are forceast to stay at or below freezing for a couple of days yet. It looks like we might start our flag football season off with some damn-cold fingers.

Steve Jobs announced the apple iPhone this morning during the macworld keynote address in California. While many other vendors have attempted to create a truly screen based interface (without any “hard” buttons), apple is implementing a new type of device interaction which may just make these devices successful. I can’t claim to like or dislike what they have done until I get my hands on one to play with, but I can say that I’m impressed with what they are trying.

Earlier, I posted a youtube video of some “multi-touch” UI interaction experiments. I think I even went so far as to say that this type of machine interaction may well represent the future of computing. Now it seems that, for better or for worse, apple is giving it a go with the new iPhone. You navigate the screen, scale visual elements, and interact with the features using a similar combination of single and multiple “touches” similar to what you see in the video.

I currently have a new-ish GSM phone, and a new-ish Video iPod, so I don’t intend to rush out and purchase one of these buggers any time soon. My curiosity is certainly peeked though, and I can’t wait to get my hands on an in-store demo to try out.

Live coverage of the Macworld Keynote: http://www.macrumorslive.com/
Image from Macrumorslive.com

Youtube amazes me. This summer while we where in Moscow I used our digital camera to capture a short ~40 second clip of a humorous traffic scene (which we actually saw many of.) I didn’t think to much of it until after giving our slide show to a few folks - the video was well received. I used iMovie to cut it up a bit and add some appropriate music and posted it to youtube to share with friends.. pretty much leaving it at that. Without any effort towards promoting the clip on my part the youtube community went to work.

Within 4 days, it had been viewed 5,000 times.. within 2 weeks, 20,000 times.. It’s been just over a month since it went online now and it’s now had move than 40,000 sets of eyes viewing it. While these numbers are insignificant compared to the hottest videos kicked around each day by youtube viewers, I’m still amazed that something that I put very little effort or thought into has managed to attract such an audience.

UPDATE: This clip has now been viewed well over 80,000 times.

Technorati Tags: Russia, Travel, youtube

From the venerable Seattlest. I was going to try and sum up the pain and joy and chaos brought on by last night’s crazy game, but I’ll just let them do it.

“I Almost Shit My Pants! I Almost Shit My Pants!”:

Romo sign procured from Qwest Field by our roommate, who was at the game, sitting behind two Dallas fans. For some reason they didn’t take their sign with them when they left.

Our headline is the reminiscence of the Cowboys’ botched 19-yard field goal, by a guy who watched today’s Seahawks playoff win at the Kiwi and Kangaroo on Aurora.

Mike Holmgren, coaching genius:

What do you do if your 238-lb star linebacker tackles the other team’s 265-lb tight end just short of a first down that would end the game, but the line judge makes a bad spot and it’s not actually a first down and the clock is running down while you’re waiting for the replay officials to review it?

1) Do NOT call the time out, let the Cowboys run the clock down 30 seconds.

2) After the call is reversed, call a timeout to ice the holder.

3) After the holder catches the snap, but inexplicably drops it in the four-inch distance between his catch and the ground, takes off running and gets tackled from behind inches short of a first down on a terrific individual play by Cowboy-killer Jordan Babineaux–since you ran the clock down there will be less time for the other team to score when they get the ball back.

What follows are views of the botched 19-yard Cowboy field goal attempt:

Julian Peterson, from the field (via Seahawks Insider):

“I didn’t get to see nothin’. I got hit in the groin at that time, all I saw was stars. I was just glad that somebody came and picked me up and said, ‘we goin’ to the sidelines, it’s the offense’s ball’ … I woke up and it was like ‘…we off the field,’ so I was like ‘ok, help me off the field, maybe I can celebrate later.’”

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I’ve been sitting on a couple of domains for a few months now trying to figure out what I wanted to do with them if anything. I’ve finally convinced myself that I got it sorted out now though, so I’m happy to be back reunited with my fall-line.com wordpress self publishing toy (did I mention I the word “blog” bugs the shit out of me?)

So anyway, I’m happy to be back up and running.
Hopefully my old friends still have my feed in their friends list, or I’ll be lonely on here…