This is a reanimation of the Vicaribus blog as lived by Miro Kazakoff and Ehren Foss in 2004 and 2005. The photos may be spotty.

Seattle 1; Map 0

Posted by ehren

The rest of the casual concert on Thursday night was horrible enough to mention. One girl forgot the lyrics to her Patsy Cline cover, and the emcee and one of the performers had a heated argument in earshot of the microphone about whether or not the emcee had scratched the guitar, and who was going to pay for it, etc, and with the exception of one guitar loopist (I don't know what else to call it, but similar to the Darin Shafer act we saw as a part of Euphonia in SF) the other acts were moderately talented at best, but compensated for it by turning up their amps to 11.

Since I'm already complaining unnecessarily, I'd also like to talk about what a navigational disaster Seattle is. Boston is likewise terrible, but with 5 or 6 years of steady effort I was able to reliably get from one end of Cambridge to the other, could react quickly enough at the weekly I-93 onramp changes, and I had learned what to do at the intersection of Tremont and Tremont, and which of the 5 Beacon Streets intersected with which of the 6 Washington Streets. At least with Boston you know it's hopeless. "Wheah? Trying to get to McGrath?...well, you can see it over yawndah... but... No, I don't think it's pawssible to drive theah. Maybe dig a tunnel?"

Seattle, I think, is far more sinister. It purports to have a gridded system of streets, with numbered avenues, boulevards, or streets, and occasionally pretends to use another reasonable system of organization, like in-order Presidents or alphabetics. Lies, all of it. The grid pattern only rarely lines up with NSEW, and it changes and jumps at town and city boundaries, and the boundaries are all totally irregular, so if you drive from Bellevue into Renton along the serpentine border you'll find intersections such as 65th St. and 154th St. which is as unhelpful as possible. Throw in patternless one-way streets, diagonal sections of downtown, towns that provide only local signs ("Coal Creek Rd." instead of the Hwy 99 we were looking for), 50% dead-end probability, 5-mile-long exitless viaducts, and... I quit. Every turn we took while looking for cheap diesel Thursday night was wrong, or felt wrong.

Pictures, of course, speak louder than words.

Pacman would throw up his arms in disgust at that overcooked pot of cartographic spaghetti (Apologies to Barb, David, Joseph, and Mindy, whose house is somewhere in there). Eventually we gave up on fuel and parked at the Wal Mart in Renton, close enough to Sea-Tac for Miro to take city transit in the morning.

Friday morning I woke up after one snooze on my alarm at 7:53, figured that the bus would be boiling hot in less than an hour, so after coffee & fruit at Denny's (where I called truck shops) I walked to the Renton Library (built over the Cedar River...very nice building), and while waiting for it to open at 10 took a photo of a firetruck RV conversion (zounds!) and called some folks. At the library, I did little work, then walked back to the bus around noon, talked to Project SPECTRE on the way, and got the foolish idea to drive up to Bellevue early (breaking the cardinal rule of WiFi cultivation: once you find a good spot, stick with it), bought 44 gallons of diesel, got lost twice on the way to downtown Bellevue, so by 3 I was ready to do some work again.

I put in about 2 solid hours on a short project due Tuesday (I shall call it KARNAGE: Klaxon After Rotoscope, Noisome Alarm Generation Engine). Then, a random guy who overheard me trying to explain how WiFi works to another random guy asked me a bunch of questions out of nowhere about machine vision, a subject that I remember little of use about, and also the title of the only class I dropped as an undergrad (after spending 70 hours on a takehome exam I got the 2nd lowest grade. Woo!). He's a graphic designer working on a system of "forms" that he believes will describe all the possible relationships that objects in images could have, in hopes that he might some day make an image search engine. I would bet that by 2010 we'll be able to type in abstract phrases like "3 people sitting in chairs" or "8 story buildings" into images.google.com and receive results based on scene understanding rather than surrounding metadata. His approach wasn't academically informed, and I tried to describe the current approaches to the problem, and he asked if I could connect him the people I knew doing vision research, so I did (with their permission).

Friday night I had dinner with the Goldbergs, old friends of my parents, who lived across the street from 77-80'. I had met them perhaps half a dozen times, all before I was 9 or 10, and to be honest I don't have any trustworthy first-order memories. While ash fell from Mt. St. Helens, my parents moved to Sun Valley Idaho, and a few months later I was born. It was strange seeing myself in someone else's scrapbooks. Their son Joseph, my age plus a few months, has 2 year old twin boys, and they kept everybody busy through dinner until their bedtime meltdowns. We brought them to see the bus, and they had a grand time pretending to drive and slapping at the switches and dials (once finding the horn and windshield wipers, but luckily not the parking brake). They let me use their shower, and around midnight I took the bus to the industrial area just south of downtown, and found a spot I hope will be good through the Monday holiday. I've heard of dozens of fun things to do in town this weekend, but I fear that I must work.

FYI Miro, we have an appointment at a truck repair shop on Tuesday, which would probably be a good day for the Boeing Factory tour.