Doug’s World

A walk around the neighborhood

I took a long walk this afternoon and snapped some pictures.

I went down through Leschi along the Lake Washington waterfront, then up the hill through the Mount Baker neighborhood, south to Columbia City, then north up the Rainier Valley to Jackson and back down the steep hill to home. It took about 4 hours with numerous photo stops (over 100 photos), and I think I covered about 8 miles. (After running a little yesterday, I felt sore and decided to just walk today.)

It’s cool to have this much variety nearby. There’s the rich folks along the waterfront, the old middle-class neighborhoods up the hill, the poor people in the Rainier Valley, and all the decades-old businesses along Rainier Avenue. I walked past multi-million dollar homes, and food banks; guys taking a drive in expensive sports cars, and guys who obviously slept on the street last night; little patches of old-growth forest, and countless acres of pavement; restaurants serving the ethnic food of Ethiopia, Vietnam, and Somalia, and markets selling the traditional groceries of Cambodia, Greece, and Mexico. People who were scared of me, and people who scared me too. And the future light-rail line that will open in 2009, whose presence may change this area in many ways. Or not.

And the views! Like the one above: that’s looking south down the Rainier Valley to Mount Rainier, from the south side of I-90. The mountain is 60 miles away, but the telephoto lens made it look like the glaciers are about to bury Kent and Renton. (Not a bad idea IMO, but that’s a topic for another post.)

Click here to step through 15 of my favorites from today’s walk.

That colorful little latte stand, Kaffa Coffee, is our favorite place to stop for coffee on Rainier. We found it when we first moved to Seattle just because of the location: it was the only drive-thru on all of northbound Rainier for most of the last year, and that was our daily commute. The African guy who owns and operates the place is sweet and friendly. If you’re in the area, give him your business — it’s at the corner of 23rd and Rainier.

This time I took pictures of stuff mostly: nature, buildings, roads, views. Next time I do this, I’m going to be a little more bold with the camera and try to get some good shots of people instead.

Christmas Present

My present from Megan arrived yesterday: a Yamaha DGX-620. (Well, she got me some other presents too, but this was the big one.) I’m having a blast, because I haven’t had a keyboard in a long time.

My first electronic keyboard was a Micromoog, purchased on Halloween Day of 1975. Dad was out of town on a business trip, and I had just sold my ‘68 Chevelle SS muscle car the day before, after losing my driver’s license at the tender age of 17. I figured I had to buy the keyboard fast, before he came home and told me to save the money for college or some other boring idea.

Since then, I think I’ve owned 12 electronic keyboards, three grand pianos, a couple of uprights, and I’ve rented a few pianos too. But I sold all my keyboards in 2004 and have only had a rented piano in the last year, which I barely played and we didn’t bother to move to this place in October.

This thing is amazing. The grand-piano patches are extremely realistic, it has the feel of a real piano, and the pitch-bend wheel is tight and responsive. Oh, and it has 500 other sounds too, and a zillion features I’ll never use because I’d rather be playing music than fiddling with the technology. I fiddle with technology at work, and this week is all about fun.

It even comes with a drink …

I was already taking the week off, and this just makes the chances of me doing anything productive drop to absolute zero. Thanks, Megan!

Sunrise Photos

Living here, it looks like the “sunrise photos” post is going to become a regular. It’s a nice way to start the day, and I don’t even need to get dressed to get shots like these …

CNN coverage of Saddam’s hanging

Saddam is dead. Finally. Let’s all think about something else. As Tony Benn (81 year-old British politician) said an hour ago on CNN, “with six hundred thousand Iraqis killed since the US invasion, one more won’t make much difference.”

CNN has lived down to its role in this debacle as expected. They’ve been breathlessly covering the story for a few hours, including things like some blond reporter in the Green Zone standing in front of a couple of guys with a campfire. That’s how we can see she’s really out in the wild, you see. And these guys have black hair and mustaches, so that’s how we know they’re Iraqis. Every half hour or so, this chick tells us about “the mood on the street” or “the feeling here,” although her two stooges have never said a word.

We also got to see this chick talking to some medical expert about the physical details of what will happen when Saddam is hung. They even put a noose around the dummy’s neck, and after a couple minutes on spinal-cord injuries and other details, they panned down to the exposed red heart of the dummy and ended with the point that Saddam’s heart will stop beating within three minutes of being hung. Nice touch.

Oh, just while I was typing this, they broke in to say that Al Jazeera has report that Saddam is dead.

And — I am not making this up — they just showed some guys in Dearborn, Michigan (later identified as “Iraqi Christians”) waving Iraqi flags and celebrating. Still no word from any actual Iraqis in Iraq, though, other than the second-hand messages from those buddies of the blond CNN chick.

Anderson Cooper just broke in to say that Saddam died half an hour ago, at 7:05PM PST, according to Al Arabia. And while he’s talking, they keep showing that dental exam of Saddam that was done back when he was captured.

They just went back to Dearborn, where a CNN reporter is explaining that “many people here” (those aforementioned Iraqi Christians living in the US) “feel this justifies the Iraq war.” He also just explained that these people have been “thanking God for what has happened.”

In America, we call this journalism.

A final snippet: the blond chick just came back to say that she heard some celebratory gunfire in the distance, and Anderson asked her how to “tell the difference between celebratory gunfire and, uh, not celebratory gunfire.” She explained that if people near you aren’t running away, then it’s safe to assume it’s celebratory.

It may not be journalism, but it’s certainly entertainment!

Time to lose some weight

I just stepped on the scale for the first time in about a year. It wasn’t pretty. Here’s my weight at the end of each of the last five years, and a goal for 2007:

Hey, I got married in 2006, that makes your weight go up, right? And with all this business travel and long hours it’s hard to get on a predictable eating/exercise routine. Yeah, yeah, yeah, excuses, excuses, excuses.

Anyway, no big talk, no more details, I’m just going to post this, and then post my actual weight at the end of each month in 2007. ‘Nuf said. We’re going jogging over at Seward Park, right now …

Odds & Ends

On a lighter note …

As a person who will be traveling to Sydney for the first time in a few weeks, I found this article especially interesting. Note to self: bring a winter jacket, in case I end up in the wrong hemisphere.

My friend Vinod in Kerala (India) sent me an interesting observation: 2007 starts and ends on a Monday, has more Saturdays and Sundays than most years, and none of the public holidays occur on a Saturday or Sunday. (That includes both US holidays like Christmas and the 4th of July, as well as all the Indian holidays like Makara Shankranthi, Independence Day and Deepvali.)

So 2007 will be the most leisurely year possible, with the maximum number of days off in both the United States and India. Stock up the fridge with your favorite beverage and get ready to enjoy!

Why the hurry to hang Saddam?

Juan Cole saw fit today to post somebody else’s thoughts on his blog. Juan is a longtime professor whose area of expertise is Middle Eastern politics and religion, and he has posted Larisa Alexandrovna’s analysis of why the Bush administration has delayed their announcement of any change in Iraq strategy, and how that fits with the sudden rush to execute Saddam Hussein during the Hajj, when Muslims are all focused on the pilgrimage to Mecca.

We’re playing with fire now. My prediction: a year from today, we’ll look back on 2006 as the year before we escalated the war and things got really bad in Iraq. (I’ve made a note in my calendar to re-visit that prediction right here on 12/29/2007 and see how I did.)

It’s interesting to see how the American media is having an orgy of excitement today over the prospect of Saddam hanging this weekend, while other major media around the world (perhaps you’ve heard of the BBC?) is covering the “subdued” tone of Saddam’s final words.

Sunrise Photos

A nice brief sunrise took place this morning. It was actually a post-sunrise, at 7:40, when the sun was above the horizon but still not visible because of clouds over the Cascades. The sky turned bright orange for just a few minutes, and then it was gone.

No Photoshop adjustments on these, this is how it looked from the front deck …

The incredible shrinking world

The world just keeps getting smaller. And it’s so easy to get online and search for people now, especially because many of us are leaving lots of digital tracks for the search engines to find.

When I first set up my personal web site back in ‘96, I heard from a friend I had completely lost touch with 15 years before. JJ Holiday and I went to junior high and high school together in the Seattle area, then he moved to Los Angeles to join a band, I moved to Chicago to play video games for a living, we both got busy, and we completely lost touch. But he found me online as soon as I stuck my head up, digitally speaking.

Now in the last month I’ve had three similar surprises, all people who found me through this blog or my work blog.

First I got an email on December 6 from Richard Brown, who works in the Applied Research section of NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. Richard happened to find on my web site a photo that I took from his condo’s front door a few days after Hurricane Katrina had destroyed his home. His family also experienced Hurricane Camille in Pass Christian, just like Megan’s family did, and like them he said Katrina was much worse.

Then on December 19 I got an email from Byron Huff, the author of one of my favorite golf books, “Be The Target.” He had found me through my blog, where he noticed I had said some nice things about his book. This was pretty exciting to me — “Be The Target” is a book I’ve read and re-read many times. There’s a whiteboard putting drill based on that book which I’ve often shown people, and the whole concept of putting your awareness at the target instead of on the mechanics of your own swing is something I work on every time I play golf. And now I have Byron’s email address, so I can nag him if I have a question about any of that stuff.

And then today, a great holiday-season surprise: I just got a comment on my work blog from Jack Biddison, a guy I collaborated with on a bunch of custom-software projects in the late 80s and early 90s. Jack and I would drive all over northeastern Illinois selling our services, and we also put together a system he used for a traveling auction of parts for race cars.

Some of my longtime friends will remember all the work I did with Chicago Data between 1988 and 1995 — Jack is the person who introduced me to the owners of Chicago Data way back when. I’ll never forget Jack and I walking into John Mengel’s office and sitting down, and John saying “now what exactly do you guys do?” Jack looked him in the eye with a big twinkling smile and said “whatever you need done, that’s what we do.”

Jack must be in his 80s by now, and I had wondered many times over the last 10 years whether he was still around. I remember how he used to talk about the old days of computers in the 60s — Jack, I know how you felt because now I’m the gray-haired guy telling the kids at work about computing back in the 80s. Kids these days, they have it so easy!

One final example of the fun of having a web site: when one of my brothers recently had the annual review of his top-secret security clearance (as required by his job at a major defense contractor), they asked him about my web site. I feel strangely proud.

Happy Birthday, Marsha!

It’s Aunt Marsha’s birthday, so to celebrate appropriately everyone should go out and do something spontaneous, outrageous, brilliantly entertaining and just plain wrong. She’s forever young, that girl.

Here’s my favorite picture of Marsha and Megan, taken at Marsha’s dearly departed home in Pass Christian. That place was so cozy, you just had to dance …

Marsha, we’ll see you in a couple weeks, assuming you survive whatever you have planned for today. Save some hugs and kisses for us.