Rhonabwy

Testing out the WordPress Plugin SyntaxHighlighter.

[source:python]
# comment…
def reset_database():
from django.core import management
management.syncdb()
print “Interesting, huh?”
[/source]

It’s been a long while since I’ve been in anything I’d describe as bitter wind. Tonight resets the clock. The wind outside isn’t really howling, but it’s pretty damn cold and with a lot more humidity in it than you’d expect at this temperature, making it a hell of a bite.

I caught on of the last “evening” bus routes up the hill. Around 5pm tonight, they made a whole bunch of busses turn around at the base of Queen Anne and not try the hill. I just saw a #4 go by though, so they’ve clearly restarted the set at some point. Even getting up to the top, there was still the walk home - and I only had the hood on my raincoat.

Tomorrow, if I go out, it will include a wool cap. That russian one that Karen brought home from Moscow all those years ago. They know how to make warm hats! And a heavier jacket. (Although I was wearing a wool sweater, so it wasn’t all that bad - the rain coat is good for cutting the wind). I’m frankly thinking about how I could work from home tomorrow - it’s going to be darned chilly, and I’m not sure I want to mess with ice seeing how I’m at the top of a 425′ hill.

Got home this afternoon about 2pm and it started coming down sideways. The rain - then slush, and finally snow. It’s being reported as drizzle and rain in the downtown core - amazing what an additional 400 feet of elevation will get you. It’s a wet sticky snow, and the lights have flickered out a couple times - brown out stuff, not anything full-blown down as yet. Although with snow like this, any weak branches over power lines are ripe to go.

Not sure what tomorrow (or the rest of this week) will bring. I sure wasn’t expecting to actually *see* snow - let alone have slush last into the night. The buses appear to all still be running tonight, so I expect they’ll be running tomorrow too. I wouldn’t want to be on the roads tonight though - the potential for ice is going to be really nasty.

But at least it’s from a kind of new source - Another tablet rumor is floating out there, making various comments about how this critter is touch screen enabled and will work with the home network setup that Apple is fiddling with. It’s at least interesting for it’s new location.

Nope - NOT me.

While I was walking through downtown to work, a lady accosted me around 1st and University asking for help finding the overpass that leads to the ferry terminal. Now it’s quite a bit farther down than University, so I pointed her in the right direction and kept moving. (It’s at 1st and Marion for the curious)
She was one of those really chatty people, and trundled along with me in that direction and kept up a steady stream, apparently requiring only the most minimal of responses from me as an indication to continue.

The strangest thing she said, just before turning off down the ramp, involved turkeys - and eating them. “You know, we’re not meant to eat meat… Our bodies aren’t built for it. That’s why vegetarians are healthier”.
Now I’m the first to admit there are a lot of healthy vegetarians out there, and there are a lot of (I think) very good rationals behind eating vegetarian. But that argument is so spurious that it left me sort of stunned in that Im-not-quite-awake-enough-for-this sort of way. I mean, really - if that were the case, why don’t we have molars all around our mouths instead of cuspids and bicuspids. Why can we even digest meat if we weren’t built do to so.

I watched her walk down the overpass thingy to the ferry thinking “Wow, what we she smokin?” and looking forward to a little cooking, eating, and drinking frenzy tomorrow on the Day of the Bird. Probably won’t do the football watching - but I’m sure we’ll come up with something fun to do.

I’m flying down to North Hollywood (that’s “noho” in the current gig’s parlance) tomorrow - and the implications for what that means tonight have just wandered home. I’ll be having a taxi pick me up at 5am for the 7am flight. Oh boy…

I haven’t been getting to sleep earlier than 1am or 1:30am lately. Tomorrow may be a very, very long day.

Update: For the record, driving to LAX from North Hollywood at 3:30pm does, indeed, suck. I was fortunate enough to at least come in through the Burbank (Bob Hope International) airport.

some sage programing advice was linked from Gus’ blog today. I’ve got to admit, it’s really on the money.

I can’t claim that I’ve followed the “polish from the beginning” concept all to well, but a lot of the other pieces have become habit. And I can clearly see where polish up front would make things easier later.

I’m a big fan of the book The Pragmatic Programmer, and I think a lot of what Wincent writes fits right in with those mini-essays and topics.

Karen and I hadn’t seen Dave in something like 5 1/2 years. Yeah - like six months before Karen moved out here to Seattle with me. So we finally hooked up - he was in town for a business trip (he’s currently living in that other Washington - DC). So we embarked on a “damn fine dinner”, which took us to the Dahlia Lounge.

Karen had actually made reservations at both Wild Ginger and the Dahlia Lounge, and as it turned out, we handed one of those reservations over to some of his team that was in town for the meeting with him.

We’d never been to Dahlia Lounge, and yep - It’s really as good as it looks. We had a great dinner - something like 3 hours there. Takes a while to catch up with old college friends, you know? Fantastic place. You’ll spend some money going there, but it is entirely worth it.

A few weeks back I enabled Google Analytics for my site, and have been amused and somewhat horrified at the results. The scope of the readership is a hell of a lot broader than I ever expected. Take, for example, the nifty little map of where my readers are physically located for the past week or so:

I mean - whoa…

I feared that the Halo series would be the only real co-op game on the XBox, but this past weekend at MindCamp I realized that Gears of War fits into that category! (Don’t bother with the official Gears of War website, because it is complete marketing shit - the IGN site linked at the top has much better detail on the game.)

Now I’ve gone and annoyed Karen by purchasing it, under my fine theory that I’d make sure to have it around the next time Dan was in town. Apparently I’m to withhold from whimsically purchasing things now that we’re “near christmas”. Frankly, I thought I was safe from that prior to Thanksgiving, but apparently not. A new meaning for caveat emptor!

The game is pretty cool, although I haven’t played it all that much as yet. I’m looking forward to wasting some nights (at some point in the future - probably not this Thanksgiving or Christmas) with Dan with it.