This was my first time seeing snow anywhere I’d actually lived. I’d only seen it on trips to DC and Russia. Seattle only gets 5.9 inches per year on average, so anytime it snows, it’s a big deal. A lot of the city shuts down because there aren’t a lot of snowplows and people don’t know how to drive in the stuff. Some people grumble and insist on going about their day as usual, but they seem to be the minority.

Anyway, as soon as I realized it was snowing, I went out on my balcony and took some pictures. I went out to breakfast at Top Pot with my friend Nick, and the snow had pretty much tapered off. But as soon as I got back to my apartment, it started coming down again. It snowed harder and harder and harder. Then Nick and I decided to go for a walk downtown while it was still snowing.

Phil Spector Christmas songs looped in my head. I was giddy. Snow makes me giddy because I missed it in my childhood, you see. It’s fun, and it’s funny—to see all these familiar sights frozen over and covered in snow. I’m not afraid to say that I made and threw snowballs. But I wasn’t the only one who was enjoying the snow. I saw three or four snowmen. Oh yeah, I also took a lot of pictures.

On Monday, most of my co-workers worked from home (that’s the great thing about having a computer-based job), so I followed suit on Tuesday; there was still a lot of snow around and nobody wanted to drive in it. On Wednesday, it snowed all day, so I worked from home again. Then, I realized that I didn’t have much of an excuse to be working from home since out of all my co-workers I’m the one who lives closest to work. So on Thursday and Friday, I was one of the few people to show up.

There was still a lot of snow around on Thursday night when Nick and I went out to celebrate his birthday, and the snow was all melty on Friday. But that night it started to get warmer, and by yesterday morning, almost all of the snow had disappeared.

It might not snow again for another year. The child in me is sad, but the adult part of me thinks it’s good that everyone will be back at work.

Here’s an interesting Lifehacker article about how to make better spending choices: The Comfort Principle.

Apparently no company currently makes them, and only websites that sell them are a few online stores that cater to left-handers. Of those, I found that England-based Left-Handed.com had the best selection and the lowest prices, so in November, I ordered one there. Not long after, I received a left-handed Swiss Army knife from them, but it wasn’t the model I ordered. The one I wanted had scissors, and the one I got had some different tools, including a wrench.

I could see how they could have made that mistake. The two models are similarly priced (about $40), and the knife I got was packaged in its original box, which didn’t identify the model. They were probably next to each other on the shelf. No big deal, I figured. So I sent the store an e-mail letting them know about the mix-up and asking for an exchange (although I was secretly hoping they’d let me keep both).

Two weeks passed and I didn’t hear anything from them, so I went ahead and mailed them the knife in the original box with the invoice and a note asking for them to send me the right knife. I chose to send the package First Class (misleadingly, the lowest tier of service that the USPS offers for shipping), which, to Left-Handed.com in England, cost me $11. I didn’t count on them paying me back for any shipping more expensive than that, so I didn’t get a tracking number or anything.

After a few weeks, I still hadn’t heard from Left-Handed.com, so I sent them a message through the contact form on their website. The holidays came and went—no reply. Last week, I tried calling the phone number listed on their website, but no one picked up, not even an answering machine. Then I tried calling them during their business hours (1 AM to 8 AM Pacific Time—not an easy thing for me!), and no one picked up then either. Finally, I sent them another message via the contact form, asking as politely as possible for the item I bought.

Okay, so maybe I sent the first e-mail to a no-reply address. Maybe they didn’t get the package. Maybe their contact form is broken or my messages got stuck in their spam filter. Maybe they don’t have an answering machine, and maybe they had closed up shop early when I called. But I very much doubt that all of the above are true. They seem to be ignoring me, plain and simple. I understand that my story may not sound credible—maybe people have tried to rip them off before—but a simple “We don’t believe you” would be more courteous. If this was my fault, my mistake was to be too trusting.

At this point, I don’t know what recourse I have. I originally paid by PayPal, but it’s too late for me to file a complaint with them. (Of course, if I had thought to do it earlier, I would have.) It seems that the only way to get the attention of Left-Handed.com would be to buy something else from them, although I’m very unlikely to give them any more of my money due to the way they’ve treated me. It looks like I’m out 50 bucks, so I guess all I can do is warn everyone not to make the mistake of doing business with them.

Oh, and I’ll send them a link to this post too, in case it gets their attention.

I’ve often wondered if there’s a website that keeps track of the surprisingly common trend of homophobic public figures being outed as gay themselves. Turns out there is: Gay Homophobe succinctly announces “# days since the last prominent homophobe was caught in a gay sex scandal” (25 as of right now) and lists previous “winners” (there were seven last year alone).

I could have added to my recent lament (and I could have sworn I did) that the US is woefully locked in to a two-party system that offers us little real choice. It’s one cog of the machine in which corporations buy politicians and get favorable laws out of them. I’ve at times been tempted to support third-party candidates, but it seems hopeless: Voting for your favorite third-party candidate means not voting for your preferred major-party candidate, which helps your less preferred major-party candidate cruise to victory. It’s called the spoiler effect, and if you want to avoid it, you have to vote dishonestly. I’ve always accepted this as a sad reality of life.

But it doesn’t have to be so. Your vote doesn’t have to consist of picking a single candidate to the exclusion of all others. I’ve just found out about a system of voting called range voting. In range voting, a voter ranks the candidates on a numeric scale according to preference (say, 0 to 10), and the candidate most preferred by voters—the one with the highest average score—wins. This allows voters to express various levels of support for various candidates, eliminating both the spoiler effect and dishonest voting. With range voting, third-party candidates could get enough support to level the playing field without “stealing” votes that could cause one major-party candidate to lose to the other. Everyone wins, if you will.

There’s a related system called approval voting. Approval voting essentially takes the system we have now and makes it multiple choice: You can select (approve) more than one candidate, and the candidate approved by the greatest number of voters is the winner. In fact, approval voting can be thought of as range voting where the scale consists only of 0 and 1. The advantage over range voting is that it’s extremely simple, but it doesn’t allow voters to express their preferences as clearly and may not be as beneficial to third parties.

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be very much interest in either of these systems. Although several organizations have used approval voting (including the United Nations and IEEE), it’s just not very well-known, and the main source of information about range voting seems to be a poorly designed website by the mathematician who developed it.

No voting system is perfect (otherwise there probably wouldn’t be a whole branch of mathematics dedicated to them), but range voting and approval voting sound much better than anything else I’ve ever heard of. I would really like to help out an organization that supports one or both, but the Center for Election Science (which supports approval voting) and the Center for Range Voting both seem to be tiny groups with little or no momentum; the latter, whose website is the poorly-designed one I linked to above, seems to consist of that one mathematician. (And actually, I just noticed that he’s the president of the former as well.) Meanwhile, FairVote, which advocates the apparently flawed system known as instant-runoff voting, has actual support and a spiffier name.

I’m now imagining myself spearheading an initiative for local elections to use approval or range voting. It would be pretty cool to make a difference like that. But if it’s even possible, it would be extremely tiring and expensive: Seattle is one of the most populous cities in the United States, so I’d need quite a bit of help. I’m not sure, but it might even be necessary to change state law to allow approval or range voting. So, semi-jokingly, I ask: Who’s with me? And a little more seriously, I ask: How could I start?

BBC readers complain about annoying Americanisms. A lot of them sound perfectly normal and correct to me, but I’ve never heard of others. And of course, some of them are genuinely annoying.

October 28, 2011

President Barack Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW
Washington, DC 20500

Subject: “We the People” and separation of church and state

Dear Mr. President:

For the first time in my life, I am compelled to sit down and write a letter, by hand, to a government official. I am writing in response to today’s email by Joshua DuBois, Executive Director of the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, to the signers of the “We the People” petitions, “Remove ‘In God We Trust’ from Currency” and “Edit the Pledge of Allegiance to Remove the Phrase ‘Under God’.”

Mr. DuBois wrote that you “strongly support” the separation of church and state but that “that does not mean there’s no role for religion in the public square.” Where do you draw the line? To me, the separation of church (religion) and state (government) means that our public officials, in their capacity as representatives chosen by the people, must not imply that our government favors some religions over others, or irreligion over religion; to do so is to hack away at the “wall of separation” that we hold so dear as Americans. Yet you and most other politicians do this all the time and then give non-answers when we demand change.

I am an atheist, but in order to pledge allegiance to the country of my birth, I must check my worldview at the door and take up someone else’s personal convictions. Is that freedom of religion?

Consider our previous motto and pledge: “of many, one”; “one nation indivisible.” Doesn’t the government’s favoritism toward particular religions pervert these ideals?

Respectfully,

Jordon Kalilich
Seattle, WA

I know that this will go straight into the trash and that the best reply I can hope for is a form letter saying, “Thanks for your letter, citizen. Vote for me,” but it would be worse if I had not written it at all.

By now, you’ve probably heard that Bank of America is planning on charging its customers $5 every month they make purchases with their debit cards. Wells Fargo is already implementing a similar fee against some of its customers, so it’s probably a matter of time before they roll it out to everyone. The news has provoked an exodus to credit unions, and I, too, figured it was time to make the switch.

Credit unions offer the same services as banks but with a few key differences. The goal of a bank is to make a profit for its shareholders at the expense of its customers; a credit union is a not-for-profit organization focused on helping its members, who are also its owners, so they tend to have lower fees and better interest rates. Credit unions have specific criteria for membership, usually things like living in a particular area and/or working for a particular company.

A typical credit union usually doesn’t have as many branches or ATMs as a huge bank, but most credit unions across the US offer services and free ATM access to each other’s members. And they’re insured by the NCUA, a federal agency that offers the same protection that the FDIC does for bank accounts, or by equivalent agencies at the state level.

These things I learned as I was doing my homework. Find a Credit Union was also a big help; it lists the closest credit unions to your address and the membership criteria for each. Of the eight credit unions that have branches within a mile of me, I’m eligible to join six of them, mostly by virtue of being a Washington resident. So, you see, the criteria for membership can be pretty broad.

I narrowed it down to a couple of credit unions I had heard a lot of great things about: First Tech and BECU. Their offerings were both pretty attractive, but I chose BECU since their interest rates are better for me and they’re based in the Seattle area—gotta help the local economy, right? Today, I went to the nearest BECU branch and deposited the minimum amount they require for membership: $5. In unceremoniously producing a $5 bill from my wallet, I declared my independence from thieving banks.

Well, sort of. Although I’m going to close my accounts with Wells Fargo, I have a credit card with Bank of America, and I like it. There’s no annual fee, and I get 1% cash back. So I’ll probably keep that until they screw me over personally or until I can get a better deal with my new credit union or somewhere else. (Actually, now that I look at it, BECU’s credit card seems pretty good, but I’d have to research some more.)

Moral: You should probably join a credit union if you haven’t already.

Irrelevant link: Snapshots from the set of Back to the Future.

On September 11, 2001, I was 12 years old. The time between the end of the Cold War and the start of whatever this is—that was my childhood. My worldview had been shaped by the relative stability of the ’90s. As the September 11 attacks unfolded, I was just old enough to realize that the world would never be the same.

I don’t know anyone who was injured or killed that day, but it affected me just like it affected everybody. Once in a while, out of the blue, I remember all the things that happened that day, and I lose track of whatever else I was thinking about. I become quiet. And then I consider that today’s 12-year-olds must think the world is normal. That’s the really scary part.

Sure, things always change, but almost every turn America has taken in the last ten years has been for the worse. I don’t think that the attacks of September 11 are to blame for everything, but their repercussions have echoed through every aspect of our lives, serving as a leitmotif for the beginning of the end of America’s glory days. Seriously, what’s looking up for us now?

One of the big issues we’ve grappled with (or not) is the choice between freedom and safety. Presented with this false dichotomy, I’ve always stated a preference for the former. Right now, I’m not so sure. It’s easy to say that I don’t mind if a terrorist hijacks the plane I’m on, that I’ll be forever honored as a martyr for the cause of freedom. (When was the last time you saw an obituary that said, “This guy was a total asshole”?) But then I think about my future, and I think about the future without me in it. I’ll never have another life to live. Suddenly, the original question sounds very different.

But it is a false dichotomy… I guess. Surely people in other countries, where things like subtlety and nuances are appreciated, recognize a trade-off. There’s always going to be terrorism in some form or another, whether you do anything about it or not, and whether you call it that or not. When you obsess over terrorism to the point that it consumes you, that’s really when it works. The goal of the terrorist is to inspire terror. In that sense, the terrorists have been winning. Maybe the key is not to let them get to you, as horrific as their acts may have been.

I need go back only a few weeks for a possible example of what to do. The Prime Minister of Norway said that his country would respond to Anders Breivik’s terrorist attacks with “more democracy”: “It’s absolutely possible to have an open, democratic, inclusive society, and at the same time have security measures and not be naïve.” In doing so, they’d likely be getting at the cause of the problem rather than the symptoms. Plus, no domestic spying or rape flashbacks at the airport. Here in the US, however, millions of flag-waving dum-dums would be out for blood. And they were.

So, why don’t I move to Canada or something? It feels like a cop-out that wouldn’t solve the problem, though I’m not sure if anything else would work at all. I feel helpless. No matter what I say or do, America will keep going down the tubes. Huge corporations will keep bribing our representatives and writing laws on their behalf. The rich will keep getting richer while the poor lose more and grow in number. No president or ex-president is ever going to go on trial. The TSA will continue to use naked body scanners at airports. There will still be a TSA.

If this is how the politically apathetic feel, then for the first time, I totally get them. But as for me, I don’t know what to do. Stick to my ideals? I guess, but what does it matter?

Looking through my files, I found that 13-year-old me, writing a year after the attacks, got here first:

Sadly, I feel that the terrorist attacks will be America’s ultimate downfall. It showed us that we are not, as we seem to be, an invincible nation, and that we can’t handle what we dish out to many other countries. I’m really not sure how we should respond to this situation. I guess we should just let it be. Maybe America needs to learn its lesson and stop Americanizing the world.

I wasn’t a philosophy major. These opinions are just what I happen to have been thinking about over the past few days and are not particularly well thought out. I fully expect some or all of you to rip me to shreds.

Ahem. Anyway, the summer event that every Seattleite looks forward to is Seafair. Seafair is actually a series of events, including a parade and some boat races and stuff. There may be more, but that’s all I’ve heard about.

Well, I didn’t just hear about the parade… I was there to see it. It went down my street on July 30. Yes, that makes two parades down my street in little more than a month. This parade was different from the Pride Parade in that it was in the evening and seemed to be a bigger production (although it was shorter). Also, Drew Carey was the Grand Marshal for some reason. (I actually met him in 2005. If you remember that, you’ve been reading this blog since at least 2005!)

The following weekend was the boat thing, and everyone was super pumped about the Blue Angels doing a show as part of that. (It was actually pretty funny to see how excited everyone was.) They had been practicing near my work for a few days, and then I snagged a couple of pictures of them flying past my apartment after putting on their show. I didn’t see any of the day’s festivities in person, but I watched them on TV.

That’s not all I’ve been up to; I’ve been doing more to get involved in my neighborhood, Belltown. I can’t remember where I first heard about Belltown Citizens on Patrol, but I’ve been following them on Facebook, and yesterday they posted an announcement saying that they’d be going out for a walk that evening. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I figured it would be a good way to become more familiar with the neighborhood and help make it a little nicer.

It turned out that it was mostly people my parents’ age and older who were taking part; there were about 15 of us in all. We put on bright yellow vests and walked around the neighborhood, looking for signs of crime and vandalism. Nobody saw anything, though, so it was more of a goodwill thing. You’re supposed to greet everyone you see, and plenty of people wanted to talk to us. We also had a videographer and someone from the Seattle P-I in tow.

Also, some superheroes accompanied us. They were led by a masked man who goes by the name of Phoenix Jones. (Here’s a recent article about him and his fellow superheroes.) They also patrol the streets for crime, so they figured they could come and help. After our walk, which only lasted an hour, Phoenix recorded a video for his fans with all of us standing in the background. (Evidently, he disguises his identity online by typing in all caps.)

The Citizens on Patrol have their walks every week, so it might become a routine for me. If only I could get people my own age to come along…

For the nerds: Cool but obscure Unix tools. (Via waxy.org)

The meeting was held in a basement of a hostel that wasn’t far from my apartment. Nothing could be too far away since this isn’t a huge neighborhood, but it was particularly close. There was free pizza and beer, and I was one of the first people to show. There were plenty of subjects for pre-meeting chatter, such as hobbies (I guess blogging is my main hobby these days since that’s what I talked about).

Eventually, about six or eight people had come, and something like an official meeting began. Jesse wanted to know how BelltownPeople could be improved. If I hadn’t gone to the meeting, I wouldn’t have known that everyone is free to sign up and write posts for the blog, so I volunteered that that aspect should be more prominent on the site. I didn’t even know that the blog had multiple authors, so I suggested that each article have a photo of the author near the byline. Yes, I’m quite often a blog skimmer, and as a joke I was going to insert a nonsense phrase into this sentence to see if anyone would catch it, but I think everyone would and I would never live it down. I am not clever enough to make that work. I mean, you are all too smart.

Anyway, there was also some discussion about the neighborhood, like restaurants closing, sidewalks not getting fixed, and those sorts of things. Jesse also asked each of us to share a Belltown moment we had had. Several people explained why they believe it’s a good place to raise children, pointing out that great places for a day out with kids are in walking distance whereas they would be too far away if you lived in the suburbs. Others compared urban Belltown favorably to the clean, “censored” suburban neighborhoods.

I hadn’t been in the neighborhood long enough to really get a feel for it, so I just explained why I chose to live there. I had been researching neighborhoods near Amazon’s headquarters, and the Walk Score website, first featured in the World of Stuff post of January 23, 2008, indicated that Belltown was the most walkable. From there, I did more research and liked what I saw. (My current address has a Walk Score of 97/100, which is typical for Belltown. My last place had a Walk Score of 5, and the new formula revises it downward to 1.)

Jesse said that as a newcomer, I could provide a unique perspective for BelltownPeople, so he invited me to share my thoughts. I suppose I will once I have enough to write about.

It was good to go out and meet people in the neighborhood. I’m looking forward to the next meeting, not to mention any other opportunities to go out and socialize in a setting that’s not awkward for me. I walk to work; I walk to the grocery store; I hardly have any social outings to walk to. Yet.

Time to answer an Ask Jordon question.

Kate: Do you think it’s worth celebrating Valentine’s Day if you’re in a relationship? Are there people who feel unhappy this day? What about you?

I don’t know whether it’s worth it to celebrate Valentine’s Day; I don’t have enough experience. But in my experience, plenty of people are unhappy are about it. It seems that it’s often because they wish they had a girlfriend or boyfriend and are jealous of people who do. Maybe they’re even the majority, but it’s possible that they’re just the loudest people. I used to be like that, but I haven’t been for the past couple of years.

The BBC reports on a French house that’s recently been opened to the public after just sittin’ around for a hundred years.

It started at her apartment on Thursday, where we hung out and walked to a nearby Mexican restaurant. Even though it was Cinco de Mayo, it wasn’t crowded. Well, we were also early. It was a great experience. At my apartment, there are no restaurants within walking distance (unless you want to walk on a road bridge that has no sidewalk). In Seattle, I hope to be within walking distance of most everything.

In the wee hours of the morning, we made it to Orlando International Airport, and from there we flew west. In doing so, she lost the #1 fun fact she’s uses to describe herself: that she’s never been on an airplane. She’ll have to think of something else now! But I’d never been out west at all, so really, the trip was new for both of us.

We were flying to LA for a layover, so from the plane, we were able to see the Southwest’s mesas, mountains, and canyons in the morning sunlight. What a beautiful sight it was… And then there was LA. I thought I would feel cooler being in LA, having digested all the crap that everyone tells you about California and everything. Instead, I probably caught some sort of lung disease. As luck would have it, we had to go outside and take a bus to a different part of the airport to catch our next flight, and in doing so, we about choked on the filthy air.

Our first flight had been with Delta, but the next was with Alaska Airlines. It seemed more comfortable in a way. The plane was less well-kept, the flight attendants were older, and the pilot was more than happy to point out landmarks like Lake Tahoe as we made our way up the West Coast.

I wasn’t feeling good. I think it was the combination of a total lack of sleep (it’s relatively hard for me), some coffee I had had without sugar (never again), strange eating habits borne of being awake all night and sitting in planes for hours, and a large amount of worrying about whether I’d even like this city I’d been visiting through a computer screen for months, the city that was destined by contract to be my home.

The plane descended, and downtown Seattle appeared behind the gray clouds below. It was all there, the Space Needle and everything. That, I think, is when my attitude really started to turn around.

It was cold as we got out of the airport. It was also raining. We took the Link Light Rail from the airport to downtown. Where the other passengers saw the usual sights, I sat with wonder. I hope never to lose that sense of wonder one should have in new places. Same with being on a plane. Everyone in an airplane always seems so bored, even as it’s taking off and landing. A lot of them don’t even bother to look out the window. What a shame.

Once we made it to the right station downtown, I found the hotel Amazon had booked for me and checked in. After taking a breather, we decided to walk to the 5 Point Cafe in the nearby neighborhood of Belltown. Belltown is where I want to live, and the 5 Point, I am led to believe, is a Seattle institution. It also has chicken-fried bacon, so we would have had to check it out anyway.

It wasn’t a long walk. We could see the Space Needle from where we sat in the restaurant, so after enjoying some soul food (including the bacon, which came with biscuit gravy), we headed to Seattle’s most famous attraction. It was very windy up there, but we stayed outside long enough to get a few good pictures. I also pointed out the locations of Amazon’s new headquarters and some of the apartments we were going to be touring.

Next, we took the monorail to the Westlake Center. It’s a short ride, barely more than two minutes, but it saves some walking and is pretty fun. It goes to the Westlake Center, which is this shopping center closer to downtown. (I guess you could say it’s actually downtown, but Seattle’s neighborhoods exist only unofficially, so it can be hard to say what’s where.)

While my sister shopped there and at Nordstrom’s flagship store, I thought. I hate the cold and the rain, so Seattle sounds like an odd choice for me. But it seems like a really interesting and liveable city, and the fact that I have a lucrative job lined up there doesn’t hurt at all. It’s just… the weather. At any given time, I was wearing almost all of the clothes I had packed (including three shirts and a windbreaker), and I was still cold. It was unbelievably windy at times. If it was going to be like this all the time, I wasn’t going to like it.

The next morning, it was pretty clear out; I could see snow-capped mountains from the hotel room. The forecast called for it to be cloudy and drizzly all day with only a few “sun breaks.” Neither my sister nor I had heard the term before, and we thought it sounded pretty sad. In Florida, we have cloud breaks.

We started our day by going to a doughnut place I had heard of called Top Pot Doughnuts. It was also in Belltown, so we were able to walk there too. If you like doughnuts, you’ll love Top Pot. Their doughnuts are fantastic. I also had a cherry blossom, which is their cherry milkshake. It was good, but with the doughnuts, there was too much sweetness there, and that’s saying a lot coming from me. Everything’s good, but don’t get the cherry blossom and the doughnuts at the same time.

My destination services consultant (hired by Amazon) had made six appointments for me at apartment complexes in the area, so our next task was to visit those. Everyone we talked to was really nice, and nobody really tried to get me to sign a lease right there (which was good because the consultant said that might happen). Some buildings had only a few stories and others were very tall. Some didn’t look so good and others were very fancy. Some places impressed me more than others, so I managed to come up with a few favorites. The whole point of the trip was to do just that; I didn’t have to pick one just yet.

Between appointments, we had time to slip away to the famous Pike Place Market, where they throw the fish. For lunch, we split a Dungeness crab BLT and a salad from a nearby restaurant called Seatown. We also were able to go to the Olympic Sculpture Park, which is right on the water and is run by the Seattle Art Museum. The weather was better than forecast; it was actually sunny some of the time (but it was still pretty windy too).

After the last appointment, I was tired of seeing apartments. We had a little bit of time left to go to the Experience Music Project, a music museum near the Space Needle. We met up with my friend Mark to check it out.

Mark is quite a bit like me. We’re both left-handed; we both use the Dvorak keyboard. We both enrolled in the University of Florida, majoring in computer science and minoring in business administration. We were both in the honors program and both lived in Hume Hall. We both got jobs in the Dean of Students Office and were both officers in the Esperanto Club and Students for Free Culture. And then we both got hired by tech companies in the Seattle area and moved or are moving there. Actually, he’s a year older than I am, so I followed him into many of those things, but it’s just a coincidence that we’ll be living near each other in the same city after we’ve both graduated.

Anyway, we checked out the Nirvana exhibit at the Experience Music Project. I learned a lot about Nirvana, and it was cool to see all their broken guitars and stuff. I’m sure nobody expected them to end up in a museum someday. Seattle seems to be pretty proud of the fact that it was the musical capital of the world for a few years.

After that, the three of us moseyed to Amazon’s headquarters in the South Lake Union neighborhood. If I hadn’t known where it was, I wouldn’t have found it. There don’t seem to be any markings of any kind; just some big, new buildings with yellow accents and a courtyard in between with some tables. I’m going to be working there. I still can’t really get a grip on the thought.

Mark had to get going, but we asked him to recommend a place for dinner. He told us about a restaurant called Etta’s where they had good seafood. We followed his directions and found that it was right next to the restaurant where we had lunch. After dinner, we went back to Pike Place Market, where my sister, who is Starbucks’ #1 fan, visited the first Starbucks. After that, we went to a candy store and got some sweets. There’s always room for candy.

(no jurdon there isn’t thats how you get fat)

From there, we walked through the heart of downtown, all the way to Pioneer Square and back. On the way, a drunk and/or homeless guy started talking to us and wouldn’t leave us alone even though we weren’t really responding to him. We got rid of him by walking into the first place we passed, which happened to be a shop. The shopkeeper was closing up shop, but I explained our situation. She was nice and talked about how the police cracks down on homelessness whenever Seattle plays host to a big event.

This is an issue I’ve grappled with before, but I’ll probably have to confront it much more often now. How does one deal with homeless people respectfully? Our society does so much to make them miserable, but I realize that they’re people and that they deserve to be treated as such. I don’t necessarily want to talk to them all the time—I don’t necessarily want to talk to anyone all the time—but I want to do a little bit to help them out without sustaining their bad habits, even if it’s just giving them a $5 gift card for Denny’s or something. On the other hand, I don’t want anyone to grow dependent on me. I also would want to be sure they’re actually homeless and not just out collecting cash for fun. It’s a tough situation.

Anyway, I was exhausted after a big day, and I was sad that it was almost over, but I was excited that I’d be going back soon.

On Sunday morning, we went to Top Pot again, and then we were off to the airport. This time we had a layover in Minneapolis, so we got to see some different scenery on the way there, including the Rocky Mountains (which the Alaska Airlines pilot duly pointed out). Then we flew back to Orlando and made it back to Gainesville. It was a lot of traveling, but we did a lot while we were in Seattle.

I’ll be back there in less than two weeks, this time for good. I’ll be moving into corporate housing at first, and that’s when the more serious apartment search will begin. I guess if I can stay warm, everything will be fine.

Recently, I was interviewed over the phone about my involvement in Where’s George? by a journalism student at Arizona State University. He talked to several other people, but I was the one who got the Quote At The End That Summarizes Everything. Nice! Here’s the article.

I’m taking a class called Artificial Intelligence. Well, something like that. It’s probably officially called Introduction to Artificial Intelligence or Principles of Artificial Intelligence or something like that. I have the course syllabus next to my desk, so I could easily check, but to add an air of mystery to this post, I won’t.

Now that you’re intrigued enough to keep reading, I will describe how this class has been keeping me busy. It’s one of those classes where a lot of your grade depends on a project that you work on for much of the semester. In this case, we have to write a program to play a game intelligently.

Specifically, the game is a Tetris-like game called Letris, which is not like any of the Letrises you’ll find if you Google it. I think the professor just made it up. Instead of blocks, you have sequences of letters (read in from a file) that you have to put on a board, and whenever there are three or more letters in a row horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, they disappear for points and the letters on top of them fall to take their places. The game ends when you run out of sequences or you’ve filled up the board and can’t play any of them.

Our programs are allowed to peek up to three moves ahead to decide which move to make, but they’re only allowed 10 CPU seconds per move. They can be written in any language (that the instructor approves), but extra credit will be given for programs written in Lisp.

I wrote mine in Java… Hey. Don’t give me that look. Just don’t. You know what? If you’re going to act like that, why don’t you just leave? It’s just a choice of programming language, not a life-or-death situation. And you know what? Maybe I’m really good at Java. Maybe I figured out how to make it work well with Java. Did you ever think about that? Huh?

I didn’t, but it seems to work well enough. The hardest part, and what I spent the better part of two weeks on, was the lookahead stuff. For some reason, I couldn’t wrap my head around that very easily. It was so complicated (to me) that I actually spent days and days just coding and coding without even having anything ready to compile and try out.

Once I got that working, the only thing left was the evaluation function, i.e., how the game decides which move is a good one to make. It’s good to score a lot of points, but in the long run it seems like it would be better to keep the letters (blocks) low so you can score even more points in the future. However, I was on such a time crunch by then that the little testing I was able to do proved in. I ended up weighting those factors and several others equally.

The interesting part will come when the professor stages a “tournament” of all our programs, ranking them by how many points they score on certain data sets. I have absolutely no idea how my implementation will fare against everyone else’s, especially those who had the smart idea of using C or Lisp, so we’ll see how that goes.

Every time Bruce Schneier opens his mouth, amazing words come out. Actually, well, this is written, but it’s good nonetheless. Schneier half-jokingly proposes that we close the Washington Monument due to security concerns. When it comes to security, this guy hits the nail on the head.