My daughter and I picked up my mom and went up to the Fresh Paint Festival at the marina on the Everett waterfront Saturday. It was nice, plenty of interesting art - several painters were interesting, some very good glass work, and an old friend of mine named Jon Noe was manning the music stand, spinning old R&B music from the 40s and 50s. My mom enjoyed the music quite a bit, and so did I. It was interesting how many songs I recognized due to remakes, for example the original version of "Train Kept A'Rolling" which was covered by the Yardbirds and Aerosmith. I was in a band in my teens that covered that song somewhat poorly. First audio bit on the left is as we're driving over to pick mom up.

After checking out the Fresh Paint festival and having an early dinner at Lombardi's we set off for Hempfest. Parked up the hill and walked through the sculpture park (giant orange cones!). A relative was rumored to be working a booth there, but we couldn't find him. Listened to a little music, the second audio was recorded from the crowd listening to the music, came through better than I expected.

It was pretty hot, well into the 90s, and mildly crowded. Several food vendors were out of water or anything to drink. We wandered through the festival and got some water, the lines at vendors who had water were long, but we needed it. We climbed down to the water front over the rip-rack and bathed our feet which cooled us off nicely. I was sitting on a rock close to the water when the wake of a large ship came in and had to scramble to avoid getting soaked. Recorded the 3rd audio bit there.

Several bands sounded good, but I couldn't figure out the Hempfest schedule so I'm not sure who we were listening to.  My favorite was a reggae band, the beat was infectious and bouncy and the music was upbeat.

We left shortly after that and watched some of the sunset over the Olympics from the sculpture park, recorded the last message from there.

As we drove north on I-5 the view over Lake Union with the sunset over the Olympics was impressive. I don't think my daughter enjoyed it much, she has asthma so she has to avoid the smoke and it was hot and we were a bit tired, but it was an interesting experience.

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Bumbershoot is at the end of the month in Seattle, anybody planning on going?

I'm experimenting with audio blogging, I plan on trying to do some simple stuff from the festival and getting it posted in near real time. Videos and photos will take a little longer.

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Since I'm an employee of Cisco and I'm using and mentioning Cisco products, I should be clear: the views, comments and (hopefully) insights found here are purely mine, not Cisco's. No official or corporate views or policies will be expressed here, only my personal opinions.

Bumbershoot is coming and I want to do something creative or productive. Last year I took a notebook and occasionally scribbled some notes while at the Seattle Center (laying on the ground in Memorial Stadium twice) so it didn't work out all that well. I eventually blogged about it later, but many details were gone by then - I always end up seeing so many bands that by the end of it I forget what they sounded like and what I enjoyed for the majority of them.

Cisco has encouraged us to look at web 2.0 and be creative, so here's what I've come up with. It's mostly nearly web 1.0, at least so far, but I envision eventually linking this to other web 2 apps such as the user editable maps, perhaps get a GPS with path recording, if we can adorn the path with links to the audio blogs, pictures and videos on a map of the center it could get interesting.

I'm experimenting with audio blogging by leaving voice mails on my corporate phone and grabbing the .wav file using Outlook in Windows. It took me some fiddling to figure out the server and password, but it works.

VoiceMessageTest

Pretty slick. I'm using IMAP to connect Outlook into Unity Connection, the voice messaging product from Cisco that I work on. The voice message account just looks like another e-mail account in-box, it's sea-alpha-cuc in this example:

UC Inbox

The inbox shows my voice mail messages with the message attached as a .wav file for each message. I left one using my cell phone sitting at home with my lap-top using VPN over wifi/cable modem with Outlook running and the cuc-install-49 folder selected as shown. The message appeared (and Outlook beeped) in a fraction of a second. Under load it may get slower, but I expect load to be low on Labor Day weekend during Bumbershoot so we should be OK.

The VoiceMessage.wav file can be saved by right clicking on it and selecting Save As. In this example the wav file is 103 KB, just short of 13 seconds of 8 KB/sec audio.

UC Inbox Detail

The sound was better than I had expected, if not spectacular. I added it to this blog as VoiceMessageTest above to the right so you can see - or should I say hear - for yourself.

Uploading it into Vox was mildly trivial. I think from now on I'll use small rather than medium sound icons, but otherwise we're pretty much good to go.

Hmm, sheer genius - I need to go somewhere with live music this weekend to do a dry run, I want to see what a 15 second bit of a song sounds like. Also I want to try talking or perhaps screaming over the music and seeing if we end up with anything intelligible. A job related excuse to hit the bars and drink some beer - I mean listen to some music and audio blog. What'll I think up next!

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Spent a week at the cabin in Dungeness. Left Tuesday after work, worked remotely from the Sequim public library and Hurricane coffee on Wednesday and Thursday, took Friday and Monday off. Friday the weather was beautiful so that was sweet. The cabin’s kitchen sink wasn’t draining (it had been problematic for a month or two), so I called a local drain cleaning guy to snake our kitchen drain. It didn't help and he explained that our drain into the dry well had probably been sealed by food residue. He described how to fix it by digging out the drain and creating a new drain with an inverted bucket with a hole in it for the drain to enter. He used a radio transmitter to track the drain to the dry well and marked it for me.

I spent a few hours digging up the dry well, then expanding the hole a bit as I looked for the drain pipe. After about tripling the size of the hole I found the drain. I made the hole a little bigger so that I could climb into it and hunker down to reach the drain. A filthy job, it was hot & I wasn't wearing a shirt, and I was much too lazy to dig a big hole. Not a pretty picture – me squatting down in a hole only slightly bigger than myself, getting dirt all over my sweaty back, sides, arms and shoulders, hacking at the drain. Eventually we had an additional pile of gravel added, the inverted bucket with the drain running into it on top of the gravel, and several layers of tarp on top of that to keep the dirt out. Getting it filled back in and running the sink without it backing up was a huge relief. That and a nice shower. I know it wasn’t a pretty picture, I saw the photos my wife took. I also got a lot of lawn mowed - the cabin hasn't had a lot of use yet, and the weather is still mostly cool and damp so the grass gets out of hand pretty easily.

Birds were a theme of the trip. We saw adult and juvenile bald eagles, several family of quail, rufous chested towhees, a sparrow hawk, a kingfisher, red winged blackbirds, great blue herons, the usual gulls and sparrows and crows and grebes and ducks and robins and so on. We got a few pictures, the kingfisher was perched on the top of a stick that

Bird photos

had been stuck upright into muck before the tide came in, very photogenic although my picture is a little too far away and low resolution.

We went to Railroad Park in Sequim for lunch one day. The weather was nice and we found a nice picnic table with a view of the railroad bridge and the Dungeness river. Very pleasant. As we got ready to leave we checked out the new Audobon interpretive center in the park - it was excellent. They had probably 50 or 70 stuffed birds and a few other odds and ends like cougar. It was quite interesting, kept us busy oohing and ahhing over the birds for another hour.

Traffic in the Straights of Juan De Fuca was mildly interesting. Every day we saw several container cargo ships, it seems like more of the outgoing ships are semi-full than was typical a few years ago, perhaps the week dollar is increasing exports. We saw a variety of small boats, a few cruise ships, a coast guard vessel, and an aircraft carrier. We saw the carrier when we were down the bluff playing in the lagoon inside the spit, so it appeared to rise above the spit and looked pretty cool with Mt. Baker in the background and the Dungeness Lighthouse on the horizon.

We took the boat out, but the waves started picking up in the late afternoon so we didn't spend long on the water. Crab season started the day AFTER we left, though. I was tempted to call in to my boss and take another day of vacation so that we could take the boat out and put the crab pots down, but lack of pre-planning, work pressure and lack of fishing licenses finally tipped the balance and we came home on Monday, a day later than we had originally planned.

We didn't do the hike up Mt. Zion and didn't hike out to the light house, but other than that we did all of the activities we planned on. A nice vacation, if a bit more too much work for it to be really restful.

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Went to the waterfront in downtown Seattle in late spring for the lowest tide of the year,

-3 feet. Took my lunch break from my job at Cisco in Belltown and walked through the sculpture park and down to the water front. There were some volunteers with pamphlets with several interesting species already scoped out, but the beach was actually pretty dead until the last couple of feet.

According to the volunteer, the shoreline in that area of Myrtle Edwards park had been torn out when they repaired the sea-wall and replaced less than a year previously. From perhaps 0' up to 2' the rocks were slimy with simpler sea weeds. Below 0' a few interesting things were visible - barnacles, snails, limpets, several kinds of sea weed. It was slippery and rough, scrambling over the last 6 or 8 feet of sea weed coated rocks to get down where the water was splashing. Fingerlings swam by, a few gulls were visible. The shore is an isolated pocket, to the south the piers cover the shore, and to the north bulkheads drop steeply into the water up towards the grain elevator in West Seattle. There isn't an adjacent inter-tidal zone, so it's been slow to re-populate. I’m glad they took the time to rebuild a little inter-tidal zone back up, even if it may take a decade or more to really regenerate.

Rapidly changing conditions – reminds me of the recent story about the fish in Lake Washington. As the human population grew and the waters of the lake got more cloudy, this one species of little fish dropped most of their armoring of scales over a couple of decades. Apparently since the predator fish couldn’t hunt them visually they were less likely to be bitten, so the armor provided less benefit and the balanced tipped to favor fish that mature more quickly and avoid the extra metabolic cost of the extra scales. Then in the 70s Seattle and King County put in sewers and storm water retention ponds and the water cleared back up. Within a couple of decades the armor was back, and the fish now look about like they did before: moderately armored. With our rivers and lakes, swamps and marshes, erosion and flooding, we get large swings in visibility all the time. I speculate that there is a sort of meta-evolution occurring – these fish have evolved an ability to evolve additional or fewer scales quickly in response to competitive pressure. Their ability to evolve is evolving – meta-evolution.

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Odd puppet like thing hanging from wires that moved around. First time it looked vaguely like a horse or a dog, didn't do much for/to me. Later after circling around through the works and losing Dana, I circled back and looked in again and it moved oddly, almost organically, and the work suddenly hit me with meaning and promise. I didn't spend much time with it, but somehow it has eclipsed my memories of the other works. There were several I liked, particularly the city scape photography, but nothing else really stuck with me. I need to take notes, that way I can credit the artists (and to tell you the truth, my decaying memory needs the assist).

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Took Carina & Grandma Helen to the Frye to see the R.Crumb exhibit. Crumb did seminal counter-culture comics, or graphic novels as they are called now. From Mister Natural to Shuman the Human to some pretty sick and twisted stuff in Zap! comics he was a productive and interesting, perhaps genre defining artist of the 60s and 70s. Powerful stuff, he was more talented than I had realized. The selected work also said interesting things about him - his taste in women, the blues musicians, his insights into drugs, pop culture, and sex, his fearlessness in pursuing topics that reveal parts of him that most of us would never willingly expose. He did a haunting bit about seeing a girl on the bus in New York who was so beautiful it was almost magical. Of course he couldn't say a word to her, probably hardly made eye contact, and yet decades later he could still recall it and draw beautiful cartoons about it - sad, human, heart rending. Very real, it resonated and stuck with me. The cynicism and jaded sensibilities also can be over the top, but they only had a bit of his more hard-core stuff. Grandma Helen said "I just didn't look at the rude stuff."

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It's been an interesting, somewhat challenging year.

Driving home one day I saw my kids on the front porch as I I pulled in. Ben was in his underpants. What was that about? They stepped out into the front yard and as I got out of the car Carina said "the house is on fire." A moment later I heard the fire alarm and my heart started racing.

I went in and checked. We had a small fire in the upstairs bathroom, a fair amount of smoke but not too much heat yet. I put it out by smothering it, and turned the fan right above off - it was a charred, melted mess and had obviously started the fire. The fire had moved up from the fan into the beams in the attic, which I couldn't really reach.

I told Carina to call 911 and tell them we had a house fire. The fire men were there less than 2 minutes later. With their oxygen equipment they were able to get above the fire in the attic and put it out quickly.

Everyone was fine, Carina & Ben handled it beautifully, and we're insured so it's not too bad. Deductibles suck, though.

Dana's health has been a concern. She went in for some reasonably major surgery, and hanging around in the waiting room as things ran long was unpleasant. She was fine, everything came out fine (the doctor showed me pictures of what got taken out - oog). One of those moments that forces you to consider mortality, even as you try as hard as you can not to.

My oldest daughter got married, so our family has gotten bigger. They live in an apartment in north Seattle and work hard for very little money the way young people always do. I hope they are enjoying life as much as they should, this really is a peak experience in their life: they'll never be so young, fresh, and innocent again. They make a beautiful couple and I hope, wish and pray that things go well for them on their journey together.

Work is hitting a peak as well - we're at the end of our product development cycle, when we have to finish making fixes and get the product shipped pretty soon. Keeps me busy. Last night I was mildly insomniac and checked my e-mail at 11PM. A coworker from Bangalore (India) had posted a follow-up question. I went ahead and followed up, remotely accessing a server in some lab in Bangalore (I assume, I only know it's IP address) to figure out what broke and how to fix it. By midnight or so I got it patched and he was able to get it upgraded, allowing him to move further into getting the next load tests going on that system. By the end of the e-mails it was ridiculously late, so I slept in a little and worked from home. Gotta love the commute - down the stair, down the hall. Take a seat.

Spring was unusually cold for the most part - a good snowfall in April, lots of cold late May and June days. As summer gets here we're getting maybe our second or third good stretch of the year, well into the 70s. It feels like it's been a long time coming.

We're headed to our cabin next week, we'll stay there for most of a week depending. No crabbing yet, not sure if we'll take the boat out. Probably will, we've got plenty of time to kill.

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I've been singing in the church choir since December and it has been interesting. I sang in choirs back in High School and at the University of Washington, but that was a long time ago.

I started just in time for Advent, and during Advent they use no instruments, it's all a cappella. We had one rehearsal on Thursday and a small rehearsal just before mass. Some of the songs were familiar - Christmas carols - but I was singing the tenor part so it was unfamiliar. It was a challenge but I did OK and it was fun.

Oddly enough, one of the harder parts is letting go - we did several songs that I really enjoyed, but we only practiced them perhaps twice, performed them, then we were done with them. I don't have a very good vocabulary for describing why I liked them. We did one song that had the lyric "Peace, peace, wonderful peace..." where the tenor part started fairly high on the first "peace," then went up and down a half step at a time while the other parts changed through chords, it sounded beautiful but I don't know how to describe what was so moving about it. Then we turned the music back in and went on to the next week.

Some classics and old favorites were nice - "O Come O Come Emanuel" is one of my favorites, and it was fun doing it in 4 part harmony. Between Advent and Christmas I recognized perhaps half of the songs we did. During the 4 weeks of ordinary time through last Sunday I pretty much didn't recognize any songs at all. For the most part it doesn't make much difference being familiar with the song, since I'm never singing the melody anyway.

Last night we sang at the 7PM Mass for Ash Wednesday, which marks the beginning of Lent. During Lent they don't use instruments either, just like Advent, so it's challenging - if you blow it it's pretty obvious (no instruments to cover you), and you can't pick up your pitch from the instruments either. We did a song called "Miserere" in Latin that has an interesting history. It was originally written in the 1600s and performed exclusively at the Vatican only during Lent; the author was jealous and didn't want it performed any where else. Eventually some famous composers heard it and wrote the parts out, so several alternative versions were created with slight differences. Finally the original version was released, and that's pretty much the basis for what we do. It's a very typically Catholic song: all about guilt and our need for God's forgiveness. As Greg our choir director said "this is not a happy song: think guilt!" to which one of the altos said "we're Catholic, we know how to do guilt."

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I read many good books last year, some of my favorites:

This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession by Daniel J. Levitin
A wonderful book on a couple of my favorite subjects, music and the human nervous system. Pretty technical in it's own way, the first 60 pages are all about music and it's components: pitch, rhythm, tone, timbre, and so on. Then it gets really technical, introducing many of the latest findings on human neurological development and music. Fascinating stuff, he really hammers home how even though most everyone says "I don;t really know much about music" was are almost all in fact amazingly gifted when it comes to music. We can recognize our favorite songs within one or two beats based on timbre and a couple of notes, we can generally classify types of music nearly instantly, we often can guess who the band is that performed a piece of music the first time we heard it, and we can tell if a performance is a different or rerecorded version, even when it's nearly identical to the original. Great book, highly recommended, he makes the technical issues resolved in cutting edge research understandable and applicable to our own lives.

Salt

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