3 posts tagged “seattle”

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.

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!

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.