back to Monday

It was my first day at Impinj, so I filled out forms, but didn't watch the online instructional video, since a very faint sound comes out of some part of my computer but I'd have to mash my head against it to hear much. And I actually got to talk with one of the big consumers of the test data I'm trying to make useful.

Ate dinner at Thai Tom with jinian, at the bar seats closest to flames. Fire!

a new candidate for favorite walk to work

My walk to work is diagonally across what is roughly a grid, so I've been turning corners haphazardly each day, routing myself within the rectangle of no doubling back. Today I came home by walking down the Burke-Gilman until it leaves the canal, and then turning north -- a block eastwards out of the rectangle, so I hadn't walked there. It's a wonderful row of yards, all different theories side by side. The neighborhood has many good yards, I know, but I was struck by these, possibly because the day is beautiful and the sunset was slicing across and all the wisterias are in bloom.

I am very thankful that I've ended up working in a place that's a beautiful walk from home. It hauls me into the day in the morning, and in the evening for twenty minutes I don't think, just walk.

Also thankful that when I want to go outside to think about SQL, it's two minutes to the canal (I've been shown the nondescript door to the postern gate, not twenty feet from my desk), and what's more, the minute I stopped under the bridge, it went to lift for my benefit. From down there, at the start it's like the roof hovering off, and at the very end it drifts down extra-slowly, like a parachute settling.

There's even a bookstore on the way home, for sufficiently extravagant values of "on the way".

working backwards: Sunday the 18th

jinian and hattifattener and I trawled the library book sale pretty well. Some of my cool finds were --

Zeppelin. A book of thrilling WWI zeppelin tales was plenty, but it turns out it's by the captain of the Hindenberg! The last chapter is written by his colleague and friend.

The Character Dimension of Camping. For seventy-five cents, once I hit the use of IBM-machine cards in sociometric record-keeping by Camp Chingachgook counselors, how could I pass it up? Copyright 1960 the YMCA.

Bundling: Its Progress, Origin, and Decline in America. Still in print; go figure. My copy doesn't have any date, so I can imagine it's as old as I like.

Mecca the Blessed, Medina the Radiant. Some stunning photographs. And some unexpected ones -- I didn't realize you could photograph the Black Stone.

Also some McKillip and Pinkwater I didn't have, w00t.

We tried to go to the Urban Horticulture plant sale, but they were inconveniently already closing up. Freaks. So we went vindictively to buy dead plants instead, at the produce store with the dancing strawberries. hattifattener bought a fully operational battlegrapefruit.

I potted the bay-tree sprout which you haven't heard of in this time-order, moved some morning glories from the successful pot to the unsuccessful one (more of whose native seeds have now shown up, but feebly), thinned some winged beans out into pots for giving, and rearranged the pots outside from where they were conveniently waterable to where they'll want to be to climb up the webbing. Finally, I yoinked the mother fern upright again. This fern has no elasticity at all, is in fact a highly viscous liquid, as one can see from the fact that ferns in old churches are thicker at the bottom, which is actually a reference to the Black Death.