• the butterfly room at the Pacific Science Center
• the Seattle Art Museum’s Olympic Sculpture Park
• the Pioneer Square Underground Tour — hosted by an actual member of the Washington State Legislature (!)

The Space Needle is definitely a somewhat-dated but still interesting architectural highlight, and Rem Koolhaas’ Seattle Public Library is a marvel to behold first-hand. For a city of just under 600,000 residents the skyscrapers and other elements of urban architecture are top-notch.

The aquarium was kind of a disappointment, that Pacific Octpus on display is not exactly giant. Colorful, kind of afraid of the screaming kids, and interesting, but not giant. Overall Seattle strikes me as a more family-friendly city than San Francisco, which means that at this point in my life I find the rugrat overrun a little annoying.

Apparently Tom Douglas owns every restaurant in Seattle. We ate at three: Lola, Dahlia Lounce, and Serious Pie. Lola was one of the only restaurants in town open after 11PM when our flight arrived, and a late-night dinner of lamb gyros and oregano fries hit the spot perfectly. Dahlia Lounge was also pretty good, but the restaurant seems to have an odd identity crisis in that the decor is pure retro-Chinese, but most of the menu is modern Northwest. The “sea bites” appetizer is a selection of five fresh seafood preparations on ice, all delicious (five spice smoked salmon? who knew!), but with two breadsticks bizarrely placed over the dish. Halibut and King salmon entrees arrived perfectly cooked and in abundant portions — though the total bill was just as expensive as you might find in San Francisco. Serious Pie, though, had some serious problems — a morel and arugula pesto pie had so much salt in the squeeze-bottle-applied pesto so as to render the delicate morels invisible, and a fennel sausage and pepper pizza was pretty sparsely topped. At a price (and with a reputation) equivalent to my current San Francisco favorite Pizzeria Delfina, the quality seemed oddly low.

Macrina Bakery is some serious bread and I would love to seem Leslie Mackie open a southern outpost for us in the city. The breads there are easily comparable to SF’s Acme or Boulangerie Bay Bread products and would sell like hotcakes (hot rolls?).

The pulled pork sliders on buttermilk biscuits at BOKA Kitchen + Bar are not to be missed; they serve a decent crab cake and a nice plate of mussels. The menu layout favors small plates, so we got to try these as well as the house-made charcuterie, of which a pate and a mole-spiced salami were pretty memorable. Portions are again rather large, but BOKA’s menu is definitely underpriced compared to the market.

Leaving tomorrow morning. The two things I skipped due to travel time constraints were Zoka Coffee and the Museum of Flight. I really wish I had found time for Zoka so I could do a Zoka vs. Blue Bottle shootout. Overall, the espresso drinks I had up here in restaurants were surprisingly poorly made — nothing but bitter notes, perhaps it’s a local preference?

Anyway, good times. Lastly, the Pan Pacfic Hotel Seattle is a modern and beautiful place to stay that’s within walking distance of all of the sights and restaurants I just mentioned. We managed to get most of our vacation task list accomplished with exactly zero carbon footprint, yay!

• Where the hell am I?
• Is this cab really taking me to the right place?
• No really, I think we missed that turn
• Dude look here you went around the block
• Yeah that’s right you’ll stop the meter

Can you think of some more uses for this great button?

VMware Fusion 2.0 beta

Release Notes

More than 500 restaurants, shops and businesses reviewed by Citysearch are placing printed bar codes in their windows. People who have special software from Scanbuy Inc. loaded on their cell phones can simply take a picture of the code and their phone’s Internet browser will immediately take them to the restaurant’s corresponding Citysearch page.

(via SFGate)

No one wants to scan shit. In the same way that no one really wants to use a stylus on a mobile device, no one really wants to scan shit. Like, of all the competing location-based technologies, bar codes? FAIL.

It’s pretty nice. My reasons for buying a new Vespa (and no longer riding my classics) were:

1. busy lifestyle over at slide.com means no time for self-fixing
2. brutal downtown parking situations mean a lot of damage to increasingly scarce parts on vintage bikes
3. predictable annual maintenance costs vs. high-ticket sporadic expensive repairs to the vintage bikes

I also considered an entry-level Ducati. I still want one, but I need to face the fact that I rarely leave the city and even if I wanted to, the GTS 250 pulls at 76mph stock. (I haven’t yet tested this, real-world is probably 70-80 depending on wind conditions)

So, what’s it like? Well, it’s fantastic. I’m comparing vs. daily driving my Lambretta Jet 200 for the past three years:

1. much faster to pick up from the line — even two up
2. much faster to stop on the line
3. push button starter
4. hella storage space
5. doesn’t scare your passenger — less deathtrappy

The biggest downside is:

1. style

It’s no fair to compare a 1976 200cc (the cylinder is cast iron, yo) to a 2008 250cc. But the reality is that dollar for dollar over a few years, the cost of owning a modern GTS 250 is going to be (I hope) about the same, if not less, as a classic — with less headache and unexpected big bills and waits for parts.

The style thing — I’m not sure yet how I feel about this. The GTS 250 is a much bigger bike than, say, the diminutive Lambretta (they are parked next to each other) but despite this Vespa’s stylists have made a lot of progress in the past couple of years integrating the elements of beauty the classic bikes possessed into their new line. Remember the Vespa ET4? Nasty. The GT line in general has a much more rounded back end, the GTS takes this a little further and grabs some more cues from the GS 150/160 series from the late 50’s/early 60’s.

The GTS 250 is no slimline Lambretta, that’s for sure. Style was the reason I got into scooters, it feels odd to de-prioritize it. Perhaps the fact that I was considering a motorcycle also should tell me something.

I dunno what happened, but I think I’ve finally reached the point where having a great day riding around is more important to me than the kind of bike I do it on. The classic bikes will stay but I don’t think they’ll be daily drivers again — the practical advantages of the modern Vespa are just too great.

Ciao, baby.

• 2 cups flour
• 1 packet active dry yeast
• 1 cup warm water (110F or so)
• 1 tsp sugar
• 1 tsp kosher salt
• olive oil to taste
• 3 cloves garlic
• 1 spring fresh rosemary
• 1 leaf fresh sage
• 1/4 lb. proscuitto
• 1/4 cup fromage blanc

For dough: combine flour, sugar in a bowl. Separately, add the yeast to the warm water and allow the yeast to bloom for about 10 minutes. Add the yeast and water to the dry ingredients; combine with a silicon spatula (unless you like sticky hands) and form into a ball. Knead vigorously, rolling the dough between the palms of your hands. Cover, allow to stand and rise for 1 hour (or refrigerate for a day or more). Volume should have doubled.

Preheat your oven to 500F. Before baking, spread the dough into a rectangular shape on a Silpat; with a mortar and pestle, crush the fresh herbs in olive oil. Drizzle the olive oil over the dough, covering the surface evenly. Spoon the fromage blanc in small (1-2 tsp) chunks at several places on the surface of the dough. Layer the proscuitto over the top.

Place the focaccia and Silpat directly on the oven rack and bake for 7-10 minutes or until risen an slightly crusty. Remove and slice into squares; serve immediately.

There are so many bad pizzas and focaccias out there that my mission in 2008 is to learn to make a perfect one myself. Stay tuned.

For a couple of years after that I primarily used rsync. No muss, no fuss, but restoring a work machine to operation was pretty laborious, since the only part of the box that I could trust to rsync’s BSD underpinnings was my home directory. This worked pretty well in general, but I would still have to go through an OS install or two, install developer tools, set up LaunchDaemons or StartupItems, and so forth. In short: lots of geek fiddling, which I didn’t mind since I figured I was getting the most reliable solution around for the kind of systems I use.

I am very impressed with Time Machine. I used Time Machine to restore a backup from my work laptop (a 32-bit MBP) to its replacement (a faster, spiffier, brand new 64-bit Core2 MBP), and not only was all the usual stuff in my home directory safe, the new machine is now an exact copy of the original. I mean, down to the last bit — after booting the Leopard install DVD and restoring from the external FireWire drive, the machine — which runs a local copy of slide’s website, with a custom Apache, mod_python, MySQL installation, and a host of other custom software — came up with 100% of the software working. Even preferences, Mail.app accounts, and my .Mac sync services settings work.

I’ve never seen a consumer-grade backup solution work this well in practice. As a final touch, when the machine came up after the restore, it rescheduled another backup run for a few minutes in the future. Nice.

Appointment tomorrow to get a loaner, apparently this is a pretty common problem.

UPDATE: After 30 minutes at the Apple store, I walked out with a brand new iPhone. The Mac Genius dude said that this is the primary manufacturing defect he’s seen, and that the touchpad tends to fail in big horizontal bands. Pretty painless overall.

Bought through MacHeist. 9 hours left.