Rainier and the Flood

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Looks like the scenery is going to be a little bit different next time Prairie and I are able to head down to Mt. Rainier for a weekend getaway. The heavy rains and flooding of the past weeks have hit Rainier National Park hard, including quite a few of the areas that we went through this summer.

All park roads and entrances remain closed. Crews continue repair work on Nisqually Road at Sunshine Point and on Longmire utilities.

Extensive damage to backcountry bridges and trails. Sections of the Wonderland Trail may be unusable next summer.

The suspension bridge and boardwalk damaged at the Grove of the Patriarchs. The Grove is covered in a thick layer of silt.

More than two miles of the [Carbon] road are severely damaged. There are washed out sections in at least four places.

The main channel of the Nisqually River is pushing closer to the Emergency Operations Center (EOC) building. Parking behind the building is gone.

The [Sunshine Point] campground, located directly on the bank of the Nisqually River, and the dike that protected it, is gone with the exception of a few campsites.

The [Longmire] main campground road is completely removed at the road fork immediately behind the Community Building.

About 200 yards of the [Nisqually] road is washed out and impassable at the former entrance to Sunshine Point Campground.

Both lanes [of SR123] are washed out at MP 11.5 to a depth of 60-80 feet.

And those are just some of the key, most recognizable areas (well, most recognizable to me after a whopping single visit to the park).

There’s a collection of images and videos surveying the damage on this page. Pretty impressive.

Best Bad Review of the Zune

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Andy Ihnatko does a wonderful job of slaughtering the Zune, Microsoft’s new iPod competitor…

Yes, Microsoft’s new Zune digital music player is just plain dreadful. I’ve spent a week setting this thing up and using it, and the overall experience is about as pleasant as having an airbag deploy in your face.

“Avoid,” is my general message. The Zune is a square wheel, a product that’s so absurd and so obviously immune to success that it evokes something akin to a sense of pity.

[…]

The Zune is a complete, humiliating failure. Toshiba’s Gigabeat player, for example, is far more versatile, it has none of the Zune’s limitations, and Amazon sells the 30-gig model for 40 bucks less.

Throw in the Zune’s tail-wagging relationship with music publishers, and it almost becomes important that you encourage people not to buy one.

The iPod owns 85 percent of the market because it deserves to. Apple consistently makes decisions that benefit the company, the users and the media publishers — and they continue to innovatively expand the device’s capabilities without sacrificing its simplicity.

Companies such as Toshiba and Sandisk (with its wonderful Nano-like Sansa e200 series) compete effectively with the iPod by asking themselves, “What are the things that users want and Apple refuses to provide?”

Microsoft’s colossal blunder was to knock the user out of that question and put the music industry in its place.

Ouch.

(via /.)

So Long, Space Needle

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Thank goodness we have the journalistic integrity of the Weekly World News to fill us in on what’s really going on in our city…

The Space Needle will once again become this city’s tallest building in April 2009, when NASA launches the tower into Earth orbit.

The unmanned mission will test the landmark’s suitability for carrying astronauts to the moon, Mars, and beyond.

“We hope this flight will point us in the direction of cheaper modes of space travel,” said Project Director Mike Dale.

Early next year, NASA engineers will remove the 72 bolts anchoring the Needle to her 6,000-ton concrete foundation. Construction cranes will lower the building onto its side, and a convoy of trucks will transport the structure to Cape Canaveral, using the straightest roads possible.

“There, the building will be thoroughly caulked against the vaccuum of space,” Mr. Dale said.

The Needle’s elevator shaft will be filled with rocket fuel, her antennas will be oriented toward Houston, and her manned explorations of the solar system will begin no later than 2014, according to Dale.

Despite the reduced costs to NASA, the Space Needle project represents a giant leap in astronaut amenities.

“The rotating restaurant will provide simulated Earth gravity, not to mention fresh salmon and Dungeness crab from Washington and Alaska waters,” Dale said.

“It was NASA spacecraft that originally inspired the tower’s architecture,” Dale reflected from his seat in the Needle’s whirling restaurant. “But now the tables are turning.”

(via seattle)

Black Friday Recap

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Ick.

There were people lined up outside the store, waiting for us to open the gate at 6am.

We had everyone who works at the store there for opening — the manager, five salespeople, and two lab techs — there and on the floor, and all of us were constantly busy for the first few hours. When things started to slow down, there would be one or two of us that had a few minutes to breathe before they got caught up again.

By 10:30/11-ish, things had slowed down to a more moderate pace, so I went home for an extended lunch (along with two other employees). Came home, had leftover turkey dinner with Prairie, and then fell asleep for two hours. Got up (unwillingly) and went back in at 4pm.

And spent the next six hours selling virtually nothing. Sales-wise, the latter half of the day was a complete bust for me — where the morning was a lot of buyers out for the sales, the evening was all the shoppers. Meh. Sales is definitely not where I want to work for the rest of my life. Right now, I’m just hoping some (or most) of the people I talked to in the evening actually come back.

Finally closed the gate at 10:00, got out by 10:15, went home, had dinner, and fell over into bed. Long, un-fun day. But at least it’s over.

I sense a trend…

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Five Day Forecast

Not at all a normal Seattle forecast, but this hasn’t exactly been a normal Seattle November, either. Kinda fun to see what might happen as the week goes by!

Black Friday Morn

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Hope everyone had a happy Thanksgiving day!

A piece of advice: if you can manage it, don’t be so foolish as to work retail on the day after Thanksgiving. This year, the Northgate Mall gave its tenant stores the choice of opening at either 5:00am or 6:00am. My manager was kind enough to choose the 6:00am opening time…but that still means I have to be there at about 5:30am.

So now, here I am at five in the morning, trying to shake off a turkey coma so I can go deal with the craziest of the Black Friday shoppers.

Ick.

I will never be convinced that anyone has to be shopping at this hour of the morning. They’re all flat-out insane.

Storm Season

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Wow — in the past few minutes, there have been three thunderclaps loud enough to rattle the windows (and the sound rolls on for at least a good ten seconds each time), and now we’ve got hail pelting down like crazy, plus the wind and rain that you can expect for a storm like this.

Make that four thunderclaps.

And I’ve got to walk to work in about half an hour. Ick.

Hooray for winter!

Update: I just pulled this image from KOMO News:

Lightning Hits Seattle

Neat!

Teen Repellent

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I’d heard some time ago about the teen repellent noise — an ultrasonic tone that teens can hear, but adults can’t due to natural hearing loss as people age, that gets annoying enough to drive teens away.

It was named the ‘Mosquito’ because the sound resembles that of a buzzing insect. And it works by emitting a harmless ultra sonic tone that generally can only be heard by people aged 25 and under. In trials, it has proven that the longer someone is exposed to the sound, the more annoying it becomes.

Crime Reduction Officer Bob Walton elaborated further: “Effectively, it’s a transmitter which sends out a specialised frequency noise which according to the manufacture is particularly audible to young people under the age of 25.

He said: “I’m in my fifties and when it’s turned on all I can hear is a very faint buzz. But I understand from young people who have been exposed to the noise, it is very annoying.”

Amusingly, not long after this started being used, the concept was appropriated and adapted by teenagers for use as a cellphone ring tone that they could hear but that their parents or teachers could not. Clever kids!

Here’s a site that has a selection of a few different ring tones at various frequencies, from 8 kHz up to 22.4 kHz, so you can test your own hearing abilities and see if you’d be able to hear (or be annoyed by) the tones.

My results:

You are a dog
Or maybe you are a mosquito, you certainly can’t be human.
The highest pitched ultrasonic mosquito ringtone that I can hear is 21.1kHz
Find out which ringtones you can hear!

Header Images

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I’d like to get further into customizing my site later on down the line, but for the moment, I think most of my tweaks will be pretty simple. I have had fun grabbing a selection of images to use for the randomized header image at the top of the page, however. Theoretically, you should see a different image each time the page is loaded.

More may be added to this as time goes by, but for now, here’s a rundown of what you might see (unless you’d prefer to be surprised, in which case, ignore what follows…):

Read more