Getting closer!

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It’s still not Seattle, but it’s at least closer than San Francisco…

PORTLAND, ORE. – It has happened in Massachusetts, San Francisco and now it is happening in Portland.

The Multnomah County Clerk’s office plans to issue marriage licenses for same-sex couples starting tomorrow at 10:00 a.m. at their office located at 501 S.E. Hawthorne.

Oregon’s marriage law states that marriage is a civil contract entered by males who are at least 17 years old and females who are at least 17 years old.

A statement issued by the county said simply: “Based on a legal opinion released today by the County Attorney, a majority of the Board of County Commissioners supports a policy change to allow the county to issue marriage licenses to same sex couples.”

Congratulations, all you Portlanders!

(many thanks to Pops for pointing this out in the comments here!)

Toilet tourism

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Ever wanted to use a public toilet? Usually, they’re items to be avoided, not sought out. Seattle looks to be trying to change that, though, with our new high-tech public lavatories…

The doors open and close like those on an elevator. You step in. They softly seal shut behind you.

“Welcome to Seattle’s public toilet,” says the kind of voice you might hear as you board a space ride at Disneyland.

[…]

Tour the potties at Occidental Park in Pioneer Square, Hing Hay Park in the International District, Victor Steinbrueck Park at Pike Place Market, Waterfront Park at Pier 59 and the 1800 block of Broadway on Capitol Hill.

I just may have to check one of these things out at some point…just because. ;)

(via Pops)

Just feeling a little quiet

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There’s a lot of stuff out there on that in-tar-web thing these days, but I just haven’t felt terribly talkative as of late. It’s not really writers block as such, more of a general feeling of not having anything to add. It happens every so often.

The weekend’s been good, with a few days of lounging around, relaxing, and watching movies with Prairie (Lost in Translation, Donnie Darko, Willard, and Party Monster), and out to the Vogue to bounce around, flirt, and hang out with friends. All in all, a very enjoyable night.

I’ve gotten back into the eternal project of re-importing all my CDs into my computer — so far, I’m up to 6,913 songs over 583 albums in 30.38Gb, and that’s probably somewhere under halfway done. Yikes.

And…well, that’s about as exciting as things get right now. I’m sure my usual babble will resurface before terribly long. Until then, though…

iTunes: “Son of a Gun” by K.M.F.D.M. from the album XTORT (1996, 4:23).

I wanna push da button!

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Okay, so this article is New York specific, but I’d be willing to bet that just about any city works the same way. But y’know…I’m probably going to keep pushing the button.

For years, at thousands of New York City intersections, well-worn push buttons have offered harried walkers a rare promise of control over their pedestrian lives.

[…]

Millions of dutiful city residents and tourists have pushed them over the years, thinking it would help speed them in their journeys. Many trusting souls might have believed they actually worked. Others, more cynical, might have suspected they were broken but pushed anyway, out of habit, or in the off chance they might bring a walk sign more quickly.

As it turns out, the cynics were right.

(via Anil)

iTunes: “Cominagetcha” by Propellerheads from the album Decksandrumsandrockandroll (1998, 7:02).

XBox2, G5…and Virtual PC?

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Nick just dropped me a quick note to let me know that I’m showing up on Slashdot again. It seems that word just hit the ‘net that Microsoft has released the SDK for the upcoming XBox2, and said SDK is being distributed running on Apple PowerMac G5 dual-processor machines running a customized NT kernel. This prompted Mr. Muskrat’s comment…

Michael Hanscom almost blew the XBox2 story wide open back in October.

Remember when Microsoft fired that guy because he mentioned that they bought G5s. Too bad he didn’t know anything about why they bought them.

I did wonder a bit about the G5/Xbox2 link back in November, when news first broke that the Xbox2 would likely be running on the G5 chip. At the time, I was idly wondering about the possibility of an Xbox emulator for the Mac (similar to Connectix’ old Virtual Gamestation software that allowed Mac users to run Playstation games on their home computer).

Now, though, the news that the seeded G5’s are running a custom NT kernel has me wondering along different lines.

In February of ’03, Microsoft bought Virtual PC, the PC-emulation software for Macs that allows them to run Windows software inside an emulated PC. They’ve continued to support and update Virtual PC for the Mac, along with releasing Virtual PC for the PC, allowing Windows machines to run multiple virtual machines on one physical box — handy for software testing purposes. Unfortunately, Virtual PC depends on a feature of earlier PowerPC processors that is not present in the G5, so there hasn’t been a version of Virtual PC released yet that will run on Apple’s flagship G5 desktop machines.

Last month, Microsoft announced that a new G5-compatible version of Virtual PC would be released along with Office 2004. Considering that the Xbox2 SDK is apparently running a customized NT kernel that runs on G5 systems, could some of those same customizations be worked into Virtual PC 7, making for a major speed increase, as more of the low-level code would be running natively on the Mac rather than having to pass through an emulator? I don’t really know enough about the innards of how software like this works, so I could be entirely off-base here — the differences between the emulation required for Virtual PC and the customizations needed to get the NT kernel running on the PowerPC processor may have absolutely nothing in common — but it was enough to get me wondering.

Even more interesting, though, would be if someone could leak some form of benchmarks, even rough ones, showing what kind of performance this customized NT kernel was getting on the SDK machines. I’m assuming it must be at least somewhat respectable, as the machines are being used for creating software for the Xbox2 — but how respectable?

And going even more wildly out of the bounds of reality…for years now, there have been rumors of Apple porting the Mac OS to be able to run on Intel-based PCs (realistically, that’s not likely to ever be released publicly, but the technology is there). However, what about going the other direction? What if Microsoft were to take these customizations to their kernel and and eventually supplant Virtual PC with an actual build of Longhorn for the G5, either as a “red box” that would allow you to run Windows applications concurrently with Mac OS X applications (we can already run Mac OS X apps, “Classic” Mac OS apps, Unix command-line apps, and Unix X-11 apps all at the same time as it is), or as a dual-boot option (Which OS would you like to run today)?

Likely? I seriously doubt it. But fun to play with.

And I’d still love to find out just how zippy those G5s are running NT. Wouldn’t it be a fun little tweak if they were running as fast as (or faster, even) than high-end PCs?