Greg

Monday 2/26 - slow news day

Strange sight looking out over Lake Union on Saturday morning - one of the famous Seattle "houseboats" was being towed out towards Ballard.  Not something you see every day, given they generally spend their lives docked at a marina.  Unfortunately, even as slow as it was going, it was too far away to get a good photo by the time I had noticed it.

In other news the finger I injured playing virtual golf (Golden Tee) is still annoying me.  Yes, I did actually hurt myself playing a video game, you can stop laughing now and take their "injury may occur" warnings seriously :)

And the winner is...

The winner is the person who doesn't watch the award show :)

I was thinking about it earlier today when I saw a headline about some Oscar news, and realized that I really couldn't care less about award shows.  It's basically a free promotion for the movie/music/musical/etc. industry that somehow gets all sorts of hype.  I don't really care who wins best picture or best actor or best costumes.  It doesn't seem to be helping get higher quality pictures into the cinema. 

At one point I was mildly interested in the Oscars and pretty much ignored the other award shows.  Since my patronage of the movie theaters has decreased along with my tolerance for what I deemd annoying "funny" bits in these things, I've really stopped paying any attention to it. 

Maybe it's just a subconscious backlash against the fact it costs ten bucks to sit in a cramped chair with people talking around me to watch a movie these days! Sheesh! 

<grumpy old man voice>In my day a movie cost 2.75 any time of the day and people didn't talk in the theaters.  And we liked it</grumpy old man voice> 

How does this place stay in business?

We decided to get a little bit of pool practice in last night so went down to our new "regular" pool hall - Stix.  This was by far the busiest we'd seen the tables - by the time we left, they were down to two or three tables open.

It seems like this place has to go out of business soon.  I can't imagine that the rent in the marina is cheap, and it's never been very busy when I've been there.  Now, I will admit that I usually am there in the afternoon/evening just for some pool practice, but the couple people I know that have been there on Friday nights say that it's also been fairly quiet.  During the super bowl they were able to get by with two bartenders, two waitresses and one cook - because most of the pool tables were empty and the bar section was probably 2/3 - 3/4 full.

Anyway, I recommend the place and would like to see it stay around (keep I mind I don't really go for the food, I'm going there to shoot pool :)).  The tables are pretty decent, the atmosphere is better than Jillian's, and the music selection is generally excellent.  Old school rap, blues, 70s r&b - cool laid back music that fits right in.

It's baaaaaaaaack....

After 3+ days of it being offline, I've finally finished migrating the site.  The main issue I ran into was with database migration.  It turns out that it's REALLY annoying to try to move databases between SQL servers, particularly when that pesky work thing keeps coming in the middle and you're talking about multi-hours transfers of data each time you try :(

Anyway - please let me know if you notice anything weird that worked in the past - there may be something that I misconfigured on the new host and I'll need to look into it.

Administrivia

Quick administrative note - I'm going to be doing some maintanence on the site this weekend.  All going well, it'll just be offline for a couple hours.  If I screw it up, it might be down for a few days as I figure out what I did wrong and how to fix it :)

That's all - please move along.