Greg

administrativia: it's baaaaack...

Yep, the site is back up (thanks to Aaron for letting me know it was down).  Nothing to see, please move along.

Hooray for the nice weather!

I'm sure that every blog that's based in Seattle that you read is discussing the nice weather - but there's a reason for it.  When the weather is clear and you can see the mountain's ringing the area, the Puget Sound area has to be one of the most beautiful parts of the country.  And this early taste of Spring has just reminded everyone about it :)

So, what'd we do this weekend?  We ended up at the dogpark at Marymoor - far superior to the one in Magnuson, which in turn seems to be superior to every other dog park in Seattle.  It always amazes me how well that many unfamiliar dogs get along.

The other big accomplishment (I'm not counting losing twice at Careers as an accomplishment :)) was building out our new home server.  I've been trying to get one going for a while on old hardware that was lying around, and after suffering multiple HW related failures finally gave up and bought some new parts to complete the system.  Why have a home server?  For me the biggest benefit is the automatic back-ups.  I crossed over from where I was a few years ago where I didn't actually have any data that I cared about on my system - now I'd be a bit put out if I lost the gigabytes and gigabytes of photos :(.  This is the first time that I've put together a computer from parts in years (my last two computers were off-the-shelf) and I'd forgotten how satisfying and annoying building one out can be.  But hey, it's up and running and seems functional so far :)

Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded.

It's like Yogi sez: "Nobody goes there anymore.  It's too crowded."

There are a few resturaunts that I try to go to occasionally and then am just not willing to wait as long as it takes to get a table.  The Palace Kitchen is in this boat, though they also have the fatal flaw of an uppity attitude "you're lucky to get to wait an ninety minutes to get a table".  No ma'am, I'm lucky to take my hard-earned dollars to another resturaunt with food that's just as nice and actually appreciates my business.

A couple of local resturaunts are regularly busy but are at least friendly about it and keep us going back or trying to go back :).  We tried to go to Sitka on Friday and were told it'd be an hour and a half to two hours before there'd be a table.  But they have an exciting new twist on the old "here's a pager, we'll buzz you when you're up" system where you leave your phone number and then they call you when your table is almost ready.  What a great system - we can head back home or to a larger place where we it's easier to get a drink at the bar or whatever!  Of course, it works a lot better when they eventually call you...  Not sure if my phone crapped out, the tables never emptied, or they just forgot about us, but no call ever came.  Good thing we'd decided to eat somewhere else by the time our "wait time" had come and gone :)