Category: life

Today, I saw the two corporations that keep Seattle alive – the first one being the Boeing plant in Everett, where all the Boeing 747, 767, and 777 aircraft are built. No photos were allowed, unfortunately.

As you may have heard, all three assembly lines are housed in a single building. It’s a big building – apparently the largest one by volume in the world. So large, in fact, it has no heating nor air conditioning. Seattle’s temperate weather keeps its cavernous innards comfortable, but if it gets too cold, they turn on more overhead lamps. If it gets too hot, they open the bay doors. It helps considering each door is three football fields large.

The tour was only an hour long, and actually only consisted of a short walk through a maintenance tunnel to the observation gallery, where we got to see the first half of the 747 assembly line and the second half of the 777 line. Then a quick drive to the painting shed and plane parking lot via coach bus. The airlines show up with their own crews, and fly them right off the lot.

The second one being the one well all love so dear to our hearts, Microsoft Corporation.

What struck me was, compared to snooty banks and consulting firms, the Microsoft campus was a pretty spartan, functional environment. It looked like a university campus, but cleaner. No marble floors or fancy sandalwood furniture. Even on Bill’s floor, the upper part of Building 34, just a series of small drywall offices.

I decided to pay a visit to Elminster, Silverlotus’s old Asheron’s Call chum, who is now doing testing for a new RPG for Xbox. She was dismayed that the latest build removed a cutscene after defeating a certain boss; instead of a “really cool sequence” all I got to see was a popup window with the words “Awaiting technology”.

I also paid my respects to an old university classmate, now a program manager for Outlook 2003. He still keeps track of the Leafs and even has a giant Canadian flag tacked to his wall. He laughed when I mentioned how expensive food was in America. “Yeah,” he said. “Sometimes I drive up to Vancouver and pick up some groceries.”

Getting around Seattle is a bit wacky. There are the messed up highways with dead-end exits. Cheaper, reflective road turtles are preferred over streetlamps, so it can be tricky driving at night. Streets can be steep and precarious, with tiny streetsigns completely obscured by trees, and littered with stupid “traffic calming” devices like giant flowerbeds in the middle of intersections.

A lot of people drive towering SUVs, generally with tinted glass. HOV “diamond” lanes that allow cars carrying only two people – and they are still generally fairly empty. Everyone drives a car – just not necessarily together.

My sister currently lives in Bellevue, which is a suburbia east of Seattle proper across Lake Washington. It is quite a sight to take the 520 freeway across the water whenever you enter downtown Seattle.

Right underneath the 520 is a recreational waterway. If you ever want to paddle a canoe underneath a freeway, this is your big chance.

The buses actually have nice comfortable seats. Express buses run along the bridges across Lake Washington regularily. Most of the buses have bike racks so you can stick your bike on.

Express buses entire downtown Seattle underground. Here is the Westlake bus station. Once in Seattle proper, buses shut down there diesel engines and deploy electric guides and operate on electrical dynamos, like streetcars.

Every car owner has to pay a tithe to help support the downtown monorail, even though you still must pay to use it. It only has two stops, Seattle Centre and Westlake Mall, and they are 1.5 miles apart.

I spent the afternoon in downtown Seattle on my own, browsing Westlake Shopping Centre, Pike Place, and the piers along the water. I finally got to see Nordstrom’s, which is essentially the top floor of Sears. Here’s an odd difference between Canadian and American shops: in the US you have your poor man’s department store (Target) and your rich man’s department store (Nordstrom’s), while Canadians mostly lump everything in one store, like Sears or The Bay.

At night, I joined up with Shawn and Shell, and we went to the University of Washington to see a very packed but very entertaining lecture on Mars. The lecture hall put BSB 147 to shame, it probably had a over 500 people in it.

After the lecture, the line up to the telescope was too long, so we went searching for our own little treasures: sculptures in a bohemian part of town called Fremont.

There is the Fremont troll, who dwells underneath the I-99 and can be seen eating a real Volkswagen. There’s a statue of Lenin, apparently rescued from post-USSR Russia, and a model space rocket, made of actual parts from Lockheed Martin.

I was still pretty sore from my trek of Mt. Rainier on Sunday, so I took it pretty easy today. Walked around Bellevue downtown, which is pretty much consists of 6 blocks of suburbian monolithic stores. It’s interesting how slightly different America is to Canada. First of all is their ugly light green money. Second of all, they get a lot more variety in everything. For example, their CompUSA had modded Antec aluminum computer cases with prefabricated windows on sale, the sort of things you would have to pay a premium on at some specialty casemod store in Toronto.

However, I am not convinced that the US is “where the money is”. Sure, the salaries are roughly double ours, but the food can be easily twice more expensive over there. At QFC (a supermarket chain), a can of Campbell’s soup cost me $2.50 CAN.

On a better note, they have the Cartoon Network and SpikeTV, so I actually got to see Big O and The A-Team. USA! USA!

The next morning, Mich took me into Pike Place. Pike Place Market is a quaint tourist trap, with the fish throwing going on and the fresh donuts, although the fish are quite fresh and locals do come here for seafood regularily. Pike Place, like most of Seattle, does emit a different vibe from the rest of the continent. There is the first Starbucks here, a store that sells nothing but flavoured olive oils and the Pike and Western Wine Shop with its wacky wine descriptions, and Biringer’s, home of the best tea cookies and raspberry honey mustard I’ve ever tasted. Of interest is the Left Bank Bookstore, your source for all subversive, hippie literature and paraphernalia.

Today, Mich and I also visited the Museum of History and Industry, which chronicles Seattle’s fairly standard history. It shares many stories not dissimilar to other American cities; it started as a salmon canning town, kicked the non-whites (in Seattle’s case, the Chinese) out of town in 1886, and had its entire downtown district consumed by the Big Fire of 1889, and finally made its mark as being the site for the 1961 World’s Fair, the Boeing Company, and Microsoft Corporation. How funny that it took two Bills to put rainy, fishy Seattle on the map – Bill Boeing and Bill Gates.

We also got to see a special exhibit – a look at the actual Declaration of Independence! It looks like someone sneezed on it, and then folded it in quarters.

What was truly stunning was that MOHAI property includes a park on the coast of Lake Washington. Truly stunning views can be had.

In the evening, my dad came down from Vancouver to take us out to dinner in the International District, aka Seattle Chinatown. However, having been raised in Toronto, I have to say that this Chinatown was a mere shadow of Toronto’s Chinatown. Think Toronto’s Chinatown at Bathurst – fully of dingy “benevolent organizations”, bars on the windows, and fortune cookie serving restaurants. I guess they shouldn’t have kicked the Chinese out in 1886 after all. But we did acquaint ourselves with a good restaurant called Ho Ho Restaurant, and other than trying to decipher the cryptic one way streets, we faired fairly well.

Some pictures from our trek up Mt. Rainier from Paradise. Shell gave us the choice of the Nisqually Vista Trail (Easy Difficulty, 1.2 miles, 200′ elevation gain) or the Alta Vista Trail (Moderate Difficulty, 1.75 miles, 600′ elevation gain). However, a funny thing happened on the way to the trails. We changed our minds. Oh no, we ended up doing the Skyline Loop, (Strenuous Difficulty, 5.5 miles, 1700′ elevation gain). It included a walk up the summit…

…and a trek along a sloping glacier (A nice break from an otherwise balmy day)…

…and strolling by two waterfalls.

I met quite a few of Shell’s coworkers today – all bright, all young, and all newly-hired or less than three years in. Joel, an Australian bloke who was hired to be the program manager for some internal DLL stuff, and I got involved in some pretty interesting geek discussions. He used to work at Sun, and mentioned respins.

A respin is when a company has to revise and resend their microchip design prototype back to the chip fabricators, who make the mass quantities of chips and circuit boards in the devices that us consumers ultimately purchase. A respin is essentially the microprocessor version of a sculptor’s mold – if their is something wrong with it, you go back to square one and make another design. As you can imagine, a respin is a costly procedure for the company. Intel generally does two or three respins for its Pentium designs. His source of consternation was that Sun’s SPARC microchips, on average, required fifty respins apiece.

Drove in Shell’s Cavalier rental car. She’s right, it was a piece of shit. She is awaiting the delivery of her Acura 1.7EL with interest.

And, before I began to despair that no women techies were employed at MS, I met Julie, who is responsible for something codenamed Avalon for Longhorn. “Everyone in Seattle is so polite and friendly,” she remarked. When Shell mentioned that she actually thought that the folks here were actually quite rude compared to folks back in Toronto, Julie confessed that she was from Boston, and Seattlites were definitely more courteous than Bostonians.

After a great dinner of overpriced salmon (courtesy of Pike Place) and corn on the cob (courtesy of QFC and their accursed self-serve checkout lanes), the conversation turned to Microsoft interview questions. Microsoft is famous for giving multiple interviews, each one with a different department, in a single day, and packing them with challenging riddles. Aaron, who does smartphones, had several opportunities to interview Microserf hopefuls, and mentions on of his favourite questions is to ask his interviewee to make a binary tree reversal – which is like asking a novice yellow belt to go beat up Jet Li.

Shell got this question: how much money can Bill Gates put into Xbox? Everytime she would start on some form of strategic analysis, the interviewer would cut her off and yell “Irrelevant!” or “That’s BS!” This continued for several grueling minutes, her trying to make an assessment and him interrupting her. At the end of the interview, the interviewer asked her if she had any questions. She asked him, “How much money can Bill Gates spend on Xbox”, whereupon he replied, “How the hell should I know?”

Things learned: One does not need to “pass” every interview to be accepted, however it can take just one well-respected interviewer to say no to poison your chances completely. Plus, they’re not really trying to see if you can be a code Mozart or plan out the business strategy of Xbox in one sitting. They want to see if you know your fundamentals, and how you deal with pressure.

London Airport has only three major carriers: Air Canada partners, WestJet, and Northwest Airlink. That was good enough. Northwest was the preferred carrier of Microsoft.

If you are already afraid of flying, then you will be absolutely petrified at flying a turboprop. With the decor like that of a worn-down taxi and the crampness of a bus, this small Saab SF98 was to take me to Detroit-Metro for a connector flight on a “real” jet. I forgot to mention: what is known as “turbulence” on a jumbo jet, is what is passed off as “smooth flight” on a turboprop.

Still, I did make it safe and sound to my final destination – Seattle. My goal is to see if my sister had settled in properly. Before last week, my only real knowledge of the city was what I had gleaned from City Confidential, which is an A&E documentary series on a small town and a gruesome murder or murders that had taken place in said small town. But Seattle felt like London but with 2 million people – it was hot in the day, cold in the night, and rainy all the time.

Once landed, I ended up in the apartment of Shell’s friend, surrounded by Microserfs. One of the guys in the Internet Explorer team made me a margarita. I insulted Internet Explorer. It was nice.

Last weekend, we went to Toronto to attend Hoss’s wedding in Fonthill. Yes, Fonthill is a small town outside of St. Catherine’s, but we got a ride off Juice from TO to there. Thanks to Silverlotus being caught in the Burlington transformer fire in June and my own grueling 5 hour ride after the Great Blackout just recently, I managed to get some travel credit and get a cheap VIA 1 first class ticket. Sirloin steak, here I come.

So, on Friday we were in the heart of TO’s snooty district at the Marriott Bloor-Yorkville. Yorkville is packed with boutiques and trendy salons. The Marriott’s six floors are actually sandwiched vertically between a Bay department store in the basement and an apartment tower above. “Even the pigeons are jaded here,” Silverlotus quipped, as the birds weaved ambivalently through foot traffic.

Even the street beggars in Yorkville are rich. One played a xylophone. Another had a karaoke machine. A karaoke machine. Our hotel had no pool though. Go figure.

On Saturday we were in a small Presbyterian church in the middle of nowhere. At one point the driving directions said, “Turn left at the Pioneer Gas station at the next light.” The “next light’ turned out to be twenty kilometres away. “I would have stopped at a gas station and asked for directions,” Juice remarked, “but there aren’t any.”

The wedding was great, very romantic. Good to see the ol’ Mac Eng gang again. Some mental notes for my future wedding: a) don’t invite the weird relatives (you know the ones, everyone has them) and b) get a wedding DJ that actually carries wedding-ish music like Olivia Newton-John or Ella Fitzgerald, not “She Bangs” from Ricky Martin.

I wish Hoss all the best.

It arrived…

The Sapphire Radeon 9800 Pro Atlantis, with about 18 stamps on it too. The card was very heavy and thick, as it is almost entirely smothered with a gigantic Zalman heatsink-heatpipe system with ramsinks for good measure.

Since it is about as thick as a deli corned beef on kaiser, the manual stated that it would obstruct the PCI slot below the AGP slot. OK, fine. What they didn’t tell me was that the lower heatsink would rest about half a centimetre from the top of my sound card in second PCI slot, exhaling its stale hot air as it flexed its juicy pixel shading muscles.

So, the Audigy had to move to the fourth slot, some wires had to be loosened, and all was well. The internal temp of my PC has shot up about 5 degrees, but I think I’ll wait on the cooling upgrades this time. One the good news, I’m scoring 5226 3DMarks in 3DMark03, and Half Life 2 here I come!