February 25, 2009

Seattle Survival Guide

Filed under: Seattle — spiro @ 6:42 pm

Many people coming in the Seattle area ask me about things do do around town, so here’s a compile.

Things to See

Kerry park in (Seattle – Queen Anne) the best seattle view
Space Needle (Seattle)
Ride the ducks – amphibian vehicle Seattle tour (Seattle)
Underground Tour (Seattle)
Pike place market (seattle’s main attraction)
Green Lake (Seattle – North) Nice park
University of Washington (Seattle – U-District) One of the prettiest campuses in north america
Boeing factory tour (Everett) If you want to see the 787 :)
The seattle waterfront (Downtown Seattle) It’s nice, lots of docks to walk
Marymoor park (Redmond) if u like parks
Bellevue Downtown Park (Downtown Bellevue) Pretty park
Aquarium (Downtown Seattle Waterfront)
SAM – Seattle Arts Museum (Downtown Seattle) If ur into museums, they have nice stuff
Tech City Bowl (Krikland) Best bowling around

Shopping

Seattle shopping District (Downtown Seattle – Pine & Stewart)
Redmond Town Center (Redmond)
Westfield Southcenter (Tukwilla – Near the airport) Biggest mall around here.
Northgate (Seattle – Northgate) Not much.
Seattle Premium Outlets (Marysville) Outlet mall, about 1hr drive north
Fry’s (Renton) The best electronic store, ever.

Eat

Yanna (Downtown Bellevue – Galleria) Really good Japanese
Tap House  (Downtown Bellevue – Galleria) Awesome beer selection, steak is good
Rock Bottom  (Downtown Bellevue – Galleria) GOOD beer
Celtic Bayou (Redmond) Cajun cuisine, irish beer
King & I (Downtown Bellevue) Thai
Mediterranean Kitchen (Downtown Bellevue) If ur really hungry
Can Am Pizza (Bellevue-Crossroads area) Best Pizza!
Red Hook (Woodinville) Brewery, a little far, hard to find, but nice!

Gyros 2 Go (Redmond) Good gyros.
Mehfil (Redmond Town Center) Indian Buffet Las Margaritas (Many locations) Mexican.
Wilde Rover (Kirkland) Irish Pub
George’s place (Kirkland) Diner

Jade Garden (Seattle – Intl district) Chinese
Stumbling Monk (Seattle – Cap Hill) Belgian Beer pub – Be sure to ring the doorbell!
Boom Noodle (Seattle – Cap Hill) Noodles
Jai Thai (Seattle – Cap Hill) Thai
Broadway Grill (Seattle – Cap Hill)
Elysian (Seattle – Cap Hill) Brewpub
In the bowl (Seattle – Cap Hill) BEST NOODLES EVER!!!!!
Tavolata (Seattle – Belltown) Good italian fare, crappy service if it’s full.
Chapel (Seattle – Cap Hill)
Garage (Seattle – First Hill) Good food, good bowling
Pink Door (Seattle/Pike Place

Fast food: Pagliacci Pizza, Qdoba, Baja Fresh, Red Robin

For bars, very little happening on the eastside (Bellevue/Redmond), mostly located along pike street, east of Broadway, in Cap Hill and in Belltown.

Clubs: War Room, Trinity, Neighbors (gay) – I don’t go clubbing, so i cant tell u much.

Ski: Snoqualmie (closest), Steven’s Pass

Bars close at 2am, usually last call is 1:30. U can get beer/wine at grocery stores, liquor stores look shady. You *WILL* be carded at bars, so bring ID. Strip clubs: not much in Seattle, best I hear would be DejaVu in downtown.

February 23, 2009

Surprise, surprise! Ethanol is CRAP!

Filed under: Driving, Rant — spiro @ 7:14 pm

Recently, around the Seattle area, there were a few reports of “watered-down gas”. Like, it seems that around here it’s not only liquor that the water down, but gasoline! Not only do you have to be careful not to spill gas on your car’s body as ethanol dissolves car paint (scroll down the page).

The story is, ethanol absorbs the bad stuff in gas storage tanks, and pumps it right in your car. Isn’t that just great for your engine? Unfortunately, there’s no escaping ethanol, it’s now law that every gas station has to carry it. Talk about a very powerful corn lobby! (Feeding you their crap isn’t enough I guess) And don’t tell me that 13% ethanol is going to save the planet, as you still get 87% pure (supposedly) octane in ordinary gas, as ethanol can’t replace that.

Well, there is something you can do: nice, expensive premium gas! It will get you more octane, and less “other stuff”. The wikipedia article on octane rating is quite an interesting read, if you’ve ever wondered the difference between gas grades.

Maybe when they get enough insurance complaints, the insurance lobby will kill ethanol, just like they did with speeding, even though it’s only the cause of 5% of crashes.

February 22, 2009

DVI-to-HDMI input on the LG Scarlet

Filed under: Electronics, Technology — spiro @ 6:12 pm

I got myself a nice little present on Black Friday, which to get I had to wait in the wee hours in the morning in Renton’s Fry’s. I got the LG Scarlet (52LG60) for $1200. Not bad :) Anyway, so this is like the obligatory “show and tell” post…

One of the things I wanted to do with that TV was hook up an eventual media center PC. Now all I have on it is my Macbook Pro :)

So, First thing I tried hooking it up through VGA with an old monitor cable which wasn’t great, until my Monoprice order arrived. In it was a VGA+Audio cable along with a DVI-to-HDMI cable. Great, let’s try HDMI. I was expecting a crystal-clear picture, but that’s not what I got. The picture had a reduced color depth, super high contrast and the text was bleeding. So, I tried different things, including disabling ClearType which made it worse, so here’s what worked.

Display settings

Set resolution to 1920×1080 at 59Hz. You might have to click the Force button on the ATI settings dialog. The 59Hz part Intrigues me. If I pick 60Hz on HDMI, the TV says “Invalid Format” and on VGA it shrinks the picture to 4:3 aspect ratio, even if 1920×1080 is widescreen.

ati-set-refresh

Set the overscan to MAX. If you don’t, you won’t get 1:1 pixel ratio, which means the image will be resized. You DON’T want that.

ati-set-overscan

TV

Selecting overscan will hide the edges. Set the aspect ratio to Just Scan. Just Scan is just fancy terminology for 1:1.

tv-justscan

Disable the variety of picture enhancements. They mess around with the color depth. Video looks good, but your desktop won’t. I do leave the intelligent sensor ON.

tv-advanced

This improved the picture quite a bit, although it’s still not to my liking.

tv-textappear

The vertical lines seem OK, the horizontal ones, not so much…

tv-colorlines

The “info” bar and input list:

tv-inputinfo

tv-inputselect

The I/O Panel

My biggest complaint is the lack of analog audio out, it only has digital RCA and optical audio out. I don’t have a surround system yet, just a bookshelf stereo system, and I don’t care much for them.

tv-rearinput

tv-sideinput

So, I had to get this thing from GefenTV. Cost me around $70. The only problem is that it won’t decode dolby, just LPCM. They just came out with this guy that will do Dolby. I might just get it eventually.

tv-audio

And here’s my stuck pixel, located around the center of the screen. As you see, the green pixel is black (always ON), so the effect of this is that the pixel is magenta. I’ll try running one of the tools that displays white snow. I’m a hesitant about using a pencil or eraser on it. I don’t want a dent on the surface.

tv-stuckpixel

And here’s how the logo looks :) It’s quite nice actually, but if the LEDs annoy you there’s an on-screen option to turn it off. In case you are wonering, it is totally transparent, behind is the wall (you can see the texture on the wall).

tv-logo

More layoffs in March

Filed under: Microsoft, Seattle — spiro @ 3:01 pm

Fellow Microsofties, I’ve got not so good news for you.

I was reading some blogs and stumbled upon one that mentioned that 872 layoffs were coming in March. Intrigued by such an exact figure, I dug deeper.

There’s apparently a WARN act, which stands for Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, which obliges big companies to notify states, labor unions and cities of a big layoff coming. Turns out that Microsoft did file one of these which can be seen on the state’s web site.

The useful data from there is that there is to be 872 layoffs starting on March 23. So with January’s 1400 that would bring the total to 2272, with 2728 more to go. There are many other Seattle-area companies planning layoffs. Times are really bad…

February 16, 2009

Restarting the blog!

Filed under: General — spiro @ 12:26 am

Hello folks!

Lately, I haven’t updated the site frequently, mainly because I am very busy these days, and managing my site just keeps falling on the back burner. Lots of things have happened with me over the last year and a half, from relocating to Seattle, starting a new job, buying a car, buying a condo, to going out, having a good time with friends, trying to meed decent girls.

I wish I’d updated my blog, there’s so much to say, so little time to express it. To make matters worse, my Drupal installation seems to have gone south since Site5, my web host, migrated the site to another server and performed some updates with PHP, MySQL. So, I now paid the price for being lazy updating my blog software.

So, I am now ditching Drupal and switching back again to Wordpress. I was able to migrate my old posts by hacking into the DB, but not the rest because it is a lot of work, and I don’t really care about it. So, if there’s something in particular you’re looking for just ask, I probably have it backed up somewhere, and hopefully I will be able to write more here.

For those who are interested, here are the queries for migrating drupal “stories” into drupal “posts”:

INSERT INTO wordpress.wp_posts
(ID,
post_author,
post_date,
post_date_gmt,
post_content,
post_title,
post_excerpt,
post_status,
comment_status,
ping_status,
post_name,
post_modified,
post_modified_gmt)
SELECT
@rownum:=@rownum+1,
1,
FROM_UNIXTIME(node.created),
FROM_UNIXTIME(node.created+14400),
node_revisions.body,
node.title,
node_revisions.teaser,
'publish',
'open',
'open',
concat('archive-post-',node.nid),
FROM_UNIXTIME(node.changed),
FROM_UNIXTIME(node.changed+14400)
FROM node, node_revisions, (SELECT @rownum:=3) r
WHERE type = 'story' and node.nid = node_revisions.nid

Then, for some reason, some posts were from 1969 :) . I looked in the DB and found there’s a post date and a modified date. The modified date was correct, so I assume at some point drupal or maybe even my old wordpress installation only kept a last modified date. Drupal keeps dates in unix time (number of seconds since Midnight, January 1, 1970) That explains it, the modified GMT date is 0 (bogus) and the last modified local date (GMT-4 for Montreal) is in 1969! So, for these posts copying the modified date into the post date did the trick:

update wp_posts
set post_date = post_modified, post_date_gmt = post_modified_gmt
where
YEAR(post_date_gmt) = 1970