Tapirtype Blog

Alright. It's here. It's big. It's got a floppy nose. And thus far it has no content....

Until now!

Now the Tapirtype Blog has its first entry.

Eventually, you know, it'll have nice stuff like a custom layout, but for now, every step counts.

Update on 8/3/2006: layout now somewhat customized. Go us!

So I'm going to be heading to Boston in a few weeks, and that's making me feel all sentimental. Well, actually, it's also that I'm tipsy on gin and tonic and watching The Daily Show. It's good times. So for whatever reason, I felt like making a list of stuff that I like about Seattle. Hipsters around here make a big thing of being all down on Seattle, and it irritates the hell out of me, because I like this city. So here's my list, in no particular order.

The word "freckle" comes from an old Scandinavian word for... freckle.

The more you say "freckle" over and over, the funnier it sounds. This was probably true for the Vikings as well, which may be why there weren't many Viking warriors named Ragnar the Freckled.

Cafe Allegro Photo by: Michael Boyle

Seattle Farmer's Market Sign on The Ave Photo by: Michael Boyle

Sasha and I have made a tradition of going of getting up late on Saturday morning and going to the University District for brunch at Cafe Allegro after which we walk up to the Farmer's Market to stock up on fruit and other goodies.

You may of noticed that I kind of petered out on my last post about our Saturday morning tradition. That's largely because I spent all day working on a convenient way to format entries in Movable Type with multiple pictures and text flowing around them. We're using Movable Type here at Tapirtype, and largely I couldn't be happier. I looked into it the other day and discovered that I could set up a non-commercial blog for free, which is great, and I downloaded it, expecting to quickly run into a snag that I couldn't resolve. To my surprise, after creating a new subdomain on our webserver, I was able to install and set up the software very easily.

Furthermore, they've set up the software to be almost infinitely flexible, taking care of all the drudgery of blogging, while still allowing you to make your site look and behave pretty much any way you want. I've only done mild re-formatting so far, but I could, and probably will, do much more eventually.

Furthermore, publishing and management is very easy. The software is set up to easily manage publishing text based entries, comments, searching, trackbacks, and the like, and you can easily upload a picture and write an entry around it. But it is just flexible enough to encourage you to want to do more, and produce a well formatted photo essay like the one I wanted to make. Unfortunately, there things get more difficult...

Ok, it's a little thing, but come on. When you are walking down the middle of an empty sidewalk and you encounter a small group of people coming your way, you politely move to the right to give them room to pass to your left. It's just considerate. And when the guy at the front of the group who has plenty of room to his right, comes up to you, he should move slightly to his right so that you can pass.

What he should not do is walk blithely on ahead, forcing you to move even further on to the curb because he is too self absorbed to move six inches to his right into the empty sidewalk.

We finally saw an ad for it last night, and... wow. The commercial alone exceeded all my wildest expectations. I mean, there are snakes, and they're on a plane. That's a movie.

I figured that I should post some life stuff since a lot is happening.

I took Sasha to the airport last night to fly off to Boston to attend Law School at Northeastern University. Actually she flew into Hartford to stay in Northampton with her parents until next Wednesday. I'm lucky to have a flexible enough schedule that I am going to be able to fly out after her. I'm flying into Boston on a red eye over Tuesday night, and she'll pick me up on her way from Northampton and we'll go to the apartment together. The nice thing about that is that we can kind of come into the new apartment together and I can be a part of her Boston life from the beginning even if I'm flying back to Seattle after a few days.

I'm also excited to see the apartment. When we rented it, the former tenants were still living there, and they had been there for several years, so the apartment was due for some remodeling. So supposedly the floors, walls, and kitchen should be all redone. We'll have to post pictures as we are getting things set up.

The picture I posted is of the main living room windows. The apartment sits in the back of a nice, quiet courtyard, and is pretty well lined with windows. Nicest perhaps is that the living room juts out into a big bay window (shown here). It is a bit far away (all the way down the Green C line) and is a bit small, but it was by far the most livable apartment for the money that we saw. Also nice is that it seems to be very professionally managed and doesn't make the assumption that so many (read here, all) of the other affordable apartments we saw made that we are students can be safely treated like we don't know our rights as tenants, or can't be trusted. Interesting aside here. In a town like Boston where there are so many undergraduates, the term "student" gets really funny when applied to housing. You would think that a 26 year old, engaged, law student, would come with a different set of assumptions, than a 19 year old frat boy, but sometimes the word "student" just gets in the way. Another interesting exercise: substitute for "student" the word "black," "hispanic," "gay," etc. and see if the treatment that you can often find seems at all legally or morally ok.

Around here, my mom has a reputation as being the go-to person when you have a problem with wildlife, and when I'm around, I often get roped into it. I have a very specific specialty, though. My specialty is toilet rats.

I like to hold doors open for people. It isn't a men holding doors open for women thing, it's a basic human politeness thing that I do for both men and women. You see doors are often heavy and no matter your gender, if someone lets one swing closed too close to you it breaks your stride as you have to either wait for it to swing shut or reach in to wrench it open while its momentum is working against you. My problem isn't with people failing to open doors for me, it is instead with the people I open the doors for.

You see, like I said, doors are heavy, so once you open a door for someone, you are at their mercy. Either they can, as they should, take the door from you and continue in after you (holding it open for the next person in line behind them if necessary) or walk on through. If they choose to just walk on through, unless you want to potentially maim them by letting the door swing closed, literally, in their face, you have no choice but to keep holding the door. And if someone is behind them nine times out of ten they will simply follow through the door as well. I've literally been forced to stand holding a door open as a dozen people stride through, not all in one group, but all in a line with no gap large enough to let me safely let go of the door.¹ I don't really care about the people following. It is human nature to do whatever the person in front of you does, and I'm sure that I've done the same many times. But that first person should know better.

Today the woman who did it to me did something odd. As she passed through the door she lifted up her arm as if she was about to take the door from me, and then, just as her had was perpendicular to the door so that if I had let go it would have slammed painfully into her outstretched fingers, she dropped her hand back down. It was as if she knew that she should offer to take the door from me, but didn't think for a moment that there was any possibility of me taking her up on that offer.

It is true that most often the people who do this to me are women, so possibly they are misinterpreting my actions as an old fashioned etiquette thing of gentlemen holding doors for ladies. Still, do you really think that I have nothing better to do with my time than stand there all day holding the door open? Like before, the thing that really bothers me is that there is no consciousness of behaving badly. I'd feel much better about it if the person just barged through with a "hey, you gave me the window, I'm taking it" attitude.

¹ Incidentally I'm almost always carrying something when this happens.

Trying not to laugh while getting your hair cut when the Simpsons episode Two Bad Neighbors is on in the background. For those that don't know/remember, that's the one where former President George Bush Sr. comes to live next door to the Simpsons. I think I came very close to loosing an ear at one point, but I pulled through.

So I've finally got internet access for more than 30 seconds at a time. Unfortunately that is because we finally broke down and went to the nearest Starbucks to buy a T-mobil day pass. Verizon, who we called 12 days ago, still hasn't sent us the equipment to connect to the internet. They had told us that the equipment would be shipped out USPS within 24 hours of the phones being turned on (that happened before we got to the apartment on the 23rd) and would get here one day after shipping. Finally Sasha called them yesterday and they said that they still hadn't sent things out and that the account was in a "pre-approval" state. Riiiiight.

So we're dumping Verizon in favor of the new combined service from Comcast. Yes, I know that's trading one evil monopoly for another, but at least it is trading to one that has never given me problems with providing the services I've payed for, just charged me an arm and a leg for them. And actually when you combine all the services together the prices are competitive. It's too bad. I'd kind of been excited about Verizon's service. Mostly that was because it is a) cheaper, and b) they will eventually have their fiber service which promises to be very, very cool. But that's in the future. And so far their current service is in the future, too, since they seem to be utterly unable to get it hooked up. Comcast will be out on Tuesday.

Sometimes things come together in the most wonderful way. I mean hey, you get a poo license plate, well, shit happens!

Sasha started law school today!

I got up and did the commute with her. It was a little more eventful than planned because the T broke down. Fortunately they run all the time and it stopped running after a few lines had converged so we were able to catch another train pretty quick and even waited for one that wasn't packed full (literally). The commute is kind of long and kind of funny, but very easy. We are right on the Green C line of the T, but Northeastern is on the Green E line, so to get from one to the other you have to take the T in to the center of town where all the lines run together and double back changing trains. It gets you door to door service, though! It takes something like 40 minutes. Today even with the little snafu it took us about 40 minutes, so usually it will probably be closer to half an hour. And that included waiting. I can definitely get used to trains that run this often!

Anyway, we got to Northeastern and Sasha wanted to find the place she had to go for orientation, so I told her to be nice to the other children and not to throw her blocks and went off on my own to buy a T pass and get some breakfast. I took this picture from the Au Bon Pain that is across the street and am posting this mooching off of Northeastern's wireless access. Now I want to go and try to buy a map and get home before UPS comes.

I just got back from my first day of orientation. It went very well - yay! I met a lot of nice people, and all the professors seem just ridiculously cool. When they were introducing themselves to everybody, I felt like I should wave a lighter around from the desk.