*scottstuff*

Apparently I need to track more local blogs, because I missed the original announcement of the Seattle MindCamp. Fortunately, Ted Leung pointed it out to me, or I probably would have missed it entirely. This should be interesting–it’s essentially a local version of Foo Camp (or Bar Camp), held in an office building over a 26-hour span during the first weekend in November.

From the MindCamp website:

Seattle Mind Camp is a self-organizing, digitally minded, entrepreneur-driven, overnight Seattle confab. What happens when you put 150 of Seattle’s smartest geeks in an empty office building for 24 hours? We’re not sure either, but we’d like to find out. It’s time to meet and connect with those involved in the interesting projects going on in Seattle in a relaxed environment.

What: A weekend, 24-hour, multi-track event. Think huge space with breakout rooms, broadband Wi-Fi, projectors, white boards - and you.

Who: 150 of Seattle’s forward thinkers: techies, entrepreneurs, executives, gamers, musicians, and anyone else with a great idea.

When: Mind Camp will take place on November 5-6

Why?: You know all those hallway conversations that never get to flourish during a “normal” conference? Now they will.

Seattle Mind Camp is completely free of charge, and registration will begin very soon. In the meantime, check out the About page for a little more information.

It looks like there are still a few spots left, but I doubt they’ll last very long.

Update: In the spirit of information spreading, I should probably mention Seattle Code Camp, which is happening this weekend. From looking at the code camp website, it looks a bit more organized, with pre-scheduled talks, and there seems to be a big Microsoft/C#/.NET focus on a lot of the events. There are a couple Perl/Linux sessions and an introduction to Ruby, as well as a pair of Cocoa/Objective C talks, but most of the content seems to be “cool new stuff in C#.” Which is fine, but it’s not really my sort of conference. MindCamp, on the other hand, seems to be drawing a more diverse crowd, with a number of open source people on the roster.

Gabe, my 5 year old son, is really into knights right now. He has knight coloring books, plastic swords and armor, and likes to be called “Sir Gabe” from time to time.

It’ll pass eventually, just like last year’s dinosaur phase passed, but he’s enjoying it for now. I guess that’s why I let my wife talk me into taking him to the Camlann Medieval Village in Carnation yesterday to watch the Seattle Knights jousting show.

I wasn’t sure what to expect, but they put on a good show, and we really enjoyed ourselves. I took a few hundred pictures, as usual, and I’m currently uploading a dozen or so of them to Flickr.

My driver’s license expired a few days ago and I’ve been meaning to go in and get it renewed, but I was dreading the experience. The last time I had to renew, I had to take time off from work so I could sit for an hour in a hot DMV building full of crabby people. I had no desire to repeat that.

I bit the bullet today and walked over to the downtown Seattle licensing office at 3rd and Union. I was expecting a wait, but the room was almost completely empty, so I was back out the door with a new license in under 5 minutes. The whole process, including the walk from my office and back again took me under 10 minutes.

I’m having a run of good customer service experiences today. First my DSL got a free speed upgrade and now my driver’s license. I don’t really know how to top that.

I’ll have to call this a personal first: I had dinner at Chinoise yesterday with a group of people that I’d never actually met in person before, all arranged at the last minute via blog trackbacks.

Besides finally meeting Boris, I got to meet Chris, Lee, Kris, Amanda, and Silas. I’d never been to Chinoise before, but I’ll be back soon–great food, wonderful presented. The conversation was enjoyably geeky; Boris and I double-teamed Lee and Chris on the “you need a Nokia N91” front while the other half of the table discussed photo management software and backup strategies. Here are a couple pictures from Boris’s Nokia 6630, uploaded directly to Flickr during dinner. I really need to get a better phone.

I spent almost two hours in an oral surgeon’s waiting room on Friday, waiting for him to fix my wife’s broken tooth (ouch!). While idly flipping through magazines, I found an article in Sunset on Jetty Island in Everett, WA. I’d never even heard of Jetty Island before, but it’s a narrow man-made island with a long, sandy beach in Everett’s harbor that was created as part of a failed construction project a century ago. The city of Everett runs a free ferry between Everett’s marina and the island every half-hour.

This afternoon, I was looking for something fun to do with the kids and decided to go check the island out. Cynthia wasn’t done recovering yet, so we left her at home and headed for the beach. The tide was out and it seems like the mudflats went on forever. The kids ran around for an hour and a half and had a great time. I put a few pictures on Flickr.

I can highly recommend Jetty island for those in the Seattle area with kids. I’m sure we’ll be heading back soon.

It looks like the Seattle Fry’s store will be selling Tiger for $99 this weekend. I suspect that other Fry’s locations will have similar prices, but it’s not at all uncommon for Fry’s to run different promotions in different regions. Take a look at frys-electronics-ads.com; they’ll probably have details within a day or two.

ProLab, Seattle’s second-largest pro film lab is closing their film processing and printing business. According to the Seattle P-I, the shift to digital has gutted not only their film processing, but also the demand for custom prints. Apparently people have noticed that a $2 8x10 from Costco with Dry Creek Photo’s profiles is pretty much the same as a $10 8x10 from a pro lab. With film, you’re pretty guaranteed that cheap places like Costco will scratch your film, screw up processing it, and leave it coated with gunk, but with digital that’s irrelevant.

So where does this leave the pro labs? For ProLab at least, they’re sticking with larger-format printing for advertising displays. Both ProLab and Ivey have been concentrating on this market for years, and it’ll probably serve them well for years to come, while traditional film printing fades into memory.

A friend just sent me a link to this week’s ads for Fry’s Electronics in Seattle. This has been a long-running irritation for both of us–unless we go out and buy a paper, we don’t know what Fry’s is selling this week. It seems ridiculous that they don’t post their sales online themselves; instead, this link above comes from one of the two major Seattle papers; they’re both hosted in nwsource.com.

While it’s nice to see their ads show up online, it’d be even nicer if they were actually usable–as it is, you get an unreadably small image of the ad; you can click to zoom, but the zoomed image only shows a single segment of the ad, usually one or two items. So, to read the whole ad, you’d have to load at least 100 distinct images. Nice work, guys.

Remember Infinium Labs, the makers of the Phantom game console, which has been total vaporware for at least a couple years? Their latest quarterly report filing says that they’re almost out of cash. While a lot of people online don’t seem too surprised by this, I have a slightly different perspective, and what I’ve seen doesn’t look like a company that’s about to implode.

As mentioned before, Infinium’s Seattle R&D office was right next to my office, and I saw their people daily until they moved into bigger offices on September 1st. They certainly weren’t acting like they were broke–the employees were working long hours right up to their move-out date. I saw glimpses of Phantom prototypes and production samples from time to time, but I never got a demo. One of their managers had a wall-mounted countdown clock, set to trigger in November–they were really focused on getting their product out on time.

Personally, I expect them to ship the thing, perhaps on time, perhaps a bit late. I don’t have high expectations for their product, but I don’t expect them to implode before they ship.

(via Gizmodo and Firing Squad)

From today’s Seattle P-I:

When state Fish and Wildlife agents recently found a black bear passed out on the lawn of Baker Lake Resort, there were some clues scattered nearby – dozens of empty cans of Rainier Beer.

…

“He didn’t like that (Busch) and consumed, as near as we can tell, about 36 cans of Rainier.”

Cute. My parents camped there around July 30th, and had a run-in with a black bear in the campground. It’s probably safe to assume that this is the same bear.