Adverse conditions today dictate covert operations. We will be infiltrating several buildings, including one designed personally by the chief architect of the enemy forces, Gehry. His monstrous eyesores have struck fear and loathing into the hearts of thousands, and for an unlucky few, even caused blindness with their egregious ugliness. Pray that we return safely.

* Discovery Park. We spent a large portion of Monday there. It was very pretty, we walked many miles and enjoyed the beach along Puget Sound. It reminded me of Northern Michigan, to be honest. Without the mountains in the background, of course, but the terrain and vegetation were largely indistinguishable from upstate. (More ferns, different pines.)

* The locks and salmon ladder. Goofy, but amusing. We saw some great big boats go through the locks, which thrills my inner 3 year old.

* Seattle drivers. Already seen one hit a cyclist. No stop lines at intersections so people apparently just pull out into traffic randomly. Unimpressed.

* Seattle pedestrians. They outdo U-M students in terms of strolling out into traffic without looking. Effing annoying.

* Seattle denizens. So, is it a requirement to get full arm tattoos if you live here? The people seem pretty nice, though. We’ve had good staff at restaurants, and the clerk at Safeway helped us save $40, and a kind soul at the bus stop saved us a ton of trouble (we were at the wrong stop).

* Pike Market. Um, so it’s a really big farmers market with some fish mongers and book-sellers? Not uninteresting, but certainly not ‘all that’ either. Boys were unimpressed, although we did have some nice nectarines and bought a metric ton of king crab legs. Ate half tonight, the rest later.

* Seattle buses. Seem clean and efficient. In fact, there seems to be a lot of good public transportation here. I don’t really get the ‘pay as you get off’ thing, but it seems to work for them.

* Seattle Aquarium. A bit of a surprise - we were expecting it to be super lame, but it was actually interesting. Quite a large number of touch pools, and we loved the baby salmon and salmon ladder. The otters were particularly cute, too.

* City Pass. FTW. We’ve used it for the Aquarium and an Argosy boat ride so far, and will use it for the Gehry monstrosity and the Pacific Science Center before we’re done. Seems like a total bargain if you’re going to be here a few days and have kids in tow.

* Garmin. Now that we’ve ditched Jill and hooked up with Daniel the British guy, things are much better. I’m sort of liking the turn by turn narration, but what I really like is the locator thing - ‘where is a grocery store near here?’ That rocks.

* Kerry Park. If you want to see a steady parade of people with very large cameras, this is the place. Also, nice view of the city featuring the space needle thingie.

* No air-conditioning. It’s getting a bit old. It was ever-so-slightly cooler today than it was yesterday, and we’re trying to tough it out.

* Lake Union. It’s pretty but much smaller than I thought it would be. Fun to watch the sailboats go around in little bathtub circles tonight - they were pretty with the sun coming through the sails, but seemed too big for the lake.

All in all, I like Seattle so far, but I don’t love it. We’ve seen some pretty neighborhoods (Queen Anne, Magnolia, etc.) and downtown seems alright (enjoyed the buskers), but something about it just isn’t clicking with me. I mean, if I had to live here, I’m sure I’d be happy, but I don’t think I’d put it at the top of my list. If for no other reason than the tattoo requirement.

I had made a car reservation with Avis. I forgot that I had preferred status, and woot! that meant that there was a car with my name on it, literally. The car pickup was at the terminal - I can’t remember the last time I rented a car without having to get it a remote location, preferred status or not.

The car has a Garmin thingie. We giggled all the way to the little house/cottage we’re staying at listening to turn here and turn there. I think it’s ridiculous. We arrived much earlier than we thought, so the cottage owner was still there getting things ready for us. We were starving and on the owner’s recommendation, we walked up a few blocks to a very nice Italian place. It was more expensive than we should have indulged in, but we were tired and hot and hungry and just decided to eat. It was more than excellent - wonderful to have a great meal when you’re really hungry.

We picked up some wine and ice cream on the way home and just hung out at the little cottage. It’s a tiny little place, but very cute.

Now. Go sign up for Startup Weekend.

There are a few other restrictions:

• Going Eastbound on Dexter: You may not turn left onto northbound Maple. You can go straight or turn right.
• Going Westbound on Dexter: You must turn.

Northbound Maple is backing up heavily at rush hour due to merging down to one lane. Eastbound Dexter doesn’t look too bad; I think people are avoiding it completely.

The AATA #9 is picking up and dropping off on the west side of Maple, just south of Dexter (the Plum Market stop).

Now then, I’m not going to draw maps, but to get around this mess, try Jackson Road for getting to points west, or Miller Road, depending on where you’re coming from/going to. And for the hyperlocal who live near the intersection on Dexter (and who are not thrilled about going all the way out and around to Wagner on Jackson or Miller), try going north on Maple and then west on either Hollywood or Abbott (if the traffic is too backed up at Hollywood). You can snake back down on Allison or other side streets to get to Dexter.

The problem with the phrase ‘global warming’ is that it’s a scientist’s point of view, not a citizen’s point of view. Yes, the planet as a whole may be getting warmer, but most people don’t grasp that - they see that they’ve had a unusually cold winter and laugh at the idea that their world is getting warmer. Why should they believe a scientist who says something they can clearly see is not true? The scientists were telling the wrong story. Their narrative was working at cross purposes to their goal. It allowed average people to dismiss them as wackos.

Imagine what would have happened if they had started out with the now fashionable phrase ‘climate change.’ The story the scientists could have told from the beginning was that the planet as a whole is warming and that will dramatically change weather patterns everywhere. Some places will see more storms, some will see less rain, some will be colder, some will be hotter. That narrative - change instead of warming - would have made it much more clear to the average Joe that it was an important issue that needs attention. Citizens everywhere could have seen that wow, there has been less rain (or more snow or stronger storms or whatever) in their world. It would have made more sense. It’s the right story, the one that helps rally people to their cause.

So if you’re out and about on this Earth Day trying to get people to fight global warming, consider rethinking your story. It’s not about the science, it’s about the people and how they will be effected. Tell them the story that lines up with their experience: climates are changing at a rapid rate and we need to slow that down.

For much of my life, Sundays were church. When I was young, it was off to church in the morning, back home for a big dinner at lunch and then a simple supper. Lots of little favorite things in there: afternoons driving in the country, cinnamon rolls, goofing at church with my friends and that apple pie pancake thing for supper.

In college, Sundays were either hangover days or omg-must-finish-this-project days. Best skipped over, I think.

There were more recent church Sundays. I sang in the choir, I brought the kids. I don’t really remember a lot about those days. Dressing up the babies was kind of fun. I had some acquaintances at church, but not friends, so it never did hold the same charm as church of earlier times.

For the brief time I spent in Washington DC, I had the Sunday Washington Post to read. Ok, mostly the Style section, but it was something I looked forward to each week.

But since the days of church and newspaper reading are long gone, Sundays are shapeless, pretty much like any other day of the week, excepting the fact that I can’t have a mimosa til after noon. Sometimes I listen to Arwulf on WEMU, sometimes we go to Costco. There is no routine of pleasure, there is no rest.

So I need new a Sunday. I need to find a delightful routine, some little pleasure that will work whether the boys are here or not. Food seems an easy thing to implement - donuts or pancakes or cinnamon rolls or some other yummy treat. But will it be enough? What’s your Sunday routine?

I like Twitter. The main two reasons I use it are keeping up with local people and getting interesting ideas and opinions from a wider circle of interesting people. Another reason I like it is that spam is kept to a minimum by virtue of the way the system is set up. Because you decide who to follow (ie. listen to), it’s impossible for someone to send you unsolicited messages. So it’s not very easy for spammers to get any traction.

That doesn’t mean they won’t try, though. The chief way spammers seem to be trying to get their message out is to follow a ton of people. When you follow someone, the system generates a notification email to say “someone new is following you.” It also gives a link to the new person and I’m sure that like me, most people click on that link to see who this new person is. So the spammer gets one chance to abuse your eyeballs with their message. But that’s it - if you don’t follow them back, then you’ll never hear from them again. (Unless they go the follow, unfollow, follow, unfollow, etc. route to generate multiple notifications.)

On the one hand, you could simply turn off notifications and never be bothered with such things. But there are plenty of innocent followers out there too. Perhaps they found you through someone else they follow and think you might have something interesting to say. Perhaps they’re in the same town or the same field and are interested in your tweets for those reasons. So you leave the notifications on, do the click throughs, and check people out by hand (and get blobs of spam all over you in the process).

Up until recently, this has been a pretty manageable process. The innocents have generally outnumbered the spammers. What has changed, however, is the fact that a bunch of marketers have been telling everyone and their brother that Twitter is a great way to network and get your message out into the world. Well, that’s kind of true, but only if you have the time to develop real relationships with your followers and/or offer them some sort of ‘value proposition’ that would entice them to follow you. But good advice or not, what the marketers have created is this new class of followers to deal with. They’re the koolaid-drinking metrics people, the ones who think that if they get their follower and following numbers high enough, they’ll make more money (or gain more popularity, or whatever). They’re not exactly spammers, but they sure aren’t innocent, either.

The trouble for me with these metrics people is whether to apply my rules for spammers or innocents to them. My general answer is neither; they require their own set of standards. For example, if I see @scobleizer or @jowyang in their recent tweets, or if their tweets are all @ replies and no messages of their own, or if they have thousands of followings and only a couple followers, then they fall on the spammy side of the line. If they have a good mix of tweets and replies, have a reasonable number of followers (100+ ?), then I give them the benefit of the doubt (although I won’t follow them back).

You know, I reckon twitter’s crossed some kind of watershed where the spammers have gone beyond nuisance level to vaguely disruptive - Andrew Barnett

The problem is volume. There are more and more of these metrics bozos out there and it’s taking more and more time to deal with them. I have gotten much more liberal with my use of ‘block’ instead of merely not following back. I don’t want my tweets in their stream, I don’t want my icon on their profile, I don’t want to boost their number of followings. The outright spammers have always gotten blocked, but more and more of these mindless marketing metrics types (ie. the ones who fall on the spammy side) are getting that treatment, too.

It doesn’t help at all that Twitter has virtually no way to manage your followers. The UX is abysmal in that regard. All you get is a list of people you follow and a list people who follow you. It’s not in any intelligible order (not alphabetical, not by date added) and the two lists are not cross-referenced. Oh, there are some third party tools out there which help a bit in this regard, but c’mon Twitter, this is a huge failing.

What I want (so I can turn off email notifications about new followers) is a Recent Followers List. It should be a list of people who have added me in the last 14 (or maybe 30) days, and for each person, it should have their profile picture, their profile information, their number of followings and followers, and their latest tweet. It should also have some kind of check box next to it so I can go down the list, select the ones I want to follow and have it follow them all at once. Likewise with blocking - check all the ones to block and then do it in bulk.

Until then, I guess I’ll be clicking through the links in the notification emails. At some point it will become tiresome, and then I’ll turn off notifications and I’ll miss following back some cool, innocent and interesting people. Which will be a shame, and will definitely diminish the delightfulness of Twitter.

There is a little constellation of potential jobs circling around me right now (and a couple which have escaped orbit to pursue other trajectories), but none seem quite ready to make their way onto my to-do list. Which is okay with me right now. A little business-like star-gazing is good for one now and then.

Cans of spray paint are somewhere in Illinois, making their way to me. They’re transparent colors and I’m very excited about trying them out for some new paintings. I’m cutting some new stencils in anticipation.

Got me a Mega Millions ticket tonight - wish me luck!