We had a second meeting with Microsoft, as a follow-up to our famous first meeting. Thanks to everybody who showed up from Microsoft, and to Bunnie, who came along to help us understand Palladium better.
I'm going to write some notes for publication about our Palladium meetings and our earlier TCPA and LaGrande meetings, but I haven't written them yet.
I've come out to Oregon and Washington State to visit Riana this weekend. We spent Saturday and Sunday in Portland, and we're spending today and tomorrow in Walla Walla, where Riana is a college student (sort of).
Praveen and I flew up together on Friday (I got a ride to the airport with the Microsoft crew, and I didn't overhear any evil plots having to do with computing). Riana and Praveen and I had dinner on Friday, after which Praveen went to Eugene (and he's flying back separately).
Portland is beautiful! Our hosts, Deb and Perry, provided us with a copy of the Portland Greenmap, which they helped edit, and which gave an interesting perspective on the city. The driving in Portland (which Riana did and I didn't) is very confusing, because many of the streets -- particularly in the northeast quadrant -- dead-end, twist sharply, or are interrupted by parks. There's a sensible grid, but it frequently doesn't let you take the path of your choice.
Riana and I visited Powell's City of Books -- the largest new and used bookstore in the world! This was a thrill; I've been planning since 1999 to make a trip there, and I finally got the chance. (We spent hours wandering around and only saw a portion of the store. Now that's a large bookstore.)
We also visited Powell's Technical Bookstore, just down the street. They ought to connect the two with a tunnel. (Riana: "What would they put in the tunnel?" Seth: "Books!")
Browsing at Powell's Technical reminded me that there are lots of things I'd like to buy which I can't afford. Many of them were meant as college textbooks and sold at between $60 and $100 -- even used! But there was a tremendous amount of techne on sale. I was especially curious to see two textbooks on software-defined radio, apparently now a subject of college courses of its own. Neither one mentioned GNU Radio. One had a section on regulatory issues which reiterated the apparent conventional wisdom within industry that end-users should not be permitted to modify the software which drives transmitters.
I did find Gardner's Why's and Wherefores used in Powell's Technical, and several interesting things at decent prices in the regular Powell's store. I guess we spent at least four hours between the two stores. Riana spent a while in the Blue room.
We stumbled across two weddings which were taking place in churches right across the street from one another. We rode streetcars (which are all, within any given generation, painted the same way, unlike San Francisco's F Market line). We looked around downtown, ate some pizza, and watched Fritz Lang's Metropolis in an old-fashioned movie theater. (I'd never seen Metropolis before; I see why people found it so impressive, although the ending seemed corny or heavy-handed to me. The version we saw was a new restoration using many more sources than some earlier editions.)
While in Portland, we also got to see the Chinese Garden, and we saw some other places from outside without going in (a Federal court, the Art Museum, etc.).
We had two very pleasant meals at the Vita Cafe, which reminded me of Herbivore with slightly lower prices and a slightly larger menu (and, unfortunately, a couple of meat items). We also had some chai in a cafe and discovered that we were missing a concert by Dar Williams and the String Cheese Incident in Portland that very evening. (That's OK -- I'm going to hear that same concert with Sumana next weekend in Berkeley.)
We played a good game of Scrabble with our hosts and found their home extremely comfortable. I see why my father said that we'd enjoy staying with them! And all their advice and directions went a long way toward enhancing our enjoyment of Portland.
There are several bridges over the Willamette River in Portland. I think we crossed two of them by car and one on a train. You could probably spend a whole day just trying to cross all the bridges. (Leonhard Euler would be proud!) I guess it's that way in most major cities which are bisected by bridges. We also got the hand of the four-quadrant system and the numbered avenues after a while.
I enjoyed seeing the fall foliage in Portland, but when we left for Walla Walla on Sunday evening, I was even more surprised. The scene freeway along the Columbia River looked just like Massachusetts at this time of year. We got to see Multnomah Falls while it was still light out (and I think that's a larger waterfall than any in Massachusetts), and all along the way until the sun set it kept on looking like New England autumn scenery to me.
Walla Walla's climate turned out to be even more similar to Northampton's than I'd expected. There are chestnut trees, and maple, and oak, in about the same mixture as Northampton, and real and rich fall colors. So I say again to anyone who misses East Coast autumn scenery -- come to the Pacific Northwest!
Whitman's student manual reminds students that there are four distinct seasons up here. That's right, four!
Whitman's campus is architecturally and otherwise aesthetically like NMH's or Smith's. Walla Walla itself has about as many people as Northampton. The rumor is that there's not all that much to do in town, but I'm going to have to investigate that first-hand.
Contact: Seth David Schoen
