I had a nice visit to Seattle recently, thanks to Mako and Mika (and litigation).
Mika has made available some pictures from the trip. I had never been to Seattle before.
The Elliott Bay Book Company is impressive competition for Powell's, as far as it goes (it felt like it could have been almost 1/3 the size of Powell's).
I turned 24 yesterday. Nobody risked a lawsuit from AOL Time Warner by singing "Happy Birthday" to me in public.
I contemplated doing an art project called The Method of Loci in which I would be photographed on my birthday at intersections along 1st Street, 2nd Street, 3rd Street, etc., up to 24th Street, and at each intersection holding and wearing artifacts from the corresponding year of my life. I prepared a partial list of events, artifacts, and intersections, and tried to match them up in my head. I didn't actually manage to go out and take the photographs. Numbered streets seem like a very practical way of thinking about time in physical terms -- a favorite scheme of museum curators, too, producing timelines big enough to walk on.
In my timeline, I start out near the Ferry Building, move to Massachusetts around St. Francis Place, start school around the CoffeeNet, start programming and get a little sister before Tu Lan, become a vegetarian by Linuxcare, fall in love and start attending academic summer programs by the Costco and the freeway overpass, enter high school somewhere around Rainbow Grocery, graduate high school somewhere around the Abandoned Planet, move to California and drop out of college by the EFF offices, date, develop a typing injury, and become involved in free software and copyright activism on my way home from work, and climb a mountain, date again, and visit Germany around Cala Foods, arriving home in the present day. I think it might be rather more vivid with the photographs.
While cleaning my room, I found a note which I had passed to a lawyer while we were waiting for a hearing in a court case a while ago. Before the case we were interested in came up, other matters were heard, mainly the acceptance of a large number of plea bargains. Typically the defendants pled guilty to something wholly other than what the government had accused them of doing. One person who was apparently suspected of dealing drugs pled guilty to being in the country illegally -- not a word about narcotics was spoken by any party during the whole ordeal.
I had written to the lawyer that the "Dies Irae" says "iudex ergo cum sedebit / quicquid latet, apparebit", which is to say "and when the judge is seated, / he will uncover whatever is hidden". Now, Thomas of Celano was referring to a divine judge, but it seemed to me that this was the very opposite of what regularly happens in earthly courts.
Contact: Seth David Schoen
