My dad is in Israel photographing the Dead Sea Scrolls. I just saw the video on CNN here. He shows up around the 2:20 mark. He’s also keeping a blog here.

And so it begins.

In the spot where Teatro Zinzanni used to be, there is a map depicting a huge, two-tower 41 story building called the Insignia Towers.

After doing a little reading on the Seattle Condos and Lofts Blog it appears development has been put on hold. This is, evidently, becoming a fairly common occurrence in the Seattle market. Similar things are happening with The Heron Pagoda (“…due to a faltering economy, poor local condo sales and lack of financing for parts of the complex…”), the Ava Condo and Hotel, and there’s evidently a standstill with the Stewart & Minor hotel and loft project.

I don’t know enough about the Seattle real estate market to know if this is common, but I found it interesting. Some of these places look like they might be quite nice. The Stadium Lofts design is particularly unique.

I recently found out about the coolest web 2.0 app to date, RRollr:

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As most of you probably know I stopped working a “regular” job last Friday, January 11th. I decided to go full time on Wishlisting, which was formerly a part-time project.

I was curious what it would be like to wake up and have to decide what you’re going to do that day. After one week, I haven’t come up with any great solutions, but I’ve identified a number of aspects of working for one’s self that I hadn’t expected to worry so much about.

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Pros:

• The thing arrived fully charged (well, 90%). The manual even said it’s designed to be enjoyed right away. I love that. Most cool gadgets require a big charging cycle before you get to use them, and all you really want to do after opening them is play with them.
• It’s very thin, and feels well made
• The keys feel great, which I was a little nervous about
• During the setup process, it turns on your camera and prompts you to take a picture of yourself for use as your avatar on the system – a nice touch.
• From what I can tell so far, the battery indicator is actually honest about how much is left (unlike most computers I’ve owned.) It’s probably too soon to tell if this trend will last
• Java pre-installed, and Ruby pre-installed, both at recent versions
• The stuff I wanted to “just work” – wireless, bluetooth, sleep, external mouse, etc – just worked
• Safari 3 is noticeably better than Safari 2. I hadn’t used Safari 3 until this point. I didn’t care for Safari 2 at all (mostly because it had very serious bugs that made it a pain to develop for).
• Spaces seems to work well/fast. It was better than the 3rd party multiple desktop tool I was using before.

Cons:

• The 1440×900 screen resolution is a bit worse than I expected. I actually looked at it and thought it might have come out set really low from the factory, but nope, that’s as high as it goes.
• It didn’t come with Leopard pre-installed. They shipped it with a CD so I had to install it myself (which isn’t fun and effectively negates the “use it right away” idea)
• I had one forced-reboot based on a kernel panic
• I haven’t really figured out why the screen keeps adjusting it’s brightness. I know they have some kind of light sensor, and I’m sure it dims after a certain period of inactivity, but the thing changes too much for my taste (I’m sure there’s a setting somewhere).
• Some of the key placement annoys me – namely the “fn” key where I want “ctrl” to be. In fact, there are 5 modifier keys in the lower-left corner of the keyboard: shift, fn, ctrl, alt, and apple. (see photo). That’s one more (“fn”) than what I’m used to, and since I’m still learning the keyboard shortcuts, it makes it hard. Additionally, there is no dedicated page up/page down key, they double them up on the up/down arrow keys. Presumably one of those 5 modifiers plus the arrow is going to get me page up.
• It didn’t seem to auto-discover any of the computers on my home network, although once I figured out how you point it at a specific ip address it was able to mount shares no problem. I wouldn’t normally fault the Mac for this since this appears to suck on every OS ever, but in Leopard it looks like they went out of their way to hide where you’d find shared computers. The UI heavily relies on them being auto-discovered, so you have to search to find out what to do when that goes wrong.
• Much like my Mac Mini’s keyboard, there is an eject button. Much like my Mac Mini, the eject button almost never works.
• Time Machine doesn’t yet support network attached storage, and as such is useless to me.
• MySQL doesn’t yet have a Leopard package, so it’s control panel doesn’t work yet.

I’m also taking this opportunity to switch from Parallels to VMWare Fusion, and that process went super smooth. VMWare has a great tool called the VMWare converter that worked flawlessly.

I knew there would be some tradeoffs when switching platforms, and some learning curve issues, so it’s not too bad. Thankfully being BSD-based, I’m able to do all of the stuff I am used to doing from a development perspective (all of the standard unix commands are there, MacPorts lets you download the usual open source packages, etc) so that part is very familiar.

Well, it looks like King 5 news has exposed what working here is really like.

It just occurred to me that if a foreign dignitary ever did need my assistance in sending money to the United States, and offered me a substantial percentage of it to help him or her, I would probably never get the message.