DATELINE: donald, or                                                    

Author: Karl

We rolled in to Seattle last night to meet up with our good friend Ran Tao. After a couple days driving through the stix of Montana & Idaho it really felt comforting to be back in a real city again. Ran's place was really nice, we sipped a couple beers and ate at a pub just down the street from her.

We started of today eating the sinlge most obscene portion of food I have ever recieved in my life at the 5 point cafe. I went with the country fried steak breakfast with gravy, hashbrwons and eggs. Let me tell you, it was a portion fit for an NFL linebacker and not a normal human. Normally I'm good about finishing my plate, but there was no way in hell I could have finished this mountain of carbs. This unfortunately jacked up my blood sugar to hi levels for the rest of the day which made me more groggy than usual, but oh well nothing new. Next we checked out the space needle, experience music project and the science fiction museum. The experience music project & sci fi museum building was your typical Frank Gehry contruction, huge wrapping plates of metal in fluid like/organic shapes in blue and purple colors... Very impressive but not particularly different than his Chicago and Bilbao constructions. The museum featured insightful first hand audio accounts from a number of muscians and people in the music biz. It had a lot of really great interactive exhibts, all kinds of ways of recording your own stories and music; these were in-line with many of my thesis advisor's projects at his company Local Projects. The Jimi Hendrix and general history of Seattle music displays were also fascinating (good grunge music history). The connected science fiction museum was also really sweet. It seemed to be heavily bank rolled by Paul Allen, go figure, who else could justify buying raygun collection from classic sci fi cinema. Images, props and stories from Star Trek, Jetsons, Star Wars, Alien, Dune, War of the Worlds, and Lost in Space were just a few of the sights. It also glossed over various sci fi themes such as, teleportation, time travel, altered futures, changes in scale, etc... I felt they could have had more info on japanese anime and other manga style anime. But overall, it was cool and made me want to read a sci fi novel.

Time kinda ran out so we weren't able to take the microsoft tour, be then again I didn't really care too much about doing that anyway. I hope Ran likes the good bye card we left her ;-) ... You rock Ran thanks for letting us crash!