“I’d like to scale back my subscription to just weekend delivery” I said over the phone to the circulation department. That was last Tuesday, and my last weekday paper arrived on that Wednesday. Just two days later I learned that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer was up for sale. I felt like I killed it single-handedly.

I was one of the few—a young web-centric professional that still carried a daily paper subscription. I’ll always feel a print publication offers a lot of important advantages over an electronic edition—and that comes from someone who’s spent years helping people make websites.

Opportunities

I want to see the P-I continue, if not as a conventional print publication then certainly as a web-only production. The latter I feel is a giant opportunity, even though it means cutting a huge amount of jobs and really scaling back the journalistic power of the paper…exactly what you’d rather never have happen…when the bottom line interferes with good journalism.

What the P-I does have is a huge chance to reevaluate what it means to be a modern news institution. Here’s what I want from my local paper—I hope it can happen.

• Community

  First and foremost I want a publication that makes me feel like a part of a whole. Individual neighborhood sections, detailed user profiles, customizable start pages, alerts sent to my mobile or email address based on my news preferences, neighborhood and current location.

  

  I want to be able to find friends and family, see what they are reading. I want the web “paper” to be a community square, with all the advantages you’d get walking down your street—I don’t want just another information fire hose. The P-I has a good start on these tools, but I want more.

• Valuable Ads and Services

  Services aren’t a bad thing, but invasive and irrelevant advertising on the web is. How many times have a I seen someone tear apart the P-I to get to a full Circuit City pullout? Many, many, times…I often wonder why you can’t do that online for the users that want to browse.

  Classifieds? Hasn’t Craigslist ruined that for everyone? I’d love to see a local paper compete with their own free service, but use local knowledge and a superior toolset to that of Craigslist. (Simple mashups like housingmaps.com are ridiculously valuable and pretty easy to implement.) In an ideal world, smart tools and neighborhood specific pages should make ads valuable to everyone viewing the page.

• Local, Local, Local

  Let the AP feeds cover the national and international topics. I want to know what’s in my backyard. Anyone working for a news institution online should look long and hard at EveryBlock, they’re doing a lot of things right!

That’s just a few words from a subscriber that knows a lot about the web, but not a lot about the newspaper industry. I hope the P-I lives on, as the great institution it is. You can read all about the ongoing transition on The Big Blog.

Happy holidays. Under threat of site boycott, I’m forced to document a string of weather that’s nearly unprecedented in Western Washington. Here I muster my good humor, so in brief: Swings in Weather. Zing!

Seattle was paralyzed for nearly a week. Several feet of snow collecting—and staying put—in outlying areas. After initial hesitancy, Mayor Greg Nickels has given in to the pressure to lightly season Seattle streets.

For myself, one of the highlights of the snowy deluge was tailgating and attending Mike Holmgren’s swan songy victory over the Jets at Qwest Field. The snow was falling the Hawks were winning and the snowballs were flying—by the end of the game this was all just too much for Jets Defensive End Shaun Ellis.

This proved the costliest of all Seattle snowfall, as that particular cubic foot ended up being priced at a cool $10,000. That could buy a lot of salt.

Happy New Year!

After Brian Dorsey’s Noonhat presentation at the 4th Ignite Seattle I decided to give his app a shot: sign up on a particular date and find random people to eat lunch with. Simple enough, and fun too.

Wednesday morning, right on schedule, I received an email confirming the fact that there were two other folks in my proximity with the same plans as my own. I got the email addresses of Beth and Deepak and we began to exchange pleasantries and firm up the details.

Then there was the email from Brian asking if King 5 could tag along. Lunch with strangers isn’t nearly as awkward as lunch with cameras and microphones.

Thanks to Beth and Deepak for a great lunch. You can check out Noonhat here, and see King 5’s coverage here.

Arid Lands, the documentary covering the people and history of the Columbia Basin I reviewed after it screened at the Hazel Wolf Environmental Film Festival, is showing again in Seattle if you missed it.

It’s playing Saturday, Jun 2nd at 5:00 pm SAM as part of STIFF 2007, find out more and buy tickets here. Highly recommended!

Find other screenings of Arid Lands.

The lawn bowling green just above Green Lake.

It’s dumping snow right now in Seattle; this is the third major storm of the winter.

The Temple of Light was installed in Seattle Center July 30th, constructed as a memorial honoring the March 25th loss of life on Capitol Hill.

I walked past this every day to and from work—it was a great experience to watch it grow. I took these photos a few weeks ago, and the temple has since been disassembled—now on its way to becoming an installation at Burning Man.

Last night I caught Built to Spill at the Showbox, their last of three Seattle shows that kick off the tour for their latest album, You in Reverse. I’ve seen Built to Spill four times now and they never disappoint, and the Showbox is one of my favorite venues in Seattle. The setlist was peppered with new You in Reverse songs, of which Goin’ Against Your Mind and Conventional Wisdom really got my blood pumping.

Shawn Telford writes about Built’s Tuesday show over at the PI, “Built To Spill deserves our full attention”

Most multi-guitar bands caterwaul their way into a discordant chaos. Not BTS, this five-piece is able to keep all strings on course and what’s more, they’re able to mount catastrophic attacks on our pop sensibilities that leave listeners dumbstruck and amazed.

Some two weeks since an update. I’ll dispel your concern immediately by explaining that my absence has not been because I’ve found a new hobby, succumbed to radiation or anything else more sinister. I’ve been busy.

My sister is now married, (congratulations Mo and Ed! Whoo hoo!), I’ve moved to a new place here in Seattle. This is a lot for me in two weeks. I’ve also been busy trying to ignore the impossible conflict that exists between my life away from a computer and a happy readership. Two examples from the email bin, names withheld:

• “Man its better when you have nothing to do. You post more.”
• “Need more pics dude.”

In case you were wondering those two quotations represent the entirety of their respective email messages. Nothing brings home the disappointment like a heart-felt single line email. I knew I should have left my furniture in the street and my family alone in the church to pen an extra pithy blog post or two.

I’ll be out of town this weekend, but if you’re in Seattle MetBlogs says there’s a pillow fight at the pier. You know how I loves me a good pillow fight.

The day before yesterday I shot a bit around the office to get some images for our forthcoming website. The object was to get things atmospheric, abstract, basically just for backgrounds as opposed to feature page elements.

The top photo was snapped at 1/8 of a second at f/11, from a tripod about a foot off the ground. (I provided the skilled modeling of course.) The next two are of our conference table, and the last is of an Eames plywood chair with Josh in the background. Fun stuff.

I ran into Bob on Friday at the Mural Amphitheater stage on my way to a NEDA event that was taking place in the Center House. “So, are you going to take a picture of me taking my picture?” Bob asked.

“Sure, if that’s alright” I replied. Bob had noticed me walking by the stage with my camera, adjusting settings and looking a bit aimlessly for a shot. He was hunched over on the stage delicately adjusting his webcam and microphone, pecking away on his laptop preparing to record himself delivering a few poems for eventual publication on his cable access show. No one was in the audience at the amphitheater but that wasn’t the point; Bob had just missed his latest psych evaluation because of a social worker’s scheduling mix-up and wanted to blow off some steam.

“People call me Laptop Bob” he told me after his reading. Bob is a poet, blogger, and will shoot his next cable access show March 25th at Bop Street Records. (Map: 5219 Ballard Avenue NW) Here’s a short video of Bob reading two of the poems I heard in person.

Bob has been homeless for two years.

He lives life as he wants to, and from what I’ve seen he’s doing a pretty great job.

The Seattle Seahawks are the 2005-2006 NFC Champions, and are going to the Super Bowl. A moment of silence please. As a Seattle sports fan I realize how truly important this moment is.

What does one say? Seattle sports teams, save the Storm, are perennial underdogs never given the respect they deserve in the media and frankly rarely given much respect even by their own fans. The Hawks are perfectly emblematic of this most Northwest of struggles. How many 8 and 8 seasons did they have, or perhaps 9 and 7 seasons, when 10 and 6 teams all made the playoffs? At least gone is the endless turmoil of the ruthless AFC West, but even now to many outsiders this 30 year old team is still an expansion club.

But can you feel it? Now it’s all different; the Hawks have arrived and so have these patient Northwest fans. What was it that made the difference? It wasn’t just Mike Holmgren, the new uniforms, or even the new Qwest Field—it wasn’t even MVP Alexander or the resurgence of fan support the Hawks have enjoyed in recent years. I feel it was simply the entire team and the entire Northwest absolutely unwilling to stew in mediocrity any longer.

This rebirth, this realization, is much larger than the Sonics making the 1996 NBA Finals, and probably larger even than the infamous ‘Refuse to Lose’ season of the Mariners in 1995 that saved professional baseball in Seattle. Sunday night walking through Pioneer square amidst a sea of fans I felt an overwhelming groundswell of satisfaction. Not gloating, not unbridled revelry, but the kind of tangible contentment that is earned only after a long tumultuous road. There’s no surprise police made few arrests Sunday night, the fans were too shocked to be out of control.

The naysayers will remain of course, but we’re used to that up here. The same writers that proclaimed Carolina would demolish Seattle are now lamenting Carolina’s shattered running game and the long plane ride to Seattle that broke the game in Seattle’s favor, even though Carolina was a week ago so good on the road none of that would matter. (Mind you, this is not the same thing as the road trips Seattle teams make for every away game every year.)

The Seahawks will roll into Detroit the underdogs again, in the middle of a very hostile crowd, with the media still doubting their pedigree. But that’s okay with us, because, can I say it again? The Seahawks are the best team in the NFC and are going to the Superbowl. Rejoice fans of the Northwest, taste sweet redemption, we have arrived.

Chris Reiff, Matt Redding, and the author at Sunday’s NFC Championship.

That makes a perfect 9-0 at home this season; which I suppose confirms that this was indeed a great year to buy season tickets.

26 consecutive days of rain AS OF JANUARY 13TH
If it rains for 8 more days, Seattle will beat the 1953 record of 33 straight days of rain.
Precipitation since Dec. 19, 2005, total as of Jan. 13, 2006: 12.53″
January rainfall through the 12th is 3.93 inches above average: 5.97″
countdown courtesy the Seattle Times weather page

Currently in Seattle the forecast is for ten more straight days of rain. For the past month there has been little deviation from this terribly soggy pattern. Every morning I’ve put down my mug of coffee and donned my thick wool coat, only to step into the unending drizzle and face the teeming masses—of people absolutely proud—to hardy such hideous climes.

Yes, they are proud, every one of those damp Seattleites. It’s on the tips of everyone’s tongues…”what is it now, 25 straight days? I bet we’ll break it.” I overhear it in grocery stores, on the bus, outside of work. It’s all pride, willfullness, and an unspeakably thick layer of denial.

As far as the National Weather Service is concerned, Seattle in the winter of 2005 – 2006 is on its way toward a record of consecutive days of rain; though experienced locals will claim there have been winters far wetter, far darker, not even a generation in the past. Regardless it’s a shocking testament to human perserverence—every time I lower my chin and try to duck under the raindrops there is another small collection of people whispering gleefully, “oh we’re going to break it…”

The people, willing onward such terrible weather.

I can’t help but admire their optimism.

I spotted these scuttled signs behind an apartment complex not far from my place. A pretty dreary shot, but I think it’s interesting enough to show.
f/8, 1/63th. 17-40f/4L.

Note the delicate sidestepping of the ever so popular, “smoke if you got em” headline. As of midnight tonight Initiative 901 goes into effect, barring smoking inside all of Washington State’s public places. This is something I’ve been looking forward too for a long time.

I do lament the fact that this legislation became enacted via initiative however—too often the “by the people” process is co-opted by special interests, and I believe leads to overzealous law. Take for example the 25-foot provision of I-901, where smokers are banned from smoking anywhere near a public building. Why go this far?

1. A 25 foot rule can easily lead to heavy-handed enforcement
2. Will cause smoker / non-smoker resentment
3. Will most likely do nothing to aid the issue
   Smokers cannot and will not remain 25 feet from all restaurants and bars, which would leave them in the middle of the street in urban areas (at best), and is more closely a total ban of smoking in the public sphere.

I am very grateful for the ban, and will no doubt visit many more of my local bars because of it. I have no doubt in the future our public spaces will be looked upon as our airplanes are now, “you mean, people used to be allowed to smoke in here?”

Cigarettes are vile, and I’m tired of burning my clothing (this becomes costly) after I’ve strayed too long in an smoke-dense bar. So light up while you can smokers of Washington! Soon all you’ll have is your own home and a crowded intersection to pleasure your lungs.

The flakes might not last long, but are welcome nonetheless.

Taken 20 minutes ago above Western Ave. (Handheld 1/10th @ f/4.) Drive safely this weekend.

A Cap. Hill apartment building under partly-cloudy skies. 1/143rd @ f8, 17-40 f4/L.

BetterDonkey’s got a new video called Viaduct Tape. A hilarious “no on I-912” piece.

• 8MB — (.MP4 Quicktime)
• 6.8MB — (.WMV Windows)

Nice work everyone.

A shot I like—but maybe just for the nice bokeh and the great texture of the safety ribbon. 1/111 @ f5.6, 17-40 f/4L.

This building is near the very west end of Queen Anne Avenue, snapped right before I hopped on the bus. Though it looks a bit like the edge of the building, the sky is actually reflecting off windows.

1/167th @ f7.1, 17-40 f/4L

A building behind an empty lot a few blocks away from my place—in front of it a foundation is under construction for a new condominium building. f/13, 1/333rd, 17-40 f4/L.

Bold statement I know. And you can tell I mean it by my excessive. Period. Usage.

Up until now in my Seattlism I’ve completely missed Shiro’s, and what a shame because last night it offered me the best sushi I’ve ever consumed, and possibly the most fresh tasting fish I’ve ever had in a restaurant setting. The chatty and affable proprietor didn’t even wait until my miso soup arrived to proclaim that he was the first sushi chef in Seattle, running the Nikko restaurant for 20 years before creating his namesake dining venture in Belltown. Humble perhaps not, (of course I find that particularly endearing) but Shiro had the fish to back up his bold claims of superiority. The albacore was stunning in texture, and the smelt was so smooth it was shocking.

The space is extremely unimposing and the storefront is downright spartan. It isn’t trendy, ostentatious, or “innovative” sushi—it’s just plain excellent. Ironically smelling the intoxicating aromas of fresh pizza from nearby eateries I almost didn’t head in—don’t make that mistake. With a lively atmosphere, a comprehensive menu, reasonable prices, very friendly waitstaff, and amazingly FRESH. Fish. This is nothing but a Must. Visit. Period. Seriously.

Not only does the Summit Public House serve many a fine beer, but it’s also Seattle’s de facto Tour de France headquarters. This establishment also just happens to be only a few short feet from my apartment. Primetime coverage on OLN is from 8-11pm—please consider yourself invited. (Ideally let me know you’re going first.)

Speaking of OLN, what a terrible site redesign! How many bajillion Tour fans do they greet with gaudy yellow, gigantic fonts, hideous architecture, and dismal layout? Their site is so bad I can taste it, and sadly it’s nothing like a pint at the Summit.

I’ve lived on Seattle’s Capitol Hill for about a year now, and I’m an incorrigible people-watcher. Thus I’ve learned that with few exceptions the day-to-day residents of Capitol Hill fit into one of three categories, all of which I’ve made sure end with “-ster” for that extra degree of scientificality.

Hipsters, Scenesters

Latin: hippius more-n-you-us

Mostly comprised of kids who want to be cool, homos who actually are cool, and musicians who suck. Find these in seedy bars, on street corners, “edgy” coffee joints, and any place you won’t get stared at for having a purple mohawk and a silver dollar stuck in your earlobe. They ignore the world with the aid of their iPod, but continually scan the room to make sure they’re still cool.

Bumsters

Latin: shakus cup-o-changeus

Look for these outside Dick’s or anywhere else you can find money, food, or liquor. Don’t call me callous because I have bought three copies of “Real Change” before in a single day. But I do get a bit tired of seeing that “methy-twitch” and those guys with the “NEED BEER” signs- who are they kidding? That’s about as heart-warming as a troop of 2nd graders riddled with pinkeye.

Dirtsters

Latin: disappointus-parentus

The group I call dirtsters others refer to as “troubled tweens,” “disaffected youth” or other such total crap. They’re dirty, gothed-out, and hate themselves because they don’t hate themselves as much as their friends do. They despise their allowance but it pays for their ripped jeans, makeup, and gateway drugs. Their parents are crying in Bellevue… right…NOW.

So that’s about it, the others on Capitol Hill while strongly in the minority are much more widely varied (thankfully) and resist classification. Have a good stroll on Broadway and be sure to comment if I’ve left anything out.

Bartender, I’ll have a double-irony, straight up. The Seahawks most dependable receiver Bobby Engram couldn’t keep the handle on a touchdown pass in the waning seconds of Saturday’s playoff game against the Rams. So much talent- just off the fingertips. Thanks to Porkchop Express for snagging me a ticket.

The Space Needle says happy new year. I apologize for the tree and power lines, the shot was taken from my apartment deck.

Yesterday afternoon I got back from the cabin and I’m happy to report some major work accomplished on the new site. The design is at least 3/4 done, and I hope to launch ‘er within two weeks. Who wants to help enter 3+ years of updates into a database?