It took a great deal of concentration, but I made it through the day yesterday... barely. I did what I could to explore Seattle in the "free" time I was afforded from the aforementioned mixup with regard to the timing of my arrival. Unfortunately, the exhaustion didn't help and I really wasn't operating at 100% for the entirety of the day... more like 30% actually.
As you may have guessed, my hotel didn't have my room ready (why would they? it was 9am), so I did a little directionless sightseeing. I visited Seattle Center, the remnants of Seattle's own Expo experience years ago. Nowadays, it's mostly an amusement park and science centre. I did however ride the monorail, which was kinda cool. Here's a train that's bigger than the SkyTrain, but likely just as expensive to build. Also, people drive it... but what do you want? This thing came out in 1962.
I did a lot of pointless wandering and learnt a lot about the city in general in my short time. Here's some stuff in my favourite format: point form:
- The highway system has some really impressive tree-coverage. Where we just mow everything down, Seattle has Great Big fir and cedar trees alongside the highway and twisting around the interchanges.
- Subway restaurants have spinache and herb havarti. Yum.
- Much like the highways, the downtown core has a remarkably large tree canopy. It's very common to see trees 2 and 3 storeys high alongside the street. On top of that, a number of these trees have bright green paper taped to them with a notice stating that the tree is protected by the city and cutting it down would result in a substantial fine. Each tree even has an estimated value raning from $4000 to as much as $11000.
- Many of the sidewalks are also wider than those you might find in Vancouver or Toronto. Of course the trees often take up a big chunk of it, but either way, there's lots of room to walk. However the cyclists appear to use the sidewalks illegally as well.
- The Pepsi tastes different. They use high-fructose corn syrup here. I don't like it.
- The busses running around the downtown core are free, however, they suffer from the same idiotic problem Vancouver has: there's no way to know where they go. As a tourist, I'm not really interested on boarding a bus only to find out that it's not going anywhere near where I want to go.
- Seattle made the same mistake as Toronto with regard to its waterfront: They build a highway between it and the rest of the city. To get to the waterfront, (which looks a lot like Toronto's) you have to go under a noisy, ugly, overpass.
- The bus shelters are ad-free, and in the nicer parts of downtown, there's great big ad-free maps showing you where you are, and what other stores etc. are near you. They're not as cool as the ones in Gangnam though (the relevant portion is at the end).
- There are lots of phone booths. I'm not sure if they're actively removing them like they are in Canada, but from my perspective, there's lots.
- The pedestrian signals are really slow. If you think the car has dominance in Vancouver or Toronto (and it does), you should see Seattle. Cars are the boss.
After surfing in my hotel's lobby, talking to friends with IM and looking for interesting stuff in Seattle for a while, they finally hooked me up with a room and I half-crashed on my bed while I talked to Susan before she went to bed herself. After that, I decided that I needed to stay awake 'till at lest 7 or 8, so I cleaned up and went back out, intending on making my way down to the "welcome party" portion of the Gnomedex conference.
I stopped for "lunch" at 1600 and walked down to the conference centre where I got a badge, a book, and a lanyard & card from Microsoft. The card is intended for Microsoft Surface and let me tell you, it's really cool. Sure, you can trade photos and contacts etc (which are locked into the Microsoft site) but the potential for applications is really impressive. There's a dj-style game, where you take (prefab) audio tracks and load them onto a spinning disc, that you can then layer the sounds and vary the volume based on their proximity to the centre. The disc will even work as a scratch-thingy if you want. I wish Jeremy or my brother were there to try it out.
For the most part, last night was rather tough, not only because of my limited hours of sleep but also the fact that I suck at networking. I just have to care... and I don't. This conference is a hybrid of Nerds and business-types and I just don't feel social enough right now talk to anyone. It also doesn't help that everyone here seems to know everyone: imagine the twitter pools from all over the country coming to one place to twitter... it's creepy.