gonewest

I just posted a few pictures from my scouting trip to Seattle, here is a link to the photo set. The apartment complex I am moving to is visible in a few of the shots if you know where to look.

The image below was taken from the Space Needle looking north to Queen Anne hill and Lake Union (Gasworks park and Fremont are visible on the far side of Lake Union). The apartment complex is the group of brownish buildings just below the cluster of trees along the left side of the shot; my building is one of the ones closest to Lake Union.

Below is an image taken from the south bank of Lake Union looking northwest to my apartment complex on Queen Anne hill. The buildings are just visible through the trees above the dark brown office building on the right side.

So there I was wandering around south Lake Union on Tuesday, whining to myself about how I won’t be able to buy a nice sailboat this summer because I got too greedy in selecting an apartment, when I stumbled upon the Center for Wooden Boats.

I had run across the web site to this hands on museum last year when I started looking for Seattle information, mentally filed it in the “investigate later” folder, and then promptly lost the whole cabinet. This museum is within walking distance of my new place so, while I will not be able to afford a boat in the near term, I will have access to a nearby spot to rent sailboats and I will have an opportunity (through volunteerism) to gain practical experience in boat maintenance and upkeep. All-in-all, it is probably better that I spend a year or three learning to maintain older boats before taking the financial dive by buying one of my own.

I did my weekly Gentoo emerge update this morning and, because I accidentally put “vhost” in my USE flags instead of “vhosts”, it wiped out my blog install while upgrading from Wordpress 1.5.2 to 2.0.1.

Luckily the fix was a simple matter of correcting the USE flag, re-emerging Wordpress, then installing the current version into the existing blog app directory (about 10 minutes). The Mysql tables needed to be upgraded as well but the new Wordpress install handled that on its own without incident.

All-in-all, a nice and easy recovery, but it does remind me that I need to put a real backup process back in place on my server.

The plan was to make a quick trip up to Seattle to close a deal on a place for my move in early March.

The plan was to find a place with more room and amenities than what I have now so that working from home is more pleasant than it is now.

The plan was to find a place that is much less expensive than what I am paying in San Diego to make it easier to buy a boat and keep it in a slip in the area.

The plan was ruined by my foolish decision to go look at a place in Queen Anne even though I knew the price was significantly over my target.

So I will not be saving much money by moving up to Seattle which makes the prospect of buying a boat this year very low. On the good side, I found a very nice two bedroom unit that will be nice to work from and that will be much easier to put up guests in if anyone decides to visit.

IMG_1359.JPG, originally uploaded by lordjoe.

Amy and David are out here in San Diego paying me a visit before my upcoming move to Seattle. Here is a link to the photo set. I will probably upload some more photos to the set over the next few days.

Update 2006-02-19: Additional photos uploaded to the photo set.