"Why don't you use the filtered water?"

Along with my morning cup of coffee, I fill my water bottle at a water fountain right outside the passcard-controlled door leading into the development wing of my company's building. To call it a "public" water fountain is a misnomer: you can't even get to this floor without a development-flagged passcard.

Three times in the past week, as people have gotten off the elevator and seen me, they've said the same thing: "We've got a water filter in the kitchen. Why don't you use it?" Well, for one thing, the fountain is closer. For another, the fountain's cold-water resevoir is one liter. The filter's cold-water resevoir is a half-liter. My bottle is one liter, so I typically drain the filter's reservoir completely and get a bottle of warm water.

But finally, is there something wrong with Seattle's water such that we'd make a fetish out of drinking only filtered water straight? I don't see people worrying about filtration when they order coffee from the barista, or have ice put into their Cokes, or any of the myriad other ways we ingest stuff with water. Last time I checked, Seattle had great water as it was.

Usually, that's my reaction: "Is there something wrong with Seattle's water?" "Well, no, but..."

But what? Usually there's no answer.

The Seattle Webdesigner's Meetup

Yesterday, after a grueling ten-hour day where a meeting that was supposed to be just a half hour went on for an hour and forty-five minutes, I packed up my stuff and headed up to the Greenwood district for a meeting with the Seattle Webdesigner's Group. This is one of several groups I've been trying to get to for months, but between the kids and Omaha I have not had many evenings free to myself.

I arrived about an hour early and tried to find myself something to eat. I passed by a place called The Northside Grill, which billed itself as "Where North Africa meets North Seattle" and offered a combination of straight American food alongside a menu of "Moroccan" dishes. I ordered something called the "merguez," which was a sausage sandwich laden with onions and peppers, very spicy and very delicious. Very American french fries went with the meal. When I had first walked by the proprietor was standing in front of the restaurant looking a bit put out that his establishment was still empty at 6:00pm, but after I had puttered about in the game store next door (they were sold out of Marc Miller's Traveller first edition reprint, as well as Space Pirate Amazon Ninja Catgirls and Brawl: Catgirls) I went back to the restaurant. Despite being the only customer at the time, it took him a while to assemble my dinner, but it was worth the wait. And they're civilized enough to have a counter, which takes some of the edge off eating alone. If you're in the neighborhood, I recommend the place.

Then I went down to Wayward Coffee. I was one of four attendees in place that night. The other was a retired gentleman teaching himself Flash, a contract web designer, and a test engineer from Microsoft who was looking to "do something else," and so was teaching himself web design in a kind of scrambled way, worrying about CSS on the one hand and C# deployment on the other.

At one point while discussing graphic design issues I made a comment about using ems^[?] versus pixels in design, and the fellow from Microsoft asked "What's an em?" With the encouragement of the organizer, I gave a brief exposition on designing websites with disabled users in mind, showing the three modes with which the SKCCN website could be read by those with low-sight or no-sight.

We went over the difficulty in finding a decent background, and templating schemes, and choices of programming environments. And I got the sense that the Flash guy knew a lot of flash, and the organizer knew a lot of standard HTML, but the world of high-end CSS and Javascript and the deep transactional programming and event knowledge that I carry around inside my head as part of my career was not in theirs.

It's been frustrating. I feel like I'm in a kind of weird limbo, with some graphic design knowledge, some programming skill, and some documentary skill, but not enough to slip into any one of those worlds with authority. Not the jack, but the king of all trades, still master of none.

Un-frakking-believable programming language

I don't get many chances to use Ruby, but when I do I remain breathlessly impressed with it. Tonight, I had to write a program to extract the XML meta-data from a mass collection of documents (The Journal Entries, naturally) and process that meta-data into fields, which would then get output as a CSV so I could edit it with a spreadsheet. One of the tricky parts was putting the filename, which is not part of the embedded metadata, as the first column in the CSV.

I did it in one line. Not a Perl line where, a month from now, I'll have no idea what the heck I was writing. One readable, understandable, clear and concise line.

Oh, I so like this language. I wish I had more opportunities to use it.