Blog Archives: July, 2003
Land of the Free
While in Seattle, Andrew introduced me to The Stranger, a free underground weekly publication (similar to The Echo in southwestern Ontario). This week’s issue starts: “It’s America’s Independence Day, and to celebrate, we’re dedicating this issue to the greatest, most freedom-filled nation on Earth: Canada!” It’s worth reading if you have a few minutes, some of it insightful, some of it shallow, and most of it amusing. Be sure to read the French version of the Prime Minister’s welcome; it’s a little more vicious than the English version.
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Trustworthy Seattle
Andrew Abrahamowicz As part of my northwestern excursion, I’ve been in Seattle for the past two days, staying with UW graduate and amazon.com sell-out Andrew Abrahamowicz. Yesterday morning we celebrated Vancouver’s harrowing win over PyeongChang. Let me tell you, forcing the world to wait 45 minutes after the votes had been cast electronically was just mean.
I spent the past two days roaming around downtown Seattle. I took an elevator to the top of the pitifully short Seattle Space Needle, only some 520 feet above the ground. Yes, there really is a Starbucks on every corner.
Trustworthy computing on the Microsoft campus, Redmond Last night, we made a trip up to Redmond, Washington, famed home of a competitor to my current employer. Travelling around the campus, which was less majestic than I imagined, we came across banners advertising “trustworthy computing”. I don’t know what else to say, but I don’t really think much else needs to be said. While we were there, we blatantly flouted the parking policy requiring visitors to register upon arrival; as a result, we had to evade several Washington State Trooper and Microsoft police cars on the way home.
I also made a trip up to the University of Washington. Doesn’t seem like a very good school, and certainly a pretty awful place to do a degree in biostatistics. On my way back from U Dub, I saw a billboard with spurious statistical results obviously prepared by someone with a statistics degree from Washington: “32% of American households have a bicycle; 40% of American households have a gun”.
Tomorrow we’re off to Mount St. Helens, which hopefully will refrain from re-errupting while we’re there.
Update 2003/07/17: A picture gallery from my Northwest US trip is available.
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