(The map above is interactive. Double-click the left mouse button to zoom in, double-click the right mouse button to zoom out, and click any of the pushpins for details.)

In late June I’m going to Providence for my friend Meg’s wedding. The next day, instead of my original plan to return to Seattle, I board an Acela Express train bound for New York, meet up with my family at JFK Airport, and then we all depart for Rome. We’ll see Rome, Tuscany, and Venice, then go back to New York. I’ll be back in Seattle on July 5.

My whole family is excited for this trip, our first overseas vacation together. I decided to prepare for the trip the high-tech way.

First, Yahoo! Travel has really ramped up their offerings in the last couple of years. FareChase is a useful multi-site search site for airfares similar to the independent Farecast, only with more cities and fewer predictions. Yahoo! also has a trip planner that lets you plot out hotels and attractions. Here’s our trip plan. They encourage collaboration among users: other tourists can view reports of previous trips and compare notes. There is also a tie-in with Yahoo!-owned Flickr, which I use, to associate Flickr photos with Yahoo! Travel trip plans. Very snazzy.

My parents advised that I pack lightly since we might have to share a smallish hatchback for our trip through Italy. That was the last tip I needed to order a Kindle, the Amazon e-book device that’s been on back order since it came out last November. A few of my co-workers have Kindles and they’ve raved about theirs. I could have used one on my holiday trip to Hawaii: I brought 3 books with me and finished them all, so I ended up buying 3 more while there. That’s about 8 pounds of reading material that I had to lug home; by contrast the Kindle weighs 10 ounces and lets me buy books wirelessly, though its store only works in the U.S. I ordered my Kindle over three weeks ago and, if the Kindle forum is any indication, I won’t get mine until late April.

I also decided that my little point-and-shoot camera that has served me well for 2 years needs a big brother. I asked my photo-savvy friends to help me choose my first digital SLR camera. Half said Canon and half said Nikon, all due to personal preference. After spending a lunch hour at Ritz Camera trying out the Canon Digital Rebel XT and the Nikon D40 I placed an order for the D40. Its megapixel count is lower (only 6 megapixels versus 8 for the Canon) but its interface seems much more newbie-friendly. I also really liked the Nikon’s huge LCD screen since I expect to flip through photos with my family a lot while on vacation. After buying the D40 I started tooling around with it at home and in my neighborhood. Nikon publishes Digitutor, a web site with lots of handy multimedia guides to their cameras’ features. The D40’s manual is good but I ended buying a full-color “Digital Field Guide” to get more acquainted with the fundamentals of SLR photography. I hope to shoot like a pro when I get to Italy.

Lastly I’m trying to parlay my high-school Spanish lessons into conversational Italian. Last year, when my parents were first talking about this trip, I bought a copy of Barron’s E-Z Italian from a co-worker. Working through the audio CDs and the written exercises brings back a lot of memories of Spanish verb conjugation drills from years past. I’ve also bookmarked Caffe Talk, a lesson in ordering coffee in Italy. (The Italian caffe apparently operates a lot like an American bar or restaurant.)

Between Italian lessons, camera lessons, and waiting for my e-book reader to come in the mail, my weekends are pretty much booked from here on out to June!

Every time I see it I confuse it with the Barack Obama presidential logo, which I really love for its simplicity:

Coincidence or water polo association conspiracy?

Seattle is known for being rainy but most of the time, we get so little rain that it’s not even worthwhile to take an umbrella. I went out on Sunday the 2nd without an umbrella and was literally blinded by the rain. My commute to work on Monday took much longer than usual due to the weather. As of today it’s clear outside but the damage is done: 5 dead, 50,000 powerless, and a 20-mile span of I-5 closed due to flooding throughout Western Washington.

Like most folks in central Seattle, I got wet but didn’t even lose power. I’m fine, my building’s fine, and my office is fine.

I liked this charming snowy scene, so I went to the mothership site to see if it was deployed worldwide.

Amazon put the cabin on the US site as well, but it lacks the snazzy white Christmas lights of its German counterpart! Strangely, just about everywhere else in the world got the more festive cabin:

Why is the U.S. cabin so austerely decorated? I didn’t dig into the matter at work yet, so here are a few theories about the American cabin-dwellers, who I’ll call “the Smiths”:

1. They wait until December to put up lights. Principled and contemptuous of Christmas’s encroachment on Thanksgiving and Halloween, the Smiths decided to keep their Christmas decorations inside until comfortably after Thanksgiving.
2. They’re watching their carbon footprint. Environmentalism is as trendy in 2007 as it was back in the early 1990s, when Samantha Mathis, Christian Slater, Robin Williams, and many other celebrities saved the rainforest. Perhaps the Smiths decided to investigate alternative energy sources (note the smoke coming out of the chimney) and lower their electricity usage.
3. Their homeowners association won’t let them put up lights. In the exclusive upper-middle-class suburban lifestyle centre (what a prole would call a “neighborhood”) where the Smiths live, the powers that be have banned lights. They’re too ostentatious and a really well-done display can draw crowds from miles around, blocking streets and reducing property values. That’s bad news for families still trying to refinance their mortgages.
4. They don’t celebrate Christmas. Check back next week — maybe there will be a menorah in the window!

Lastly, we shan’t forget Japan, where Christmas has always been about gift-giving in a country that’s less than 1% Christian. Land is so expensive that a cabin that size would cost a fortune, so Amazon.co.jp does without a building at all:

Merry Christmas, however you celebrate it!

There’s an irritating one-question-per-page FAQ on Zipcar’s site to ease the transition. I and other Seattle members should get our cards in February. No word on how much we’ll have to pay for usage, but here are some of the highlights:

• All cities are available to all members. Big advantage to Zipcar here. With Flexcar you had to call and set up an account if you intended to visit another city. Each account has its own plan and its own billing statement — kind of annoying.
• Fewer perks: higher membership fee and no gas fill-up bonus. Flexcar waives its $35 membership fee if you drive two times per year. Zipcar will keep that going for just one year, then will start charging everyone its standard annual rate (currently $50 per year) after that. Both Flexcar and Zipcar expect you to refill the gas tank when the level drops below 1/4 tank. Flexcar credits you $2 for doing so. Zipcar does not. Both companies provide you with a gas card so you pay nothing out of pocket.
• Cooler cars. Until recently Flexcar ran an almost entirely Honda fleet in Seattle: Civics, Civic Hybrids, and Elements. They’ve recently added Mini Coopers, Subaru Impreza wagons, and a few Scions to the mix. Zipcar’s selection runs the gamut. In Boston alone, there’s a BMW 328, a Volvo S40, a few Honda Fits, a few Ford Escapes, and various other cars of many makes and sizes. Zipcar also names their cars with whimsical names like “Versa Valedictorian” and “Fit Foulke” (nothing like pandering to the hometown fans) whereas Flexcar uses numbers to identify locations — and you’re not guaranteed any specific make and model of car when you book, only a specific class.
• No more releasing unused balances. Flexcar lets you reserve a car for a long time, then release the unused balance if you return the car early. If another member takes some of your previously-reserved time, you don’t pay for that portion of the reservation. I’ve tried this numerous times with Flexcar, and nobody’s ever picked up the slack time, but it’s been a good feature to have in my opinion. Flexcar also lets you cancel a reservation within 1 hour of making it or no sooner than 8 hours before the start time. Zipcar is much stingier: no option to release the unused balance of a reservation, and longer reservations must be cancelled a full day in advance. (Zipcar lets you cancel a reservation of under 8 hours with only 3 hours’ notice, though.)
• Better service? This one’s up in the air. Flexcar often feels like a much smaller company than I’d expect. The company caters to hip, tech-savvy users, but talking to their customer service often entails very long hold times and requests to speak with specific individuals. For example, when I wanted to set up an account to book a car in Pittsburgh, they said I’d have to talk to Deborah about that. I appreciate the human touch of dealing with individual people directly, but simple actions often required more callbacks and personal e-mail exchanges than I ever would have expected. Flexcar didn’t even offer on-line statements until very recently. I’m hoping that Zipcar will be more customer service tech-savvy and that the lower overhead will reduce their costs.

The competition for the merged Zipcar will be much more broad than I had expected. U-Haul has already started a pilot car-sharing program, and Hertz and Enterprise are exploring hourly rentals. Traditional car rental places charge less for a daily rental, but Zipcar still wins on convenience: book on-line, walk up to car, swipe in, drive, swipe out. As cities keep growing upward and as people pretend to fret about high gas prices, I’m curious to see how car-sharing will change.

It’s a decommissioned Titan missile base. You can buy it on eBay!

I really love unique homes despite their near-total lack of marketability. No one should ever buy a home because they want to live there, I’m told; one should only buy a home for the next person who lives there. After seeing endless “very unique condos” on the market, I would much rather have a truly unique home like LA’s famous Chemosphere than a unit in a building made to look cloyingly retro.

But back to the topic at hand: silo living. It is possible to make a below-ground missile silo into a livable space. Consider Silohome, a former missile silo in the Adirondacks that is now a home in an air park. The owners bought the site, constructed a 2000-square-foot home on the surface, converted the Launch Control Center (LCC) into a 2300-square-foot luxury home, and preserved access to at least the upper part of the “LLC” (whatever that is) where the missile once stood. The square footage numbers seem impressive though I’m sure the angles and shapes make decorating very difficult. One web site from 2001 claims that the home’s owners are “asking $2.3 million.”

Paying a million and a half for a missile base in Central Washington would only be the beginning. The site has electricity and water, but gas was trucked in — why entrust such a dangerous substance to a municipal utility? The owner is an eccentric gentleman named Bari Hotchkiss who bought the site around 1999 and previously offered it for about $4 million. Hotchkiss told KOMO-TV of Seattle that his site “is sort of like the Washington monument or the pyramids of Egypt.” According to a pseudonymous comment on BoingBoing, Hotchkiss is “convinced that with the right investment someone could put a multi-story destination resort on it. Pretty hilarious considering it’s in the middle of nowhere in central WA.” The nearest tourist attraction, Moses Lake, is about 40 minutes west on I-90 and the nearest metropolitan area is the Tri-Cities, more than an hour south. But who wouldn’t want an address that, according to Yahoo! Maps, is “Titan Missile Silo, Batum, WA”?

The next time we have a sunny day in Seattle, which won’t be until March, I’ll remember Hotchkiss’s pie-in-the-sky description of what one could do with a house in a silo:

if you chose to live in one or both of the Antenna Silos, you could retrofit the ANTENNA SILO - SILO DOORS - each weighing about 50 tons - with a new hydraulic opening system and then you could have your own push button 100-ton opening skylight. And if you really wanted to go whole hog, you could live in the bottom of one of the 155’ tall MISSILE SILOS and retrofit the 150 ton SILO DOORS so you could push a button and open them up – 155’ above the floor!!

Earlier this year, a co-worker pitched to me the McLeod Residence, an off-beat project in which he was an investor. “The Residence” is a bar/gallery/social club with an emphasis on creating a sort of synthetic family. I became a lifetime member quickly thereafter.

Something that appealed to me about the Residence is the emphasis on technology to enhance socialization. The McLeod Residence started its socialization efforts with its touch-screen photo booth: touch a monitor, strike a pose, and seconds later a picture is taken and immediately uploaded to Flickr for the world to see. In less than a year since this feature launched, thousands of photos have been uploaded. After seeing a list of ideas for more social applications, I decided to throw my hacking skills at one: an anonymous confession board.

The idea is simple: McLeods both near and far submit brief, anonymous confessions, which are broadcast to an audience both inside and outside the Residence. I’d seen the idea done with Group Hug, a site where confessions range from the whimsical to the bizarre, but I wanted my idea to enable participation on a more personal level. People could submit confessions by cell phone, via the web, by e-mail, or any other means.

The Hardware

I went on eBay and found a burgeoning trade in used BetaBrite LED signs for a hundred dollars or less. I specifically looked for BetaBrite after reading about a Ruby module specifically to talk to BetaBrite signs. A complete BetaBrite sign with all the needed accessories cost about $120 shipped. The sign connects to a PC via a serial port, and you control it using simple commands that the aforementioned Ruby module abstracts away.

At first I used my $300 Dell, running Ubuntu Linux, to control the sign. I still had some money left in my budget, though, and a dark bar is no place to put a cheap mid-tower computer case. Enter the MicroClient Jr., a computer made by a Thai company called Norhtec. The MicroClient Jr is a tiny x86 PC that offers two serial ports, three USB ports, VGA output, Ethernet, and even a wireless card. I bought the $200 model with a 1 GB CompactFlash card on which Damn Small Linux (DSL) was preloaded.

The Software

The MicroClient Jr. is amazingly tiny — it has a footprint smaller than a CD case — and it makes no noise at all when turned on. I’m told it consumes just 8 Watts of power, and it emits so little heat that you can mount it on the wall without any problems. I found DSL a little too hard to work with due to its LiveCD-like behavior. I discovered a great article by a man named Nicolas who loaded Debian 4.0 “Etch” onto his own MicroClient Jr.

There’s something surreal about installing an operating system from a USB flash drive onto a CompactFlash drive, especially when said flash drive is half as long as the computer itself! After an agonizingly long install time I was ready to boot into a minimal system to start loading modules.

My MicroClient Jr now runs several useful services in its 120 MB of memory. (Of the built-in 128 MB, 8 MB are shared as video memory.) I set it up with crond to periodically run my Ruby scripts, MySQL to store confessions, and OpenSSH to let me manage the PC from throughout the McLeod Residence. I didn’t set up a swap file so I occasionally ran into memory problems when setting up multiple things at once. Patience is a virtue when you have a low-power 200 MHz chip to work with.

There are two Ruby scripts that manage the confession board. Every 2 minutes, mail-to-db.rb runs. This script accesses the special POP account that I use for confessions, pulls in all messages, obfuscates the senders’ addresses, and inserts records into the onboard MySQL database. Signatures and everything after the first 160 characters are eliminated. Every 5 minutes, a separate script called db-to-sign.rb runs. This script pulls a sampling of confessions from the database, giving priority to those which haven’t been shown yet. It then pushes an update to the sign.

What’s Next?

This being just the first version of my sign, there are already many things I’d like to add or improve. Right now I’m writing updates to the sign using BetaBrite’s TextFiles, which require that the sign go blank during an update. There is supposedly a way to write updates using StringFiles so that they take effect instantly, but so far I haven’t been able to get this method to work.

Also, confessions are only visible if you happen to be sitting in the McLeod Residence. I’d like to enable communications using Twitter, everyone’s favorite oh-God-not-another-messaging-service, so that we can easily push updates to the web.

Like any 1.0 product, some folks have noticed occasional bugs or made suggestions to me. Of note: Yahoo! Mail encodes all messages in a way that my scripts can’t read, and its ad-laden signatures often show up verbatim on the sign. Also, confessions never expire; I’ve been asked to favor more recent confessions more heavily.

Like with any new product, I’ll be keeping a close eye on the LED confession board. This is a really cool new project and I’m proud to have worked on it. Drop by someday during happy hour and check it out!

So far, Kiva has a better return (0%) than Prosper (-2%). Not one of my Kiva borrowers has missed a payment while two of my Prosper loans defaulted.

Prosper rates borrowers’ credit on a scale of AA, A, B, C, D, E, HR (high risk), and finally NC (no credit). Of my two defaulted loans, one was to an HR borrower at 29% and the other was to a B borrower at 15%. I was way too greedy in expecting a 29% annual return from a low-grade buyer, but the B borrower had a modest interest rate and good numbers in general. Prosper’s reports suggest that over the past year, there is very little difference in net return over all credit grades: borrowers with poor credit will accept a higher interest rate, but they are also more likely to default on their loans. Of course, those numbers are of little consolation when lenders have only about a dozen loans at any one time.

I’ve decided to focus more on the higher-grade loans, concentrating on people trying to pay down credit card debts. Business owners are often more emotionally appealing, but the risks are just too high. Then there’s the pockets of people who have great credit and want to reinvest: borrowing money at, say, 8% and reloaning it to other Prosper borrowers at higher rates. At an expected return of 9–12%, I’d much rather just put my money into a savings account or an index fund.

I’m not sour on Prosper. It’s an interesting idea to emphasize a more personal relationship between borrower and lender. I’m going to stick it out for another year in the hope that better decisions erase a single bad year’s results.

And as for Kiva: As long as shopkeepers in the developing world keep paying me back, I’ll keep lending to others.

To glorify King County, ask that governments make it easier to make movies here. Let’s raise the living standard by getting a larger percentage of our people working. Employment cures many problems and helps some homeless people buy vans.

Governments should make showers available to our people and should give employment as helpers to minimum wage applicants. We could then open our libraries more and investigate more crimes.…

Goodspaceguy studied at universities in Germany, Sweden, and America. Goodspaceguy earned a university Master’s and a Bachelor’s degree. Please keep campaign contributions under $25.

So if you want some homeless people to buy vans, more movies filmed in King County, and policemen solving crimes in libraries, send $24.99 or less to 10219 9th Ave. S., Seattle, WA 98168.

By the way, I’m pretty sure that both of the photos on that page are from the DuMont Network’s 1951 programming guide, and that everything on that page of my guide was made up as a ruse to get people interested in local primaries.

Update: Here’s a short video illustrating some of Goodspaceguy’s beliefs:

You win this round, Hollywood.

I’m in LA staying with my cousins who have graciously offered me room and board during my effort to get myself on a game show.

I came down here to audition for Temptation, a new game show that is ostensibly a remake of the classic game show $ale of the Century. I thought I had everything settled for a 6:00 PM audition at the Woodland Hills Marriott, so I left my cousins’ house in Beverly Glen at 4:00 PM for what Google Maps considers a “20-minute drive” to the hotel. Fifty minutes later I arrive blissfully early… except the Marriott shows no signs that Temptation has booked any sort of room for auditions.

“They were here last week,” says a front desk clerk after checking with the management, “but they’re not here today.”

Well, shoot. I came down all this way for nothing?! I decide to start making some phone calls to find out what’s going on here. The sympathetic front desk staff issue me a special pass to use the business center so I could pull up the exact e-mail message with the hotel’s address. I find a phone number for Temptation’s casting office, call it, and get the voice mail for some guy who is clearly not in his office at 5:15 PM.

It is at this point that I thank God I work for Amazon. See, Amazon owns IMDb, and IMDb has a special service called IMDbPro that’s intended for industry professionals. IMDbPro, I remember, has phone numbers of studios for each movie and TV studio. The receptionist at Fox, in the 323 area code, doesn’t know anything about Temptation, and since I (perhaps incorrectly) refer to it as “in development,” she claims that Fox wouldn’t have an office for it yet. The second phone number, in the 818 area code, goes to Fremantle Media, who is in charge of distributing Temptation. A receptionist there gives me a third phone number, this one back in area code 323, that should give me more information. I call this number.

Turns out that Temptation auditions are going on at 6:00 PM, but not at the Woodland Hills Marriott. They’re at the Beverly Garland Holiday Inn, at 4222 Vineland Avenue in North Hollywood. Google Maps puts the distance between the two at 14.8 miles. It’s 5:37 PM, right in the middle of LA’s rush hour, and I’m sitting in front of a computer praying for someone to invent a teleporter. I ask the representative to let the casting person know I’m going to be late. He obliges.

Sandie, my cousin, is an expert at avoiding LA traffic jams, but even she is at a loss as to how I can get across the valley with any possible speed at this hour of day. She recommends Burbank Boulevard, which forks off Ventura about three miles east of the hotel. After fumbling with my phone-based GPS, which is woefully bad at avoiding the jammed-up Ventura Freeway, I pull over and plot out the map on my ridiculously-comprehensive Thomas Guide, which has enough detail on Los Angeles County to plan a military strike. Burbank Boulevard is remarkably clear at this time of day, and with a little coaxing my GPS brings me over to the hotel as fast as possible.

It’s 6:50 PM. I’m a little bit late. A few other latecomers have also shown up, and we’re escorted from the ballroom (where many people are discussing the quiz they just received, forcing me to un-hear their comments) to a separate room. We are given a 15-question oral quiz of which no fewer than five questions concern stuff we might have seen on television recently. I really should watch more commercials and entertainment shows, since I’m sure I flubbed a couple of the more recent ones. After the quiz is over we’re brought back to the ballroom where the pilot screening is underway on an entirely-too-small screen. While watching clips of a show graphically similar to the Australian Temptation (which has already proven successful) I fill out the rest of my contestant bio and I sign the various waivers. This is clearly a show more about shopping than about anything else. Instead of being asked to provide a humorous anecdote about myself, I am instead asked to provide a funny story about myself that involves shopping. Dumbfounded, I write about something very silly that happened when I was at Nordstrom last week. The other personal questions are equally dull, and they all have to do with shopping: What kind of shopper are you? What do you love most about shopping? Which of these products would you be excited to receive?

I should note that the casting people repeatedly point out that this is a “cast show.” They’re not looking for people who are trivia buffs; they want people who are exciting, who love to shop, and who can be amusing on camera. Eventually, after a brief Q&A session (actual question: “Are you stalling right now?”) several of the 52 people in attendance are named to play sample games of Temptation in threes. My number, #52, is not called. We’re told that they will hang on to our bios and that we might get a call in the future, but I’m not holding out hope. It’s 8:00 PM and I am thoroughly drained. I grab a sandwich and head back to Sandie’s.

Bonus coverage: As a longtime fan of the ‘80s-era $ale of the Century, I am disappointed with the pilot of Temptation. Hosted by Arkansas football star and Temptation Island contestant Rossi Morreale, Temptation has two elements that make it far, far worse than either the ‘80s-era US version or the current Australian version (which I’ve only seen in bits and pieces on YouTube).

Showstopper #1: You, the viewer, can buy the products that are given away to contestants. Most daytime game shows, especially the venerable Price is Right, contain thinly-veiled advertisements for their sponsors. Temptation takes the veil away entirely. Example commercial bumper: “The robe you saw our spokesmodel wearing normally sells for $147. If you order today, it’s yours for only $89! Go to (our web site) and enter deal number 5234.” That’s not a commercial bumper; that’s home shopping. It looks unconscionably cheap even by game show standards.

Showstopper #2: No more speed round. In my opinion, this was the best part of the ‘80s show, and it’s still being used on the Australian show. The speed round, also called “fast money,” is a 60-second round where questions are worth $5 for a right answer and negative $5 for a wrong answer. It could decide a close game on the very last question. Jim Perry made many a speed round extremely exciting. Apparently Rossi can’t read questions fast enough to make the speed round worthwhile, since instead we have one of the lamest devices ever for a pivotal show moment: the Randomizer. Five questions are asked, but their dollar values aren’t known until the contestant buzzes in. On the pilot, for example, the trailing contestants don’t know whether the last question will let them catch up until they buzz in—and when they do buzz in, there’s a chance for a painfully anticlimactic moment. This really cements that Temptation is no more a quiz show than Press Your Luck was.

I’ve still got three-plus days left in my LA trip. Now that this craziness is behind me, I can spend the rest of the weekend having fun!