On January 30, 2009, I headed out to Seattle, Washington. I had a short layover in the Denver airport, where I encountered this statue of Jack Swigert, an Apollo XIII astronaut.
You can read about him here. Apparently, I didn't have to travel this far to see this statue since it is an exact replica of one in the U.S. Capitol.
This is the plane I flew in on. It is a Boeing 777-222ER. I can't remember the last time I flew on a plane like this. Usually they are the planes used for international flights. This plane could fly non-stop from London to Los Angeles, but I flew it from Dulles to Denver.
The engines on this plane are ridiculous. The technical specs for the plane say they will generate 90,000 pounds of thrust each. The engines on a 747 generate roughly 60,000 pounds of thrust. Of course, a 747 has four of them.
The tower at the Denver airport.
I once again stayed at the Seattle Grand Hyatt. It was great, as usual. This is the view out my window to the right.
Straight out my window was this apartment building.
The view to the left.
The view even further to the left, where you can see water between these two buildings.
Once again, I was in Seattle to help support registration, this time for TechReady8.
One night after work I went to the Space Needle.
This is a view of downtown from the observation deck of the Space Needle. The restaurant was closed for renovations.
Here it is with a little bit longer exposure time. I am having some trouble taking landscape-mode pictures with my camera. Things are coming out a little blurry. These might have come out blurry anyway, just because of the long exposure time. But I was using my tripod!
Here's the view to the right.
And here's the view to the left.
They're building something here. It looks like it is going to be pretty big. But right now it is just a big hole in the ground.
Testing out the zoom feature of my camera. This is a globe, presumably on top of the offices of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. By the time TechReady9 comes to town, this globe will likely be dark because the paper is going to be shut down unless a buyer can be found, which is reported as unlikely.
Accompanying me on my trip up to the space needle were Anthony, on the left, and Raf, on the right.
Oops. At least I didn't drop the camera or my tripod off of the Space Needle.
One last picture of the Seattle skyline.
Space Chess, found in the gift shop of the Space Needle.
I checked my bag at the airport and then wandered off onto the top of the parking deck to take this picture of Mt. Rainier. When it goes boom, Seattle goes bye-bye.
On my way back home from work, I decided to make a pit stop in California to visit my little brother. This is my plane waiting to depart at the Seattle-Tacoma airport.
Well, OK, that wasn't it. This is it. Alaska Airlines is cheap to fly from Seattle to San Jose, which is what I wanted to do.
This is the apartment building where my brother Nathan lives in Palo Alto.
It has a nice fountain.
And a nice courtyard, although it was a little too cool to be hanging out in the courtyard.
Here's his kitchen. I kind of took over and wrecked the rest of his apartment, so I decided not to take pictures of it. But he also has a nice big comfy sofa, which is where I camped out for a few days.
I didn't take many pictures this trip. This was the last full day I was in Palo Alto. It rained! Hard! Or at least hard for Palo Alto. The next day it cleared up a little bit. The weather in Hagerstown was a little better on this day. But weather in Palo Alto will be nicer sooner than here.
That wraps up my trip to Seattle and Palo Alto. This is a picture of a new Blend Air Door Actuator for my 1999 Dodge Intrepid ES with ATC. It has absolutely nothing to do with my trip, but eventually I will post a blog with pictures of the old one, which will illustrate why I have a new one. Replacing this part is ridiculously hard, and I haven't quite managed it yet, but at least the engineers cut me a break and made it so that I don't have to tear out the entire air conditioning system to replace it. But this is a story for another blog.
Saturday, February 14, 2009
Category: Life
