After a year of being in Spokane full-time, I’ve decided to re-establish a residence in Seattle so that I can be closer to my business partners and work with them in person more often. That’s not to say that I will be leaving Spokane behind. In fact, I will keep my primary residence in Spokane. I found a nice little furnished cottage to rent in the Greenlake neighborhood of Seattle. Yay! No more apartments. At some point, I plan to buy a house in Seattle or a live-aboard boat.
If you care about the environment and oil independence, you might want to think twice about supporting John McCain’s pick for VP, Sarah Palin. She supports drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge:
We have just launched a new trivia game site, paydaytrivia.com. This new site is a trivia gaming site which allows a user to answer trivia questions to earn points, which can then be used to spin the wheel to win cash. These are some of the trivia games we have on the site:
My previous car, a 1999 Nissan Altima, had given me 9 years of reliable service, but it was time to upgrade to a newer car with all-wheel drive. Last winter’s storms had made it difficult to get around with a conventional front-wheel drive vehicle. Enter the 2008 Subaru Outback. Now I’m sure I’m going to hear ridiculous comments such as, “Isn’t that a lesbian car?” or “Why would a single guy own a station wagon?”, but the truth is this car is more suited to my lifestyle and living in the Pacific Northwest. It has the all-wheel drive, Vehicle Dynamics Control (VDC), lots of cargo room for camping gear, and roof racks for kayaks and bikes. Plus, it has leather seats and a moonroof.
I recently came across a problem. I was really in need of consulting with a qualified PHP/MySQL developer close to home to discuss a problem that I needed to solve. I only know of one in the area and it got me thinking about where these mid-career professionals might be. Did these qualified developers leave the area?
So I started thinking about salaries. The bulk of my work comes from Seattle, so for me personally this is not a concern, but what about the people here who work for a Spokane-based employer? I went to payscale.com to get some salary comparisons, not just between Seattle and Spokane, but also from cities closer in population to Spokane.
When I did a search on software developer salaries between Spokane, Boise and Seattle, I found that salaries are significantly lower for software developers in Spokane. This could be why there’s few qualified software developers in the area. (more…)
Last year, I published a list of all the Gay Pride events in the Pacific Northwest and I decided to make it a tradition for 2008. So here’s the list of this year’s celebrations around the Northwest:
It sounds like the Florida senate should concentrate their efforts on more important issues, such as global warming. Hey Florida! Wake Up! Your state is going to be under water soon, and you’re worried about whether a truck has a pair of gonads hanging from the trailer hitch.
I have been looking for something to replace my old clock radio with something that would allow me to wake up to any radio station or music that I wanted. Last week, I discovered Chumby. Chumby is a small, soft-sided device device with a 3.5 inch touchscreen. It connects to my home network via wi-fi and I can listen to any streaming radio stations or listen to any songs (non-DRM tracks only) by connecting my iPod to one of the USB ports on the back. It works fairly well and can be modified because the code is open source and linux-based. Chumby has only been available to the public for a few months, so there’s a few bugs that have to be worked out, but all in all, I’m pretty pleased with this clock radio replacement.
Just when I thought every big idea had already been thought of, I come across this one: an indoor ski area with a chairlift and real snow… in Dubai. It’s called Ski Dubai and is located inside of the Mall of the Emirates in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. They actually advertise 85 meters of vertical drop (255 ft.). I’m guessing there’s no double black diamond runs at this ski “resort”. I’m also guessing they won’t be having gay ski week here, either.
