Joe.
He sure loves nonparametric modeling.
And Boddingtons.
Showing posts with label seattle. Show all posts
Showing posts with label seattle. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
11 April 2010: Seattle, Bill's Brunch
AJ: went on a roadtrip with Bill down to Mexico, and continued down Central America to Costa Rica, where he helped his friends set up an organic farm. Out of work architect, thinking about starting a dog toy business.
Matt: drunk from the party the night before, got on a bike and decided that he didn't want to go home but wanted to get laid. Rode around looking for a party (bound to have girls, right?), heard commotion coming from a house with a 50-something year old man sitting outside it. Asked, "Can I come in? I have a beer." Presented the beer. Man nodded approvingly. Walked in, everyone was middle-aged. Sat down and played the bongos for them.
Spike: works for Amazon.com. His girlfriend Sara looks a bit like Mel from Flight of the Conchords. Used to work in cloud computing but now works on discussion boards, trying to write programs to automatically remove bad posts. I asked him about any interesting books or discussion boards, and he brought up Anita Blake, this character who has to have sex with as many werewolves and vampires as she can or else she'll die. People can discuss all the details of the books, but he has to remove all posts about the author's personal life, apparently. Apparently, Spike's dad was way into mushrooms and believes that some of the hallucinations he saw while high were signs from divinity. Spike is atheist.
Brad: tall, friendly, boisterous Navy guy. I wanted to high five him the entire time. Kept forgetting pear-shaped girl's and Jim's names, to their chagrin. I chortled in my head.
That one girl who kept playing crappy techno music and dancing with no shoes on. That's all I remember about her.
Matt: drunk from the party the night before, got on a bike and decided that he didn't want to go home but wanted to get laid. Rode around looking for a party (bound to have girls, right?), heard commotion coming from a house with a 50-something year old man sitting outside it. Asked, "Can I come in? I have a beer." Presented the beer. Man nodded approvingly. Walked in, everyone was middle-aged. Sat down and played the bongos for them.
Spike: works for Amazon.com. His girlfriend Sara looks a bit like Mel from Flight of the Conchords. Used to work in cloud computing but now works on discussion boards, trying to write programs to automatically remove bad posts. I asked him about any interesting books or discussion boards, and he brought up Anita Blake, this character who has to have sex with as many werewolves and vampires as she can or else she'll die. People can discuss all the details of the books, but he has to remove all posts about the author's personal life, apparently. Apparently, Spike's dad was way into mushrooms and believes that some of the hallucinations he saw while high were signs from divinity. Spike is atheist.
Brad: tall, friendly, boisterous Navy guy. I wanted to high five him the entire time. Kept forgetting pear-shaped girl's and Jim's names, to their chagrin. I chortled in my head.
That one girl who kept playing crappy techno music and dancing with no shoes on. That's all I remember about her.
10 April 2010: Seattle, Bill's Friend's Party
Note to self: Missoula, MT is supposed to be cool?
So said the pear-shaped softball coach with stringy & wavy, black-dyed hair (she grew up there).
And so agreed Jim (?), the hobbit-like former Microsoft employee (hard times!) now considering returning to school for medicine or the culinary arts.
Which was enthusiastically confirmed by Justin (?), the political campaigner from Syracuse who once worked on Capitol Hill but made his way through Montana and now lives in Seattle. He bought an outdoorsy vest to fit in with the Pacific Northwesterners.
So said the pear-shaped softball coach with stringy & wavy, black-dyed hair (she grew up there).
And so agreed Jim (?), the hobbit-like former Microsoft employee (hard times!) now considering returning to school for medicine or the culinary arts.
Which was enthusiastically confirmed by Justin (?), the political campaigner from Syracuse who once worked on Capitol Hill but made his way through Montana and now lives in Seattle. He bought an outdoorsy vest to fit in with the Pacific Northwesterners.
10 April 2010: PDX -> SEA
Matt. Fresh-faced, curly blonde hair, baseball cap, smelled like last night's beer and cigarettes. Cargo pants, heather grey gym T-shirt. 26. Thought I was 30 (damn it!).
I had intended to read Out during the train ride, but we started talking because we wanted to look out the window, but we were in an awkward row that faced the space between windows. We cleverly finagled the drapes, voila, kept talking.
Matt is from a suburb of Detroit and went to school in the Upper Peninsula, majoring in outdoor recreation (I was not aware of this major's existence). His mother is a nurse in OB/GYN and hearts delivering babies. He moved out to Oregon after he and his girlfriend of 8 years broke up; she moved to Boston, and he wanted to physically get as far as possible from her within the continental United States.
He eventually moved up to Washington state (working in Olympic National Park), and from there to Alaska, where the job he thought he had secured fell through. After venting at a bar, the bartender hooked him up with her husband's work in fishery. He has been counting salmon 7 months out of a year for 4 years ever since, from 5:30am to 9pm. His company is his iPod (on it? "indie" rock).
He really loves the town he works in, which has about 1,500 people. He says, because it's so small, everyone is held accountable. The whole town relies on the fishing industry, and everyone knows and respects each other. Surprisingly, it's a democratic town.
For the other 5 months out of the year, he does impulsive things, like follow a girl he slept with for less than 2 weeks to Athens, GA, where he found temp work in the botanical garden and decided that he hates her. He stayed there for about two months before traveling back West, slowly making his way back up to Alaska for the start of the season.
Matt wants to get a graduate degree someday. Sees himself counting salmon for at most another 4 years. Hopes to move down to Hawaii. In the meantime, he's delicately dodging his Inuit friend's handsome sister's sexual advances.
I had intended to read Out during the train ride, but we started talking because we wanted to look out the window, but we were in an awkward row that faced the space between windows. We cleverly finagled the drapes, voila, kept talking.
Matt is from a suburb of Detroit and went to school in the Upper Peninsula, majoring in outdoor recreation (I was not aware of this major's existence). His mother is a nurse in OB/GYN and hearts delivering babies. He moved out to Oregon after he and his girlfriend of 8 years broke up; she moved to Boston, and he wanted to physically get as far as possible from her within the continental United States.
He eventually moved up to Washington state (working in Olympic National Park), and from there to Alaska, where the job he thought he had secured fell through. After venting at a bar, the bartender hooked him up with her husband's work in fishery. He has been counting salmon 7 months out of a year for 4 years ever since, from 5:30am to 9pm. His company is his iPod (on it? "indie" rock).
He really loves the town he works in, which has about 1,500 people. He says, because it's so small, everyone is held accountable. The whole town relies on the fishing industry, and everyone knows and respects each other. Surprisingly, it's a democratic town.
For the other 5 months out of the year, he does impulsive things, like follow a girl he slept with for less than 2 weeks to Athens, GA, where he found temp work in the botanical garden and decided that he hates her. He stayed there for about two months before traveling back West, slowly making his way back up to Alaska for the start of the season.
Matt wants to get a graduate degree someday. Sees himself counting salmon for at most another 4 years. Hopes to move down to Hawaii. In the meantime, he's delicately dodging his Inuit friend's handsome sister's sexual advances.
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