2 for Tuesday

A couple more pics, for the enjoyment of my vast global audience out there on the interwebs. I've been busy in RL today, tracking down a fun sockets + threads + memory leakage bug, so I haven't had much time to think about blogging.

You probably won't care about this, but my job has been made immeasurably more difficult because the Beast of Redmond tweaked Windows' debug symbol format as part of the move to WinXP & Visual Studio.NET, so if you're still standardized on VC6 (as I sadly am), and you're hoping to get meaningful stack trace info when your app blows chunks, well, sorry sucka, you're just plain out of luck. Bastards.

I mention that mostly to explain why I don't have any topics prepared today. Fortunately I do have a couple of decent photos I figured people might enjoy. I say fortunately because blogging is a great way to relax while you're sitting around waiting for your stupid program to crash again.

So the top photo is of an interesting flower I ran across on my way to work this morning. Don't ask me what it is, though, because I have absolutely no idea.



This is a "clever" shot of the bamboo outside the trendy Saucebox restaurant (also see here), in downtown PDX.

I was planning to go take some pics of the ridiculous palm trees they're planting on Davis and Flanders between 3rd and 4th, over in our city's tiny, crime-ridden "Chinatown". I keep meaning to do that, because it just looks so damn silly having palm trees here. Maybe I'll hold off and wait until November. I imagine the poor stubby little things will look really sad and pathetic during one of our chilly autumn downpours. We're told they're called Chinese Windmill Palms, and they're supposed to be able to survive in our climate, so far as anybody knows. Yes, this is another bright idea from the PDC. The idea is they're creating "festival streets", so the neighborhood's colorful ethnic folk can have their street fairs and such. As it turns out, the actual Chinese population of "Chinatown" is basically zero, and has been for several decades now. The city keeps trying to cajole people into living here, an effort that mostly involves adding one taxpayer-subsidized piece of tourist eye candy after another to the area, while doing nothing about stuff like, I dunno, crime, jobs, or housing, stuff like that. The result is sort of like Disneyland with crack dealers. Understandably, despite the city's "best" efforts, people keep moving to the 'burbs, or at least out to the area around 82nd Avenue. Sure is weird how some people refuse to follow the plan. What's the city going to do next, put up a wall to keep people in?

Maybe the PDC's just trying to atone for having bulldozed most of the city's other ethnic neighborhoods back in the 60's, or maybe they're trying to make the area attractive for the million-dollar-loft crowd, since the so-called "Asian influence" look has been awfully trendy the last few years. The look they insist on calling "Zen", as far as I can tell, is just a simple matter of not having any furniture and pretending you like it that way. Developers love this look, because it means they can make the condos extremely tiny, and sell them for triple the normal price.


Oh, lookee. My app just crashed again. Oh, well, back to the ol' salt mine. Happy, happy, happy, joy, joy, joy....