________ ________ ________ 2018-04-28 / \/ \/ / \ / __/ /_ _/ This past Thursday, wife and I cruised / _/ / / into Seattle to goof off around the SoDo \_______/_\___/____/\___/____/_ district - we had three things on our / \/ \/ / \ agenda; a sandwich at the sketchy Subway, / _/ /_ _/ antiquing at Pacific Galleries and visiting /- / _/ / the Living Computer Museum + Labs to geek \________/\________/\___/____/ out and see Jason Scott's keynote for their PreserveIT! event. The sketchy Subway was the sketchy Subway, we ended up there last time we were here, just by accident, and we went back this time. It's just a regular subway but kinda sketchy clientele. American Subway still does flat bread and roasted chicken, both had been removed from Australian stores because Australia is ridiculous. They basically robbed me of my order! American Subway also has ranch and pepperoncini, we have neither of these things and are poorer for it. Wait, why am I still writing about Subway. Pacific Galleries is amazing, it's a huge warehouse sized antiques mall. Another thing we found by accident last time we were here, we just drove past it and thought "that looks neat" and neat is right, it's so great. Crammed full of some really wild odds and ends. We'll have to go back because we'd forgotten just how big it was and didn't give ourselves enough time to get through the whole store. Did see some really neat stuff though, unfortunately it was mostly big neat stuff so I'll have to let it go, at least for now. They had a pair of beautiful vine-like wrought iron stair ends, salvaged from a demolished hotel, I'd love to repurpose them for the front stairs of a house or flanking a front gate. So perfect. Everything was really well priced too, they had a pair of white wingback chairs in beautiful condition and were asking $1,300 each for them - in Australia you'd be looking at $3,000 per chair at least for something like that. Like I mentioned above, we only had an hour to spend there so had to bail half way through the mall. If we get the chance to go back I might make another entry on our subsequent visit. We split from the antique mall and got to the LCM+L a little later than I'd hoped because we went a round-about way so only had about 40 minutes in the Vintage Collection upstairs before they closed it up so we scooted up there for a look around and it's looking so good, wow. I've been to the museum every time I've come to the States and it just gets better and better. I love the new open workshop area with the piles of bits and pieces, I just wanted to go combing through it all! There seems to be less stuff upstairs now but they've laid it out so it feels like there's more, it's really nice. Downstairs though, that was a real treat. Last time we were here was July 2016 and the whole downstairs area was still boarded up and under construction so this is my first time seeing it and maaaan I loved it. It's got a real focus on education and interactivity, a bunch of stuff on robotics and some VR, it was super cool and I really want to drag my nephew here. I had a lot of fun dorking around with the telepresence robot but what really stole the show for me is their Totally 80s Rewind exhibit. It was so perfectly executed. The exhibit is broken down into three rooms; a school computer lab equipped with Apple IIe computers, an arcade and a basement hangout, essentially following the path of an average 80s teenager on an average 80s day. They nailed all three rooms and the attention to detail is amazing. The classroom has an old school overhead projector, with a lesson in BASIC programming up, and of course every machine was working so you could do the lesson or just fiddle. To one side was a bunch of lockers with theme- appropriate junk, including a Cyndi Lauper tape obviously. The arcade had a token vending machine rather than just putting the machines on free play which I thought was a really neat, authentic touch. All the games worked and were originals or replicas, no generic MAME cabs. It also had a working payphone, attached to the SDF VoIP system. I took a call from my sister in Australia on it! The basement room was even better. Ancient sofa, CRT TV, Atari and NES (Although weirdly the top-loader, the one piece that really felt out of place), desk phone (some kind of Model 2500 I think, also working thanks to the SDF VoIP) and a TRS-80. It was really great, if you recall way back in July last year I posted a file[1] about a place called Forgotten Worlds, the basement room reminded me a lot of the back room in there. It was so comfy. Highly recommend if you're around the area to check it out, it's open until the end of the year, I think. Lastly was the keynote from Jason Scott and, if you're familiar with him it was exactly what you'd expect from him; the value in archiving everything, archiving in practice and the limitations and risks in doing so. The tour of the Internet Archive was really good, I hadn't heard of The David W. Niven Collection of Early Jazz Legends[2] before and that it exists is really interesting. I also didn't know much of how the Archive started so it was nice to hear him talk on that. If you aren't familiar with him, he's the guy behind textfiles.com and BBS: The Documentary and prolific speaker. There were one or two people in the crowd I recognized but I never worked up the nerve to say "Hi" unfortunately, but that's ok. The crowd was actually smaller than what I would have expected, especially for a free event with food and drinks. Father-in-law says it's probably because it was a Thursday night and that is pretty interesting to me, if true. Melbourne's weekend starts Thursday night, even for computer nerds. A similar event there would have been a full house, although likely there'd be a high ratio of hipster looky-loos. After the keynote finished I bailed Jason Scott up to introduce myself but ended up fangirling a bit about what an inspiration he is, etc, and told him about the Otarchive project. I immediately regretted that because I haven't scanned in anything new in well over a year so, but at least I feel re- energised to tackle it. We'll see if I still feel that way when I get back home, I suppose. [1] gopher://baud.baby/0/phlog/fs20170704.txt [2] https://archive.org/details/davidwnivenjazz EOF