Touring Seattle and Microsoft…
So, as aforementioned, I was over at Seattle for about 24 hours from the 15th to the 16th. The flight was fairly uneventful…I guess. There were some kids in the row in front of me when I was flying from Toronto to San Francisco which got a little rowdy at times, but oh well.
So the first thing we did after I met up with Jacky and Mark was to go out for some chow. Being the genius I am, I obviously did not take any photos. Let me tell you though, it was some good curry, yes sir it was.
Afterwards, we went (south?) to Pike Place Market where we strolled around both inside and outside. I bought some souvenirs there but when I got back here at Waterloo I realized I was missing one. I don’t know if I dropped it or the guy ripped me off. But anyway, it also started to rain a little but it stopped very quickly soon after. I guess that’s what Seattle weather is like. You can see the original Starbucks coffee shop in the second photo below.
Next, we went to Kerry Park…which wasn’t really much of a park, it was more of a…place with a good view? I don’t know what that half-assed basketball court was, but anyway…
After that, we went over to Discovery Park. Their road signs were not exactly very good but that’s okay, we found the beach at the end anyway. I’ll admit that wasn’t the trail we were planning to go on initially, but whatever. Jacky and Mark skipped stones while I watched.
We also found a dead crab. And we also found several crab limbs a couple of metres away from said body. I don’t know if they’re all from the same crab, but anyway…
This one bird caught some food and before we knew it, two others were hot on its trail.
We went to Kinokuniya after this where I picked up some 「ああっ女神さまっ」 and 「ハヤテのごとく!」 manga along with two Final Fantasy XII posters. I also picked up two Kingdom Hearts posters which will compensate for the fact that I’m missing a souvenir. It works out, it just means that Kitty will be getting one souvenir instead of the original two.
Our next stop was Bellevue. We went up Lincoln Square where Microsoft’s cafeteria was and took some drinks (which were free like IBM’s) while waiting for the time to pass due to the absurd line that was at the Cheesecake Factory.
We didn’t get any photos of our food but we snapped one of our cheesecakes.
After that, it was time to bust into Microsoft’s offices to take a peek at Microsoft Surface. We found a bug while we were playing around with it and promptly submitted it through the feedback submission interface that was in the system. I hope they get it resolved before its release!
The puzzle we are playing here was quite cool as the original image is actually a video. So as we are trying to align the squares together, that portion of the video is playing within each square. This makes the ordeal take a little bit more time than usual since the image is moving as you are trying to merge it together which makes it a little annoying since things that look like they match might not actually match.
And that was really pretty much the last thing we did on the 15th. We drove back to where Jacky and Mark lived (which is quite a mansion I must say) to wind down. We played a bit of Mario Kart on the DS before retiring to bed. Here you can see my crap is all over their house. Of course, due to its awesome size, it didn’t really cover that much area.
The next day, we sat around a bit before heading off to the airport. After getting my boarding pass, we had some food and played some Brain Age 2 to kill the time before I had to pass the security gates to get on my flight to Santa Clara for EclipseCon.
It wasn’t a very long stay but I definitely had a blast. Thanks, Jacky and Mark!