According to the Seattle PI

Beginning next month, Washington residents who play poker or make other types of wagers on the Internet will be committing a Class C felony, equivalent under the law to possessing child pornography, threatening the governor or torturing an animal.

I've never been to a concert at the Gorge before, but I'd heard about the multi-day camping/concert experience, and have always wanted to go. This year, a bunch of us decided to go to Saturday's Sasquatch festival, stay overnight, and come back Sunday. What an experience it was.

The day started early and rainy in Seattle. After driving for nearly an hour, I realized that I didn't have my ticket. Luckily, the nice people I was with turned around (instead of kicking me out of the car), and John met us at exit 8 on I-90 where we did a quick exchange. Back on the road.

Once we got to the Gorge, and settled into our campsite (which Oya and crew had to defend until we arrived), we did some barbequing, and got ready for a nice afternoon of music.

Once at the concert, we found a nice spot, and settled down.


But soon the black clouds that were once off in the distance started rolling in,

and it started a light rain. Luckily some of us had cover.

But nothing helped when the rain turned into hail. Some struggled to put on pants,

while others screamed at the weather gods.

But the pellets kept coming down, and it hurt when it hit you.

This was the aftermath.

A lot of people left, but some of the hardcore stuck around, and waited for the Hip

The morning after, as we got ready to leave, we noticed that a lot of people were getting stuck

because of the mud.

But we made it out without a scratch, and thanks to that dude in the shorts who gave us a good push, we owe you a beer.

More pictures here.

As the Oilers get closer to the Stanley Cup finals, Edmonton bars fear they'll run out of beer.

Ever want to see the political contributions of people in your area?

Use this google maps app. Looks like my upstairs neighbour gave some money to Kerry.

There were a couple of stealth launches on the Amazon.com site today. One is Amazon Upgrade, and another is YourMediaLibrary (an updated version of digital locker).

From Amazon Upgrade, you can view books you've purchased from Amazon (that are also in the Search Inside the Book program) online - for a relatively small fee (usually $1-$2). There is also a pretty cool AJAX online reader that allows you to search, annotate, tag, view other public annotations, bookmark, copy/paste, and print. You can get a look and feel for the reader by going to any SITB'able book (like this one), and searching for a term (by hovering over the image).

The media library pretty much consolidates all the media you've ever bought at Amazon.com, as well as some product manuals for non-media products. The coolest new feature is the ability to search inside ONLY the books you own (and are in the SITB program). This is an awesome feature, especially for technical books, or if you're looking for a specific quote but don't remember which book it was from.

Just saw this today, a 3rd party app that communicates with Amazon's S3 to store and backup data. I'm going to try this out in the next couple of days.

Klingon is not on the Unicode roadmap.

I've only been Milan once, for about half a day, and the only thing I did was see this church, and eat some gelato. Apparently, I missed out on the Gray Hotel.

Exerpt from Tuesday's Daily Show with Jason Jones (interviewer), and Ron Oplinus (Minuteman volunteer).

JJ: Just like the Mexicans, the Canadois are sneaking into America by the bazillions.
RO: Whether it's a Canadian citizen who wants better medical care, or they go to the emergency room, you and I pay for it.
JJ: I don't want Jonny Canuck's triple bypass coming out of my pocket.
RO: not only that, the illegals coming into the country bring with them tuberculosis, leprosy, and other diseases that were basically eradicated in this country.

From the UW daily bulletin:

The US state department published the proposal in the Federal Register on April 7. It has to do with the "training" category of the J-1 visa that allows admission to the US as an "exchange visitor". As proposed, that category would be altered to apply only to those with three years of experience, and a new category of "intern" would be introduced that would apply only to those with a degree and in their first year post-graduation. Without these categories, the only remaining J-1 visa categories under which co-op students could work in the US would be the "Summer Work-Travel" category (valid for the spring term only) and the "Research Scholar" category (valid for research jobs in post-secondary institutions or research facilities).

Emphasis mine.

A New Zealand pizza chain has an interesting box that folds up into a coffin for the remains.

So I was in Banff for the last five days, and did some pretty decent spring boarding at Sunshine.

Wednesday (late) morning, we drove to Abbotsford (getting directions along the way via Matt's phone), and flew to Calgary, catching some hockey on the plane. At the Calgary airport, we met up with the Gord's group, and took the Rocky Mountain shuttle to the Banff Park Lodge, right in the middle of Banff.

The first three days were very hot, and the snow pretty slushy. In fact, on the third day, the temperature gauge read 22 degrees celcius at the lift. We saw some young kids skiing with their shirts off, and some people in shorts. But that night, it started raining, and turned into snow. The next day, there was some fresh tracks, and the snow was pretty great (even though we didn't get to the hill til noon). We also met up with Nic, who's been working in Banff for the last three years!! How did we not know this?

So, after much boarding, and much partying (I'm just realizing how expensive it is to drink in Canada, with the current exchange rate, and the single-shot pour), I'm now back in Seattle, working to pay off my vacation.

Pictures here.