You’ll have to give me a break on photo quality for this one – it’s hard getting something good through the foggy glass of a plane window.

This is Mount Rainier, the tallest mountain in Washington state and the Cascade mountain range, and also one of the most dangerous volcanoes in the world. It’s on the list of Decade Volcanoes thanks to its history of large, destructive eruptions and near proximity to a dense populzation zone. Wikipedia almost notes that it’s the most topologically prominent peak in the contiguous US, dwarfing everything else around it and having quite a striking effect on the eye.

I just landed in Seattle. It’s colder than expected. Like colder than it rightfully should be in any west coast city. Luckily, I learned from my mistake in New York and came equipped with a variety of cold weather gear this time around. I haven’t had a chance to do much yet besides check into my hotel and head over to the flagship Amazon Go store, which was quite busy, but appeared to be about 5% shoppers, and 95% senior Amazon staff chatting in small circles, lauding each other on their own ingenuity. Still, it was nice seeing a downtown that’d regained some of its lost vibrancy.

I got a coffee, along with a note saying that Amazon is “working on my receipt”, but nothing since. I suspect it might be a Mechanical Turk who ends up piecing together my bill from video rather than the finely tuned neural nets of a hyper-sophisticated ML cluster, but I might be a cynic. On my way out, someone handed me a free banana from a cart parked next to a geodesic dome.

Last weekend I wrote a Spring ‘83 key generator, and on the flight got maybe halfway to a working server implementation. Tomorrow, more Seattle, more Spring ‘83, and work time spent on SSO and polish on a forthcoming metrics product for Bridge.