This is one of those things where I'm making a note more for my future Googling than for anyone else, but this information is not useless for other readers. One thing about going to PAX is sorting out the food situation. The conference center itself has a lot of fast food options, but A ) none of them are very appealing and B ) they are all jam-packed with PAX attendees. (I heard the Subway in the convention center ran out of bread at one point during the weekend.) There's a Daily Grill across the street from the convention center which is just pricy enough to not be swamped, but still casual enough I feel OK about going there in jeans and a t-shirt; but that only covers one meal really. The convention center is downtown, so you know there are plenty of dining options nearby but you want to identify good choices and move efficiently, right? Karin started using this site called Earthcomber.com to look for places to eat. If you go there in a regular browser it's sort of a weird site but it looks fine on an iPhone. There's a Yelp app for iPhone but A ) Yelp doesn't really work without a certain critical mass of reviews which Seattle didn't quite seem to have, and B ) it does searches centered on where you are which is usually great but sometimes you're at your hotel and searching for place for dinner and what you really want is next to the convention center. Anyway, she found two fantastic places that I can recommend for downtown Seattle. The first is a place called The Oceanaire Seafood Room on 7th Avenue, and the second was The Islander on Union Street (down by the water). The Oceanaire was almost too nice for a t-shirt and it was certainly more expensive but it was great food. In particular they served a little tray of pickled veggies and some pickled herring that I quite liked. Karin didn't even want to try it so that was just more herring for me! The Islander was a little more laid back. They had some nice tiki drinks and good polynesian-style dishes - I had a really good chicken coconut curry. The only downside to this place was we stuffed ourselves (had to get a Pu Pu Platter right?) and then had to walk like six blocks UPHILL back to our hotel. Anyway, next year I'll probably want to go to both of these places again. And skip the mediocre breakfast we had the first day in the hotel restaurant. :-)

Maybe I should dash off a quick missive to my neglected blog during my jetsetting ways. It's vacation time! Last weekend we flew up to Seattle for PAX. We came back on Monday and I had just enough time to A) write a silly little iPhone app I wanted for my next vacation and B) develop and mostly recover from some mild con-flu thingie. Tomorrow morning at stupid o'clock I'm off to the east coast for yet another Big Honkin' Road Trip with some friends. PAX was awesome as it always is. We got the new MC Frontalot album which doesn't even get released until November, got to see Jonathan Coulton and Freezepop play, saw the west coast premiere of Nerdcore Rising and generally hung out. We also managed to go check out the Experience Music Project (very meh) and the Science Fiction Hall of Fame (sadly also sort of meh). We also flew Virgin America, which truthfully I didn't care for. The seats were cramped. Jetblue has recently done this thing where you can pay extra (like $30 or so) for "Extra Leg Room" seating and that's much nicer than Virgin. They both have the screen that I don't use (do you have any idea how many video playback devices I carry for even a two hour flight? I come up with four. It's ridiculous.) and Virgin's extra interactivity seems to amount to Doom and a bunch of crappy Linux games. It was cheap and I guess it was nicer than Southwest (but not much - really I care about two things in an airline: being on time, and given me enough room to actually sit without hunching my shoulders. I felt like the VA seats were even MORE cramped than normal.) and Jetblue doesn't fly to Seattle from here. But I was surprised after all the internet gushing over Virgin Air. I'm happy to be flying Jetblue tomorrow instead of Virgin. The Virgin first class seats looked nice, but DUH! everybody's first class looks nice.