Sleepless in Seattle: Part One

So this Easter weekend, me and my girlfriend had a little road trip down to Seattle. The trip had been in the works for a while, but with a little luck in terms of work load and some inspiration provided by Departures, we finally committed less than a week before Good Friday. Apart from the 4 hour wait getting into the States, and the strangely windy and cold weather, it was a very enjoyable and much needed trip.  I’ll post some of my thoughts on the attractions we went to in this post, and touch on accommodation, food and my budget in subsequent posts.

April Fool’s 2010

Here are some April Fool’s jokes around the web this year:

Youtube -  launched its text-only TEXTp format which apparently saves them $1/sec in bandwidth costs.

Gotta Catch ‘em All!

Here’s a fun post in light of April’s Fools: My top 6 pokemon (of the original 150 of course).

After extensive recent debate, discussion and thought…here is the party of 6 pokemon I would carry around Kanto:

pCubee

Does this little cube reveal what’s upcoming in 3D technology (which has been all the rage these days)? This impressive piece of technology was designed right here at UBC, and was recently showcased on Wired and Daily Planet. It takes advantage of motion parallax instead of stereoscopy, so it doesn’t require any stylish glasses. You can even use a stylus to interact with the virtual objects in the cube. Currently the designers are working to get it commercialized, but personally I think they should work on renaming it first. Pretty neat concept with many potential applications though.

Departures Season 1 Review

Departures is a small travel show with a small budget, yet is just incredibly inspiring. Just to give you an idea of how much I like it, I started the first season late Tuesday night and finished the season this afternoon, that’s 13 hours of Departures in less than 48 hours. The show is about 3 Canadian friends (Scott Wilson, Justin Lukach, Andre Dupuis the cameraman) leaving their mundane and routine lives behind and traveling the world for an entire year.

New Zealand, taken from departuresentertainment.com

Ever wonder how a real life assassination takes place?

The video is a few months old but it shows the Israeli secret service (Mossad) taking out a top Hamas leader in Dubai. Not as exciting as 24 or 007, but proof that these kinds of things don’t only happen in movies.

Continuing on the Israel story, the UK expelled an Israeli diplomat today for the use of forged UK passports by the assassins. That’s just like using one of your best friend’s credit cards to buy a gun to murder someone.  Meanwhile, Netanyahu met with Obama in a closed media meeting. He also managed to blame the Palestinians for freezing the peace talks because their demands to stop building settlements in East Jerusalem were unfair. Israel isn’t very good at making friends right now. Though I am slightly sympathetic for Netanyahu’s position right now, having to choose between domestic political suicide or damaging relations and friendships abroad. It’s a lose-lose situation.

Netanyahu Takes a Stand

“The Jewish people were building Jerusalem 3000 years ago, and the Jewish people are building it today.” – Netanyahu

Interesting developments at AIPAC in Washington tonight as Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu takes a firm stand in defending the rights to build settlements in Eastern Jerusalem.  The speech came just hours after Hillary Clinton directly warned Israel about continued settlement building.  I’m a bit surprised that Netanyahu has taken such an uncompromising stance, directly defying the Americans. If I was in the Obama administration, I would be pretty annoyed. Netanyahu doesn’t seem too concerned about the deteriorating status of US-Israeli relations nor does he show any urgency in continuing peace talks. While he did call for a 2 state solution and for the Palestinians to come back to the table, everyone knows that such a firm stance means nothing but a continued freeze in the peace talks.

Netanyahu meets with Obama tomorrow. It will be interesting to see what this meeting will lead to.

Watch the speech here.