There’s another rule of thumb engineers talk about also: “Good. Fast. Cheap. Pick two.” (Meaning you can’t have everything — there’s always a compromise that has to be made with either the schedule, the budget, or the quality.)

Well, the Sky City restaurant rotates at the top of the Space Needle in Seattle, where we ate this evening. It seems to defy both rules: The view is truly magnificent yet the food was good too. I had the clam chowder followed by Dungeness crab mac and cheese, and it was sublime. The other entrees chosen by our group (my wife and my sister-in-law, plus my two kids) all seemed delicious as well, if not especially gourmet. Kimi’s crab cakes were perfect, and Tomi’s French toast with espresso creme was wonderful.

As for that second maxim: The food was good, but it wasn’t fast or cheap. The speed didn’t bother us — more time to enjoy the view. We were planning on riding up to the top of the needle regardless, and since no restaurants were open nearby on New Year’s Day, it seemed prudent to eat there.

The maxim I will pass onto my kids is this: “The better the view, the more you’ll pay for it.”

Great treat to start the new year, though! Happy New Year, Zeigen.com readers. (Both of you.)

Vvvv vvv vv, V vvvvv, vvv vvvv vvvvvv vv’vv vvvv vv vvv vv “v.”

(Click to enlarge)

In the collage, roughly from left to right:

1. Supermodel Anne V (Sports Illustrated photo), wearing a v-neck bathing suit, from her 5-year SI run.
2. Actress Morena Baccarin as Anna in the new “V” series on ABC.
3. The energy drink V.
4. XKCD illustrating Valentine’s Day (V Day). (Notice that the bottom half of a heart forms a V.)
5. The band Live’s album V.
6. V logos for Virgin brands as well as the TV series “V” look similar.
7. The annual music festival in the UK.
8. The victory gesture with 2 fingers; Churchill (his arm, at least) and Nixon are demonstrating here. Nixon is really demonstrating three Vs.
9. The graphic novel V for Vendetta, written by Alan Moore, drawn by David Lloyd, which later became a movie.
10. In the HBO series “True Blood,” adapted from the Charlaine Harris novels, vampires are known as “Vs,” and their blood is a drug known as “V” (reminiscent of “X” for ecstasy).
11. Visitors, visitors, everywhere. In addition to the current “V” series (where the Visitors are called “Vs”), there was the original two-part 1983 miniseries, a three-part 1984 miniseries, a short-lived 1984 TV series, and various novels and comics.
12. Thomas Pynchon’s first novel, V.
13. The V subway train, familiar in orange to residents of New York.
14. The Gibson Flying V, made famous by Lonnie Mack and Jimi Hendrix.
15. V Day (or V-J Day), and the world’s most famous photograph of a kiss in Times Square.

And there are probably a dozen more I could have included if I had thought of them.

When heading down Highway 17, usually I expect the least traffic at the crack of dawn or after noon. But even waiting until noon didn’t help, and it took over two hours to get there (when normally it’s about 45 minutes). The slowest traffic was on the surface streets in Santa Cruz, and even trying some offbeat routes didn’t help. We stopped downtown to eat the Walnut Street Cafe to give the tangle some time to disperse before heading to Natural Bridges. (It costs $8 to park now! How on earth can it save the state money to close these parks when they charge what should be enough to break even? I was happy to pay if it meant helping out the state during the budget crisis.)

As it turned out, we got there right after the morning fog burned off, and there was a bit of a wind, so it was a great way to cool down.

I experimented a bit with the new video feature of my new iPhone 3GS.

Now that’s after upload to YouTube, and that process seems to introduce a lot of artifacts. On the plus side, iPhone video is convenient — I will amost always be carrying my phone — and it’s not nearly as sensitive as the Flip to shake. But the brightness changes are jarring, and the overall image quality is not as good. (You can view my other video tests on my YouTube channel.)

sammy

^^^^^ Sammy typed that. Pardon the intrusion.

After the sun started to sink, we headed to the wharf for bread-bowl clam chowder and to watch the seals and sea lions and pelicans. Sheets of mist draped the pier, giving the whole scene a surreal and wonderful edge.

Armed with salt water taffy from Marini’s, we headed home at 9, and once again ran into crushing traffic. While everyone else slept in the car, I tried every trick I knew to take the non-beaten path, but wasn’t able to get home until 10:30pm.

Worth it.

This one was shot with the Mino Flip HD as well (see previous post), using the tripod. Here I have problems keeping Sammy in frame, there appear to be a couple of audio sync issues, and the low light is a little more problematic. However, for a device smaller than a pack of cards, dealing with the fact that it was dusk in a room with no lights, it’s not too bad. As I learn to use the zoom and position the thing properly, I expect the quality to improve.

We do have a video camera, and it has more features than I’ll ever use, but it uses mini tapes, and it’s difficult to capture the video on computer to edit or publish here. It’s also not as ultra-portable as the Mino Flip HD. I’ve been interested in it ever since I saw David Pogue review it on The New York Times “Circuits” show a few months ago.

The package includes a soft pouch and wrist strap, plus composite cables for quick playback on your TV set (but that’d be in SD, obviously, given the cable). The product itself is well-designed in terms of UI, stripping down the feature set to only the bare essentials. It has only the most minimal controls, to make video capture simple.

I took two quick test videos, one of Sophie and one of Sammy. The first test video, of Sophie, quickly showed that I don’t have a steady hand and should really use the tripod.

For the second test video, I used the tripod, which helped the stability a lot.

The light wasn’t great for either test, and it looks like the Flip did a better job of handling low light conditions than our handheld Canon camcorder.

The Flip does capture in HD (see below for specs), and it was very simple to use the built-in USB to transfer the videos to my computer. After installing the software (automatic the first time you attach the Flip to your PC), transfer only took a few seconds.

The supplied “FlipShare” software is a little too stripped down. While it has very basic editing (titles, clip beginning and end, organize clips into a single movie, add music) and has functions for uploading to YouTube and other sites, there’s not enough control over the file conversion.

My one minute Sophie sample file was 70 megs in the native MP4 (H.264/AAC) file format, at 1280 by 720 resolution. FlipShare can convert to WMV on a PC (or apparently to MOV on a Mac). So I had it convert for me, but the version it produced for sharing via e-mail or uploading to a web site was 10 megs, in 640 by 360. It didn’t offer me an option to change that resolution or compress further. Ten megs a minute isn’t bad, but is too big a file size for uploading here to zeigen.com.

The YouTube upload is seamless, however, and it’s painless to embed (plus I don’t have to pay for hosting — thanks, Google!). The first test is below.

See, I wasn’t kidding about the jerky video. Sophie is now 18 months old.

Overall I haven’t used the Mino Flip HD enough to give a full review but I’m cautiously optimistic.

So, this is for you, Barbara…

Not the greatest shot, I know. (The one I liked best is next.) But this is the one Sammy wanted to give you.

Sophie has become a much more vocal (and strident!) babbler. In the last couple of weeks she’s learned how to sit up by herself, and she can roll over adeptly now, but still no crawling. She’s moved from baby food level 1 to 2 to 3 to real solid food quickly, and in just two days went from being unable to pick up a piece of cereal to mastering the pincer movement pretty much right on.

The other night as Kimi gave her a bath, she started splashing the water and cracking herself up. Over and over and over.

This last weekend for Father’s Day we joined up with Kyrie, Jack and Andy and headed up to Pier 39 for lunch at a crab place and a visit to the Aquarium of the Bay. A better father’s day I can’t imagine.

The kids adjusted to the hotel room pretty well , and we enjoyed the aquarium on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Sammy was particularly impressed by the hammerhead sharks of the Outer Bay exhibit, but also enjoyed watching the otters play, touching bat stars, walking through the giant wave room, gazing at the jellies, peeking in on hermit crabs, and much more.

I can’t say the weekend was without stress (particularly on Saturday trying to find a good lunch spot, and Saturday night, when a loud neighbor kept us awake), but it was great to get away. The hotel pool was fun too.

Crappy iPhone pictures from Pebble Beach follow (as a placeholder until I have some time to see if any of the real camera’s pictures from the aquarium came out).

I would have liked to explore more, but based on our babysitting arrangements and when Tracee and Rafique could join us, we only made it there at around 9pm. The main attraction for Kimi was seeing Amon Tobin perform, which was around 10:15. The immediate problem was food: There were only a few booths, what they sold was a bit weird, and the lines were extremely long. Kimi and I waited in one long line, only to arrive at the front just as they ran out of food. So we bought some overpriced organic juice. Repeat again at the next line, where all we ended up with were some bizarre chips made from weird roots, and some chocolate. That was dinner. For an event of this size, they clearly didn’t plan the food situation well enough. More vendors, more choices, and adequate food supplies at each vendor would have helped a lot.

We spent a bit of time near a fire sculpture, talking with friends, and gradually made our way around to see different displays, some aeronautical, some environmental, and a few rides. We waited in line for the psycho-bike ride, which was a lot of fun: Four people pedal on bicycles, which spins around four seats in a merry-go-round. First you pedal and then you ride (or vice versa). I haven’t ridden a bicycle in a while, so it was a bit of a workout.

We had to relieve the babysitter at midnight, so we weren’t able to stay too late, but we did enjoy the performances, and I thought the light installations were very well done. The music was so loud, though. I guess the kids today can’t have it any other way, but I was very glad Kimi remembered ear plugs. I was a little put off to see one dad had dragged along his (approximately) seven year old daughter and plunked her down by the speakers. She didn’t have ear plugs, and clearly wasn’t enjoying herself. Same kind of parent who drags toddlers to horror movies, I guess.

Amon was outstanding, and did make the evening worthwhile. There was a bit of cognitive dissonance in wandering past hangars and flight trainers, across a parade ground and runway, only to arrive at a rave on an airstrip. I would love to attend this event next year, prepared with having eaten at home and being able to attend more of it.

(Apologies for the bad picture quality; the only camera I had with me was the iPhone.)

Kimi scanned this in for some reason. I believe it showed my potential as a gas station attendant.

(He’s the smiley one on the right.)

While we were there, we visited the Point Defiance Zoo (some pictures forthcoming if I get around to it), celebrated Kira’s fifth birthday, as well as her mom Tomi’s birthday, as well as my brother-in-law Rob’s birthday, plus Fallon’s baptism, as well as a trip to the Tacoma Children’s Museum, a big group family photo session, and a lavish fondue dinner at The Melting Pot.

John and I also caught Vantage Point, which I thought was a bit repetitive (the Rashomon-style retelling doesn’t hold up if you end up reshowing the same scene six times) but still a worthy distraction of a movie with some good performances and action scenes.

In answer to a dilemma I posted earlier, Sophie and Sammy were well-behaved on both airplane rides, but every one of us was sick (our hosts were just getting over bronchitis) and Sophie was having a very tough time at night (especially the first night there), so Kimi and I ended up more exhausted than we’d normally be after a trip like this. Poor Kimi’s very much under the weather right now.

Still, we had a great time and it was wonderful to get out of California for a bit. Thanks go to John, Tomi, Kira and Fallon for hosting us, plus thanks to Rob for taking time off work to hang out with us. Finally, big thanks to John’s parents, Foote and Louise, for some wonderful gifts and for watching Sammy and Sophie and Kira and Fallon on fondue night.

While John and Yvonne were over for dinner (and to catch up on The Sarah Connor Chronicles with me), Sammy decided he was tired of grown-ups talking, and wanted to read a book. But what was a bit mystifying to me is that he wanted to read to his ball, telling us the ball wanted to know how bread was made.

We had Andy, Jack, Kyrie, Jen, Talia and Taylor over on Saturday to celebrate St. Valentine’s Day (a bit early). Pictures are up at our Shutterfly site.