Seattle Travelog Sun 10/23

Part of a series from the travelog of my trip to Seattle in October 2022.

Up spontaneously at 7:30am PDT. Jet lead.

Ballard Farmer’s Market, a Sunday fixture

Pulled myself together and met up with Jane and her daughter at the Ballard Farmer’s Market. They’d already gotten most of their groceries, so after the meat truck, we sat at Root Cafe. Weird espresso, weird space, but OK.

Magic Meat Truck. All kinds, locally raised and butchered by a small family farm.

We walked back through the market, then I parted ways to find breakfast and wander. No seating anywhere, no place to stoop without looking homeless. With nothing to wash down my meal, I walked all over looking for a bottle of water. This place is weird how basics like that require planning. Found a Starbucks way up the street in a QFC, got water, and then ate my food standing up on the front deck, like a goddamned vagabond. Ugh.

Ballard Lock and Dam, commercial channel

Walked west down Market to the Ballard Locks — so cool. Lots of pix and videos. 3.8GB. Ugh. Salmon ladder! Locks! Dam! Cantilever rail bridge! The Sound! Sailboats! Pontoon planes! Sea level!

Elevation: 4 feet.
Passenger ship channel, tall sailboat inbound, downstream.
Salmon Ladder, fully operational after renovations. Observation room beyond.
Carbs, grease, and fish. Everything a hungry boy needs.

Walked up, got fish & chips at Lockspot Cafe, uniquely situated to catch all the foot traffic out of the lock. Sufficiently greasy, carbo-loaded, and tasty.

National Nordic Museum, central hall, with boats and sculptures

Checked out the National Nordic Museum. $20. A-OK. Interesting. Fine. Explains the grand scale of the European landscape that’s considered Nordic, how those people traveled across North America to settle in Seattle and continue their naval lifestyles, and how the Nordic Model for a good life carried over into Seattle public policy.

Pinch point!

Weary from standing, I slogged my way up to Target for tissues & Benadryl because my nose is stupid. Don’t use a CPAP without a humidifier. Ugh. Feel so drugged and tired. My sinuses are in full revolt. This humid air is irritating every dried crack in my mucus membranes. At least that’s my working theory. Same thing happened on my Europe trip.

Sculptures on Market St

Feeling shitty, I went home, napped, got up, thought about going out for drinks — dazed and confused, I stayed home instead. Caught up on reading, then went to bed. I needed sleep.

Fucking Seattle.

Permanently Disable Tracker in Ubuntu

Ubuntu Gnome Desktop comes with a background service called Tracker that runs a bunch of other sub-services such as tracker-miner-fs, tracker-extract, tracker-store, etc., that do the job of scanning and indexing the files in your user home folder. It’s a service used by the Gnome file manager for speeding up the search bar. This is fine and all, except for a few very important catches:

  • The indexing action of tracker-miner-fs runs on boot after user login and also when files are being created or moved, i.e.: any time there is any major disk activity. This robs disk performance.
  • Tracker services run even if you’re using xfce4 Desktop. If Gnome3 is installed on the system, you get the punishment regardless.
  • tracker-miner-fs runs best on SSD and NVMe storage, which I do not have. My workstation’s primary disk is spinning rust. So the indexing, at critical times of heavy disk activity, causes more thrashing of the read heads. Everything slows to a crawl, because Tracker is stealing time. Rude.
  • All of the Tracker services are running under systemd’s user slice, which start and run when the user logs in. You can use systemctl --user stop tracker-miner-fs and even go so far as to disable the service files, but Tracker will just re-enable those services on next boot. Stupendously rude.
  • You can uninstall the package that provides Tracker, but that will also uninstall all the packages that depend on it. That’s a dependency hell you do not want to walk into.

There is no way to completely stop Tracker from running on boot.

Well, I thought there was no way. Check out this Gist on Github that explains that Tracker is started by Gnome .desktop files in the system’s autorun folder under /etc, and that you can copy them to your profile’s autorun folder and change a variable to disable and hide the service. Boom. No more running on boot, and no more thrashing when you’re trying to move files around.

I’ve been bumping my head into this for a while, but it’s a problem that I only see once on every reboot, which is on the order of weeks apart. A recent issue with my workstation had me rebooting several times in an hour, so I had to find an answer to this just to reduce my loop time.

Thanks to the brilliant Chris Marchesi in the gist above for the protip.

Seattle Travelog Sat 10/22

Part of a series from the travelog of my trip to Seattle in October 2022.

Away From Keyboard. ABIA, waiting for boarding on Alaska Airlines.

Flight from Austin Bergstrom International Airport was delayed 10 minutes because the ground captain failed to close the communications hatch on the fuselage after pushback. Had to hold on the taxiway for a mechanic.

Seatmates kept the window shade closed. Ugh. Exciting takeoff; I miss the thrill of getting pushed into my seat. Squeezed for elbow room in Coach class. Watched 2 episodes of “Sandman” and played some “The Room 2” on my tablet. No air meals, only pretzels, cookie, and coffee. Alaska Air requires preorder for lunches.

SEATAC International N-Terminal is confusing. No maps or kiosks — still under construction, so it looks like a dead mall, but filled with people. Found the central downstairs escalator to the train to A-Terminal, Ground Transportation. Inter-terminal trains are tunneled underground. Body now on “jet lead” to Pacific Daylight Time.

SEATAC Inter-Terminal subway

My friend “Joe” surprised me at the airport. Hah! I crossed the bridge from the terminal to the parking garage, then found the bridge to the SoundTransit #1 train. Saw some masked guy walking directly toward me from the side, I was about to freak. Oh shit, it’s Joe! Hugs! Thankfully he was there to navigate transit, since the train was shutdown in the middle for track maintenance, with connector buses between sections. I was too far gone to focus.

SoundTransit transfer to bus

35 pounds of luggage on my back, carry-on and daybag (more than my Europe trip). Up 14th Ave from the station on Broadway to his apartment. Seattle is far too three-dimensional. And there are worse hills in this town. But, that view. That. View.

View from CapHill to downtown, typical weather

Dropped off luggage at his place since I couldn’t check-in until 3, then we went down to pickup lunch and coffee, Dingfelder’s Jewish deli — no dine-in, carry-out only (it’s a theme here in Seattle). And of course, heavy rain started as we hit the sidewalk. My backpack’s not as waterproof as my raincoat. Ugh. Lessons.

Northbound platform of SoundTransit 1 line, at Broadway

Found our way up to U-District on train, then over on the 44 bus to Ballard, uphill walk to my weird-ass AirBnB. Check-in, drop off, freshen, then off to meet “Jane” and friends at Gracia for dinner and drinks.

Mole Enchilada and a variation on a Gin and Tonic, at Gracia, in an outdoor dinette.

Still stuffed from lunch. Ate half, kept mostly quiet during conversation. Social scene was overwhelming in the restaurant; couldn’t hear well enough to focus, so I just gave up. We walked to Miro Tea for drinks and coffee, then on to Jane’s house to chill and chat. Homey, warm, creaking floors. Discussions about hikes and rocks and transit. Me phasing in and out. Travel fatigue.

The unused bedroom table in my weird-assed AirBnB

Joe walked me home on his way to his bus, not very far. I unpacked, showered, slept. First day. Seattle. I’m in Seattle.