Seattle Travelog Tues 10/25

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

Took my time getting up. 7+ hours of sleep is something magical.

Got up, coffee and travel cashews, shower, out. Ham & Swiss croissant at Besalu with Americano. Go time.

Walked down Ballard below Leary toward Fremont. Goal, Gasworks Park. Saw the back side of Leary; industry and ships. Boat ramps. Homeless camps. Missed a few buses, but found a pocket knife at a sporting goods store. Better than my Rite-Aid boxcutter.

Kept walking down Leary due to missing buses. Dying 7-Eleven with empty shelves. No bathroom. Burger joint, drive-thru only. Block probably slated for redevelopment. Ballard.

In my soggy ambles, I walked into a Fred Meyer. It was at once ghetto and uppity. It’s like a Walmart but also a hardware store, bank, health clinic, phone store, and grocery. Even before walking in the door, there was a homeless couple arguing, and what can be best described as a desperate addict casually walking down the sidewalk with a stack of beeping shoeboxes. Concerned onlookers with quizzical faces. I just needed to piss.

After masking up, because the hallway to the johns was way foul, I could finally do the biz. Doubled back and found some granola bars I’d need to finish out the week.

Made my way out, walked through some sketch shit until the next 40 bus. 40 saved me?

Pivot and survive. Seattle, y’all trippin’.

Finally, Fremont. Rain. Slow, light, incessant rain. You get used to it. Decided to rent a scooter for the last mile to Gasworks.

What a great park. It’s minimal on perks and facilities, but it’s got a great view of Union Lake north of downtown. Despite the rain and wind, I got some great pix.

Rain. You just get used to it.

The sundial up on Kite Hill was missing its gnomon — I hope that’s just seasonal.

Geese everywhere. Also, goose shit. So much goose shit.

Scooted back to Fremont, walked across the Fremont drawbridge. Too cool.

After some missed buses, back to Ballard, now I’m cooling my heels at this bar called Lock & Keel. Maritime themed. One of the last local bars of this type. A few beers, some snack chips, a friendly bartender that reminded me so much of my ex-roomate Pat. Walk home.

Who knows what tonight brings. Drinking, walking, packing? Tomorrow — migrate to my next AirBnB in Cap Hill.

Change and flux. Seattle.

After reheating yakisoba and watching Episode 4 of “The Sandman”, I knew I shouldn’t bitch out and stay in the rest of the night. Despite the cold and rain, I left at 8:30 back to Ballard Ave to find a dive for drinks, pix, & scrolling. Found the Sunset Tavern, because the clientele was mixed, and it didn’t feel too uppity or brotherhoodish (both very real problems here). Live bands in the back room; I stayed in the front. Two Jack & Cokes, $20. Happy, I slogged uphill to 7-Eleven for snacks. Now home, once again, before the rain really let loose…once again.

Fucking Seattle.

Seattle Travelog Mon 10/24

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

My AirBnB booking for 26th-30th cancelled on me. “Sorry, we lost our license!” Gave me a full refund. Found another place on my own near to the lost rental for $300 less.

AirBnB support reached out and gave me a $111 coupon on my next rental. I asked if they could apply it to the one I just placed; they couldn’t. Asked if they could extend the offer for a year, because this is my yearly vacation. They couldn’t. So they asked me to create a merchant account so they could deposit the money. Fine. Yay.

Pivot and adapt.

Shredded pastrami breakfast sandwich, salad, and Americano at Sabine

Having brunch and writing this at Sabine Cafe on Ballard Ave. This place is Very Good. High end fare for a sandwich restaurant. Great coffee and staff. Went here on recommendation.

Not sure of my plans today. Maybe Fremont Troll, Black Sun sculpture, Bruce and Brandon Lee graves. Who knows?

Fremont Troll, menacing all passers-by on Aurora bridge

Took the 40 bus to Fremont and trudged up the hill to see the Fremont Troll under the Aurora bridge. Big, concrete, grasping a VW Bug, looking ominous as it exacts a toll. Menacing, but cute.

Moss Turtle, water sprinkler, and makeshift shelter

Around the corner, up the hill, is the Moss Turtle. Sprinkle water on it and make a wish.

Lake Union, middle of the Seattle isthmus

Hopped the stone railing and started walking across the Aurora bridge. It commands a great view of the dockhouses of Lake Union. Didn’t realize how long the bridge was until 1/3 of the way across, so I had to keep going — to ADVENTURE!

Boathouses and docks on Lake Union
Graffiti sticker on a suicide hotline sign on the Aurora bridge

Every estimate on the Transit app for getting to Volunteer Park from there was too long, so I opted to find the next bus downtown to rendezvous with Joe, who was getting out to check his PO Box. Had to take a pedestrian underpass to cross Aurora and wait for the express. Hung out at a Starbucks for an OJ and wifi. We met up, had drinks downtown, walked around, and went up to Ballard for dinner. Miso, sushi, and seafood yakisoba. Happy Birthday, Joe!

Sushi rolls

We walked to my place to drop off leftovers, then on to Jane’s for a social call. Was nice.

When Seattlites get together, they talk about transit and rent. Full stop.

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.