adam @ 404

The NYTimes recently published an article about Fulfillment by Amazon, the team I work with 5 days a week. The program is basically a self-service 3rd party fulfillment solution that provides picking, packing and shipping of your orders. Overall, it was a good article with some minor glitches. It labeled FBA an Amazon Web Service. FBA has web services related to it, but its usually not considered to be just an Amazon Web Service like S3 or EC2, since there are many interfaces to it (one of which are web services).

If any of my adoring readers would like to know more about FBA or try it out, let me know. I can give you the lowdown and help you along. There are some seller forums for FBA now too.

On a whim, I took the day off on Wednesday to go skiing. It’s the last week of Spring skiing at most ski areas in washington, and we had just been getting snow in the mountains. After some hard thought, I decided life was too short to miss out on the favorable conditions and go to work to stare out the window at the snowcapped mountains.

I got out the door around 8:30 and up to Stevens Pass a bit after 10. I was surprised at how easy it was to drive up on a weekday morning. I rented some skis and was out on the slopes by 10:30. Now, I’ve never been skiing alone before for a full day. It was exhilarating though. The conditions were great, the sun was out, there was a fair amount of snow on the ground from the night before last and the mountain was virtually empty. Like I’ve recounted to everyone today that I’ve told about my outting, I got into an amazing rhythm… I would ski a run, be completely focused on what was in front of me, taking the run, get to the bottom, hop on the lift, totally zone out and think about whatever came to mind on the way up and reawaken when I saw the unloading point, only to repeat it as I traversed the mountain from front to back. I covered the entire area of Stevens, which isn’t that hard to do in a day, but I made a point of trying out all challenging slopes from any chair that offered one.

There were a couple amazing runs that I took where I traversed diagonally down the backside through trees and found some more or less light powder that were simply amazing. You could hear me yelling woohoo, and stopping only to exclaim, “This is awesome.”

The weather was such that I didn’t have to wear a cap so I ended up with a wonderful racoon sunburn around my goggles.

Seattle/stevenshooky

Someone asked me who my favorite author was recently. I told them I didn’t know. That was a lie though. My favorite author is Kurt Vonnegut. Good Night.

Spring is here in Seattle. It’s consistently in the 50s or higher and although the rain is still around, it subsides more often than not. I took advantage of a mild Saturday to head out to Discovery Park in Magnolia. It offers some of the best views of the Bay, city and Olympics mountains. Check out some of the nature photos below.

Seattle/discovery

I am moved, absolutely moved to tell you about the greatest musical adaptation of the past ten years. I nearly pooped my pants when I saw the TV ad for Edward Scissorhands The Musical coming to Seattle. There’s not much better than a genre that follows its parodies pretty much in lockstep. I don’t know any other way to describe it other than crumbelievable.