Seattle

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Kate and I were in Seattle, Washington November 5-14, 1996 for a conference of mine. Usually I'm tagging along carrying Kate's luggage but this was a work conference for me. Kate does spend some time visiting with colleagues at the University of Washington but mostly she's on holidays.

For more on the "technical stuff" about my conference and work see below. We can ignore that for a moment and move on to our daily adventures, tours and holidays.

Tuesday, Nov 5: We flew a commuter turbo-prop US Air out of London, Ontario to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where we changed for Seattle and arrived late in the day. The Westin Seattle was a modern upscale downtown hotel (today it's part of the Marriot chain); it's oddly shaped as a stack of round floors. It's big enough to host conferences like this one. We had a nice room fairly high up with good views looking eastward towards the inland and mountains. 

Wednesday Nov 6: Not too far away, a short walk towards the water of Puget Sound and the harbor, is the Pike Place Farmers Market (pictured above) where there's lots to see — the fish mongers liked to throw around the huge fresh salmon. Coming from inland Ontario I was really impressed by all the fresh seafood — salmon, squids, crabs, of all sorts and much more. Down the street a little ways from the market was the small, but original, Starbucks Coffee shop. The move to proper coffee in the US started here! These days (2023) Starbucks is a world wide corporation; our nephew Darren works to market them to the Europeans (who already know about good coffee).

Thursday Nov 7: Our second night we went to see Gillian Welch and her partner David Rawlings at a small club. "The Backstage" was down an alley, it really was "backstage". The folks in line with us were surprised that we knew of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings and had found the club. We had picked up their first CD, Revival (1996), at Tower Records in Nashville recently as it was recommended by Emmy Lou Harris. I recall that we had the salmon dinner package at $25 each. It was a great show and well worth the visit.

Google tells me the club, which was located in the Ballard neighborhood (2208 NW Market St), shut down in July of 1997 not too long after this visit. However, there is an active Facebook Group "The Backstage in Ballard is gone but not forgotten" — I ought to post some of the concert photos from this visit and find out who the opening act was.

I did post our pictures and received some commentary:

• Miro Jugum (Admin & Top contributor): "The opening act for Gillian & David that evening was my friend Michael Shuler."
• Michael Shuler: "Cool pictures. It was fun opening for them. Gillian was writing a song in the green room. That was the only time I’ve encountered that."
• Kathy Christman (member): "I was there and it was unforgettably great! One of the best shows I’ve ever seen!"
• Katy Keenan (Top contributor): "Oh these are some great pictures! [thanks] for sharing" 

Friday Nov 8: At the Pioneer Square we explored, or were guided, on the Seattle Underground. It's an interesting story where they raised the streets years ago as a part of a sewage/water works project leaving the original ground floor for many streets in the area as an underground floor. That evening we had a posh dinner at a restaurant called Anthony's Pier 66 below the Pike Place Market on the shore of Puget Sound.

Saturday Nov 9: We took a Ballard Locks Cruise from Pier 57 (below the market, near the posh restaurant) that took us out to the harbor of Puget Sound and then up through the locks to the lakes — Union and the larger Lake Washington. We visited the University of Washington where Kate was meeting with colleagues.

Sunday Nov 10: More visits to the Pike Place Market. We visited the nearby Seattle Art Museum where there was a travelling exhibit of works by Tamara de Lempicka who I had not known but came to really like. Her Autoportrait (Tamara in a Green Bugatti) is quite famous. Her style is art deco, sort of industrial. Later we went to the iconic Seattle Space Needle which really helps to define the Seattle sky-line. Built for the 1962 World's Fair it's now an observation deck, restaurant and required tourist stop. Unfortunately the day turned rather drab and cloudy so there wasn't a lot to see from the needle.

Monday Nov 11: More tromping about the Market before a wine tour. We visited the nearby Columbia Winery (since 1962), had lunch at the Red Hook Brewery and finished off with a visit the the Chateaux St. Michelle Winery (oldest in the state and acclaimed). All are near Woodinville a little to the north and east of the city centre. We had crossed the floating bridge on Lake Washington to Redmond.

Our friend Pat had recommended we explore Washington State red wines, especially merlot. These are grown in the interior of the state in the rain shadow of the mountains. They're grown along the Columbia river, in desert country, where they irrigate and can predictably grow great wines.

We continued our drive a little ways into the mountains and spent the evening at "Casa Bianca" with our friend Bianca (Scott's mom) and her partner "Uncle Al".

Sunday Nov 12: Casa Bianca is a quiet cottage on the shores of a quiet lake not too far inland. It's a small lake and motor boats aren't allowed. We enjoyed our visit with Bianca and Al.

On our way back into the city we stopped off at the scenic Snoqualmie Falls. It's just off the I90 with a very tall twin falls a little over a half hour from the city center. It's well work a visit. This is the setting for the mythical TV town of  Twin Peaks from the 1990 series and you can go on a Twin Peaks Tour if you were a fan of that very odd show. Back in the city we saw a cajun band at a Louisiana restaurant that evening in the Pioneer Square area.

Monday Nov 13: There's some pictures of the sea shore on the Puget Sound in the early part of the day as we were on our way to the Sea-Tac International Airport between Seattle and Tacoma to the south for our scheduled return home. We got there in good time only to discover that our return flight had been cancelled! We had to stay one more day. What to do?

That afternoon we took the Bainbridge Island Ferry, we rode the "Walla Walla" (named after the town I suppose), across Puget Sound to Bainbridge Island to the west where we understand they are growing white grapes for wine. 

We visited the Bainbridge Island Winery and have a story there. There was a couple ahead of us at the tasting who were asking about ice wine. The wine steward explained to them that, although they grow white wines on the island, the weather wasn't practical to make ice wine and anyways those that did, like in Canada, did it by picking the grapes and chucking them into a freezer. When we had our turn with her we explained that, coming from Canada, we knew a little more about ice wine and what she had described just was not true. Ice wine is a VQA product and is strictly controlled (see VQA Icewine Standards). She went on to argue with us (actually the customer sometimes is right) and said she had read this fact recently in Wine Spectator and we were wrong. When we got home we found the article she was referring to and it talked about growers in California who were experimenting with that method. But the article was clear, in Canada (and Germany), that's not how icewine is made!

Tuesday Nov 14: Our last day we return home flying again through Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Technical Stuff

The Second International IMAP conference was sponsored by the IETF and hosted by the University of Washington at the Westin Hotel in the downtown city core of Seattle and I attended as part of my work with email systems at the University of Western Ontario. My boss, Peter Marshall, had sent me to determine if IMAP (Internet Mail Application Protocol) was going anywhere and if we ought to be looking there rather than at POP (the Post Office Protocol) to provide an easy to use email client for our users. We had installed implementations of both servers on Unix systems at Western. The IMAP mail client Peter and Colleen were keen on was called Pine; but it would have been a hard sell to Windows users. I had ported Berkeley Mail from BSD/Unix to Vax/VMS and likewise that would have been a hard sell.

The conference was here for good reasons:

"The UW IMAP server was the reference server implementation of the Internet Message Access Protocol. It was developed at the University of Washington by Mark Crispin and others."

I was happy to report back that both Netscape and Microsoft had embedded a very good IMAP client in their respective web applications so it looked like IMAP was indeed the way to go. At this writing, April 2023, pretty much everyone is using IMAP mail clients to connect to servers like gmail.com, hotmail.com or etc.

— Slides scanned and notes from faded memories written during April 2023.