Salty’s and Cutters

They stare across puget sound at each other like jealous lovers, but really they are more like brother and sister. Cutters gets the tourist traffic and serves the cruise-boat-crowd and Sleepless-In-Seattle-wannabes expensive seafood, while Salty’s gets the locals and serves them expensive seafood. In both cases you are paying for the view and in both cases the view justifies the price (mostly).

If you are a local, these are special occaison places. Places where you go to celebrate a birthday or other event. Locals know that there are many better places to get seafood in Seattle, but few with a view such as these. If you are tourist, you don’t know any better.

I don’t know if they have the same owner or if they just are stealing playbooks from each other, but both serve seafood that might be fresh or might be frozen. You’ll need to ask if you really care. To an extent it doesn’t really matter, because they will smother it in butter or cream sauces or surround it by mashed potatoes so that the flavor is lost anyway.

I find both to sort of fill a comfort food niche. You know that you’ll leave feeling full and somewhat bloated, your arteries clogging rapidly, but the food tasted decent, so you might not care (until you remember how much that you paid).

If you are going during daylight or near sunset, west-facing Cutters will be your choice. If you are having brunch or are eating after dark, Salty’s is the appropriate choice.

Get a reservation in either case.

If quality is your main concern, don’t bother with either. For the same prices, you can eat much better seafood in this town.

In fact, I can give a general tip that seems to hold up for every sea-side town I’ve ever been in: don’t eat in the restaurants on the waterfront (especially in the main part of town). They exist for tourists and will charge you too much money for average food.

I can’t think of an exception on Alaska Ave. I haven’t been to that pier-end place near the sculpture garden yet, and the bar at the Edgewater had good drinks, but I’ve eaten in pretty much every other establishment on the Seattle waterfront and the only place with a decent meal for the price is the walk-up window at Ivar’s and that is because it is cheap, not good.

The sad state of Seattle real estate

The Seattle Times: Real Estate: Fewer can afford to buy a house in King County, report says

Foreclosures up sharply in state, Seattle area

I’ve been saying this for years. The median home price in Seattle has far eclipsed the median income. This means that it is becoming impossible for people working in the area to actually afford a home. Which either increases the number of people in insane debt and living from paycheck to paycheck or it increases the number of commuters travelling into the city and around the region. This is unsustainable and the Mayor’s response of building condos everywhere isn’t going to fix the problem.

my iTunes quandry

I really like iTunes. Mostly because of the metadata and organization, plus being able to add scripts.

The one thing that bugs me is that you can’t split up the library across different hard drives while maintaining the auto-organize feature. I’d love to put my music on one drive, my video on the other, and my podcasts on a third. As it stands, I either have to not consolidate my library (which is do-able, but a pain in the ass), or rather, consolidate by hand; or I can try the trick of splitting up my library, but then I lose the metadata; or I can just get a bigger disk, but at this point that means getting a TB disk which kinda sucks (I’d have to get two so that I could back it up).

I’m going to try the first step and maybe whip up some script to make it easier to manage. If I do, I’ll post it here.

Flash audio not working on OS X? Check your output bitrate.

OS X 10.4.7 Doesn’t Fix Audio Problem – Jeremy Flint – Red Hot and Daily

This had been driving me insane for a little while. It seemed like after upgrading to Flash Player 9 that Flash audio stopped working. I even posted a bug on it in the internal Adobe bug database.

whoops. It turns out that one of my programs switched the audio output bitrate to 96k and for some reason, Flash doesn’t like that (it seems like every other program I have handles it just fine).

Anyway, if you have that problem, check the above link.

Interland (web.com) sucks – part the final

After my post on Thursday about Interland (which was 24 hours after first contacting Interland support and more than 48 hours after Interland switched my mail server without warning and broke my e-mail), I received a message from Interland (web.com)’s SVP for corporate communications! So, supposedly, contacting web.com’s customer support gets you response times of a week, but posting on your blog that web.com sucks gets you a response from senior management within 24 hours. Wow, the power of the internet.

Here is what he said:
I noticed your blog post this morning and wanted to pass along my apologies for your troubles. I have spoken with customer service and looked into your account. It seems like there were a few email configuration changes that were updated and needed to be executed on your end as well. In any case, I am having our best rep call you to walk you through the process.

Again, I want to apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced. Please feel free to contact me any time if you have any questions or comments. We treat these cases very seriously and I want to assure you I’m here to make things right again.

This is corporate marketing at it’s best, right? This is also what a loyal customer would want to hear, right?

There was a slight problem, and I had logged it in the original support item as well. Here was my response to his message:
Peter, I have been a customer of interland and now web.com for 6+ years. I remained a customer even though I am paying substantially more for your hosting than other hosting providers charge for significantly more capabilities. On SEVERAL occaisons over the years, you have made modifications or broken my site without prior warning. Each time I have complained and each time I have been promised that it would not happen again.

This most recent change is absolutely horrific. I have set up about 300 mail rules over the years to weed out spam on my main account. When you switched systems, you broke all of these rules so that the ones filtering mail INTO my box now essentially DELETE it. I have gone from getting around 50-75 valid e-mails a day to getting 6-10 (actually, it turned out to be around 2-3). I would go through and rewrite all my 300 rules, but your new ajax-ish web mail interface won’t let me bulk edit and it is so impossibly slow that it would take me HOURS TO FIX YOUR SCREWUPS. (I wasn’t exaggerating, I had tried. It was taking me over a minute to delete a single mail rule on a broadband connection on a fast machine. I had to delete 300)

All this and you recently raised my rates $10/month.

I switched to your service because I thought that it would be reliable and bulletproof. I am sorely dissapointed.

So, meanwhile, I never got that call that web.com promised from their “best rep”. This morning, I checked my support ticket and saw that it was closed. The tech who closed it noted that I had to change the addresses for my pop and smtp. Of course, if I hadn’t logged into their support system and checked that myself I wouldn’t have known. After following their instructions , they are still deleting 99% of my mail, and downloading my mail still doesn’t work.

So, I’m switching all my domains to dreamhost. I had planned on keeping my main unitcircle.com domain on interland, but this utter stupidity and lack of respect for one of their long-term customers is the last straw. I’ll have to figure out how to switch the catalog from asp to php, but that will be fun and I’d been meaning to get off windows hosting anyhow.

You cannot trust interland or web.com with anything remotely important, and they are more expensive than their competition if you are doing anything not-critical. Seriously, .Mac is cheaper than those losers.

And interland, if you want to respond to me again, I’d love to hear from you, but don’t try to send me an e-mail for a couple of days, because if it ends up on your servers, I’ll probably never see it.