Washingcon: Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Wednesday, July 18

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Morning

No known explanation

Screwing around with the forums by making custom badges for certain users

Paul made cinnamon rolls with orange-flavored icing for everyone.

A number of posters were made available to convention attendees

EB Siege

After breakfast, we looked at our EB Siege materials.

The EB Anthology books

EB Anthology

Envelope art

One of Camille's starman figurines

Another one of Camille's starman figurines

One of our older EB art books

A book of envelope art from previous EB Sieges

Seattle II

The con headed to Seattle for the second day in a row. This time, we planned to head to the Seattle Center area.

More traffic and a rainy day greeted us

The area around the Space Needle was our destination

We first stopped at a nearby food court for lunch

Steve apparently didn't want to be photographed

Jon thoroughly enjoying some rock candy

For some unknown reason, there was a piece of the Berlin Wall between the fudge shop and the teriyaki stand

The Space Needle

Outside the Space Needle

Apparently Blizzard relocated to Seattle. Who knew?

We visited the Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum. Photographs were not allowed, so we "put away" the camera.

The Science Fiction Museum and Experience Music Project building

Ticket

The lobby of the Experience Music Project, a music museum.

The Experience Music Project had a sketchpad available in one of the rooms for some reason, so Martin (pictured), Logan, and Camille took turns at it.

The end result of the sketching session

Having a jam session at the Experience Music Project

The lobby for the Science Fiction Museum

After the museum trip, half of us planned on staying in Seattle to attend a Mariners game while the remainder were going back to Marysville to get dinner and see a movie. Two cars were staying in Seattle, but one of those drivers was Trip, who'd gone to Bellvue to buy a gun. He ran into heavy traffic coming back, and as a result, four of us had to wait on him to pick us up at the Space Needle's front entry loop and take us to the ball game.

While we were waiting, Paul noticed something that looked electronic:

Sensor

There were a pair of what appeared to be optical sensors mounted, facing each other, at about nine feet off the ground on either side of the access road to the Space Needle's front traffic loop. His engineer's curiosity piqued, Paul attempted to figure out what the apparent sensor was for. Looking around, he noticed a light-up sign attached to the roof structure overhanging the loop:

Overhang sign

Interestingly enough, the roof structure's clearance was similar to the height of the sensor pair. Apparently, this setup was an overheight sensor, which would probably light up the sign if a tall vehicle broke the light beam.

Like any good engineer, Paul had to test this theory. The sensor was a bit out of his eight-foot reach, but there were a number of concrete posts nearby placed to prevent traffic from driving on the sidewalk. One of these posts was nearly directly between the two sensors, so Paul climbed up on the post and waved his arm in front of the sensor, blocking the invisible light beam.

As Paul predicted, the sign did light up with a "STOP OVERHEIGHT" message. However, he had failed to notice the speaker mounted just above the sign. This speaker proceeded to emit a constant tone, about as loud as an ambulance siren, for the thirty seconds or so that the sign was lit up.

Paul quickly jumped down from the concrete post and his entire party tried to act as if nothing had happened. Luckily, Trip showed up not too long afterwards, and we were able to make a clean getaway.

Seattle Mariners Game

The baseball game we attended was the Seattle Mariners versus the Baltimore Orioles, scheduled to start at 7:05 PM. Dan had a contact that was able to score us some cheap tickets.

Safeco Field

Due to our delays in leaving the Space Needle, we arrived about 15 minutes after the start of the game. It began to rain just as we were leaving the parking garage, so we got to see the stadium's retractable roof closing. The game was in the bottom of the first inning when we got into the park.

The view from our seats

Us at the game

More of us at the game

Partway through the game, the setting sun began to shine in through the gap between the stands and the roof, creating some interesting lighting effects