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Ken Hinckley's blog exploring the savage frontiers of pen, touch, and mobile devices
The official blog of the InkSeine project at Microsoft Research
January 2008 - Posts
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Well, there was just no way I could present this series without sneaking in a picture of my beautiful twin girls. I recommended that you should always wear extremely dark cute-polarized sunglasses whenever visiting the site way back in the inaugural post of The AlpineInker, and this was not an idle warning!
This picture is rather out of date, because the girls are almost a year old now. The cat is no longer quite as perplexed about the new additions to my family, but he wisely remains wary of becoming the twins' latest plaything. Since this photo was taken, the cat had an unfortunate encounter with what was probably a coyote, but miraculously he survived and is still with us, although he is getting rather old. At this point not only has he used up all nine of his lives, but he is also down to three legs!
It is quite a hoot to use ink to lend a personal touch to pictures of friends and family. Of course you don't need InkSeine to do this, but I find it a makes a great place to have scrapbook fun.
Application of this technology to mark up photos of your pointy-haired boss is left as an exercise to the reader.
Previous Post: Day #9: Messy Desk - with Search!
Next Post: Day #11: Dish out a Little UMPC Love
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If you're like me, you probably have a messy desk.
My desk piles up with papers that I expect to need again soon. There are tasks that I have started but not finished. There are also documents that I let stew on my desk because I want them to nag at my brain; I sense there's some important idea or insight lying in wait, but I haven't yet had the "Aha!" moment of how the information fits into everything else I am thinking about.
But according to Dr. David Kirsh, messy desks are really all about The Intelligent Use of Space.
Kirsh wrote a great paper of the same name where he discusses ways that people use physical space to simplify their tasks, as well as to facilitate opportunistic new uses for materials and tools. He calls the early stages of a project "the discovery phase." He writes that:
In the discovery phase one wants to note as many possible extensions and variations to one's ideas as possible... Facilitating opportunism is to find a way of leaving equipment, intermediate products, and task detritus around the workplace.
In short, Kirsh concludes:
The most intelligent use of space is to try out conjectures... in the hope of triggering an association.
That's right, the detritus upon my messy desk really just represents my super intelligent use of space.
At least I hope that is the case. Or maybe it's just a mess. But I know once I clean up and put stuff in folders, I might as well dump it in the trash. The odds I ever touch any of those documents again-- or of getting to the root of that nagging feeling that the documents had important insights that I should learn from-- drops dramatically.
I like to think of InkSeine as the digital equivalent of my messy desk, a place for me to gather together the detritus of electronic work. But to make that useful, I need a really quick and easy way to get stuff into my notes in the first place.
With the advances that have been made in search technology, searches have become a big part of how I work. With standard search tools, I type in a query, my results are returned, and the query is forever gone. If I want to go back later and see how and where I found something, or to revisit the results to see if there is any new information, I am out of luck. It's just like those documents that I've filed way, never to be seen again.
And I don't just mean searching the web.
I have thousands of documents on my computer. I have over 18,000 emails in my inbox. I am totally dependent on search to put my hands on the information I need quickly. Doubly so on my Tablet PC, where tapping and double-tapping through folders can feel like trying to catch a fruit fly with a pair of chopsticks.
InkSeine offers the ultimate search scratchpad. Even on my desktop Wacom Cintiq display tablet, where I always have a keyboard ready to go, I rarely type in a query any more. A search in InkSeine is triggered directly from my notes, and it persists after I am done with it. I can remove it if I don't want it any more. But by default it gets created as its own object next to the ink that I use to start my query, and it gets saved in context with my notes.
It is extremely valuable to me to have all my searches persisted in this way. I'll keep all my searches with my notes about a project. Here's an example where I searched for the names of some people who have recently sent me some especially helpful feedback on InkSeine. I needed to collect all those together to make sure that our release plan would address as many of the issues as possible.
When I return to this page, I can just stroke down on any one of those search icons to see all the recent correspondence from that person. For example, Rob has kindly sent me some additional comments. I will go back to this note and use this search to see all his recent emails to me so I can add the remaining issues to my release plan.
Anyway, I hope that all your InkSeine notes turn out to be messy ones, because I firmly believe that is the most intelligent use of (electronic) space.
Previous Post: Day #8: Collaborate on my Big Honkin Wacom Cintiq Tablet
Next Post: Day #10: Scrapbook Fun!
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I don't have a single screen in my office that I can't write on.
This includes my main desktop display, which is a 21" Wacom Cintiq display tablet. Here's a picture of me using it in the drafting board format. I don't use it this way very often, though, because I normally pick up my Tablet PC when I want to do some heads-down sketching.
What I like about this gigantic tablet is that I can always have InkSeine running on my desktop computer. I use it almost like a desk blotter - I can drag stuff onto it or jot down little notes whenever fancy strikes.
The Cintiq is large enough to use as a shared display for one-on-one meetings. In the example I've captured below, I collected together some initial information, and then my colleague Ravin joined me and we talked about some research stuff. I jotted down some of our discussion points as we chatted.
Even though I have two pens for this big tablet, I've found that in meetings of this sort, one person at a time always drives the pen. I jotted down all the notes shown above. On some subsequent pages of this note, there are some diagrams and ideas that Ravin sketched out.
What's the worst thing about having a big honkin' display tablet as my desktop computer? Well, the pen for it is not compatible with Tablet PC's. This means at least ten times a day I attempt to use my Cintiq pen on my Tablet PC, or my Tablet PC pen on the Cintiq. In either case, no joy is to be had.
Previous Post: Day #7: Give an Informal Presentation
Next Post: Day #9: Messy Desk - with Search!
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One of my favorite ways that I have started using InkSeine of late is for informal presentations. I often discuss my research projects or ideas with relatively small groups of people. Almost every meeting room at Microsoft has a projector, so of course it is popular to project PowerPoint slides. But in a small group setting, I usually don't want to take the time to make a polished PowerPoint presentation. However, my time is only one dimension of concern.
Polished marketing-type presentations are unhealthy for nascent ideas.
For the audience, everything just looks too slick and finalized. But a handwritten presentation immediately communicates that the ideas, like the ink strokes on the page, are subject to change, and that feedback is being sought. A handwritten presentation also invites the right level of discourse and elicits helpful suggestions for things to try. That's what I want in this type of meeting.
For the author, PowerPoint's detailed formatting decisions, and the temptation to type in a lot of text and bullet points, mires you in details at the expense of the main creative ideas. But I can whip out a slide, such as the one pictured below, very quickly. Then I move on to the next point that I want to strike, before I lose track of the big picture.
Since my presenation is a drawing surface, I can add sketches and annotations, or jot down comments that people make during the actual presentation. Or I can start a new page and list everyone's suggestions when I ask people what things I should try next.
The one gotcha for me about making presentations with InkSeine is that I need to create my note in landscape format, because most projectors can't handle portrait screen format. Yet I love to use my tablet in portrait orientation while inking. InkSeine currently lacks a command to reformat a page between screen orientations.
But I'm highly motivated to remedy this limitation, because presenting with ink is both fun and productive. [:-)]
Previous Post: Day #6: Hunt and Gather (and Doodle!)
Next Post: Day #8: Collaborate on my Big Honkin' Wacom Cintiq Tablet
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On page 186 of Bill Buxton's book Sketching User Experiences, he has a great section entitled "On Hunters, Gatherers, and Doodlers." Bill talks about how designers are "doodlers" who produce great volumes of design sketches. He also observes that designers are the modern-day embodiment of hunters and gatherers, because they collect a great deal of reference material to inspire and inform their designs. I've posted elsewhere about how I use InkSeine to meet my needs as an inveterate doodler, as well as to actually sketch designs, but it may be the best tool ever for the hunting and gathering part.
When we deployed InkSeine at Microsoft I received a large number of bug reports, requests for features, ideas, and general comments about the application. When the dust settled a bit, I did some searches to pull those emails out of my inbox, and I took snapshots of individual features or ideas from each and arranged them in my notes. The little round envelope icons in the note shown below are links back to the original email so that I could reference it again later. InkSeine made a great tool to hunt down and gather together all of these gold nuggets contributed by kind folks who sent me detailed feedback.
The sad part is that if you look closely, some very good ideas and improvements that people suggested have not been added to the application yet. We are just a small team, but we keep plugging away at the biggest holes, and InkSeine gets a little better with every release.
But for now I'm back off to the information jungle to hone my skill at hunting, gathering, and doodling!
Previous Post: Day #5: Review Documents
Next Post: Day #7: Give an Informal Presentation
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InkSeine doesn't have the equivalent of a "Print to OneNote" feature, so I don't use InkSeine that often to mark up documents. OneNote is better for that. (You can copy individual pages that you have printed to OneNote and then paste them into InkSeine, however.)
But for documents that I really want to go through in detail and pull out the key issues, ideas, or parts that I have questions about, InkSeine serves me well. I create a scrapbook that consists of only the key portions of the document - not the entire document - with my thoughts and annotations.
I recently reviewed a PhD thesis, a massive PDF file that was some 300 pages long. Since I was serving on the student's examination committee, I needed to understand what he had done and of course ask him tough questions after his presentation. I also had to write up an assessment of the thesis in a report to his advisors. And I sure didn't want to keep scrolling through this 300 page behemoth any more than I absolutely had to.
So that I could be at maximum efficiency when grilling the student during his defense, I boiled down all the interesting stuff into a 13-page note. I just captured the key images and ideas, with my thoughts about his contributions to human knowledge, and questions that I could ask him about his project.
This worked out great for both me and the student. If I run out of tough questions to ask, my standard one is "Justify your existence in 25 words or less!" Somehow, that one never seems to be a great conversation starter. [:-)]
The best thing out of all of this? He passed! Congratulations, Dr. Shazad Malik.
Previous Post: Day #4: Track Progress
Next Post: Day #6: Hunt and Gather (and Doodle!)
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I keep a big spreadsheet of things in InkSeine that I'd like to change, fix, or think more about. So when it comes time to work on a design sketch for some feature, I want to see everything on my list about it so I can be sure I haven't forgotten something.
Here I'm using a snapshot from my spreadsheet to keep track of all the things I need to resolve. I highlight the key phrases before I start so I can really zero in my attention on the important points.
I check off things as they're completed. I also add notes about new issues that arise as I'm working. I added most of the comments drawn with the thick red pen at a later time when I was reviewing all my design sketches and trying to distill them into specific things to implement. I use OneNote for that crucial distillation step; I'll write a blog post about how I use OneNote for that some time. (Update: Here is my post about OneNote- Day #13 of the 12 day series, of course).
Now, it would certainly be possible to do all of this by switching back and forth to Excel and typing notes or inserting text comments there. But then that totally pulls me away, as FeralBoy over on the GottaBeMobile forums would put it, from all the "inky goodness" of drawing my design sketches.
And I, for one, try to stay as far away as I can from the black gaping maw of text's "ascii badness" when I'm in the creative flow of sketching out a design.
Previous Post: Day #3: Sketching Designs
Next Post: Day #5: Review Documents
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I love to use InkSeine on my Tablet PC to quickly sketch up ideas. I usually like to lean over my tablet on a desk for this, but sometimes I keep it on my lap, and I almost always sketch on my tablet in the "portrait" orientation when I'm involved with creative work.
To get started on a design sketch, I collect reference material (images) either as inspiration, or as actual pieces to use in my design sketch. I use InkSeine's floating camera capture feature very heavily to take screen clippings from existing applications, documents, or web pages. I also drag bitmaps from Windows Explorer folders into InkSeine. This imports them directly as images (rather than just creating a link to the file).
Now the fun starts. I throw them together, rearrange them, mark them up, and otherwise use them to explore the terra incognita of my design ideas. I like to sketch out every possible way I can think of to do something. I'll often have several pages of variations on an idea. Through this excercise, I unearth problems that I hadn't initially thought of. New ideas arise from the detritus of failed designs on page after page.
The great thing about this approach is that often the idea for a solution doesn't occur to me until after I have already completed my sketch of it. It sounds a bit like a time traveler's paradox, but for me it really works this way more often than not!
Here's an example where I'm sketching out some ideas that I have been thinking about for updates to the Tool Ring in InkSeine. Of course, many of the design sketches I have for InkSeine are drawn with InkSeine. It's a tool for designing itself. How's that for another mind-bending time traveler's paradox?!?
For my next trick, I think I'll sketch a picture of myself sketching a picture of the next version of InkSeine so that I can get it released quicker. I may just drop John Cramer a line and see how his retrocausal quantum nonlocal communication experiment is going. Receive Email from the Future would sure make a killer feature for Outlook 2010, wouldn't it?
Time travel paradoxes are cool. Sketching up ideas on my Tablet PC with InkSeine just might be cooler. [:-)]
Previous Post: Day #2: Web Surfing
Next Post: Day #4: Track Progress
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We've recently started using Visual Studio 2008 for our InkSeine development and have been really very pleased with it so far.
However, we've discovered one gotcha that may affect other Tablet PC developers out there who are using C# managed code, so I wanted to put up a blog post about this. People may encounter this issue and start searching for more information about it.
Under certain conditions, if your code includes an error and you also have Microsoft.Ink.dll as part of your project, the compiler produces a mysterious error.
Here's some example code, where the member variable this.strangeCompilerErrorForUndefinedMembers does not exist in my class:
When I build my project, depending on which file contains this code, the error returned by the compiler will sometimes consist of this wonderfully informative nugget:
Input file 'c:\Windows\assembly\GAC\Microsoft.Ink\1.7.2600.2180__31bf3856ad364e35\Microsoft.Ink.dll' contains invalid metadata
Of course, that's not the real error. There is nothing in fact wrong with Microsoft.Ink.dll.
The real issue with this glitch is that I can't even click on this error to bring me to the problematic line of code. So if I introduce a coding typo anywhere in my project, I may see this message and have no clue what line of code or even which module is causing the problem. This can make it risky to make a large number of changes to your code before you compile it.
However, if I modify the example code above to remove the "this" pointer:
The compiler then generates the error that it is supposed to:
The name 'strangeCompilerErrorForUndefinedMembers' does not exist in the current context
As far as we can tell, this issue only affects managed code. It also is not specific to undefined member variables; for example, an illegal cast sometimes elicits this error. We also haven't been able to figure out why this bad behavior occurs in some files of our project, but not others.
We've reported this issue to the Microsoft Visual Studio team and they have been able to reproduce it, although exactly why this happens or how to fix / work around the issue is not yet clear. We have been able to verify that there is nothing in fact wrong with Microsoft.Ink.dll on any of our machines. Hopefully this problem will be cleaned up when the service pack comes along.
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Yesterday I showed you how I use InkSeine to Make a Project Binder. Well that's great for work and challenging projects. But with infant identical twin girls in my household, I need a severe coffee infusion when I arrive at work before my brain begins to function. So of course I multitask and do all my web "research" while I'm getting going.
InkSeine makes it easy and fun to collect visual shortcuts to web pages. It is just a zillion times better than looking at a stupid scrolling menu or sidebar that is overflowing with textual shortcuts that all look the same.
With InkSeine, I can lay out all my information spatially on a page of my notebook. I place web sites that I use together in the same area of the page. I collect and annotate interesting posts underneath the shortcuts that I keep to the main sites. Web sites that I don't visit often stay out sight on other pages of my notebook.
The page pictured below is the "front page" of my web notebook, which I use as my main launching pad for surfing. To you this probably looks like a mess, but to me it makes perfect sense, and I know exactly where to stroke my pen to open up any of the web sites that I visit frequently. Even with a dense page of shortcuts like this, there's still room to collect new links and jot down notes at a moment's notice.
Since I took this snapshot I have cleaned up my "launch pad" a bit. I've cut sites that fell into disuse or disfavor (e.g. Gizmodo after their juvenile CES prank). I also had to archive my ever-growing list of "cool GottaBeMobile.com blog posts" to a subsequent page in this note where I keep links to Tablet PC-related tech articles. I have other pages where I archive Surface Computing related stuff, a list of all the InkShows on GottaBeMobile.com that I want to check out (complete with my notes on the ones I've already watched), or my page of online videos that I like to keep handy.
To me, the information super-highway is a notebook page with plenty of wide open space. There's no speed limit on how fast I can fly around with my pen.
Previous Post: Day #1: Make a Project Binder
Next Post: Day #3: Sketching Designs
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An exciting development today. We finally have copy/paste of ink strokes between InkSeine and OneNote doing something reasonable. So this is looking more likely to get into our initial release, provided we don't find any severe landmines with it during further testing!
This three-part capture shows the original content in InkSeine, the strokes appearing "selected" after doing a Paste in OneNote, and then the final look of the strokes in OneNote after tapping to clear the selection.
The fidelity of our stroke thickness conversion isn't perfect, but it's close enough that it shouldn't matter for most practical uses.
The only catch right now is that if you select ink strokes and bitmaps or other stuff from InkSeine, we only paste the ink strokes into OneNote so that you can get at their inky goodness. However, it is a simple matter to grab a screen capture of your ink strokes mixed in with bitmaps if that is what you want instead.
My only remaining wish is that 'FeralBoy' will forgive me for appropriating his signature "inky goodness" catchphrase [:-)]
Update: Since my original post, we've discovered that on Windows XP, Microsoft.Ink.dll under the Common Language Runtime (CLR) 2.0 has a bug that prevents inky goodness from happening by default. Since InkSeine is 100% written in managed code, this issue affects us.
But there is good news! The issue is described in this knowledge base article and has a patch available. Copying and pasting ink between InkSeine and other applications will work as long as you install the update and reboot your Windows XP tablet.
I've also been able to verify that ink strokes can be copied and pasted between InkSeine and Windows Journal. However, Windows Journal highlighter strokes cannot yet be pasted into InkSeine correctly. Nevermind, we've fixed that too!
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If you're a fan of inking on your Tablet PC or UMPC, you better really treat your significant other to a great date on Valentine's day, because you'll be spending Feb. 15th with your tablet.
I'm happy to announce that Microsoft InkSeine will be available as a research prototype, courtesy of Microsoft Research, that you can download via research.microsoft.com on February 15th, 2008.
We have a number of improvements, bug fixes, and some nifty new features that we are rolling into the program. One of the coolest is InkSeine's newfound ability to automatically capture "backlinks" for screen shots that you take from Internet Explorer or Office 2003 and 2007 documents (PowerPoint, Word, Excel, or Outlook emails), as pictured below. These "backlinks" are shortcuts that you can open to revisit web and Office documents that you've taken a screen capture from. All you have to do is stroke down on one of the round icons in your notes to open the document or web page.
Here's a sample document I generated with a search for "InkSeine" at the top. I opened a series of documents that I found in my search, and took a clipping from each of them. You can see the backlinks sitting at the top left corner of each clipping. The clippings you see there were taken from PowerPoint, Word, Excel, an Outlook email, and an Internet Explorer web page, respectively.
A sneak preview of Microsoft InkSeine is available courtesy of Matt Faulkner over at GottaBeMobile.com. And let me take this opportunity to offer a special thanks to Rob, Warner, and Matt at GottaBeMobile.com for their helpful early encouragement and feedback on the program. Tablet PC MVP's Steve Seto and Frank Garcia have also been super helpful in trying out different versions of some features we've been working on.
InkSeine works on Vista or the Tablet PC version of XP, but we definitely recommend installing InkSeine under Windows Vista for the best experience. InkSeine's handwriting recognition is superior under Vista because it uses your email corpus to augment the recognizer's word list. So be sure to get yourself a Vista tablet or UMPC ready for the 15th if you really want to get the most out of InkSeine. But it works pretty well on XP too, you just have to take some extra time to install Windows Desktop Search (WDS 3.01) if you don't already have it.
Note that Microsoft InkSeine is not a supported Microsoft product. It is a research prototype being deployed by Microsoft Research in order to help showcase some of what the Tablet PC can do, and of course to collect feedback, ideas, and comments from people who try it out. I'll be the first to admit that InkSeine isn't perfect, and has its warts and quirks, but it is pretty cool for what it does. We're doing our best to beat all the bugs out of it, but if you use it enough you'll probably find some glitches. Nonetheless InkSeine has a great set of functionality for handling ink on your tablet PC. You can definitely do a lot of fun stuff with it. It also automatically saves a backup file just in case you mess up, or encounter a crash.
We'll have more details and feature descriptions as the release date gets closer. Stay tuned for updates.
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I have a confession to make.
I'll bring my Tablet PC to most meetings that I attend. But I don't like to take detailed notes about meetings and I can't stand to sit there doing nothing. So I often populate the margins and headers of my notes with sprawling squiggles and arabesques. I just think better if my hand is in constant motion on the screen. If you witness me scrawling furiously, then I'm either taking detailed notes on something important you said, or I'm thinking about what you're saying while I doodle.
That's right, I'm an inveterate doodler.
It's something that I've always done, as long as I can remember. My third grade teacher told me that I would never amount to anything. I tended to look out the window a lot during class. And I liked to doodle on the reams of mind-numbing addition problems that she passed out, instead of completing them. I did the first page and after that I got it, so why waste everyone's time?
I never know what I'm going to scrawl. I just do it and sometimes I like the results. I tend to gravitate to abstract doodles with a knife-edged gestural rhythm, perhaps inspired by the work of Wassily Kandinsky or Jackson Pollock. But modern art pieces tend to have banal titles like "No. 5," "Composition VII," or the dreaded "Untitled."
This is where I depart from the masters and bring technology to bear: modern art meets surreal poetry, courtesy of the Tablet PC.
The Tablet PC handwriting recognition engine has a daunting problem to solve and I'm often amazed at how well it works. But if you toss it some random strokes and ask it to recognize them, by golly the Tablet PC will happily go off and hallucinate an answer for you.
For example, here's one of my recent Prize Winning Squiggles:
According to the recognizer, this doodle says "toe: Fatalities: faerie insignia." There was some other gobbledygook there too, but I just took a screen capture of the first few words to use as my title. This sketch has something of the menacing feel of a Mayan stelae to me. But it's only slightly menacing. It could very well be the "faerie insignia" for a long-forgotten elder god of toe fatalities. The ancients must have dropped a lot of boulders on their feet when building pyramids and ziggurats and all that cool stuff, so I can see where there would be a real need for such a deity in the good old days. So this title really works for me. Voila!
Here's another example:
In case you aren't fluent in doodle, according to my Tablet PC this one reads "initiative: 1 appointee." That sounds very business process oriented. I'll be sure to make it my action item for this week.
If you want to play this game at home, the only rule is that the title must be chosen from a contiguous string that appears in the recognized text.
In fact, I'll make a contest of it. Whoever submits the best doodle with a Tablet PC-hallucinated title to the AlpineInker will win a 100% genuine spiffy orange Microsoft polystyrene coffee cup, signed by yours truly. All entries will be judged by an international panel of jurists consisting of myself.
The highly coveted Doodle Cup '08. Who will win it? 
Here's how to name all your masterpieces for the Museum of Modern Doodles, using some of your favorite inking programs:
- I sketched the two pieces above with InkSeine. With InkSeine I can easily translate my handwriting-or doodles- to text by lassoing some strokes, picking the search command, and then taking a snapshot of the resulting query. InkSeine will be available for external release soon. If you are reading this blog post then you know that is February 15, 2008.
- If you use Windows Journal, you can do the same by lassoing some strokes, and then from the Actions menu, choose Convert Handwriting to Text.
- If you're using OneNote, the game is a bit harder to play because it's clever enough to realize that the strokes are probably a drawing. So you'll have to force OneNote to treat it as text. To do this, lasso-select your doodle and then go to the Tools menu. Pick the Treat Selected Ink As command and choose the Handwriting option. Then open the Tools menu again and choose Convert Handwriting to Text. This will replace your doodle with the text equivalent, but you can just copy the text and hit Undo to get your doodle back.
Here's one final example of this art form, where I've gathered a few smaller doodles together to create a triptych. These were sketched over the course of a long workshop so they ended up having similar colors and styles. I originally drew them in Windows Journal, but collected and framed them in InkSeine.
I have to admit that I wasn't quite as pleased with the recognizer-hallucinated names for these ones. "le tent it Emit it", "Itineraries is Eyeleted" and "Inapt Feral" didn't quite capture my intent. Oh well, handwriting technology still has significant room for improvement.
And I doubt it's ever been optimized properly for the avant-garde doodlers among us.
Update: Rob Bushway of GottaBeMobile.com has kindly promoted the Doodle Cup '08 contest for Inveterate Tablet PC Doodlers. I think this is a hoot - I wrote this post for fun and didn't really expect that I'd ever get any submissions. But when some good ones come in, I'll set up a Museum of Modern Doodles page with all of the submissions (modulo spam and inappropriate content [:-)]). The contest will remain open until someone wins.
Rob has also started a doodle contest thread on the GBM Forums where you can post your doodles. The GBM forums are a great resource if you have any tablet or mobile tech questions - people read them and usually respond very quickly! This thread make it easy for you to participate in the contest if you don't have a convenient place to host your own web content (you can also post a comment on this thread, with a hyperlink to your doodle). All comments on the AlpineInker blog are moderated, so just post once and I'll bless your comments as soon as possible.
I also recently discovered there have been some very famous "Inveterate Doodlers." For example, here is a page of doodles that John F. Kennedy made during a crticial meeting at the height of the Cuban missle crisis! One of his doodle tics was to repeatedly write the same word. Perhaps this crisis was averted solely because JFK wasn't paying attention to the military dudes [:-)]. He was a wise man. In my experience, patience and doing nothing cause most problems to go away on their own.
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I visited Snoqualmie Pass this weekend, just 1 hour east of Seattle. Life in the mountains here at just 3000 feet of elevation is dramatically different than the maritime climate of Seattle.
The Alpental ski area, about 1 mile north of the Pass, has received 234 inches of snow (i.e., 19 ½ feet, or 6 ½ meters) in the last 40 days, according to the records of a local resident who keeps a running tally of the snowfall.
So what does all that snow look like? To give a sense of scale, here's my car dwarfed by the colossal snow banks. The other is the barely visible roof of my cabin, festooned with unstable snow mushrooms... The entire building shakes when one of them lets loose from the roof.
 
Noah's ark would do me little good in these conditions. Our solution was to concoct a sled to carry the twins around. So I spent my weekend as a glorified mushing dog, competing in the "Identical Iditarod." We were not beating anyone to our destination, but we certainly had the cutest brood on the trail.
 
Now that's traveling in style.
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