…the past two weeks, instead of writing here:

• Selling Vanishing Seattle books. (It’s only been out less than six weeks, and the third printing is already scheduled.)
• Working temp gigs. Most recently, I was at the Convention Center during the American Library Association’s huge confab. Sorry to report, I don’t have any dirt to report about raucous librarian nights on the town. I was mostly stuck at a desk, fielding questions from exhibiting companies about their “lead retrieval” machines. (They’re magnetic-stripe readers that collect demographic info about any convention attendee who stops by a company’s display booth.)This is one of those meta business-to-business-to-business enterprises that should have been rendered obsolete long ago. But then again, the whole convention biz is something online communication should have rendered obsolete by now. Yet it’s still more-or-less going strong, propping up all sorts of industries (display designers/builders, staging crews, airlines, hotels, restaurants, hookers, cab drivers, caterers, truckers, Pike Place fish throwers, the makers of promotional swag of all sorts (backpacks, brochures, candies, water bottles, pens, golf balls)), all so dispersed people with one professional or social link can all gather F2F (that’s “face to face” in geekspeak), be collectively bored by PowerPoint slide presentations, and dine on overpriced trout almondine.

  My next such gig’s at the Boat Show. It’ll be nine straight days of, well, I never know what.

• Neglecting work on my next book, a history of bodacious Belltown, and on another update to my ebook about digital TV.
• Planning a long-way-overdue reworking of this here blog site thang. I’m not yet ready to say much about it, only that it’ll be a group endeavor with several other bloggers and journalists, and just might be the Next Big (Online) Thing.
• Putting the February Belltown Messenger together. It’ll have the first of two consecutive installments about the new Olympic Sculpture Park. One reason why: The “park” part of the park, the landscaping and the plantings, still aren’t done yet, and even those flora aspects that have been installed will look nicer the closer we get toward spring.