Past and Present

GOTTA CATCH 'EM ALL: We got some exercise and a history lesson while chasing Pokemon this morning.

Kennedy suggested some Pokemon hunting, and I suggested the Ballard Locks, as I'd heard there was lots of activity there. 

For those who haven't yet heard of the cell phone based game Pokemon Go, it's an app credited with getting gamers to take their action outside. Rolling Stone aptly describes it as 

You look for the critters, catch them, train them and battle with them. What's different here is that it uses the real world to inform your game experience. The game uses your phone's GPS sensors to track where you are, and makes use of a stylized Google map as the primary game board. Your character moves in the game as you walk around in real life, and events and objects – known as PokéStops – are associated with specific locations in the physical world. In order to interact with them, you need to actually walk to a particular place, like, in the real world. You can look at the game world through your phone's display, which serves as a viewfinder that mixes reality with game objects. Hence the term "augmented reality."

Since its initial rollout on July 6th, the app already has broken every record for app based games, and if it doesn't already, it will soon have more daily mobile users than Twitter.

We headed for the estuary between Lake Union and Puget Sound. It's less than two miles from our house. We found it fertile grounds for rare Pokemon like Squirtle, VictreeBell, and a Dratini. This me very happy.

What also made me happy was that our hunt became a walking history lesson.

There's lots of construction on the north side of the Locks right now. Turns out the 100+ year old pump plant is getting a long overdue upgrade. It was really neat to get to see the century old parts, and read about their replacements.

 Look at this worn-out workhorse, below. Amazing that for years, it was capable of moving 26,000 gallons of water PER MINUTE. I talked with the kids for a couple of minutes about trying to visualize that volume.

I really love that the construction at the Lock incorporated this cool opportunity to get a glimpse of the past instead of just doing it all behind tarps and fences. 

 And oh, yeah, there were boats at the Locks today, too. Wonder if they had any Pokemon stowaways. 

 We noticed that the boat bringing up the rear had a couple of probes on board, and its stern had the telltale "RV" in its name (research vessel).

On our way back to the car, we noticed a full on art in the park session, with painters capturing the railroad bridge. We wondered if it's a regular event, if the group travels, or it was just an unlikely coincidence.

MOD SQUAD: Tonight marked the start of a project CJ has been obsessing over for months. He's hoping to squeeze 'hi def' quality out of a decades old Nintendo NES console. 

He decided this mod kid (pictured below) was his best bet. They are new to the market and were in high demand (go figure), but we managed to score on the first day it launched. 

 CJ and Christian began dismantling the good ol' NES tonight, in preparation for the upgrade.

Please hold your breath, keep your fingers crossed and offer up good thoughts to the retro gaming powers that be that this works. 

To be continued ...