West Seattle, Washington
03 Sunday
Congratulations to new Alki News-Beacon editor Cami MacNamara on publication of her first edition – you can check it out online here. Cami is also webmaster for AlkiNews.com, where you can always find a link to the latest Beacon as well as other info from the Alki Community Council, which is preparing for its regular bimonthly meeting next Thursday (have you joined yet?).
–Taco Del Mar in Westwood Village has opened.
-Also in Westwood Village, Pet Pros — one of the 6 pet stores WS now has, counting the newly opened All the Best Pet Care on Alki — says it’s having a grand-opening sale 9/28-9/30.ÂÂ
-Another business is celebrating a grand opening: We just heard from TouchTech Systems, which has moved into the former West Seattle Helpline spot (they’re now in the WS Community Resource Center) in The Junction (along the corridor at 4517 Cali). Company president Brian Presser, a WS resident, describes TouchTech Systems as:
We are a small local company that provides multimedia marketing and communication solutions for the internet (such as websites) as well as interactive kiosks for a multitude of uses. We sell and provide service for essentially all Apple computer equipment and are a reseller of most major hardware and software brands including Xerox, HP, Adobe and Microsoft.
Continuing today’s unplanned “in other blogs” theme … beware the F-bombs if you are sensitive, but that said, if you drive the WS bridge, you might identify with this driver’s fury.
The breast-cancer-fighting 3-Day Walkers who traveled WS shores on Sunday are posting their stories online. Among those we’ve found: Two bloggers from our Other Blogs in WS page (Courtney and Kristina), and another blogger with WS ties. Good job, all.
We promised during WSB Pledge Day that we would keep working to make the site worth your time and trouble (not to mention the $ that many readers were kind enough to invest). We’re working on several upgrades. The first successful one fixes a somewhat secret (but annoying) problem: Until now, comments on WSB were not searchable; if you remembered reading something in a comment and tried to find it with the WSB search box, no dice — “search” would only look at the posts (though comments at least were indexed by Google and other offsite search engines). Now, this is fixed, so whatever you put in the WSB search box, you will get back a page with any posts featuring that text in either the body of the post or its comments. (Test it by searching for the name you use to leave comments!) NEXT UP: We’re working on the oft-requested “open discussion” (forum/bulletin board) feature — thought we had one earlier tonight, but it blew up the site, so we had to cancel it — stand by for eventual triumph!
Some folks grump at us from time to time for deciding to refer to the venerable California Avenue Southwest as “Cali.” Yes, we admit, we made it up, although there is at least one business that uses the shorthand (Cali Nails, south edge of The Junction). Other new abbreviations have started to appear in the past year or so, such as SOA. But now, here’s one we have never heard/seen before — interested if you have — a blogger who apparently moved to WS recently is calling it “WeSea.”
GIANT THANK YOU to everyone who reads and/or participates in WSB – contributors and non-contributors alike. 
As promised, at the stroke of midnight, the Pledge Day posts stop, the “Support WSB” contribution “button” will drop to the bottom of the sidebar, and we’ll get back to posting at a dull-roar pace (a few notches lower than today’s frenzy). And stand by for a picture of the forthcoming video cam as soon as we find the right one in which to wisely invest some of the $ you entrusted us with to make WSB better! West Seattle, and everyone who’s part of it, absolutely rocks.
As we mentioned in WSBPD update #1, the first thing we will invest in, to improve WSB, is a video camera. Some West Seattle people, places, and events just beg for moving pix and sound. Even still pix are a relatively recent addition for us — we bought a small Nikon with 10x zoom on closeout a few months back, and it’s enabled us to get beyond what we were managing to eke out with a combination of a dying decade-old Sony plus a cell-phone cam. Speaking of which, we also will invest in a low-cost blog phone line, since we’ve found that some information providers just don’t want to do business via e-mail. But that’s all “infrastructure” stuff, as our governmental friends might call it. We have tried to enhance the features you see — adding “live” screengrabs to the WS “Live” Cams page, refining and expanding the categories (list on the right-side sidebar) so you can subscribe via RSS to just the categories that interest you (Admiral Theater, Elliott Bay Water Taxi, Alki Statue of Liberty, among other topics, all have their own categories now) or bookmark the specific category page, and continuing to update the Other Blogs in WS page, currently with 91 blogs (and we’re always ready to hear about more!), as well as researching and posting the WS Weekend Lineup every Friday morning. For a while we were deluged with lost-pet announcements and about to create a pet page — that’s still in queue — and we’re mulling a few other ideas. Most important — is there anything you wish you could find at WSB? We can’t promise everything (some things aren’t scalable for a small family-run site) but we would love to hear your wish list.
If you’re just joining us, welcome to WSB Pledge Day (it ends @ midnight so if you don’t want to hear about it, it’ll be safe to come back then). 
MEGA-THANKS to everyone who has chipped in so far. The other type of contribution that makes this more interesting every day are your e-mails and on-site comments – from “news tips” to rants/raves, and way beyond. Right now, we wanted to call your attention to the comments on our favorite post from last weekend — the one about the yard-sale signs. Several members of the family that staged the sale have come to WSB to post some very touching, lively follow-up comments, just another example of how finding out more about our neighbors, whether through a website or through in-person conversation, gives us big thrills, every day, and we hope you get a kick out of it too; e-mail us any time with something interesting you’re seeing, hearing, planning, doing.
Half the team is napping to recover from overnight Eclipse Watch (what a sight, especially when the moon turned smoky shadowy rust-red during “totality”), the other half is out gathering new pix and info to share on a stepped-up posting schedule in honor of WSB Pledge Day. Meantime, an artistically promising associate proclaimed the original “Support WSB” graphic (seen in the sidebar at right) “too dull” and cooked up the one making a cameo here:
As mentioned earlier, we’re calling today WSB Pledge Day — riffing off those public-tv pledge drives, and we’re starting early since we’re up late awaiting the lunar eclipse. Here’s what “Pledge Day” is about: For the first time since we fired this thing up more than a year and a half ago — when we had no idea it would take the thrilling turn it’s taken, becoming a forum for info and input from all of you, as well as a place to report the things we see, hear about, and check into — we’re accepting contributions. Full disclosure, we are NOT starving artists (you already probably figured out, we’re not even artists); also, we expect to eventually accept some ads — local, relevant ads, not those annoying spammy national types. Moderating WSB’s metamorphosis into a community news/info/discussion hub has taken a ton of time and an increasing amount of $, so we feel less sheepish about giving you a way to contribute, but only if you really want to — no hard feelings if you don’t.
If you click that button, which will appear on the site multiple other times today, it will take you to the page for our new PayPal $-receiving account. You do NOT have to be a PayPal member to contribute; you can give PayPal a credit card number (which will NOT EVER be seen by us). Please note that you will see the name “A Drink of Water and a Story Interactive” atop the page; that’s the name we’ve given our fledgling umbrella operation. (The first item on our wishlist for whatever this all brings in is a video camera; so much of what we see begs to be recorded on video, so we all can share the sights and sounds of WS people in good times as well as in bad … from the Hi-Yu Parade to important community meetings, and way beyond.) For all those of you who chip in, THANK YOU!!!! and let us know if it’s OK to put your name on a supporters’ page that we hope to set up, just for posterity’s sake.
You know how it’s done on public TV, big ballyhooed episodes of Dr. Who or Riverdance or a Dr. Christiane Northrup lecture or something, interrupted every five minutes by Wheedling For Dollars? Read More
The website for Washington State Ferries wi-fi service now says wi-fi for the Fauntleroy-Vashon-Southworth run is delayed yet again and now not scheduled to start until September 17th. (The same WSF page allows you to check the service status on individual ferries where it’s installed.) However, commuters driving through West Seattle on their way to the Fauntleroy dock can get a wi-fi fix at yet another stop along the way — the Corner Inn at Fauntleroy/Cali now has huge signs in its windows announcing FREE WI-FI.
A WS blogger woke up today to discover his old-ish truck gone. Got us wondering how much of this is going on. Seattle Police posts crime stats online by census tract; we for example are in #116, and the newest monthly report is for May, which shows 4 auto thefts in our census tract. (514 total for that month in the entire area served by the SW Precinct.) If you want to check your area — the citywide report is here; find your census tract number on this map.
We are working on a list of who’s got wi-fi access around WS, besides the obvious (coffeehouses), for anyone who really can take the advice of West Seattle’s Most Famous Politician and telecommute to avoid the I-5-related trauma expected during FF ’07. The latest addition, if you weren’t aware: Public library branches. West Seattle has four of ’em: Southwest, High Point, Delridge, and of course, WS (north of Metro Market).
Two things to tell you about quickly, before we run out to implore the current sunbreak to hold long enough for Blue Angels and hydros and all that:
-The semiweekly city Land Use Info Bulletin revealed a plan for a new 2-story building, described as “restaurant on the ground floor and offices above,” at the site of Pegasus Pizza. A Design Review Board meeting is already set for August 23rd. This would be the first big building project in that part of the Alki business district since the revamp of the former Alki Market (now Cactus and future All the Best Pet Care).
-Many potential WS projects we hadn’t previously heard about are listed on this message board we just discovered (along with many we HAD heard about). No clue what those folks’ sources are but we are trying to find out!
Yes, the blog was shown for a few seconds on King5 News at eleven o’clock Wednesday night (part of actual tv screen shown below), when their anchorguy announced that the station’s excellent site collecting Seattle blogs, Citizen Rain, had picked WSB as “Blog of the Week.” Makes up for losing the “Best Neighborhood Blog ’07” title to our witty and talented pals at Capitol Hill Seattle (though we didn’t even know there was a competition till we heard they won; maybe we’ll have a chance in ’08).
With about an hour and a half left in July, this has become WSB’s first month with six-digit “traffic,” as they say in internetland. 101,099 “page views” for July; double what we notched as recently as February; 12 times July ’06. Without marketing or gimmicks — people are just discovering WSB online, or hearing about it from friends/relatives/co-workers. By “people,” we mean YOU, so we want to thank you not just for coming by to look at what we’re posting about, but especially for e-mailing us with rants, raves, questions, photos, tips, whatever you are seeing/hearing in, and about, WS. That’s what makes this so much more than we imagined possible when we launched it on a lark, yet it’s barely a shell of what it can become … with your continued help. Thank you, thank you, thank you, 100(thousand) times thank you!
Our WS “live” cams page has long featured links to city and state traffic cameras in and near WS. In time for this morning’s commute, we tweaked the page to add images from those cameras: Each time you check the page, you will see the newest images from all the cameras we link to. They won’t automatically refresh (nor do they on their source sites), but every time you “refresh” or return to the page, you will get updated images for all cameras. Let us know any other cameras (the city and state have a ton) you would like to see added.
From Creighton Space (one of the 75-plus sites featured on our Other Blogs In WS page): A poster near his home promises a reward for solving an arson, but where was the fire? (We’ll check with our police contacts in the morning if no one solves this sooner.)
#1 — Our fly-fishing-blog friends at thee a** hooked whitey (one of the 75-plus blogs linked from our Other Blogs In WS page) report the first much-awaited Pink Salmon has been caught in West Seattle waters.
#2 — Here’s something pink you can catch without a hook or a net (just a checkbook). The famously pink Park Apartments just north of Lincoln Park are up for sale. Less than a million bucks!
Yet another tidbit from last night’s Alki Community Council meeting, big changes ahead for the semi-monthly Alki News Beacon: Its webmaster Cami MacNamara will take over as editor, as Christine L’Ecluse moves on to “a new adventure”; plus, toward the end of the year, subscribers will receive the Beacon by mail instead of by carrier. (If you pick it up at local businesses, don’t worry; Cami tells WSB that copies will still be made available at Alki/Admiral-area businesses.)
A local internet-service pioneer (we remember hearing about his company way back when we got online in the early ’90s) keeps a blog about UFO sightings and ET encounters, after experiencing one himself. Today he has posted a photo he took at Alki on Monday, saying he thinks it shows a “teardrop-shaped UFO.” (Hmm, taken the same day it was reported a new “X-Files” movie might finally come to pass. The truth is out there … somewhere.)
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