Wednesday/ a Pi happy hour

Here’s a poster from the hotel advertising the hotel restaurant and bar, called Pi (as in the mathematical symbol).  Check out the happy hour* that runs from 3.14 pm to 6.28 pm : very geeky. I’m not so sure that think and drink go well together, though!  Those blocked ‘Br’ and ‘Ba’ are chemical symbols, for bromide and barium respectively.

*Happy hour means you get your booze at half-price, or at least at a discount.

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Tuesday/ P.S. We won!

I’m in the Hilton Garden Inn in downtown Denver : not very fancy, but comfortable and newly refurbished.   Hey, and they have oatmeal for me in the morning.

P.S.  It’s official.  We received the good news today that we (my firm, PwC) beat out 5 other competitors in our bid for the work at Union Gas in Ontario province in Canada (the one I made two trips for up to Toronto).

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This is the Fontius Building on Welton Street in downtown Denver, around 7.30 am this morning as I walked to the offices where we work. ‘Duplers Furs’ says the ghost sign on the side of it.

Monday/ pink and blue

There were no mountains or landscape in sight when I work up this morning after falling asleep on my early morning flight.   And sure enough, we never saw the sun all day here in Denver : unusual for a city with the reputation of the most sunny days in the country.

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There was a continuous sheet of cloud cover somewhere en route to Denver this morning, just getting colored pink as the sun comes up.   (It’s a Boeing 757).

Sunday/ Africa is very, very big

Check out this map of continents and countries.  It is from Ezra Klein’s ‘wonk blog’ hosted by the Washington Port.   I found it just stunning to realize that the surface area of the continent of Africa is equal to : China + Mexico + Western Europe + Eastern Europe + the U.S. of A. + India.

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Saturday/ U WANT DOCTR?

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‘Kathleen Sebelius’ * (channeled by Saturday Night Live’s Kate McKinnon complete with brooch and outfit seen in recent interviews) offering some ‘tips’ on using the new healthcare.gov web site.    *United States Secretary of Health and Human Services

The comedy show Saturday Night Live here in the USA opened last night with ‘Kathleen Sebelius’ offering some tips on how to get by all the glitches of the new healthcare.gov website that enables more people to apply for health insurance (political name of the program ‘Obamacare’, otherwise known as the Affordable Care Act).   ‘Have you tried restarting your computer?’ was her first tip, then a low-res website offering a YES and NO button, followed by signing up in other languages such as Icelandic. Here’s a video clip .. WSL Blog.    So now we have Republicans that shut down the government and flirted with the debt ceiling over the new healthcare law, calling for Sebelius’s resignation.  They say ‘We’re looking out for the interests of the people’.  Well, it’s not that simple.   The Republicans are representing rich people.  The healthcare law is mostly aimed at poor people, at healthy young people, and sick people (with so-called pre-existing conditions that have disqualified them from healh insurance so far), and at people out of work, who used to get health insurance from their employers.   I don’t have sympathy for the argument that the country cannot expand Medicaid (a means-tested program run by the states, supported by the federal government), and at the same time we need to stop the really glaring flaws in affordable health care that a really rich country’s citizens can get.  If you’ve lost your job, why should you lose your health insurance?  If we are all equal citizens, and you are born into a poor family, why should your mother not have access for herself and for you to health insurance?   Every time someone goes to the emergency room, we all pay for it sooner or later .. so we should move toward more preventive care, more access to doctors and nurses and clinics for everyone, not less. The health care industry in the USA is a $2.8 trillion dollar industry.  We spend $0 on some people, and 2.5 times the OECD average on others.   As for those people that ‘have health insurance’ that will ‘lose’ it through Obamacare (an accusation from the Republicans) : many of those are on a plan that costs $50 per month, that offers $2,000 of cover for medical expenses.   That is not health insurance.

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Friday/ DIA’s train station design drama

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The view from up top as the taxi drops me for checking in.   So the metal frame is the top arched covering shown in the next picture.
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Here is a rendition of the completed arrival point at Denver International Airport of the East Rail Line that will go from Union Station in downtown Denver to DIA. The design is by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava.  Completion is slated for late 2015/ early 2016.

Once I looked into the background of the train station/ plaza/ hotel complex that is under construction at Denver airport, I discovered that there had been a lot of trouble with its design.  Check out this cool animation from the Denver Post.   The original design from star Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava had to be modified somewhat after he withdrew from the project.

Friday morning/ Warwick William

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Warwick William sits on the counter in the Warwick hotel’s lobby.

It is nice to check out of the hotel at the end of the work week away from home.  No matter what happens at work, there will come a time where you say : now I have got to go.   I have been staying in the comfortable but old(er) Warwick hotel here in downtown Denver, but will move over to a Hilton Garden Inn hotel from next week on.   Maybe I can get my oatmeal on the run there in the mornings? Time will tell.

Wednesday/ have a Clif bar

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Clif bar helps out as a snack food .. but I try not to eat these kinds of snack bars too regularly, even if they are supposed to be loaded up with good nutrients. It’s not ‘natural’ food.

I need to get up earlier in the morning so that I don’t miss my breakfast at the hotel .. but my problem is that they take too long! First I get seated, then a second person comes and pours me my coffee, and then a third person comes and takes my order.  Then I have to wait for it, even if it’s just oatmeal.  Oatmeal and cereal should be out as a buffet item and ready to go.

Tuesday/ Coohills and Wynkoop

Our project manager treated us to a dinner at a French restaurant in lower downtown Denver at Coohills Restaurant.  The dinner was wonderful, but the service was oh, so slow.   I had apple tart and rum &raisin ice cream for dessert.  We started at 7 pm and was finally done by 10 pm (dessert was served shortly before 10).  Then when we walked back to the hotel, I noticed we crossed a street called Wynkoop Avenue.   It turns out the street is named after Edward Wanshear Wynkoop (1836-1891), a founder of the city of Denver, Colorado.  Wynkoop served as an officer in the First Colorado Volunteer Cavalry during the American Civil War, attaining the rank of major of volunteers, and was brevetted a lieutenant colonel in May 1865.  The Wikipedia entry does not say as much, but he must have been a Dutchman with a last name of Wynkoop.

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The Coohills Restaurant serves up fine French cuisine.  Just be prepared to relax with some good French wine and wait for it!
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Buy your wine off Wynkoop Ave in downtown Denver. ‘Wyn koop’ as Dutch or Afrikaans literally means to buy wine.

Monday/ the new Benjamin is blue

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The sun is just lighting up the snow caps on the mountains below our Boeing 757 this morning. This is somewhere between Seattle and Denver, I’m not exactly sure where !
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The old ‘Benjamin’ is on the top and new one with the bluish tint and fancy holographic ribbon and orange bell, below. There’s a watermark of Benjamin Franklin in the white space. The orange jar with a bell on it has a lot must have taken several drops of ink to print onto the note!
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And here are the backs of the bills.

I checked again today at lunch time with the bank if they had new $100 bills, and they did.   The teller emerged from the vault with a crisp new stack of one hundred $100 bills (so : $10,000; enough to choke a horse?) and peeled off two for me.  The new bills have a blue appearance and is not radically different from the old – but it does have some nice touches of color with the blue and the orange.

Sunday/ dead car battery

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It’s charged .. the trickle charger shows that my car battery is fully charged.

Last weekend I found the car battery was completely dead when I had jumped into the car to run an errand.  Well – nothing to be done before last Monday’s early departure to Denver.    So this Friday I found the cause : I left my car’s trunk lid not completely pushed shut .. and the light inside drained the battery completely.   So this weekend I could borrow a trickle charger from Bryan to put some voltage in the battery, and it it’s taken care of.   It did not lost its charge overnight, and the car started as usual two or three times when I took it out.  I guess I don’t get to buy one of those shiny new cars at the car show, just yet.  But I will, sooner or later.

Saturday/ another car show

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This is from an Audi SUV’s navigation system, showing the car’s location. Drive around in the real world, and hope it matches with the virtual world in the navigation system !

Here are a few selected pictures that I took at the 2014 Seattle Auto Show that we attended today.

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This was the only Tesla on display. The front trunk aka ‘frunk’ is available for luggage. And this model had two jump seats in the trunk. The electric engine is in there somewhere in between in the lower part of the car.
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The interior of the Tesla. Check out the enormous navigation and function panel, by far the largest in any of the cars.
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Here’s the view of part of the showroom floor.
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This is a stingray ..
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The yellow 2014 Chevrolet Corvette Stingray Z51 had plenty of admirers. It will set you back some $55,000.
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Side view of the 2014 Chevrolet Corvette Stingray Z51.
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Here is Dodge’s 2014 SRT Viper Roadster. (In white? No. Any other color but not white).
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Lo and behold the all-electric car from BMW’s new I Division. The car features a body made entirely out of carbon fibre, for which BMW invested $100 million to build a plant in Moses Lake, here in the state of Washington.

 

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And here is a 2014 BMW 435i xDrive Coupe, price tag $63,000.

 

Friday/ Windows 8.1

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The Windows Start button is back – sort of – ‘by popular demand’, in Windows 8.1.

I downloaded and installed Windows 8.1.  It works a little better now.  It is finally ‘usable’, say some tech commentators.  The Surface 2 tablet will come out just about as Apple is to announce its iPad 5 and possibly an improved iPad mini.   I know Windows are trying to lure some business users to the Surface with its Windows applications, but I for one cannot just see myself using the Surface 2 for work – ever.  Even if some day my firm would be able to put all the PC apps on the Surface, there are the obstacles of pure physics.  I need all 15 inches of my notebook computer’s screen, and I need a proper keyboard with keys and key caps.   And my finger will never, ever be as sharp as a mouse pointer.

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Windows 8.1 with a big bold arrow to provide tips of new functions. It seems the developers have realized that there are many desktop users, that use a MOUSE on a regular screen to navigate WIndows and not a FINGER on a touch screen.

Thursday/ heading home

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A tiny T-Rex underfoot in Denver airport’s B terminal floor is nibbling my toe.
The Royal Gorge
Here’s a picture from my archives : a 1999 road trip during which my friend Marlien (that’s her on the suspension bridge) and I stopped at the Royal Gorge close to Canon City, Denver. At 955 feet (291 m) above the river way below, the bridge held the record of highest bridge in the world from 1929 to 2003. On June 11, 2013, a wildfire broke out in the Royal Gorge Park of Canon city that ultimately destroyed 48 of 52 buildings in the Royal Gorge Bridge & Park.
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The area by Canon City known as Garden Park is one of the richer dinosaur fossil beds in the U.S. A. Fossil hunters have been pulling bones from the ground here since 1877.

I’d better enjoy coming home this Thursday night, because for the next several weeks we are going to have to stick around until mid-day on Fridays.   We are pushing hard to get all the design work for our project done before the disruptions of Thanksgiving and Christmas (good disruptions nonetheless!) are upon us.   The year 2013 is running out on all of us.  Yikes !

Wednesday/ the Daniels & Fischer tower

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The Daniels & Fisher (D&F) Tower is a distinctive Denver landmark. Built as part of the Daniels & Fisher department store in 1910, it was the tallest between the Mississippi and California at the time of construction, at a height of 325 feet (99 m).

We had a nice team dinner on Tuesday night at a restaurant called Willie G’s, a seafood and steak place.  I had some halibut and vegetables with a nice white wine.  It was quite a walk down there from the hotel, but I am sure the ‘exercise’ was good for me.  And I got to check out the Denver clock tower (also called the Daniels & Fisher tower) from up close.

P.S.  Soo .. the US Government is set to open in the morning, and the debt ceiling has been raised from its $16.7 trillion level to some level that will pay the bills through Jan 15 next year.  Hooray?

Tuesday/ sunny but cold

It’s good that it’s a short walk from the hotel to my office building.  It has suddenly become cold here in the mornings (29 °F/ -2°C).  And : there some snowflakes  in the air coming down from by lunch time.  Nothing that stuck on the pavement or streets, though.

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The early morning view from my hotel room on Tuesday. I work in the Denver Financial Center, the building with the square windows straight ahead. In front of it is the El Jebel Shrine a.k.a. the Sherman Street Event Center, with its Moorish Revival architectural style.

Monday/ United 244

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The view of our Boeing 757-200’s engine from seat 6F at 5 am at Seattle airport ..

 

I was on United 244 as is usual these Monday mornings.  We left on time at 5.40 am but the pilot had some turbulence to deal with at the landing in Denver.  I noticed four or five emergency vehicles next to the runway, which made me wonder if there was a concern that some airplanes could skid off the runway.

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.. and right after landing at Denver airport three hours later.

Sunday/ fall colors

The green in the trees here in Seattle are turning into reds, oranges and yellows, as they are across the United States.

So why are leaves green to begin with? asks Wikipedia in its article on chlorophyll.  Wikipedia : ‘It still is unclear exactly why plants have mostly evolved to be green. Green plants reflect mostly green and near-green light to viewers rather than absorbing it. Other parts of the system of photosynthesis still allow green plants to use the green light spectrum (for example, through a light-trapping leaf structure, carotenoids, and so on). Green plants do not use a large part of the visible spectrum as efficiently as possible. A black plant can absorb more radiation.   For more, check out Wikipedia : Chlorophyll

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This is a scene from 17th Ave on Capitol Hill in Seattle at about 5 pm on Sunday. It was sunny but not very warm (53 F/ 12 C).

 

Saturday/ Ellensburg and the Wildcats

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Central Washington Univesity’s mascot is a ‘wildcat’.
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Two beautiful huskies at the Kittitas County Farmers market in downtown Ellensburg. Initiative 522 (poster on the table in the background) is to label genetically modified food.
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The historic Davidson Building in downtown Ellensburg, completed in 1890.
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Just for fun : here is the same building, circa 1905.
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This is a beautiful brick building on North Main Street that houses several businesses.
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Here is the beautiful Art Deco entrance to the National Bank of Ellensburg Building. The building was constructed in 1930.
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The ‘sitting bull’ statue with cowboy hat radiates a ‘bullish’ personality. A little unnerving, not?
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This is Barge Hall, the main administrative building of Central Washington University. The institution was established in 1891 as the Washington State Normal School.
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Bouillon Hall houses the CWU Testing Center.
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Learn. Do. Live. Sign on a lamp post outside the library.
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Nicholson Pavilion has basketball courts inside. We’re headed to Tomlinson Stadium close by for the football game.
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The Wildcat mascot is saying hi to the radio station blaring music and announcements.
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The start of the game. On the far left there was a billow of white fire extinguisher cloud to add some drama for the entrance of the Wildcats football team. Crimson and black are their colors.  They finally came through 27-24 after a deficit of 3-17 !
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Bryan and I are headed back to Seattle. This is Old Highway Ten that goes through the town of Cle Ellum before it joins up with I-90 to go over the Cascades.  The landscape and vegetation is very, very different from Western Washington across the Cascades.
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We have arrived in Seattle. The artwork marks the entrance into the Mount Baker tunnel on I-90 that leads into the Mt Baker neighborhood.

On Saturday morning we did a little tour of historic downtown Ellensburg (the established in 1883). We stopped for a short time at the Kittitas County Farmers Market as well. Then we went to Central Washington Univeristy’s Tomlinson Stadium for a football game.  The CWU Wildcats took on Dixie State University (from Utah) in its annual Homecoming contest. Homecoming is the tradition of welcoming back alumni of a school.

 

Friday/ drive to Ellensburg

Bryan and I drove out to Ellensburg on Friday (two hours and some from Seattle, depending on traffic).  Bryan’s dad Dale received a Distinguished Alumnus Award from his alma mater in Ellensburg, Central Washington University.

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Interstate 90 and Snoqualmie Pass gets one from Seattle across the Cascades to central Washington State and Ellensburg (pop. 18,000). The Cascade Range (or Cascades) is a major mountain range, extending from southern British Columbia (in Canada) through Washington and Oregon all the way into Northern California.
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This is Snoqualmie Pass (elevation 3,022′ /921 m) ans we are approaching the summit. The pass can get snowy in winter time and that sturdy barrier is to offer some protection against avalanches.
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These are the ski slopes (see the ski lifts?) at The Summit at Snoqualmie Pass. Yes, there is something important missing on the slopes : snow! Opening day is still several weeks away; anywhere from mid-November to the first 10 days of December.
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Our arrival into Ellensburg. The Red Horse Diner, sporting Pegasus the flying horse (Mobil’s old iconic logo), is just one of many retro diners and gas stations in and around Ellensburg.