a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
Hey! you’re in California, 
where 99% of the USA’s almonds are grown, I thought as I grabbed this almond milk in the grocery store tonight. It is very tasty – but they’ve cheated of course, adding vanilla flavor to it.
A sandwich, a salad and the milk did it for me. Not a fancy dinner but such a nice break from eating in the hotel restaurant downstairs and waiting for one’s food to eventually appear on the table!
It was interesting for me to see on Monday morning that Alaska Airlines sometimes uses the aircraft’s rear door for boarding the back rows of the airplane. It’s not something that is done often !
I think there are studies out there that show that boarding all window seats first, then all middle seats, then all aisle seats is the quickest – but to do that in practice is a major challenge. The airline will likely upset the super platinum elite frequent fliers that like to all board first – to go sit in the front of the airplane, or to go sit in their chosen seat further back.
I noticed an unusual handwritten poster on a tree as I went for my walk to Volunteer Park this afternoon. Not of a lost cat or dog, but a report of a ‘plane crash’. A plane crash right here in Capitol Hill? Would I not know about it? Well, when I looked up the DJI FC40, I saw that it is actually a drone. (I guess drone is a word with bad connotations, but maybe say ‘quad copter’ and not ‘plane’?).
Saturday was a beautiful cool cloudless 
day here in Seattle. I hopped on the No 43 bus that dropped me off on Denny Way, and then I walked downhill across Interstate 5 to the gym. There I read of the South Africa’s rap-rave group ‘Die Antwoord’ (the answer) that are quite a hit in New York City. (They have been here in Seattle as well, some time ago).
Well, it’s a good thing that people listen to the music and not the words in Afrikaans! Let’s just say they speak a different Afrikaans than I do.
I ran out to the doc to get my flu shot today. Getting a flu shot is nowadays even available at drug stores and at supermarkets here in the USA (I wonder why .. maybe they hope people that come in will buy $20 of groceries as well?). Even so, less than half of the population get their shot every year. Flu costs the USA more than $87 billion annually, including an estimated $10.4 billion a year in direct medical expenses and an additional $16.3 billion in lost earnings annually, according to a report released recently by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) Foundation. I went with the standard needle, stuck into the muscle of my arm. For the squeamish there is a fancy intra-dermal shot that uses a tiny 1/16-inch long micro-needle to inject the vaccine just under the skin.
We stayed very late at the office last night, and we were very happy
to get out of there today .. but the work never really stops. When I got at San Francisco airport after driving the rental car there this afternoon, there were 20 new e-mails on my smartphone. One simply said ‘Send KDD* slides’, from our project manager. Yikes. This must be urgent, I thought. *KDD stands for key design decisions, that our proposed solution will be built on.
The file is large and I could not send it with my phone. I had no luck using the airport’s wireless network either. (For my second attempt I was at the TSA security station. The notebook computer screen was open, and the agent closed it before I could stop him, killing the connection). Aargh. Right, I only had 5 more minutes before I had to board my flight. Time to pull out the heavy artillery : my Verizon ‘Mi-Fi’ JetPack. It creates a secure personal hot spot (wireless connection). Let’s go, let’s go .. why so slow? send it ! wait for the confirmation .. yes! made it.
Concord .. hmm, maybe they grow grapes there, I told my colleague as I noticed the sign post pointing there (Concord grapes, the ones they make jelly with). We were stuck in traffic. We had just exited I-680 and making our way back to the hotel in Walnut Creek. But no, I was wrong. Yes, the Concord grape is a cultivar derived from the grape species Vitis labrusca (also called fox grape). But the major growing areas are the Finger Lakes District of New York, Lake Erie, Lake Ontario, South-western Michigan, and the Yakima Valley in Washington. And the original Concord grape hails from Concord, Massachusetts : developed in 1849 by Ephraim Wales Bull. [Source for all this information : Wikipedia].
I have a very smart 
smart phone. It knows what I wanted to type in my message to my colleagues in San Francisco before I even started typing it. My flight is .. and there it suggested ‘delayed’ (in the grey box below my name, so you just poke it to pop it into your message. You saved a whole lot of typing.
I made it in an hour later to San Francisco, so not too bad a delay.
I stopped by the grocery store to buy some rice. I like to cook a quick dinner even on Sunday night before I travel early on Mondays .. or maybe expecially on Sunday night. Once or twice I have ordered take-out food on a Sunday night, only to discover late at night or early in the morning it was too spicy or too rich.
So I settled for my usual white jasmine rice from Thailand. Next time I will try the Northwest pilaf with the wolf and the wild rice.
Gray wolves once lived around Washington state, including the Olympic Peninsula. They are currently listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act. A few packs of gray wolves have returned to Washington the last few years, though – filtering in across the borders from Idaho and British Columbia.
Android users point out that most of the ‘new’ features on the iPhone have been on Android phones for a long time. Oh well, that’s alright. It’s still all new to me. On the other hand some Apple fanatics say ‘It’s like getting a new phone’. Well, yes and no. A new phone would have a longer-lasting battery, for example. I wonder if the new iPhone 6’s are any better that way. Bigger screens eat up more battery power.
What I should still do is clean up (delete) all the silly Apps on my phone that I don’t use. I have way too many of those!
*iOS 8 is the operating system of the phone. It’s like upgrading one’s desktop computer from Windows 7 to Windows 8.
Video Killed the Radio Star was the first music video shown on MTV in the United States at 12:01am on 1 August 1981. Well, now there is something that is killing the video (store) : streaming flicks over the internet with Netflix or Amazon Instant Video. On 15th Video held out for a long time as the last video store here on Capitol Hill, but it has now also closed its business. Even its collection of rare and weird cult flicks alongside the new releases and hits could not save it.
I made it in to Seattle. The four days out at our client project site went by quickly. It always does when we are busy. I made my way through security and onto the Alaska Airlines flight. While we were at the gate waiting to get pushed back, there was a young woman sitting next to me juggling two iPhones on her lap. From what I could tell she was feverishly sending and receiving e-mails on her two iPhones. So I was relieved when the airplane door was just and she had to turn the two phones off. Man! Give it up!
Check
out the waistband of the fancy pants I am wearing. This is stitching on the inside of the pants, of course. (So is it OK to wear Wednesday pants on Monday?). Stitching the day into the waistband is probably a marketing ploy to get me to buy seven pairs of pants – or at least five, one for each working day of the week. I actually have four pairs of these pants already. I like to wear the same types of pants every day to work.
.. says this Wall Street Journal write-up about the benefits of reading a real book, and not plowing through it in record time (the way I have to do many times at work when I have 15 minutes to review a document).
My flight out, and my drive out to Walnut Creek went fine. Monday on the road is always long day for me, mostly the result of getting up really early. It’s an even longer day for my colleagues from the East Coast! If we’re still at the office at 7 pm, that’s 10 pm for them. Yikes. Better to be in my position and stay in the same time zone.
I’m making sure I’m not getting lost while driving out to the office on my own tomorrow morning, by printing a map. I will turn on Google Maps with voice instructions on my phone as well, of course. The phone is working very hard when it is used as a GPS, and it can draw down the phone battery completely in an hour or so, though. And then I’m up the creek without a paddle!
The weather is still summery here in Seattle, even though it is starting to cool down at night. Bryan, Gary and I walked down to The Chieftain on 12th Avenue : a place that is not fancy at all, but offers beer and reliably good pub food. They were playing a version of Billy Joel’s ‘The Piano Man’ and it sounded to us as if some of the people outside partook in the chorus :
Sing us a song, you’re the piano man
Sing us a song tonight
Well, we’re all in the mood for a melody
And you’ve got us all feelin’ alright ..
I have written about an SAP ‘sandbox’ system before, here .. it is usually a copy of a company’s SAP system with some sample data.
I finally gained access to our current project’s SAP sandbox on Friday, and it was great to look around in a real system and to see how our client company has deployed the functionality.
It’s been awhile that I got my hands dirty in an SAP project! That was not the case in Denver.
When I came home tonight, the original broadcast of the 9/11 events from 2001 was on MSNBC with minimal edits. I was already in Seattle in 2001, living in a one bedroom apartment, and woke up to the sight on TV of one of the Twin Towers that had been struck by the hijacked airplane. I called my dad and we talked on the phone for a little bit, and then I did not quite know if I should drive down to Weyerhaeuser Company where I worked at the time – but I did.
Here’s to never forgetting 9/11, all its victims and the first responders that lost their lives as well on that terrible day.
I am at San Francisco International Airport. The prisoners have been released out of their asylum for the week, and we are all heading back home, some of the team members all the way to the east coast!
