a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
I’m legit for another year for motoring around with my trusty 1996 Toyota Camry : I just renewed the license plate tabs. (It’s about $75).
Check out my mini-collection of old number plates. There is the WILLEM from Missouri the Show-me State, a regular plate from Texas the Lone Star State, and another ‘vanity plate’ from Washington the Evergreen State that says WILLSTL, short for Willem Seattle.
I have only been to Indiana a few times, many years ago. I would fly into and out of Evansville in its far southwestern corner – to drive across the border to Weyerhauser Company’s paper mill in Henderson, Kentucky. So after all this time, I just had to check out the map of Indiana again. There is quite a media firestorm over the State Assembly there passing a ‘Religious Freedom Restoration Act’ that allows businesses to refuse service to customers based on their (the business’) religious beliefs. Example : a florist can refuse to deliver flowers to a gay wedding. (Yes, believe it or not : same-sex marriage has been legally recognized in Indiana since October 7, 2014). Is this such a big deal? Just go to another florist instead, if you are ‘Adam and Steve’. Well, it’s bad for public relations and it paints the state as unwelcoming and intolerant.
I finally knuckled down on Saturday
and submitted my 2014 federal and state tax forms (due April 15th here in the USA). It was the first time in many years that I had to get my hands dirty and do the work myself (without the help of H&R Block or my firm’s resources).
I selected TurboTax tax software to prepare and file the forms electronically. The outcome : NO tax refund for me! I have to send in a check since I paid too little during the year. It was a little unnerving to enter my Social Security Number and financial information on-line. Identity theft and tax refund fraud have skyrocketed in recent years .. and the IRS is simply not equipped and staffed to handle all the thievery. Come on, Congress ! Get some funds and help the IRS to put better processes, checks and systems in place !
I finally have my new Lenovo T440s (my work computer) more or less set up. My Firm is slowly migrating us to Google’s G-mail and other cloud-based services such as Google Drive for storage and Google Docs for office work.
It’s a massive undertaking for a Firm with 160,000 employees world-wide. Since I already had a personal G-mail account, I now have two G-mail accounts with aliases for myself : the ‘business me’ and the ‘personal me’. For each user I had to set up a separate Chrome browser profile as well. Mercifully, I could create two different desktop shortcuts and now Chrome knows which ‘me’ it is when I fire it up! I don’t have to log in every time. I have to believe some tech entrepreneur is going to make a killing soon by inventing a nifty way to do the elusive ‘single sign-on’ for people like me that log into dozens of different systems and applications every day for work.
So .. another airplane tragedy, that brings another mystery.
Why did the young Germanwings co-pilot deliberately crash the plane? I checked out the website for the German magazine Der Spiegel today to see if their reporting offered anything new. Nothing new, but the police will investigate computers and materials obtained from the pilot’s family.
‘Stop being silly and go home’ said my project manager when I told him late today that I’m sick. (Head cold, sore throat since Monday). And so I decided that was good advice : to fly while I still can. It’s really miserable to be sick in a hotel room! The last flight out on Alaska to Seattle leaves San Francisco at 9.45 pm, and that’s the one I took. The flight was not full, and I could stretch out where I sat in the emergency row with all three seats to myself. Man! It’s been a long time since I have had an empty seat next to me.
‘Another week starts, right?’ said my regular cab driver as I got in at 5.30 am this morning. Yes, I said. The winter travel doldrums of January and February are behind us, and the early morning traffic at the airport is picking up. Here are two interesting snippets from my reading on the airplane : a picture of one of dozens of mysterious craters that started to appear in Siberia, thought to be caused by underground gas explosions. And how about an iPhone index with 1.6 billion phone numbers? Get the app and find everyone that had signed up by searching for names in the world-wide phone directory!
It’s Sunday night. My bags are packed, and my peace made with what I could get to, for the weekend, and what I could not. There will be another weekend soon, right?
Check out my grocery items from my stop at the Asian grocery store Uwajimaya on Saturday. We are omnivores (most of us), and modern-day scavengers for food : food in the grocery store, that is, not the jungle or the savanna !
We watched Birdman (Micheal Keaton, the movie that won the Oscar this year) last night. I guess it’s refreshing to see an ex-‘superhero’ be a non-hero, with the flood of Spiderman, Captain America, X-Men and Ironman movies these last few years.
The real Birdman is not a ‘nice’ person – an absent dad; he seems to endlessly trash his room using telekinesis (or was that his imagination?) and rants frequently about his frustrations. His memories of being ‘Birdman’ that can fly around, blurs the lines between what’s real and what’s imagined.
Micheal Keaton’s co-performer in the movie’s stage play, Edward Norton, says at one point ‘The stage is the only place every day where I do not act’. So. Few of us are actors – or are we all? is what I took away from the movie. As Shakespeare famously wrote ‘All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players .. ‘. So who are we really? Is there a different/ real person from the self that interacts with the world every day?
It’s officially spring here 
in the Northern Hemisphere. Earthlings in the UK and Scotland were treated with the sight of a solar eclipse on Friday. No such luck anywhere in North America. The Faroe Islands were actually the best place to be. The islands are north of the Shetland Islands, a ‘self-governing country in the Danish realm’, says WIkipedia.
I forgot to fully charge my phone Wednesday night, and I 
ended up with a dead phone on the way to the airport (drained battery). The rental car had no USB port to charge it with. I could not use my notebook computer to charge it*. Finally – no open outlets at San Francisco airport’s International Terminal (come on SFO, we want the same tech amenities you have in Terminals 1, 2 and 3). So! Cannot read e-mail or send e-mail, get called or texted, or talk to people – or anything. SO WHAT, I realized. Sit back and take a break from it all !
*One final trick for me to get a charge into the phone battery would have been to connect the phone with its USB cord to my notebook computer. It just so happens that my new firm-issued computer’s start switch has a glitch. It cannot start up without being connected to an electrical outlet. Aargh.
This proposed new 58-story office tower for Seattle’s downtown will cot $600 million. The property is owned by the University of Washington. The developers hope to lure tech companies away from neighborhoods such as South Lake Union to Seattle downtown (Hmm. South Lake Union is barely a mile or two away). Here’s the article in the Wall Street Journal of Wednesday that caught my eye.
‘Do I really need to go?’ I asked the Project Manager on Tuesday : to a team dinner for all of us in Walnut Creek. ‘Yes! – everyone is going, and the food will be great!’ he said. Well, we had barely settled in, all 36 of us, when the lights went out completely. ‘Should you guys not go back to work, and get the lights back on?’ joked the waiter. Um, noo, we said, we work in the Gas business of PG&E, so go and get our food cooked, please. Well, so they did, and they got the food to the table. They did very well given that they must have had the kitchen lit up with candles and flash lights. They bill for the evening was presented in handwritten format on a long scroll of paper. The cash register was out as well, of course!
The little card is from the Starbucks
across the street from the hotel here in Walnut Creek. Sulawesi is a large island that is part of Indonesia. I found that out when I wanted to know where the ‘special reserve’ coffee from Starbucks came from. The water painting art on the card must be a nod to the cave paintings found on the island. In October 2014 it was announced that paintings in Maros had been dated as being about 40,000 years old – among the oldest anywhere on earth.
My friends and I went ten-pin bowling for the first time in years on Saturday night. We did not do too badly, breaking a 100 for both the rounds. (Yes, a long way from the perfect score of 300, but spare a thought for President Obama’s bowling disaster while on the 2008 campaign trail. While attempting to woo blue collar voters in Pennsylvania, he bowled a 37. Several balls into the gutter. The late night comedians were relentless in making fun of it.) Afterwards we went to Jack’s BBQ. The owner (Jack, of course) that started the restaurant spent 12 years working at Microsoft and decided it was time to pursue his passion for making barbecue the way they do in Texas, and offering it to Seattle diners. The brisket that I had was great, and I give the black-eyed-pea salad top marks as a very tasty side dish.
My two colleagues from China were in Seattle for the weekend, and wanted to go on a Boeing factory tour. Let’s go! I said, since I had not done that either. The factory is actually in Everett, 40 minutes north of Seattle. (There is another factory that produces 737s in Renton closer to Seattle, and some 787 work is done in North Charleston in South Carolina). The tour starts with a short film, and then we were taken into two of the cavernous construction hangars, one for the 747 and 777 and another for the new 787 Dreamliner. We entered by the utilities tunnel and then go directly up with the freight elevator to the third floor where we look down on the floor.
The factory is very, very, very large, by volume the largest in the world. The 777 is assembled with a crawling assembly line, until the plane is in its weight-on-wheels (WoW) configuration; then it is tugged along and outside the building to be painted. In contrast, the 787 is assembled in one place, with its major sections flown in from all over the world (wings from Japan, center fuselage from Italy, landing-gear system from France, main cabin lighting from Germany main cabin lighting, among others).
Some 6 million parts go into a modern airplane. That is counting each little rivet as a part, though. Since the fuselage expands under pressurization, it cannot have welds. I was also reminded that the wings are actually gigantic fuel tanks (I will try to forget that again by the time I fly on Monday!) and that the skin of the fuselage is no thicker than that of a dime (yikes). We could actually check a section of fuselage out up close and it is shocking how thin the skin is.
So! .. while we’re all very proud of Boeing and its manufacturing prowess, being a fierce international competitor and providing some 30,000 jobs to local communities around Washington State, does it make for a good corporate citizen? The Center For Effective Government reported in 2014 that Boeing Company’s 2013 tax filings noted that it had claimed $82 million in federal tax refunds, despite $5.9 billion in U.S. pre-tax profits for the 2013 tax year. ‘This represents an effective tax rate of -1.4 percent. Boeing paid just $11 million in state income taxes, an effective state tax rate of just 0.2 percent’. Fantastic for the shareholders, but the company makes almost no contribution to the Washington State coffers for the use of its infrastructure, and pays no Federal income taxes in spite of being the second largest federal contractor in the United States.
As for the machine workers that pop all those rivets, they should start learning to program and maintain the robots that are on the way to take over the work from them. This video is from Boeing’s web site itself, here.
It was late afternoon before I finally got out of the house and away from work to go run a few errands. It helps that we now have an extra hour of sunlight in the evening (daylight saving time started last weekend). One of my stops was at the little postal store to check again if the Chinese lunar new year stamps had arrived – and they had. I can add them to my little collection.
I’m home .. my flight went without incident. I sat in row 10 on the Alaska Air Boeing 737 the way I normally do. So why do we have a sound, and San Francisco has a bay? I wondered as we landed. Well. Did Wikipedia have an answer for me – and more :
In geography a sound is a large sea or ocean inlet larger than a bay, deeper than a bight, and wider than a fjord; or a narrow sea or ocean channel between two bodies of land (see also strait).
Now I know there is something such as a bight as well. A bight is a shallow sound.
The Wall Street Journal of Wednesday listed the following 12 ‘tech fails’ as the most annoying –
Never-ending Notifications (messages)
Battery Life Is Too Short
Updates Bog Down Old iPhones
Waiting for Android Updates
Privacy as a Luxury
Printers Are Still Terrible
Die, Passwords, Die
Kickstarter Isn’t a Store
Inaccurate Fitness Biometrics
App Addiction
Email: Older, but Not Wiser
Baffling Bills
I highlighted my two un-favorites in bold. Passwords is a major nuisance. I must log into the systems I work in a good 20 to 30 times a day. The automatic lock-out typically kicks in after 15 minutes, and I cannot change it. The abuse/ wrong is of e-mail is next on my list. Sending a Reply All message that says ‘Thanks’. Or not replacing the subject of a forwarded message for an e-mail that is about something completely different !
Hmm. So count me
anong the sceptics, wondering if Apple will indeed sell a projected 15 million Apple watches this year. I doubt I will get one. After all, it will have to replace my cheap but beloved Seiko watch that I bought in Tokyo a few years ago and to which I have grown attached to.
But here I am, browsing through the models they will offer on apple.com, after Tim Cook’s press conference of yesterday. My favorite is this little black number with its Milanese loop in stainless steel and with the magnetic closure on the strap.