Tuesday/ the State of the Union address

‘Let’s see if your numbers add up’ .. ‘but let’s not have another 40 something votes’ on the health care law, was the challenge from the President to the Republicans in the State of the Union speech tonight.   And the Huffington Post reported that the award for the first GOP congressman to call Pres. Obama a ‘socialistic dictator’ goes to Rep. Randy Weber (R-Texas).  (Who would do well to stop using big words he does not know the meaning of). The longest ovation went to war hero, the Army Sergeant Cory Remsburg.  Pres. Obama met him at Omaha Beach in France, at a D-Day commemoration.   Cory was later injured by a roadside bomb during his 10th deployment (in the Iraq war, I think), in a coma for three months and emerged partially paralyzed.

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Classic State of the Union photo from NBC news : Vice-Prez Joe Biden (left) ‘talking’ with the crowd while the President is talking, and stony-faced Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner on the right.

Monday/ snow day

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The temperature here in Denver was 18 °F (-7°C), with light snow falling. It’s all relative! I see Chicago was at -4 °F (-20°C) today. It’s been a harsh winter in Chicago.
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The view from the 18th floor onto Denver downtown’s 18th Ave around 6 pm shows that the street surfaces are still clear of snow, not not so the sidewalks.

We made it in fine this morning from Seattle.  We landed early even though there was light snow falling at Denver airport.  But the snow persisted all day long, and had not stopped by the time we closed up shop at the office.  So my colleague and I walked two blocks in the snow to a restaurant, had our dinner .. but then called a taxi to take us the eight blocks to the hotel.

It looks like the sun will come out tomorrow, but then there’s more snow in the forecast for Thursday and Friday.

Sunday/ Queen Anne walk

Go, go, go! get out of the house, I said to myself at 4pm, before it is dark.  I didn’t want to go to the gym, and it was bearable outside (only just) to go for a walk.   So I took the No 8 bus down Denny Way and to Seattle’s Queen Anne neighborhood, and walk around there for a bit, and back down to the Space Needle.

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This odd urban park (no grass, just gravel!) is called Counterbalance Park. It is at the corner of Roy St. and Queen Anne Avenue North. I should have stayed a little while longer, because the walls are lit up in rainbow colors at night. It is just starting to show in the picture. NOTE : The panorama picture bends the lines in the middle of the picture. In reality the building is a perfect rectangle, and the low wall with the blue light runs in a straight line.
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This is right about 5.00 pm. I’m making my way down the steep Queen Anne Ave North. It’s up high enough to that the Space Needle and downtown Seattle’s skyline is visible; even Mount Rainier in the distance just to the right of the Space Needle.
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And here is the Space Needle up close as I walked by it.

Saturday/ The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc Sec

I love the Tintin series of comic bookse4fb7d5a3d8acc49881250b2095d9604 (from Belgium), and know it very well.  It turns out there is also a more recent French comic book series, with a heroine called Adèle Blanc Sec.  I only learned all of this after picking up the French-made film Les Aventures extraordinaires d’Adèle Blanc-Sec/The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc Sec (2010) at the DVD store.  (And watched it Saturday night with Bryan and Gary).  The title character was played by French actress Louise Bourgoin. The plot of the film is developed nicely. The film opens with an Indiana Jones-esque tomb-raiding scene and plays out in 1912 in Paris after that.  Some of the main characters (men) have large ears, others have large noses or flamboyant moustaches, and of course they wear clothing true to the period.    The adventures also feature a pterodactyl and a ladies’ tennis match, one that could very well have been inspired by 1920s French tennis legend Suzanne Lenglen (her Wikipedia entry here).

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Here’s the pterodactyl, checking in at the professor’s apartment. (Yes : it is hungry and is looking for food!).
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And here is a scene from the tennis match.  There is a freak accident in the match. The woman in the picture is Adele’s sister, and is hit squarely on the forehead with a ferocious forearm shot, and falls backwards  .. and so the story starts.

Friday/ the Apple Mac is 30

TheMacat30The Apple McIntosh is 30 years old, and Apple is celebrating it with a timeline on their website, here.  (Click on Mac timeline). In 1987 when I was a student, I did use the university’s Apple Mac II. (The basic system with its 20 MB drive and monitor cost more than $5,000).  Today we carry hundreds of times more powerful computing power and storage capacity in our pockets, of course .. AND we are connected to the internet, back then barely in existence and certainly not available outside research and military institutions.

So what do I use today? Well, an IBM Thinkcentre desktop with Windows 8 at home, a Lenovo Thinkpad with Windows 7 for work, and then my Apple iPad and Apple iPhone.  Each has its own area of strength, and they are somewhat connected, but not fully.   For example, I back up my digital media onto the W8 desktop with Apple’s iTunes, and the rest to an attached external drive. Everything does not always work nicely together.  Just this morning the lastest iTunes software update turned out to be incompatible with Windows 8.  I took awhile to fix it, grr.  1. Rebooting everything did not help.  2. Reinstalling iTunes did not work.  Of course, no earlier iTunes version to download, either. 3.  Forget Windows Troubleshooter to find the problem.  4. Now it is war. Uninstall everything Apple, including a software app called Bonjour.  Good day and good-bye, since I don’t even know what you do monsieur!  5. Reinstall iTunes with Internet Explorer’s download, in case using Google Chrome for downloading did something different.    6. Try again .. voila!  It works.

Thursday/ ‘Time to Ride’

‘Time to ride’ say the banners here in Denver : a broncosreference to the Denver Broncos’ mascot, and their Superbowl match-up on Sunday Feb 2 against the Seattle Seahawks.

There was a little snow on the ground this morning; just enough to make it too cold and too difficult to walk to the office – especially with one’s roller bag luggage in tow. 14° F ( -10 °C) is definitely too frigid to be out and about! My name is not Robert Scott or Roald Amundsen!.  We managed to hail down a taxi to take us to the office, though.

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The ‘Time to Ride’ Denver Broncos banner at the United Airlines check-in counter.
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This is on the way to the airport.  This is a glimpse of the old Stapleton International Airport’s control tower. The airport was Denver, Colorado’s primary airport from 1929 to 1995. At different times it served as a hub for TWA, People Express, Frontier Airlines, Western Airlines, Continental Airlines and United Airlines. Nowadays there is low-income housing complexes and businesses nearby. I’m not sure what the ultimate fate of the control tower will be!
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This is 7.30 am. My colleagues and I are contemplating if we should walk the 8 blocks to the office, or try to hail a cab. 

Wednesday/ the Colorado State capitol

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Every morning as I walk to the office from the Hilton Garden Inn, I catch a glimpse of the Colorado State capitol building. Recently the dome has started to emerge from the curtain around it.

Ever since I started working in Denver in September, the Colorado State capitol had been shrouded in a scrim : a curtain that can be heated, and withstand strong winds, so that workers could complete its $17 million rehab with no interruption.  The entire dome is covered in thinner-than-paper Colorado gold.  The gold bullion used for the new gild was donated in 2011 by mine owner AngloGold Ashanti. The 24-karat gold, valued at more than $116,175, was shipped off to Florence, Italy, and milled into gold leaf.  The Capitol had been constructed from 1886 to 1903, and the dome was initially covered in copper. [Information from a report by the Denver Post dated 12/26/2013].

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I walked right up to the Colorado State capitol dome today at lunch to go and check it out up close. It is located at 200 East Colfax Avenue in ‘uptown’ Denver.

Tuesday/ clean hands

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Start your Big Day with clean hands, says my Hilton Garden Inn bar of soap.

We ‘recoiled in horror’ on Monday night as our server in the restaurant sneezed, turned around and immediately blew his nose. This was right after putting our food on the table. He had a heavy cold, poor guy. But were our plates full of germs? What about the glasses of water? Should we drink those?  I guess it helps not to think about these things too much .. it will surely turn one into a germophobe, unable to touch anything or anyone.

Monday/ Martin Luther King Day

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My secret desk drawer weapon to brighten up and survive my Monday. (Forget the ‘Sharing Size’ concept! It’s all mine!).
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Google’s home page homage to Martin Luther King.

It’s Martin Luther King Day, but only about 1/3 of employers recognize it as a holiday, so I traveled out to Denver.   My return air fare was a ridiculously cheap $137.  That’s about the same as the 20 min taxi fare to Seattle airport this morning plus the 40 min taxi fare to the office in Denver after landing. The airlines’ computer geeks supposedly maximize the profit on every seat, on every plane, on every route .. but it sure seems like they were not profiting from my fare!

Sunday/ it’s the Seahawks vs. the Broncos

The Seahawks will take on the Broncos on Feb 2 in the Superbowl.  The Seahawks came out with a 23-17 victory over the San Francisco 49ers today.  The Hawks were down 3-10 at halftime, and the game had a somewhat dramatic ending in the final minutes when a touchdown throw from 49ers QB Colin Kaepernick’s to teammate Malcolm Smith was intercepted by Richard Sherman.  So my hometown team will take on my ‘work town’ team!

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Here’s a great picture from CNN’s Sports page that shows the interception by Sherman that prevented the 49ers from staying in the game.
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From the NFL’s website .. how the Broncos and the Seahawks got to the Superbowl.

Saturday/ poetry for my iPad

I worked on adding to my iPad music library this weekend.  I also discovered that I can read Adobe .pdf documents with the iBook application.   So I decided to try and salvage the contents from a CD that I bought in 2000 in South Africa with large collection of Afrikaans poetry on it (‘Die Groot Verseboek’/ ‘The Big Book of Poems’).   It wasn’t easy.  The CD had customized reader software on it, that could only run on pre-Windows 7 computers.  I dusted off an old notebook computer that still had Windows XP on.  Then I had to manually cut and paste the content from the reader frame into MS Word.  The reader application crashed several times during these attempts : either because it was unstable, or because it was loathe to give up its digital treasure.   But hey, I bought the CD, and I want to transfer the content over to my iPad.  So I ended up with a 600 page Word doc, which I will reformat and see if I can add an index and links into.

I show one of my many favorite poems below, with a rough translation of the last verse in English.  It is by Gottfried Watermeyer, was written in 1948 and is titled ‘Ballad of the Drunk Party’.

Love is the bitter glass
the dry glass, the dark glass;
love is the after-sorrow
that fits the hollow of the heart.

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This is what the poems will look like on my iPad. I chose Century Gothic for the font, and make the titles bold in 24pt. The rest is in 12 pt font size.
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My 8 year old Fujitsu notebook computer is hanging in there with its Windows XP operating system. I dusted it off and used it to read a CD ROM with Afrikaans poetry, so that I could transfer the material to my iPad.

Friday/ fog

As the statistics tell us : it’s much safer to fly for two hours than to drive for two hours, and Thursday night proved that point.   On the drive home from Seatac airport I was half-asleep in the back when my taxi driver stirred with a fright and grabbed his phone.   Maybe he forgot to phone someone really important, I thought.   But no : he was dialing 911. There was a driver in a white car facing south on northbound I-5 in the shoulder lane.  So luckily she had managed to get to the shoulder – but man! how on earth did she manage to use the north-bound off-ramp to drive south?  Was the fog partly to blame? It really wasn’t that thick.  Anyway, there was nothing on the news, and there is nothing on the WSDOT blog, so I trust that she got help and that the situation was remedied.

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This is late Thursday night.  We’re taxiing to Terminal A. Visibility was down to a 1/4 mile in some places due to low-lying fog.
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This is early evening on Friday night. I am on the Denny Way bridge looking south at I-5. On Thursday night, a wrong-way driver had somehow entered the freeway driving south on the north-bound side (left on the picture).

 

Thursday is fly-day

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Here’s the ‘Metro Taxi’ app that I used to order a taxi. I ordered one an hour ahead of time, but I guess one can stumble out of a restaurant, and see if any are nearby and summon one on the spot.

I am at Denver airport. It’s Thursday and so most of the travelers on the project – and me – are heading home tonight.  The office people here plan to wear something orange tomorrow to support the Denver Broncos in their bid against the New England Patriots for a place in the Superbowl final.   (And Seattle’s Seahawks play against the San Francisco 49ers this weekend.  In Seattle, the colors to wear are blue with a little lime green trim).

My colleague and I tried a new taxi service smart phone app; this one is called Metro Taxi.  It’s just a little easier to order a taxi than using the phone and yelling one’s name (and sometimes its spelling) into the phone for the dispatcher.  And here in Denver there seems to be a 5 minute or longer wait time for a dispatcher every time I call the cab company.

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In the cab and on the way to Denver airport. Easy Street wheat beer is brewed in Ft Collins, Colorado. The town is some 65 miles north of Denver, and was founded as a military outpost of the United States Army in 1864.
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And here is a snapshot of the light rail train station terminal that is slated for completion some time in 2015, that will connect the airport with the city.

 

Wednesday/ the Arctic Passage

Here’s an interesting excerpt from the Wall Street Journal about the ‘Polar Star’ icebreaker that is based in Seattle.

SEATTLE—The 40-year-old Coast Guard icebreaker Polar Star returned to the Arctic Ocean this summer after seven years in semi-retirement, charging into a thinning polar ice sheet that U.S. defense officials predict will give way to new commercial waterways and a resource-rich frontier by mid-century.  The Polar Star was originally supposed to be in service for 30 years. Its age and a lack of funding had prompted the Coast Guard to put the ship into semiretirement: afloat but not operational.

This summer, on its first voyage to the Arctic since 2001, veterans on the crew found a very different ocean.   “Back in the day there were a lot more challenges, more multi-year ice, you had to pick your spots through it,” said Coast Guard Cmdr. Kenneth Boda, the ship’s executive officer. “This summer we set a course and go…We were teaching our young officers to drive around the thicker stuff but we could have gone right through.”

The changing conditions make the Arctic particularly unpredictable.  Lt. j.g. Paul Garcia, on his first icebreaking mission this summer, steered the Polar Star into what the Coast Guard calls a “blind alley.”   In the Arctic, moving ice floes can bunch up to form mountainous ridges of ice. When three or four floes ram together, the ice can be so thick that even the Polar Star—capable of 75,000 horsepower—can’t smash through, creating a blind alley.

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Picture from the Wall Street Journal, 1/12/14 : The amount of polar ice in the Arctic shrinks in the summer and returns in the winter. Shown here is how much the ice retreated by late summer 2012. Scientists forecast the ice will further extend its annual retreat, opening new routes between Asia and Europe for commercial shippers by midcentury. (Source: U.S. Navy)
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.. and here is the ice cover forecast for 2020.
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.. for 2025
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.. and for 2030

Tuesday/ Häagen-Dazs’s history

Here’s my little reward for Tuesday, the IMG_0282 smsmallest serving of Häagen-Dazs ice cream, barely a big scoop packaged in a tiny tub.   Even so, it still packs 45% of one’s daily saturated fat allowance! And I learned today that Häagen-Dazs was actually established by Reuben and Rose Mattus in the Bronx, New York, in 1961.  Coffee was one of the three original flavors (vanilla and chocolate the others).

For some reason I have always assumed it’s a German brand .. but here is a full explanation from Wikipedia : Mattus invented the “Danish-sounding” “Häagen-Dazs” as a tribute to Denmark’s exemplary treatment of its Jews during the Second World War, and included an outline map of Denmark on early labels. The name, however, is not Danish, which has neither an umlaut nor a digraph zs – ä is used in Finnish, Swedish and German, but Danish uses æ for the corresponding sound (both of these are contractions of “ae”), and zs is used in Hungarian – nor does it have any meaning in any language or etymology before its creation. Mattus felt that Denmark was known for its dairy products and had a positive image in the U.S.  His daughter Doris Hurley reported in the PBS documentary, An Ice Cream Show (1999), that her father sat at the kitchen table for hours saying nonsensical words until he came up with a combination he liked. The reason he chose this method was so that the name would be unique and original.

Monday/ taxi trouble

My early morning flight out to Denver today went without incident (because I was sleeping most of the way).  It was a different story trying to get to Denver downtown from the airport, though.   The one part was our mistake (my colleague’s and mine) : agreeing with a friendly guy to share a taxi to the city to save a few dollars.  He was dropped off first, and the detour added about 30 mins to our trip to the office.   The other part was not our fault, though.  The entire I-270 highway was closed in both directions from 3 am to 1 pm.   Turned out a fugitive was shot in the early hours of the morning by the local police (non-life threatening injuries), and the highway was closed in both directions for an investigation.   So what should have been a 30 min ride, took 1 hr and 40 mins stuck in traffic.  Oy vey.

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This is 16th Ave in Denver downtown with the Hard Rock Cafe’s guitar neon sign on the left. I am walking to the hotel from the office, and it’s a nice change not to have freezing and icy weather outside.
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Here’s Monday morning’s sunrise, as we fly toward Denver from Seattle.

Saturday/ it’s the Seahawks

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From my TV screen : This is Taima, an augur hawk. I assume the bird is handled by master falconer David Knudson (shown in the Seahawks website).
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Another shot from my TV screen, showing the stadium and the weather conditions at the start of the game.

So the Seahawks got it, with a win of 23-15 over the Saints.  The Hawks will host and play in one more game (tickets start at $415). That final playoff game to get to the Superbowl that is in New York City this year, is Sunday Jan 19. Meanwhile, I ran all my errands on Saturday, also tracking down my vacation mail that was still held at my request by the US Postal Service.  Boy, did they made me work for it.  USPS moved the mail hold location from my local post office to the SODO (South of downtown) district.  I finally found the right building, and with some luck, someone that found my mail. There were no signs, no door and no service counter. Come on USPS, you can do better than that!  By the time I got out of there, the fans had started to show up for the Seahawks playoff game. The hardy ones had been tailgate-partying in parking lots around the stadium since early morning already, not seeming to mind the blustery conditions.

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The view from the building on 4th Ave where I picked up my mail, looking north toward downtown. The first stadium after the McDonalds golden arch is the baseball stadium. The football stadium is further in the distance. Parking at local businesses and parking lots ran from $20 to $40, depending on how close to the stadium it was.

Friday/ unemployment down but ..

1.  In the news here on Friday : unemployment down to 6.7% in the USA in December, but the labor participation rate of the population is the lowest in 35 years.  Is there really that many baby boomers retiring? And why was only 74,000 jobs added in December when most economists thought it would be 200,000 or more?

Unemployment

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The George Washington Bridge brings traffic from New Jersey into New York City. Picture from Wikipedia.

2.  Then there’s the George Washington Bridge scandal, the world’s busiest motor vehicle bridge : from Sept 9 to 13, 2013, dedicated toll lanes for one of the Fort Lee entrances to the bridge’s upper level were reduced from three to one without notification of local government officials and emergency responders.    The orders were issued by aides and associates of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.  The closures caused massive traffic congestion, with major delays for school transportation and police and emergency response within Fort Lee.  Was the Governor involved, and was it political retribution for the major of Ft Lee’s refusal to endorse Christie for governor in the Oct 2013 election? Time will tell.

3.  Finally, it’s the Seattle Seahawks Seattle-Seahawks-Logoand the New Orleans Saints in an NFL post-season playoff on Saturday here in Seattle, on the road to the Superbowl.  The Seahawks are favored (they beat the Saints 34-7 just in December), but they have to do it again.

Thursday/ week one is done

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This is 7.30 am in the morning, and the view of Denver downtown as I’m waiting at the intersection by our office building to cross the street.

The travelers (‘road warriors’) on the project were all very happy to call the first work week of the year done! and we can go home! on Thursday night.  So off to Denver airport to go home.

Travel-wise, the week had a rough start with the severe weather.   We stayed at a Hampton Inn right across the street from the offices where we work, which was very convenient, given the cold weather.   Next week we are back at the Hilton Garden Inn, some eight city blocks away.

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This is at Denver airport. United Airlines’s Boeing 757 is just pulling up to the gate – the one that will take us home to Seattle.

Wednesday/ the Avalanche has it

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A sweater for sale in the fan shop. That’s the foot of a Sasquatch (abominable snowman),the alternative logo of the Colorado Avalanche ice hockey team.
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The Pepsi Center is a multi-purpose stadium : used for ice hockey, basketball, and even musical concerts. Justin Timberlake is scheduled for a show later in January.
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This is during a break between one of the four periods. Those are zambonis on the ice, the ice resurfacing machines, The machine is named after its inventor, Frank Zamboni. Also check out the in-stadium only blimps (‘Dream Big’ advertises the lottery!) that are radio-controlled with little electric propellers.
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Here’s some action on the ice. The Colorado Avalanche bested the Ottawa Senators 4-3 in overtime. The Avalanche team captain is Gabriel Landeskog, a Swedish national.

On Wednesday night we had a project team event : going to an ice hockey game here in downtown Denver’s Pepsi Center.  (Yes, we DO work here in Denver as well!).   We had great seats ($103 said my ticket, a good thing I did not have to pay). It was not a sold-out event, but there was a pretty good turn-out, given that it was a week night, and that it was pretty cold outside.