Thursday/ over the top, completely

I was thinking I should run out and see the San Andreas earthquake disaster movie this weekend – but after reading the reviews, thought : no.   Maybe later as a Netflix download or something.    The movie is overdramatized, and the damage shown happening to buildings completely overdone.  “You’re going to have pockets of destruction, pockets of collapse and casualties, but it’s not going to be Armageddon,” says Farzad Neaim, a structural and earthquake engineer in Irvine. “The toppling of buildings is very rare.”

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A scene from the ‘San Andreas’ disaster flick, widely panned by earthquake experts. The largest possible tsunami is estimated at 50 ft high; and the San Andreas fault actually runs on land and not on the seabed.

Wednesday/ ‘trim’ fit

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I like my shirts PLAID. I don’t wear a tie to work, so I feel solid colors will not work as well as plaid shirts do.

I don’t feel very trim* but I can still fit into Nordstrom’s ‘Trim Fit’ shirts – ha! .. so that is what I ordered on-line and what landed on my doorstep today.  I still like to go out to the store and look at clothes and buy it there as well, though.

*Too much work and not enough exercise!

Tuesday/ summer is here!

We alwaysIMG_7893 sm2 say here in the USA that Memorial Day is the unofficial start of summer.  So here is the (somewhat cheesy) cover of a brochure of the summer events scheduled for the Emerald City.   Check out the orca frolicking in the foreground right by Pier 57 (where the Ferris Wheel is) .. a very unlikely sight!

And I’m still getting used to the Ferris Wheel’s silhouette on the waterfront –  but that would pale in comparison to the changes that will be brought when the Alaskan Viaduct (double-decker highway right above the waterline) eventually comes down when its replacement tunnel had been completed.

Memorial Day 2015

It was Memorial Day today here in the United States : a somber day to remember our fallen soldiers – and made more so by the cool gray weather we had in Seattle.  The TV news tonight mentioned that it is roughly the 40th anniversary of the fall of Saigon in the Viet Nam War, with the last evacuations taking place there on April 29, 1975.  Public support for the War had long waned by then :  by 1970 only a third of Americans believed that the U.S. had not made a mistake by sending troops to fight in Vietnam.

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This is the ceiling of the chapel at the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial at Omaha Beach in Normandy, France. I took the picture in 2013 during a visit there.

Saturday/ Ireland’s referendum

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The cute toucan with the Guinness is painted on the wall of the Blarney Inn in Dublin. I took the picture in 2013 when we toured Dublin as part of a cruise around the British Isles.

So there it was! on Saturday .. Ireland became the world’s first country to vote for and approve same-sex unions* by referendum.  62% of voters said yes.

*Same-sex ‘civil partnerships’ were introduced in Ireland in 2010, but advocates for marriage equality said those fell short of the recognition and protections afforded by civil marriage.

The New York Times writes that in 1979, more than 1 million people turned out for Pope John Paul II’s visit to Dublin, a staggering crowd for a country with a population of just 3.4 million at the time.   Looking back, that may have been the high point of the Catholic Church’s influence.  A a tide of child sexual abuse scandals destroyed the church’s credibility in the whole area of sexuality, says Tony Flannery, a priest who was suspended in 2012 for criticizing the church’s views on women and homosexuality. It should be noted, though, that Ireland is not entirely beyond contentious cultural battles : abortion is still illegal (except if the mother’s life is in danger).

Friday/ assets, income and cash

Each year I have to spend a number of hours on on-going training (mandated by my firm). This year I chose an on-line course about retirement (a little for learning some of this, is it not? Fortunately I seem to have done mostly the right things the last twenty years).

The training course notes that understanding wealth requires the mastering and understanding of three basic concepts : assets, income, and cash*.  Income must be budgeted to make cash available.   Cash must be used to acquire assets.  Assets must be managed to produce more income.  And so the cycle starts again.

*Cash is a very liquid asset, of course.

Unfortunately, comments the training course .. ‘Most Americans do not understand these relationships, nor how to put it to use.    Most people live on economic myths and fairy tales, using depression-era concepts taken from their parents and grandparents’.

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Assets, income and cash.   This spectacular asset is called ‘House of the Flight of Birds’ and was designed by Portuguese architect Bernardo Rodrigues and built in 2010. It is located in Ribeira Grande, a municipality on Soa Miguel island in the Azores, Portugal.

Thursday is Fly-day

This week at the project site went by quickly .. must have been because we were very busy.  I made a dash for the airport as usual, ran into a little traffic southbound after crossing the Bay with the Bay Bridge .. but nothing too serious.  (The serious traffic jams start just a little later!).

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Here’s the United Air Lines hangar at San Francisco International airport. (United Air Lines? Should it not say United Airlines? Hmm.)

Wednesday/ debit cards are trouble

One would have thought by now that banks have figured out how to put a stop to fraudsters rigging the bank’s ATM machine – but apparently that’s not the case.  Check out this example of a debit-card hack (from the Wall Street Journal).   And as the diagram below show, a compromised debit card can wreak havoc and clean out much more than just one’s entire savings account (check out the table below).   Bankrate.com advises not to use debit cards at dicey ATMs, at gas stations, on the web for purchases, or at restaurants where the waiter disappears with the card and then brings the check to the table.   All of this is a little bit unsettling.

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Tuesday/ defect resolution

We are wrapping up the third of four cycles of testing, and have plenty of defects that the testing team had logged, to sift through and resolve.   Some defects are small coding bugs; others are combinations of bad data and missing system checks that are not catching the data flaws early enough.   Finally – some ‘defects’ that had been logged are not really defects, but features that never made it into the design.

Example, using a car as a metaphor for a software product : testing the factory installed brakes of a prototype car may prove that they are a little too sharp and need adjustment (a defect), but the car not having an anti-lock braking system (ABS) is not a defect if the engineering design of the braking system never called for it !

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From left to right (from HP Quality Center’s home page) : Start with a functional specification that includes flow charts; build the code; test it; install and use it ! (If only it were as quick and simple as it sounds! ).

 

The usual Monday morning

These days, it is broad daylight as I step out of my house and into the cab at 5.30 am. The airport was busy this morning.   I suppose we’re on the upswing toward the peak summer travel season.  (Not that it matters too much : the airplane is filled to capacity every time I travel on it).

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Here is Virgin America’s check in counters at Seattle-Tacoma airport .. glitzy with the pink neon and all. Pretty quiet, so I guess they don’t have a lot of early morning flights out, though.

Sunday/ Washington State quilt

Here’s a nice Washington State quilt that caught my eye at a store where Bryan, Gary and I stopped by on Sunday.  We also tried to get a nice close-up look at the Polar Pioneer oil rig, but it was not possible to drive right up to it .. which should not have been a surprise, I guess.

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Saturday/ Shell’s unwelcome party

We have a huge oil rig destined for drilling off the coast of Alaska docked here in Elliott Bay at Terminal 5 in the Port of Seattle.  There were plenty of protesters in kayaks our in force today on the water around the rig (called kayaktivists).  I want to run out tomorrow and go and take a close-up look of the intimidating drilling monster.   Here is the article in the Seattle Times that I borrowed the pictures from.

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Shell’s Polar Pioneer enters Elliott Bay with Seattle in the background. (Steve Ringman / Seattle Times)
The ferry, Spokane heading for Edmonds crosses the path of the Polar Pioneer being towed to Terminal 5 in Seattle from Port Angeles.   (Steve Ringman / The Seattle Times)
The ferry, Spokane heading for Edmonds crosses the path of the Polar Pioneer being towed to Terminal 5 in Seattle from Port Angeles. (Steve Ringman / The Seattle Times)
Shell's Polar Pioneer oil rig cruises past the Edmonds waterfront in Puget Sound this morning. The huge oil rig, expected to arrive in Seattle on Thursday afternoon, is the biggest piece of a 25-vessel fleet Shell Oil has mustered to resume its oil-exploration effort in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska. The rig is 400 feet long and 292 feet wide.   (Steve Ringman / The Seattle Times)
Shell’s Polar Pioneer oil rig cruises past the Edmonds waterfront in Puget Sound this morning. The huge oil rig, expected to arrive in Seattle on Thursday afternoon, is the biggest piece of a 25-vessel fleet Shell Oil has mustered to resume its oil-exploration effort in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska. The rig is 400 feet long and 292 feet wide. (Steve Ringman / The Seattle Times)

 

Friday/ Chiller Theatre

Here are some silly cartoons from the The New Yorker magazine I flipped through while I was waiting for my check-up at the doctor’s office on Friday.  (All three very true, actually). Chiller Theatre was a local TV channel in New York City in the ’60s and ’70s that showed classic horror movies.

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Thursday/ Amtrak train derailment

I made it in from San Francisco, and I’m following the reporting of the Amtrak train derailment in Philadelphia (8 fatalities; some 200 others injured) with special interest, since my trip to Portland on the train is so recent.   

Check out the diagrams from the New York Times here.  Not yet known : why was the train barreling around a sharp curve in the track at twice the speed limit?    

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Wednesday/ Santa Clara, the stepsister

One could be forgiven for not knowing the name of the city of Santa Clara even though it is in the center of Silicon Valley (there is also Cupertino, San Jose, Palo Alto, Mountain View, and others).  Everyone knows San Francisco, of course .. and it looks like next year’s Superbowl 50 in the Bay Area will be a little bit like Superbowl 48 where the New York City stole the thunder of New Jersey (where the superbowl was actually played).  In this case San Francisco will be hogging all the attention, leaving little of it to Santa Clara.

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A report in the local Walnut Creek newspaper about Santa Clara and its relationship to San Francisco.

Tuesday/ precious metal

This Lamborghini Aventador was parked at the hotel entrance here in Walnut Creek today.  Beverley Hills Lamborghini said the frame around the license plate.   Assuming this is a 2014 or 2015 machine, it must have set its owner back some $430,000.    That princely sum would be good for four top-of-the line Teslas, and then some.

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Monday/ First and Mission St construction

I made it in to foggy SFO a little later than scheduled – as usual these last few weeks – and headed for our client’s Beale St building for meetings all day.

I had a nice view from the 23rd floor of the ambitious construction going on around First and Mission St in the Embarcadero district.    The Transbay Tower is going to be the tallest building in the city in 2017, with the futuristic aluminum-skinned Transbay Transit Center right next to it.   Here is a link to the TransBay Center Interactive Map.

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San Francisco city center’s new buildings. [Source : The San Francisco Chronicle]
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Here’s a 23rd floor view from Beale St and looking southwest to the on-going construction around Mission St and First St. Look at the top left of the frame between two tall buildings for a little bit of the incoming Bay Bridge.
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Entering the Embarcadero train station to take the train across the Bay to Walnut Creek.
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Cool picture on board the BART train with lots of 3D geometry figures, and – the real mathematical formulas for calculating their volumes or surface areas!

Saturday/ tranquil weather

There are reports of heavy downpours and tornadoes in the central parts of the USA this weekend – but here in the Pacific Northwest we are enjoying mild and tranquil weather.

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A scene at dusk in Volunteer Park on Friday night. The Asian Art Museum is on the right.

Friday/ the Relativity Express

Check out the pages from my Time-Life Science Library book that I bought for $7 from Amazon.   I remember the book from when I was growing up, and I wanted it especially for the explanation of the effects of relativity, illustrated by a fantastical train called the Relativity Express and the doings of the evil Agent X.   The Relativity Express will get you there in a flash : it travels at  ¾ the speed of light !

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