[From Wikipedia] Merlin advising King Arthur in Gustave Doré’s illustration.We have a new team member that has joined us all the way from our SAP code development center in Shanghai, China. His name is Merlin, and of course more than one of us welcomed him and inquired (teasingly) ‘.. and are you a wizard?’
The wizard named Merlin goes back a long, long way in storytelling – many centuries. [From Wikipedia] The figure known as Merlin is best known from Arthurian* legend. The standard depiction of the character first appeared in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, written circa 1136.
*King Arthur is a legendary British leader of the late 5th and early 6th centuries, who, according to medieval histories and romances, led the defence of Britain against Saxon invaders in the early 6th century.
This nattily-dressed fella’s name is Pierce Thompson and he is a brand strategist for Horizon Media in New York City. He is featured in Bloomberg BusinessWeek’s ‘What I Wear to Work’ page. My plain old business-casual wardrobe cannot possibly measure up to his, but I can still admire what he wears. (I cannot say my shoes are ‘clean on the foot’. And is one allowed to say ‘My pant (no s) comes to the top of my shoe’?).
We has a stormy Saturday night in the city with broken tree limbs and power outages in the outlying areas. It rained on and off this morning, but then in the afternoon the sun came out, and I went for a brisk walk. It was about 52°F/ 12°C. I will probably step out in the rain tomorrow morning when I jump in the cab to go to the airport.
Blue skies and white clouds on Sunday afternoon. This is the Holy Names Academy – a Catholic private all-girls college-preparatory high school located on the east slope of Seattle’s Capitol Hill at 21st Avenue East between E. Aloha and E. Roy Streets.
One more update on the mushroom from Friday – the last one, I promise. It’s just that I feel a little like Tintin in ‘The Shooting Star’ .. facing a mushroom that grows to be very big in a short space of time.
The top of the mushroom has flattened out, and is now about 10 inches across.Here are Tintin and Snowy (from the German translation of The Shooting Star), discovering what they first think is a bird’s egg, and then realizes it is a mushroom. (Spoiler alert : And what happened to the giant mushroom? It exploded.).
It’s (apparently) time for the mushrooms to pop out from the ground in my back yard again. The squirrels nibble on them as well, but they are 1. not too tasty or 2. the squirrel get a psychoactive mushroom high from the nibbles and cannot continue. I let the mushrooms be until they get really big and flat, and then throw them into the yard waste bin with the leaves I rake together.
As far as I can tell this specimen from my back yard is Amanita muscaria, commonly known as the fly agaric or fly amanita. Don’t touch! Or eat! It is toxic and has psychoactive constituents. (The dollar bill is just to illustrate the size, about 4 inches across).
We were all glad to call this week’s trip out to the project office good, and get out of there. I drove my little rental car out to San Francisco International Airport across the San Mateo Bridge, dropped it off at Hertz, and stood in line at TSA’s security check point. I hate those big millimeter wave scanners; they have those at SFO. (The ones where you step into a giant cylinder, do a Hands up! and hold still while the machine does a whole-body image scan).
I’m sitting in 27A in the tail of our Alaska Airlines Boeing 737-400, checking out the British Air 747. ‘I’m not going if it’s not a Boeing’ said a sticker on the flight attendant’s file folder at the main door.
Most store coupons are bland, mostly white with just a bar code on. This one from the fresh&easy grocery store actually looks a little like real money, with some nice graphic design touches on it.
Some days we work too late to go to the hotel restaurant for dinner (it takes at least an hour by the time the food finally had arrived and everything had been squared away and paid for). So on those nights I stop at the ‘fresh&easy’ grocery store on the way to the hotel and pick up a ready-to-eat salad, a sandwich and some yogurt. (Don’t eat in your hotel room! said a colleague one time. It’s dirty ..people have sex in hotel rooms, you know! I just laughed).
We have major project milestones coming up very rapidly on our project. Some teams are falling behind and are being subjected to daily ‘special attention reviews’ : a formal way to describe the daily reporting of the team’s progress against detailed activities. Yikes. My team and I agreed that we don’t want that kind of attention ! Better to knuckle down and get it done – and avoid getting some ‘special attention’.
Hmm .. very interesting, I thought, the paint on the Alaska Airlines fuselage, as we stepped into the front door. Could it be a mushroom? What could it be?! I never saw the entire airplane since it was out of sight as I stepped out of it in San Francisco as well.
So I had to resort to an on-line search .. and here is the answer to the mystery. It’s Minnie Mouse’s red polka-dot hair bow. It was a ‘Disneyland’ Alaska Airlines plane that I flew on. Says the DisneyWiki : Minnie Mouse is the girlfriend of Mickey Mouse created by The Walt Disney Company. Minnie is sweet in nature and fun-loving. She is widely recognized by her pink or red polka-dot hair bow.
I voted for the upcoming local elections for the City of Seattle and for King County tonight. (It’s low tech to vote : fill in oval circles with pen, fold up your ballot, stuff in an envelope, and send it in the mail. I guess it’s sort-of high tech when it comes to counting votes. They run the ballots through a scanner. Will voting ever become fully electronic? Maybe not, just the same as paper money that will not go away any time soon).
The artwork is by JAMES YAMASAKI and appeared in ‘The Stranger’, Seattle’s ‘alternative’ weekly newspaper. There is an initiative for more funding for city buses, for a monorail petition and for more funding for Washington State schools and pre-Kindergarten education.
Picture from the LEGO website. The reindeer is new .. and that’s an elf hat on its head
Le·go
ˈleɡō/
noun
trademark
1. a construction toy consisting of interlocking plastic building blocks.
2. from the Danish phrase leg godt, which means ‘play well’.
We watched The Lego Movie last night .. a non-stop animation action flick of all kinds of Lego characters, vehicles and sets. (Spoiler alert : two humans, a dad and his son, make an appearance at the end). The movie has a good message : ‘Everyone is special, and capable of doing great things – even if you sometimes think you’re not’.
I read on Wikipedia that the movie is an American-Australian-Danish collaboration, and from an idea that goes back to 2008. Most of the animation is computer-generated, but the animators used only available LEGO characters and building blocks. It’s hard to imagine how many countless hours must have been spent putting all the scenes together. If I had a DVD for the movie I would stop at some scenes and just check out everything that was built to make up some of the very elaborate backdrops. Some are of the city, some of the Wild West with horses and pigs and all, and some are of outer space.
A sobering graphic from TIME magazine about containment and a worst case scenario. Inaction is not an option.The left part of the graphic is a poster from Work War II in Britain. (It was rediscovered in 2000 and is now seen everywhere in print and on t-shirts). The right part is a spoof.
Ebola hysteria is raging in the media coverage – and in the real world – here in the United States. A patient died in a Dallas hospital on Oct 8 and infected two nurses caring for him (so far). One of the two nurses had a fever, did the right thing by calling the Centers for Disease Control to ask if she could travel by airplane, but they nonetheless did not stop her from flying. The airplane she was on made 5 more flights the next day before the airline got word of their passenger and pulled it from service. The plane had already been cleaned three times, and now the microfilters will also be replaced. The two pilots and four flight attendants on board the flight were placed on paid leave for 21 days (the maximum time it takes for Ebola to appear in newly infected people). Ebola screening at four major U.S. airports has been stepped up and some schools in Ohio and Texas temporarily closed.
Is all of this necessary, given that the disease is contracted through bodily fluids? How about some alarm for the flu season that is upon is, and the fact that flu is much, much easier to contract from a sick person? The 2009 H1N1 Flu Pandemic killed more than 10,000 people in the United States. But does everyone get his or her flu shot? No – not even half of the population here in the States do.
I found myself spending the last hours of this week’s trip in the Embarcadero again, to attend a meeting. Afterwards I had to run out and take BART to the airport, but managed to snap a few pictures (of course).
I’m standing on the corner of Mission and Fremont St. The building across the block is 100 1st St and belongs to the University of San Francisco. Built as recently in 1988, I see it has a ‘postmodern’ style (which is hard to explain, even after reading up about it!). The blue billboard in the middle quotes Steve Jobs : ‘If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.’And here is a brand new building going up right there at the same street corner, for the global cloud-computing company called Salesforce.com. They are somewhat of a competitor to SAP and as with SAP, whole consulting practices have sprung up, dedicated to help big companies implement their software.
I developed a eye irritation that bothered me all Wednesday – and that is hopefully just an allergic reaction. So off to Walgreens. The pharnacist recommended the standard Walgreens brand called ‘irritated eye drops’. So 1. Why is the container pink? and 2. Are the eye drops ‘irritated’? Finally, as I tried to use the stuff, it turned out it’s in a little glass bottle. So it’s not possible to gently squeeze it to make a drop come out. I ended up shaking the bottle, making a number of drops fly out and hoping that one hits my eye. Or if they end up close enough to my eye, my eyelashes can pick some of the stuff and I can get it into my eye that way. All of which makes more than my eye irritated.
A colleague of mine (he was born and raised in Germany) teases me by calling me ‘Kaiser Wilhelm’ now and again. Hopefully it’s just because of the similarity between our first names!
I read on Wikipedia of the Kaiser ‘Bombastic and impetuous, he sometimes made tactless pronouncements on sensitive topics without consulting his ministers, culminating in a disastrous Daily Telegraph interview that cost him most of his power in 1908′.. He was partly responsible for starting World War I, then was an ineffective war leader, lost the support of the army, and abdicated in November 1918.
I had just settled into my seat at 20C on the Alaska Air flight out to San Francisco this morning, when a woman with a pink track suit came by, and lifted up a very large garment bag – also pink – into the overhead bins. It filled two whole side-by-side bins, taking up six feet of space! Ahh .. of course, can only be one thing : a wedding dress, I thought. Sure enough, that’s what it is, she confirmed soon after when someone inquired what it was inside.
It’s 6.30 am and I’m sitting in row 20 on the Alaska Air flight at the gate in Seattle.
It was a quiet day for me .. I went about my business of doing my chores at home and getting ready as I always seem to do for my early Monday morning trip. I remembered only late in the game that the Seahawks (football team) were playing the Dallas Cowboys (in Dallas). By then it was 20-20 in the fourth quarter. The Seahawks pulled ahead with a successful field goal, but then the Cowboys scored twice to make it 30-23. Oh well.
We don’t seem to have much oranges and reds in the way of fall colors here in Seattle .. but then there are many trees that are evergreen. This tree is on 16th Ave close by my house.
[From Wikipedia] The Higgs boson stands on its own in the updated Standard Model of elementary particles (electrons, protons and neutrons are made up of these and are therefore not elementary particles).Our Saturday night movie fare was ‘Particle Fever’, a documentary about the Large Hadron Collider. The confirmation of the long-postulated Higgs boson particle’s existence gave further credibility to the Standard Model, but the giant experiment’s results were inconclusive in another way. The weight of the Higgs boson is thought to point to one or two completely opposite views of the universe. One the hand the proposal is that there is one cosmos (universe) with a cosmological constant (that indicates the energy density of the vacuum of space – but don’t ask me what energy density of the vacuum of space is!). The other proposal is that there are multiple universes, and that each has a randomly assigned cosmological constant. What the Higgs boson’s mass indicate? Well, it fell right in the middle of the values thought to support the two opposite views! Man! We need more data! (And as it turns out, the LHC is already getting warmed up for another series of atom smashing in early 2015).
On the left is the Standard Model that says there is one universe, underpinned by the Higgs boson that gives mass to all the particles. Its mass is thought to be 125.6 GeV. (Giga electron-volt. Electron-volt measures energy, but at this sub-sub-atomic level, units for mass and energy are interchangeable). Anything significantly heavier than that would have pointed to us living in one of several universes – AND that there is really no such thing as a ‘standard model’ of elementary particles.
The leaves from the big maple tree next door are starting to come down in large numbers. If I sweep them every weekend, I can manage to get away with not buying giant yard waste paper bag at the home depot store. (I put them in my giant yard waste bin).
And luckily, the big dog next door that used to bark at me from the fence while I sweep the leaves, left with his owners when they moved out. Voertsek!*, I would bark back at it when I could no longer ignore the ruckus.
*An Afrikaans word, from the Dutch ‘voort seg ek’ , commonly applied to animals. It means ‘go away!’ or ‘get out of here!’
Here’s the view from my BART train on the way back to the airport today, as we were approaching Daly City, south of San Francisco.
[From Wikipedia] ‘Little Boxes’ is a protest song written and composed by Malvina Reynolds in 1962, which became a hit for her friend Pete Seeger in 1963. The song was reportedly inspired by the boxy houses of Daly City and expresses alarm at conformity and loss of individuality. Well, the little boxes are still there today, but I see in writings of historians and sociologists that the people populating them are actually quite diverse with large Filipino and other Asian communities there.
Here are the words for the song.
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky tacky
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes all the same,
There’s a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look the same.
And the people in the houses
All went to the university
Where they were put in boxes
And they came out all the same
And there’s doctors and lawyers
And business executives
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.
And they all play on the golf course
And drink their martinis dry
And they all have pretty children
And the children go to school,
And the children go to summer camp
And then to the university
Where they are put in boxes
And they come out all the same.
And the boys go into business
And marry and raise a family
In boxes made of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same,
There’s a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.
