Wednesday/ the Granite Building

Here’s the beautiful Granite Building here in lower downtown Denver.  We had wood-fired pizza just across the street from it tonight.

From the Denver Post : It’s the four-story presence that looms over the southwest corner of Larimer and 15th streets, boasting a history that is appropriately rich, given that it was constructed stone by multicolored stone in 1882, just 24 years after gold prospectors founded Denver.

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The Granite Building is also known as the Graham-Clayton Building. Built in 1882, it is 132 years old.

Tuesday/ cool inventions

Check out these cool inventions I found in recent issues of Bloomberg Businessweek.

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Check out this nifty little wireless ‘robotic’ printer.
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Spring for this DIY air filter by Gus Tate if you live in Beijing or Shanghai .. about $35 vs. an expensive $800 installation. It is equally effective at improving indoor air quality !
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Here’s inventor Frank Wang’s easy-as-pie-to-use-out-of-the-box drone, the Phantom 2 Vision +. Buy it on Amazon or at Best Buy for about $1,400. (Be careful where you fly it! Don’t get it shot down!).

Memorial Day 2014

It was Monday, Memorial Day of 2014, here in the United States today (a national holiday honoring fallen soldiers in the country’s wars); also the considered the ‘unofficial’ start of summer.  We still have cool temperatures here in Seattle, so it always comes as a surprise to me to realize in May that the longest day of the year in the northern hemisphere is less than a month away!  Check out this infographic that explains the history of Memorial Day here in the USA that I found on-line.

Memorial Day

Sunday/ Seattle’s Central Waterfront

It is a long weekend here in the USA with Memorial Day on Monday .. so I could relax and not start preparing for my weekly trip to Denver.  We spent time on the Seattle Waterfront today, even though there was a steady drizzle all afternoon.

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This is Pier 62/63, former site of the annual Summer Nights concerts at the waterfront, is now empty and lets visitors stroll out and look out over the water of Elliot Bay, or back at the Seattle skyline.   The Norwegian Cruise Line cruise ship in the background was just setting sail for Alaska as we walked by there.

 

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This ‘octopus’ bike rack is outside the Seattle Aquarium.
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This is Echo (a giant 46-ft tall sculpture created in 2011 by Jaume Plensa), and newly moved from New York City to Seattle’s Olympic Sculpture park.  In Greek mythology, Echo offended the goddess Hera by keeping her engaged in conversation, thus preventing her from spying on one of Zeus’s lovers.  As punishment, Echo was deprived of speech, except for the ability to repeat the last words of another person.
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The Seattle Great Wheel is a giant Ferris wheel at Pier 57, height 175′ (53 m). It’s been in operation since June 2012.
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Here we are inside and in the air and .. thinking deep thoughts?  From left to right Gary, Bryan, Ken, Steve and Tony.
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And here is the bicycle parking ‘Squid’, by local artist Susan Robb. (Bicycles can be parked and locked on any of the tentacles).

Saturday/ the fence is up

My new fence is up! Yay!  So this on the north side of my property.  It’s a little higher than the old fence.  And I have finally run out of excuses – like not enough sun – to put some ground cover thingies and other green in at the back, so I will have to get to that.  The green bush was a lot bigger prior to the work on the fence, and will grow back to fill up some of the space as well.

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Mr SQRL with his big fluffy tail seems unfazed by the new fence.  The fence poses no obstacle, of course ..  and he runs along on the few flat inches on the top edge. 

 

Friday/ Nest-ing

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Inside the Nest on my living room wall : an internet-connected, smart thermostat.
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.. and here is the outside. It says the temperature in the house is 69 °F (20.5 °C). The thermostat is set to 67 °F (19.5 °C), and will turn on the heat if the temperature falls below that. The thermostat can be programmed, or controlled from anywhere in the world with its wireless internet connection – or it can just be left to figure out on its own when to turn on the heat !
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The view from where I was sitting on my airplane at Denver airport waiting for us to get pushed back from the gate. The storm was evidently over with bright sunlight striking the airplanes.

I made it home on Thursday night, thankful that our flight out of Denver was not delayed by the weather.

On Friday my contractors Bryan and Paul completed the installation of a new fence on the north side of my property, as well as installing a ‘Nest’ internet-connected, smart thermostat inside the house for me. The device has a very elegant look, and can be controlled from anywhere with my smart phone.   (Or it can just be left to ‘learn’ one’s typical daily and weekly schedule with its built-in activity sensors).

Yes, my old Honeywell thermostat was programmable, but there are holidays, daylight savings-time shifts, and simply times when one comes home ‘unexpectedly’ (vis-à-vis the programmed thermostat schedule).   With remote access and control to it, I can warm up my house ahead of time so that I don’t step out of the taxi cab and into an icebox. 

Thursday/ thunderstorm

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The Yahoo Weather app on my phone lit up every now and again with flashing clouds and a ‘lightning bolt’. (63 *F is 17*C).
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I’m just stepping out of my little Prius Metro Taxi. it was still raining very hard .. look closely at the road surface to see the rain coming down.

There were more warnings of tornadoes in the Denver metro area today, and an hour later, that was followed by a severe thunderstorm with lightning and hail just as I was heading out to the airport.

(Hail damaged six Frontier Airlines aircraft at Denver International Airport on Wednesday, forcing them to cancel some 16 flights.  Wow. I wonder how hard it is to fix a fuselage or wing surface with hail dents in. Surely a hair dryer or letting it stand in the sun will NOT do?).

The little Prius taxi cab I was in took quite a pummeling from the cats-and-dogs-coming-down kind of rain, with some hail mixed in as well .. but thankfully none that would damage an aircraft !

Wednesday/ tornadoes! and Union Station

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Eek! Take shelter NOW! It is very rare for Denver to get tornadoes, though. Today six were spotted in the metro area, but there was no major damage anywhere.
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The Beaux Arts–style Union Station depot, built in 1914, is being restored and converted—by Denver firms Tryba Architects and JG Johnson Architects—into a 112-room boutique hotel with shops, offices, and restaurants, opening in July. The lettering below the clock says ‘Travel by Train’.
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This is the Ice House building at 18th and Wynkoop Street. Beginning in 1903, it was a refrigeration warehouse first for Littleton Creamery, then the Beatrice Creamery. Butter, cheese, cream and dairy supplies were stored here from 1903 to 1979. Today its interior has loft apartments on the upper floor, a tavern and a Brazilian steakhouse.

We had some mild excitement this afternoon in the office when severaI of us got tornado alerts on our phones from the National Weather Service, and an announcement by the building management.  So we moved to the elevators and stairwells for 30 mins or so, until the coast (the Denver plains?) was clear.

Later on I walked down to Union Station to check on its remodeling progress.  The work on it still needs a few more months, though, and I could only admire the exterior.

 

Tuesday/ the Cheese Bomb Incident

We had a team dinner tonight, and managed to steer clear of discussing work – for the most part.   We all have travel stories and consulting ‘war’ stories to tell.  We even retold – for those that did not hear it – one of the best ones, of the time one of our colleagues from Germany managed to clear everyone out of an entire Frankfurt Airport concourse in a classic cheese bomb incident.  (Here is a similar story I found on the website Mother Jones, where I borrowed the phrase from : cheese bomb incident).   He had bought a soft flavorful cheese in Russia, and at Frankfurt airport was questioned for the third time during his trip back about the suspicious substance in his carry-on luggage.  ‘Open your luggage’ please, said the security personnel.   Fed up, grumpy and probably feeling that’s he is German and should be trusted by his fellow citizens, he announced ‘Why should I? There is a bomb inside’.  Whoah.  Of course that triggered a major security alert, and everyone had to leave until the cheese was inspected properly.  (Cheese not only looks like plastic explosives, some cheeses have vapors similar to the signature vapors of explosives).   I don’t think our colleague spent time in a German jail, but he got in some serious trouble, alright.

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The Denver clock tower on 16th Street was lit up in blue (violet?) tonight.  The restaurant where we had dinner was just a block away from it.

Monday/ in Denver

I made it out to Denver with my usual early morning flight.   I went for a walk tonight after dinner, to the Denver City Hall – forgetting that I have been wanting to go and check out the recently remodeled Union Station (train station) here in downtown.  So I will have to do that tomorrow or Wednesday.

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Denver City Hall at dusk on Monday night. Despite my best efforts, I couldn’t find out why the central rotunda is lit up in red.

Sunday/ a virtual Rubik’s cube

The Rubik’s cube is 40. 5-18-2014 10-08-46 PM It’s shocking (that it is that old), but I do remember that I was still in school when it first appeared.  My younger brother could solve it in under 2 minutes .. while I never did get the hang of it ! Invented in 1974 by Hungarian mathematician Ernő Rubik, it is the world’s top-selling puzzle game, and widely considered to be the world’s best-selling toy.   Google is celebrating the anniversary with a virtual Rubik’s cube on its home page (picture on the right; it takes a little imagination to see ‘Google’ written there!

And how many permutations of the cube color positions are there? 43 quintillion.  The number is so large that the packaging simply says ‘billions’ of possible permutations.

 {8! \times 3^7 \times (12!/2) \times 2^{11}} = 43,252,003,274,489,856,000

Saturday/ Southern African trees

I am doing a (late) spring cleaning of my stuff in my study, and found these Southern African tree post cards.  I want to frame them, but will have to get to it next weekend ! My favorite tree?  It has to be the legendary boabab.

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That’s me in the picture, showing how big the trunk of a boabab tree is. This was in Botswana, some 25 years ago.

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Friday/ EPNS, not ESPN*

IMG_2569 sm*ESPN is a television sports network here in the USA.

I brought a set of silver spoons back 047 smfrom South Africa : a gift from my mom (that belonged to my grand-mother).  While checking them out a little closer today, I noticed the letters EPNS-AI stamped on the back. Turns out the EPNS stands for electroplated nickel-silver and the AI stands for superior quality (the thickest layer of silver).  So how to clean silverware (made of silver)?  One way is to simply use a glass bowl lined with kitchen-grade aluminum foil, filled with hot water and ordinary salt.   The electrochemical reaction (exchange of electrons between the aluminum and silver) will clean the tarnish.  I also recall ‘Silvo’ that we used on occasion in my parents’ house – a mild liquid metal polish that originated in Britain at the turn of the last century.

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The little silver spoons (tea, anyone?) with a dollar note to show their relative size.

Thursday/ red-hot ride

We walked by this Chevrolet Corvette Stingray on the way to lunch today here in Denver. It’s brand new and has to be a 2014 model. It must have set its owner back some $60,000.

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We walked by this Chevrolet Corvette Stingray on the way to lunch. 

Wednesday/ dinner took too long

Most of the time it’s nice to go and relax and go grab a bite with my colleagues .. but tonight was one of those where it took way too long.  We picked the Yard House, a popular place that offers 200 kinds of beers on tap.  Tonight it was bustling with people. (There’s probably a convention at the Colorado Convention Center going on again).  So what was supposed to be a 15 minute wait turned into a 40 minute wait, and then it took another 30 minutes before we finally had our food on the table.   But hey, I got to get a spectacular panorama picture as we left, and just as the sun was setting.

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Here’s a panorama view of Denvet’s downtown at the corner of 16th St and Court. From left to right there is Republic Plaza, Starbucks, the Sheraton Hotel where we stay sometimes, and the Yard House where I had dinner earlier tonight.

Tuesday/ Mt Everest spotlight

I read a few pages of my TIME magazine this morning on the plane to Denver – about the recent tragedy on Mount Everest.  (Sixteen sherpas were killed in the single most deadliest incident on Mount Everest when giant pieces of ice broke loose higher up).  I remember when I first learned of Mount Everest as a schoolboy that I liked that the height expressed in either meters or feet has some pattern to it – 8,848 m (29,029 ft).   P.S. Check out the price tag for an individual undertaking an expedition on the second graphiic.

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Here’s a map and a graphical presentation of the numbers of people that Attempted to reach the summit, Reached the summit and Died trying to do so.
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In this picture, I think I prefer to be in the Boeing 747, cruising at 35,000 ft, and looking down on Mt Everest.

 

Monday/ blue sky

Monday was a spectacular blue sky day in Seattle.  I postponed my usual Monday morning trip to Denver to Tuesday due to a bad cold.  I think I will be OK to travel tomorrow.  (I see they had snow there in Denver today .. it’s very late for snow!).

P.S.  Here’s a link to Seattle Art Museum’s Deco Japan exhibit to go with the picture below. There’s some pretty cool graphic design posters in there.

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I took this picture on Sunday.  Seattle Art Museum’s branch in Volunteer Park has started a ‘Deco Japan’ exhibit. Fittingly, the museum building itself is Art Deco.

Mother’s Day wishes

A very happy Mother’s Day to all the moms in the whole wide world.
We love you! We salute you!

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This is South African-born artist Piet Grobler’s depiction of the miller’s daughter from the Rumpelstiltskin (Grimm’s fairy tale) that became a queen. She had to guess Rumpelstiltskin’s name correctly within three days – or give up her child to him.

Saturday/ a piece of (mousse) cake

Paul, Thomas and I went for dinner at the Old Bamboo Vietnamese Restaurant in Seattle’s International District.  It’s the new incarnation of the Spring Garden Restaurant, but in our estimation not quite as good.  Afterwards we went to a bakery-cafe to pick up some dessert.  I picked the red bean mousse cake. It reminded me of the red bean-filled buns I used to buy at the 7-11 in Hong Kong.

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Here’s Thomas at the entrance of A Piece of Cake Bakery and Cafe in the International District.
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Ready for dessert?  We all shared in the bounty.  Clockwise from the left : a slice of blueberry and yogurt mousse cake, a date and walnut pastry, a coconut pastry, and pieces of mango pudding mousse cake and red bean mousse cake.

Friday/ street hog

I ran some errands Friday morning, but then had I to go home and answer a dozen e-mails that came in from the Denver project.  Technology brings the work e-mails to my smart phone, but I cannot pull up full screen work sheets and applications on a tiny phone screen!

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This street ‘hog’ was parked on 5th Ave in downtown Seattle this morning .. I think it’s a food truck. It would also fit into a Mad Max movie – sort of.
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Here’s my view as I’m settling into my seat on Thursday night at the gate at Denver airport, ready to go home.