a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
We had Seattle weather all week in Denver (rain), and Colorado weather in Seattle, I think. (Wednesday’s high in Seattle of 93° F/ 34°C was a record high for this time of year).
On the drive out to Denver airport this afternoon, some off ramps from the freeway were closed due to standing water, or flash flood water. The flooding is worst in Boulder, not too far northwest from the city of Denver.
I am still catching up as quickly as I can with all the team members and all the work that had been completed so far on the project, so that I can make a contribution.
There were no special announcements in remembrance of the 9.11 events 12 years ago here at the office, but I am sure it was on everyone’s mind. It is a day in the USA that is going to be very hard to forget, for a very long time.
It’s cool and rainy here in the mile-high city. I went for a quick walkabout here in the 16th Street Mall in downtown : a very nice mix of restaurants, bars and shops. It was only Day 2 on my new gig, so I’m still learning a lot about what has happened on the project so far – and who my PwC colleagues are and who my client colleagues are. It’s important to know! I can commiserate with my own firm’s colleagues, or ask them dumb questions .. but not so when I converse with the client team members !
I made my very early start, waiting at 4 am for the TSA to open their security lines, boarded at 4.40 am, and arrived at Denver airport 9 am local time. Got the rental car (you have to wait for a shuttle bus that goes to the rental car lot), and drove into the city. It’s a good 40 min drive to the offices, and my Google Map’s turn-by-turn directions led me astray. So by now it was 11 am. Our project manager introduced me to about 30 people, and I sat in four meetings, which made for a very long day – but it’s very nice to have the whole Denver downtown to explore. And hey, I have a shared office and they had my computer all set up.
My ‘Thinking in Numbers’ book has arrived, and I think I will like it a lot from what I have read so far. I have to make it an early night because the flight leaves frightfully early (5.15 am) in the morning. I am going to Denver – and yes, I know I was just there for my stopover back from Toronto! My new project is at an oil company headquartered in the city. The last time I helped an oil company convert their information systems to SAP in was in 1999. The crude oil price at the time dipped down to $18 a barrel. These days it sits at $110 per barrel and is heading higher.
When traveling back to the USA from Canada, all the customs formalities are done in the Canadian airport, before one even sets foot in the USA. My Global Entry accreditation that I did for my trips to China is still valid (it is $100 for 5 years), and it came in handy today. I could bypass a very long line at the passport control by scanning my passport, looking into the camera, and providing four fingerprints. I was very tired, and the flights felt very long : one to Denver (3 hrs) and one to Seattle (3 hrs).
So there we were Friday, seated up in front facing a panel of about fifteen client team people listening and looking at to our presentation for 45 minutes (I only did 4 of the 26 slides). Then there was an Q & A for the next hour and 15 mins. We were not perfect (who is?) but we think we did well. We stumbled on one question, and was a little too vague on one or two others. So we shook some hands, and piled into the van back to Toronto. We felt good about our effort .. but for now it is out of our hands. I stayed over, only going out to Seattle on Saturday morning.
The floor which we were in on Thursday for our preparation had even fancier technology in the meeting rooms : big screen projectors descending from the ceiling at the touch of a button; and little microphones on the table to speak into for those conference calls where someone is always too far from the phone or speaking too softly. Andrè our presentation coach was at it again, and we went through several dry runs. We also went through a list of anticipated questions, and practiced who would answer, and what we would say. By 5.30 pm, the five of us that were going to present to the client on Friday, piled into a van with our luggage and all. We had to pick up our 6th team member at Toronto airport, and then headed out to the town of Chatham where the gas utility company’s headquarters are. No fancy hotels there; we stayed in a Comfort Inn (which was very comfortable given that I only got 5 and 6 hours of sleep the previous two nights). Friday was going to be a big day.
We spent all day going over our presentation materials, and we had a coach to critique our presentation methods as well. Said he : ‘I know it’s not easy, but you have to boast a little and sell yourself!’, and remember : at the same time the client should feel they want to hire you, that they want to work with you (so don’t come across as arrogant) ! I spent a little time after work walking around the office in downtown Toronto, but then had to go back to the hotel and catch up on my sleep.
My travels on Tuesday went without incident. I stopped over in Chicago; and made it through Canada’s customs at Toronto airport without getting sent to the ‘problem with passport’ checkpoint (even though I have a US passport now, they black-marked me for ‘trying’ to get to the Canadian side of the Niagara falls in 1995 with my South African passport). Of course there’s French everywhere. Fin de trottoir, goes the French for ‘end of walkway’ in the airport, for example. I only arrived at the hotel in downtown Toronto after 10.00 pm. It’s always a challenge to get a decent bite to eat at that time on a week night, but there was a Tim Horton’s (Canada’s more-or-less equivalent of Starbucks, a fast casual restaurant known for its coffee and doughnuts) open right by the hotel.
It was Labor Day here in the USA and Canada, but there was no rest for the wicked (me). We have our work cut out to meet a deadline on Wednesday for a proposal that my firm is making for a big two-year project. In the meantime, I’m off to Toronto tomorrow to go and sit in on another proposal, for the so-called oral presentations. It is somewhat like a job interview and therefore a nerve-wracking affair, but I’m just there to answer to technical questions they may have. Others in our party are familiar with the terms of the contract and the bid that we are making. I even went shopping for a new pair of pants or two, and ended up springing for a snazzy new jacket as well.
It’s Bumbershoot weekend, Seattle’s annual music festival by the Space Needle. I have to confess that I am not soo into the music scene and the headliners that include Heart, Death Cab for Cutie, MGMT and Bassnectar are all unfamiliar to me. Does that mean I should listen to more music? Broaden my horizons? The thing with live music is : it’s never quite the same as its recorded version that you have come to love, the one on your boombox or iPhone or iPad. But yes, it’s nice to see the band of humans that actually make the music, make it for real up there on the stage – and share the experience with a crowd of fans .. right?
So now that it seems certain that the ‘red line’ has been crossed by the Syrian government (using chemical weapons against civilians) .. what should the US government do? The UK has indicated that they are out. Secretary of State John Kerry made a passionate case for action today, but President Obama’s response was much more measured. ‘No boots on the ground’, no open-ended commitment. It’s ironical that Syria is smack-bang next door to Iraq, where the USA has burnt through all its credibility with the 10-year war there, the start of which turned up zero weapons of mass destruction. (Which was held up as the main justification for the Iraq war by then-Secretary of State Colin Powell). And how sad that a brutal civil war that has now killed more than 100,000 people, rages in a country with two of the oldest inhabited cities in the world : Damascus and Aleppo.
Wednesday marked the 50th anniversary of the ‘I have a dream’ speech by civil rights leader Martin Luther King (August 28, 1963). a panel of more than 130 scholars got together in 1999 to rate the best speeches of the 20th century and King’s speech ranked No. 1. Dr King was assassinated 4½ years later, on April 4, 1968 .. but he did see the Civil Rights Act of 1964 signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson : a landmark piece of civil rights legislation in the United States that outlawed major forms of discrimination against racial, ethnic, national and religious minorities, and women.
Watch out for those summer colds! They are worse than ones that will get you in winter, says this picture panel is Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal. I know, because I have had one this summer that lingered on for weeks. Blech !
Daniel Tammet is a savant, but not quite the kind
portrayed by Dustin Hoffman in the 1998 film Rain Man : he can function socially and describe what he experiences as he performs mind-boggling feats. In 2004, he recited pi to 22,514 places (it took 5 hours 9 mins). He learned conversational Icelandic in one week. Check out an interview that Morley Safer did way back in 2007, here : CBS ’60 minutes’ interview. Daniel says he sees numbers as colors and shapes. His book ‘Thinking in Numbers’ has been published recently, and shown here on TV on Monday, and so I am going to buy it.
Businessweek magazine says there are 3,200 utilities (!) that make up the U.S. electrical grid. They sell $400 billion of electricity every year, mostly derived from burning fossil fuels in centralized power stations, and distributed over 2.7 million miles of power lines. (In the Pacific Northwest we generate up to 70% of our energy with hydropower stations). Says Businessweek : Regulators set the rates, utilities get guaranteed returns, investors get sure-thing dividends. It’s a model that has not changed much since Thomas Edison invented the light bulb. And it’s doomed to obsolescense. There is a confluence of green energy and computer technology, deregulation, cheap natural gas and political pressure that, says David Crane of NRG Energy, poses a mortal threat to the system. Rooftop solar in particular, is turning tens of thousands of businesses and homes into power producers : ‘distributed generation’. Of course, it’s going to be a long haul to see how all of this plays out. But it seems certain that the energy and technology sectors will no longer be supplier and customer. They will be competing directly with each other.
As a tennis player (ex-tennis player?, since I play so rarely these days), I found this article about little-known 35-year old tennis pro Michael Russell, that Businessweek calls ‘tennis’s #1 loser’, very interesting. His wife travels full-time with him in a supporting role (picks up his rackets from the stringer, buys groceries, sits in the stands when it’s almost empty). ‘The sport is basically about how well you can cope with losing’, says Michael. He can still chase down balls few other humans can, but at 5’8″ is at a disadvantage against tall, lean players. They mention a weekend trip to Richard Branson’s private island where rich guys pay to play with the pros, and say ‘it was awesome; the only thing is it kind of ruins everything else for you afterwards’. Tennis players don’t have to deal with concussions, but the game is rough on the joints. Michael has had his share of injuries : knee surgery, and has torn his rotator cuff (tendons in the shoulder joint).
I am sure Friday’s surprise announcement of CEO Steve Ballmer’s departure sometime over the next year, caused a buzz in the Microsoft world over on the ‘east side’. (A reference to the main campus in Redmond and the city of Bellevue east of Seattle across Lake Washington). Ironically, with the jump in the stock price, Mr Ballmer saw some $700 million added to his net worth. Yes, the juggernaut is struggling to transition to a ‘devices and services’ company, and Windows 8 has not found traction so far. But for fiscal 2013, Microsoft reported revenue of $77.85 billion, 6% increase over the previous year. It sits on a $68 billion pile of cash. They still have their operating system sitting on 91% of workstations(45% Windows 7, and 37% Windows XP : a product that is now 12 years old to the day). Will it be a sales guy that replaces Steve Ballmer, or a product guy* (as the late Steve Jobs was)? I would say the latter, but time will tell.
*I should say person and not guy. For example, there is Meg Whitman leading the charge on Hewlett-Packard’s long comeback trail.
I like to go to Trader Joe every now and again even though I really cannot claim that I am a foodie. You go .. hey, what’s this? Ooh, let me try it. And this? Got to have some of that as well. They have all the stuff that’s in a regular grocery store, but just not with the mega brand names. So they have their own style of Oreo cookies, or potato chips, and never ever Starbucks coffee or Lipton tea. Those are corporate ‘evil empires’ that will never get their products on the shelves of Trader Joe.
