a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
It’s been a week since the collapse of the Skagit River Bridge on Interstate 5 north of Seattle. Washington State Department of Transport (we just call them ‘wash-dot’ here on the news) has dredged up the bridge section and vehicles from the river, and is getting ready to put a temporary section in place. I see Wash-DOT splashed out on Yahoo’s photo site (called Flickr) with detailed pictures. Here is the link http://www.flickr.com/photos/wsdot/sets/72157633665218854/
Wednesday night found four of us at the German-style beer hall Von Trapp on 12th Ave. I had a pilsner and a chicken schnitzel sandwich (breaded and fried chicken on pretzel bread) with fries. I know it’s not the healthiest meal but hey! : this was an exception to all the veggies I cook and eat on all the other days of the week.
Here’s a nice view from behind the overhand of a maple tree onto the pavement on 15th Ave, seen as I went for a little walk late Tue afternoon. The leaves make a nice camouflage pattern (the French word derived from camoufler, to disguise). After Memorial Day it’s ‘unofficially summer’ but the warm and dry weather still has to arrive here in Rain City.
Memorial Day is a somber holiday here is in the USA, a difficult day for families that lost loved ones in a war. CNN has a page that shows the names, the home locations and the battlefield locations (here http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/war.casualties/index.html) of the coalition troops that have been killed in the Afghanistan and Irag wars. The toll for these two wars now exceeds 8,000, with some 50,000 wounded. The war in Iraq is over, of course .. but the figures for Afghanistan show 23 casualties as recently as May 20.
On Sunday Bryan, Gary and I made a mini-road trip out to Bryan’s family in Westport. Westport is a seaside town on the west side of the Olympic Peninsula. It’s about 2 hours one way.
It’s been many years since I had been inside the Seattle Central Library on 4th Avenue, and today I went there, also in search of a 1967 Time-Life Sciences book. (The book is long out of print and has pictures of an Einsteinian ‘relativistic’ train robbery in that I am very fond of.) Alas, I did not find the book, but I took some pictures. The library opened in 2004 to mixed reviews, some criticizing it for being relatively isolated from 4th Ave and 5th Ave and not easy to get into and out of .. but its current usage is actually double of what was estimated when it opened.
I spotted these ‘bloplets’ on a leaf on Wednesday night by my friends’ house before we went out. The leaf surfaces are waxy, of course, and so the water forms big blobs instead of droplets. The Wikipedia entry has an interesting video clip of a water droplet on a superhydrophobic surfacs getting cut in two by using a superhydrophobic knife. Here is the link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_tension.
From Kiro7tv.com : The Interstate 5 bridge over the Skagit River at Mount Vernon collapsed Thursday evening, dumping vehicles and people into the water shortly after 7 p.m. Here is a link http://www.kirotv.com/gallery/news/i-5-skagit-river-bridge-collapses/g9w8/#last.
Three people and their cars ended up in the river, but was pulled out and seem to be doing fine. At this point there are no known fatalities. The bridge was built in 1955*, and is some 65 miles north of Seattle, and the four-lane structure sees an average daily traffic of about 71,000. So this spells trouble for the immediate area. There is an alternate route and a newer bridge, but it was not designed for nearly as much traffic.
*Designated ‘functionally obsolete’ on its most recent inspection reports but apparently that does not mean the bridge is unsafe. (Sounds as it was overdue for an upgrade or replacement, though).
Here is a map of the damage brought by Monday’s tornado in Moore, OK. (This is just a section of the 17 miles in total that the tornado traveled). The map is from the New York Times website, with pictures as well. State officials have lowered the death toll to at least 24, revised down from Monday’s estimate. If anything, it’s amazing that not many more people lost their lives in the buildings that collapsed and the flying debris. http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/05/20/us/oklahoma-tornado-map.html?ref=us
This metal tile that I found under my feet while I was at the Westlake Center plaza in downtown Seattle, poses a question. It is one that a Seattle resident should be able to answer (or at least guess) easily : What is the longest floating bridge in the world? (Side comment .. shouldn’t the question have said ‘WHERE is the longest floating bridge in the world?). Answer : In Seattle, of course. Well, between Seattle and Redmond. So that the Microsofties can get across Lake Washington. Here is a post I made long ago SR 520 showing what a cross-section of the bridge will look like once the renovations and expansion to it is complete, scheduled for 2015.
A really big tornado caused extensive damage and tragic loss of life (51 people found so far, of which 20 are children from an elementary school) in the Oklahoma City area on Monday. The tornado was more than a mile wide, with winds of 180 mph or more. It flattened everything in its wake, ripped the bark from trees with its debris and swept cars and like trucks up like Matchbox toys. There is footage of the funnel cloud and the damage on the website of the public news service PBS at this link http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/weather/jan-june13/tornado_05-20.html
I learned a new word while listening to a discussion of the Denny Substation’s progress on the city council’s web site : there will be a utilidor for the station. Utilidor is short for utility corridor (really just a utility tunnel, to carry cabling and to house equipment underground). There’s not much to see behind the Denny Substation Project site yet .. right now they are scooping up the top two to four feet of soil to clean up oil and grime from the old Greyhound bus station maintenance facility. It’s still a ways to 2016 when the substation will be complete.
So .. it’s not hard to see why Microsoft is encountering resistance from their installed Windows 7 user base that have been forced into the gaudy Start screen tiles of Windows 8 that screams color and wiggly little updates at them. What a shock to one’s senses if one had a desktop with a dreamy wallpaper background ! It’s in your face, and it’s ‘noisy’. And of course Microsoft prods its users to sign up for a Microsoft account for many of the apps – such as Mail, Skydrive, the Store. You can even sign in onto your machine with a Microsoft account (not local a password) which will then save your settings in the cloud and make your desktop, Surface tablet and Microsoft phone all look the same (does anybody have all of those?). No thanks, I think. If that account password gets lost in the clouds, or hacked, then I am toast.
As for the problem of landing on the Metro Start screen at boot-up, I actually found a remedy for that, at extremetech.com .. http://www.extremetech.com/computing/139960-how-to-shut-down-windows-8-easily-and-how-to-boot-to-the-desktop. So now I boot up directly into the desktop, the way Windows 7 did. I still don’t have a Start button and Start menu, but that’s OK since I have shortcuts on the desktop or below on the task bar for all the apps I use every day. Everything is now an ‘app’ I guess .. even the monstrous Office products Excel and Word. Which by the way, in the 2013 versions now run in the cloud as well, and allows you to store your documents in the cloud. ‘So that your files are accessible from anywhere’. Yes, OK, but not when you’re actually in the cloud flying at 30,000 ft and your airline still does not have wi-fi on board. And so it goes. Some new things are really cool, and others solve some problems – but create others.
The picture is from Thursday. I am standing on the corner of 7th Ave and Olive Way. I had just left the Vessel bar/ watering hole where I had a beer with a few colleagues after work. The ‘Olive 8’ condo tower still has 5 units left, but it seems like the opportunity to snap up a condo on the cheap from the distressed developer has now come and gone. The building was completed in 2009, and one bedroom condos typically listed for $500,000. One condo for sale on the property website Zillow had been sold in Nov 2010 for $328,000, probably by the developer to a speculator. The listing price (it’s a one bed, one bath condo) is now back up to $495,000.
My new ThinkCentre with Windows 8 has arrived, and I managed to fire it up successfully on Thursday night. I have to move some files (especially my large library of pictures), and do some consolidation. I will write about my impressions of Windows 8 later. The ‘desktop’ part of it is much like Windows 7.
Got something confidential that you want to send to ‘The New Yorker’ magazine for publication.. but you want to remain completely anonymous? To do that, previously there was the mailing address of the magazine (1925), later joined by a phone number (1928) and much later by an e-mail address (1998). But e-mail addresses and the location of the computer from where it was sent is traceable and not good for super-secret communications. So now in 2013 there is the ‘Strongbox’ on the Tor network. Check out the steps below .. I am no encryption expert but it looks pretty cloak-and-dagger, spy-versus-spy super-secret to me! On the upside The New Yorker cannot divulge their confidential sources to say, the FBI .. but on the downside : they cannot verify the authenticity of the material easily, either.
I watched an animated movie called ‘Grave of the Fireflies’ from Ghibli studios last night – because the cover had a quote from movie critic Roger Ebert that said it belonged on a list of the 10 best war movies of all time. Well, I did not quite know what to expect, but it was harrowing to watch. This is not a feel-good pop-cultury Pixar movie. To me the message was ‘War is brutal, and its consequences show no compassion to defenseless people’ (such as children).
A few of us from Seattle with family will go on the Princess Cruise shown below. We will try to manage the potential hazards as best we can (sinking ship, adrift with no power, seasickness!). I have really not been outside of London except for a train ride up to Birmingham, so I am really looking forward to see Ireland and Scotland (and the Loch Ness monster*).
*The Loch ness monster is a cryptid, from the Greek “κρύπτω” (krypto) meaning ‘hide’. It is a creature or plant whose existence has been suggested but is not yet recognized by scientific consensus. Kind of like Bigfoot (Sasquatch), the ape-like creature that some people believe inhabits the forests here in the Pacific Northwest.
It looks as if two weeks of dry weather is coming to an end today, and we had beers on Bryan and Gary’s deck tonight to enjoy the last of it. Check out Bryan’s ‘Elysian Superfuzz Pale Ale’ beer, brewed with blood orange to give it a citrussy taste. I buy the little blood oranges here at the grocery store when I see them. They are small and sweet and make you feel like a vampire when you bite into the juicy dark red fruit. Njarr !
