a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
I read about Imgur (say ‘imager’) in today’s issue of BloombergBusinessweek. The company only has 11 employees, but the start-up is already profitable thanks to a stream of display ads from movie studios and video game makers. It gets more than 120 million unique visitors a month posting images and searching for jolts of humor and insight. About 1/4 of the user-submitted images feature cats or dogs.
I am at Denver airport, and it looks like I will be able to get out of here just ahead of several inches of snow that may accumulate tonight and tomorrow morning. Locations around the city of Denver expect 6 to 10 inches of snow by Friday afternoon – not a good outlook for continued operations at the airport, I would say. The airport is some 25 miles west from the city.
The project team went to dinner tonight at Willie G’s here in downtown Denver. Some of the dinner conversation : ‘we should not eat any fish from the Pacific’ (dangerous due to Fukushima radiation). Well, that’s nonsense. And do we know of Indian superstar Shahrukh Khan? (No). Well, his arrival at Vancouver airport almost shut the place down due to security and fans, something that would never happen with a Hollywood star. Which is your favorite James Bond? Do you like Daniel Craig? Some of us did, some did not. I have no opinion on the matter! And did we know of the Hungarian wedding tradition of the ‘money dance’? The father or best man announces that the ‘bride is for sale’ while Hungarian wedding music plays in the background. Guests then pay, and twirl the bride around, usually just for a few seconds, and this provides the newlyweds money for their honeymoon and start of their new life.
‘Let’s see if your numbers add up’ .. ‘but let’s not have another 40 something votes’ on the health care law, was the challenge from the President to the Republicans in the State of the Union speech tonight. And the Huffington Post reported that the award for the first GOP congressman to call Pres. Obama a ‘socialistic dictator’ goes to Rep. Randy Weber (R-Texas). (Who would do well to stop using big words he does not know the meaning of). The longest ovation went to war hero, the Army Sergeant Cory Remsburg. Pres. Obama met him at Omaha Beach in France, at a D-Day commemoration. Cory was later injured by a roadside bomb during his 10th deployment (in the Iraq war, I think), in a coma for three months and emerged partially paralyzed.
We made it in fine this morning from Seattle. We landed early even though there was light snow falling at Denver airport. But the snow persisted all day long, and had not stopped by the time we closed up shop at the office. So my colleague and I walked two blocks in the snow to a restaurant, had our dinner .. but then called a taxi to take us the eight blocks to the hotel.
It looks like the sun will come out tomorrow, but then there’s more snow in the forecast for Thursday and Friday.
Go, go, go! get out of the house, I said to myself at 4pm, before it is dark. I didn’t want to go to the gym, and it was bearable outside (only just) to go for a walk. So I took the No 8 bus down Denny Way and to Seattle’s Queen Anne neighborhood, and walk around there for a bit, and back down to the Space Needle.
I love the Tintin series of comic books
(from Belgium), and know it very well. It turns out there is also a more recent French comic book series, with a heroine called Adèle Blanc Sec. I only learned all of this after picking up the French-made film Les Aventures extraordinaires d’Adèle Blanc-Sec/The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc Sec (2010) at the DVD store. (And watched it Saturday night with Bryan and Gary). The title character was played by French actress Louise Bourgoin. The plot of the film is developed nicely. The film opens with an Indiana Jones-esque tomb-raiding scene and plays out in 1912 in Paris after that. Some of the main characters (men) have large ears, others have large noses or flamboyant moustaches, and of course they wear clothing true to the period. The adventures also feature a pterodactyl and a ladies’ tennis match, one that could very well have been inspired by 1920s French tennis legend Suzanne Lenglen (her Wikipedia entry here).
The Apple McIntosh is 30 years old, and Apple is celebrating it with a timeline on their website, here. (Click on Mac timeline). In 1987 when I was a student, I did use the university’s Apple Mac II. (The basic system with its 20 MB drive and monitor cost more than $5,000). Today we carry hundreds of times more powerful computing power and storage capacity in our pockets, of course .. AND we are connected to the internet, back then barely in existence and certainly not available outside research and military institutions.
So what do I use today? Well, an IBM Thinkcentre desktop with Windows 8 at home, a Lenovo Thinkpad with Windows 7 for work, and then my Apple iPad and Apple iPhone. Each has its own area of strength, and they are somewhat connected, but not fully. For example, I back up my digital media onto the W8 desktop with Apple’s iTunes, and the rest to an attached external drive. Everything does not always work nicely together. Just this morning the lastest iTunes software update turned out to be incompatible with Windows 8. I took awhile to fix it, grr. 1. Rebooting everything did not help. 2. Reinstalling iTunes did not work. Of course, no earlier iTunes version to download, either. 3. Forget Windows Troubleshooter to find the problem. 4. Now it is war. Uninstall everything Apple, including a software app called Bonjour. Good day and good-bye, since I don’t even know what you do monsieur! 5. Reinstall iTunes with Internet Explorer’s download, in case using Google Chrome for downloading did something different. 6. Try again .. voila! It works.
‘Time to ride’ say the banners here in Denver : a 
reference to the Denver Broncos’ mascot, and their Superbowl match-up on Sunday Feb 2 against the Seattle Seahawks.
There was a little snow on the ground this morning; just enough to make it too cold and too difficult to walk to the office – especially with one’s roller bag luggage in tow. 14° F ( -10 °C) is definitely too frigid to be out and about! My name is not Robert Scott or Roald Amundsen!. We managed to hail down a taxi to take us to the office, though.
Ever since I started working in Denver in September, the Colorado State capitol had been shrouded in a scrim : a curtain that can be heated, and withstand strong winds, so that workers could complete its $17 million rehab with no interruption. The entire dome is covered in thinner-than-paper Colorado gold. The gold bullion used for the new gild was donated in 2011 by mine owner AngloGold Ashanti. The 24-karat gold, valued at more than $116,175, was shipped off to Florence, Italy, and milled into gold leaf. The Capitol had been constructed from 1886 to 1903, and the dome was initially covered in copper. [Information from a report by the Denver Post dated 12/26/2013].
We ‘recoiled in horror’ on Monday night as our server in the restaurant sneezed, turned around and immediately blew his nose. This was right after putting our food on the table. He had a heavy cold, poor guy. But were our plates full of germs? What about the glasses of water? Should we drink those? I guess it helps not to think about these things too much .. it will surely turn one into a germophobe, unable to touch anything or anyone.
It’s Martin Luther King Day, but only about 1/3 of employers recognize it as a holiday, so I traveled out to Denver. My return air fare was a ridiculously cheap $137. That’s about the same as the 20 min taxi fare to Seattle airport this morning plus the 40 min taxi fare to the office in Denver after landing. The airlines’ computer geeks supposedly maximize the profit on every seat, on every plane, on every route .. but it sure seems like they were not profiting from my fare!
The Seahawks will take on the Broncos on Feb 2 in the Superbowl. The Seahawks came out with a 23-17 victory over the San Francisco 49ers today. The Hawks were down 3-10 at halftime, and the game had a somewhat dramatic ending in the final minutes when a touchdown throw from 49ers QB Colin Kaepernick’s to teammate Malcolm Smith was intercepted by Richard Sherman. So my hometown team will take on my ‘work town’ team!
I worked on adding to my iPad music library this weekend. I also discovered that I can read Adobe .pdf documents with the iBook application. So I decided to try and salvage the contents from a CD that I bought in 2000 in South Africa with large collection of Afrikaans poetry on it (‘Die Groot Verseboek’/ ‘The Big Book of Poems’). It wasn’t easy. The CD had customized reader software on it, that could only run on pre-Windows 7 computers. I dusted off an old notebook computer that still had Windows XP on. Then I had to manually cut and paste the content from the reader frame into MS Word. The reader application crashed several times during these attempts : either because it was unstable, or because it was loathe to give up its digital treasure. But hey, I bought the CD, and I want to transfer the content over to my iPad. So I ended up with a 600 page Word doc, which I will reformat and see if I can add an index and links into.
I show one of my many favorite poems below, with a rough translation of the last verse in English. It is by Gottfried Watermeyer, was written in 1948 and is titled ‘Ballad of the Drunk Party’.
Love is the bitter glass
the dry glass, the dark glass;
love is the after-sorrow
that fits the hollow of the heart.
As the statistics tell us : it’s much safer to fly for two hours than to drive for two hours, and Thursday night proved that point. On the drive home from Seatac airport I was half-asleep in the back when my taxi driver stirred with a fright and grabbed his phone. Maybe he forgot to phone someone really important, I thought. But no : he was dialing 911. There was a driver in a white car facing south on northbound I-5 in the shoulder lane. So luckily she had managed to get to the shoulder – but man! how on earth did she manage to use the north-bound off-ramp to drive south? Was the fog partly to blame? It really wasn’t that thick. Anyway, there was nothing on the news, and there is nothing on the WSDOT blog, so I trust that she got help and that the situation was remedied.
I am at Denver airport. It’s Thursday and so most of the travelers on the project – and me – are heading home tonight. The office people here plan to wear something orange tomorrow to support the Denver Broncos in their bid against the New England Patriots for a place in the Superbowl final. (And Seattle’s Seahawks play against the San Francisco 49ers this weekend. In Seattle, the colors to wear are blue with a little lime green trim).
My colleague and I tried a new taxi service smart phone app; this one is called Metro Taxi. It’s just a little easier to order a taxi than using the phone and yelling one’s name (and sometimes its spelling) into the phone for the dispatcher. And here in Denver there seems to be a 5 minute or longer wait time for a dispatcher every time I call the cab company.
Here’s an interesting excerpt from the Wall Street Journal about the ‘Polar Star’ icebreaker that is based in Seattle.
SEATTLE—The 40-year-old Coast Guard icebreaker Polar Star returned to the Arctic Ocean this summer after seven years in semi-retirement, charging into a thinning polar ice sheet that U.S. defense officials predict will give way to new commercial waterways and a resource-rich frontier by mid-century. The Polar Star was originally supposed to be in service for 30 years. Its age and a lack of funding had prompted the Coast Guard to put the ship into semiretirement: afloat but not operational.
This summer, on its first voyage to the Arctic since 2001, veterans on the crew found a very different ocean. “Back in the day there were a lot more challenges, more multi-year ice, you had to pick your spots through it,” said Coast Guard Cmdr. Kenneth Boda, the ship’s executive officer. “This summer we set a course and go…We were teaching our young officers to drive around the thicker stuff but we could have gone right through.”
The changing conditions make the Arctic particularly unpredictable. Lt. j.g. Paul Garcia, on his first icebreaking mission this summer, steered the Polar Star into what the Coast Guard calls a “blind alley.” In the Arctic, moving ice floes can bunch up to form mountainous ridges of ice. When three or four floes ram together, the ice can be so thick that even the Polar Star—capable of 75,000 horsepower—can’t smash through, creating a blind alley.
Here’s my little reward for Tuesday, the 
smallest serving of Häagen-Dazs ice cream, barely a big scoop packaged in a tiny tub. Even so, it still packs 45% of one’s daily saturated fat allowance! And I learned today that Häagen-Dazs was actually established by Reuben and Rose Mattus in the Bronx, New York, in 1961. Coffee was one of the three original flavors (vanilla and chocolate the others).
For some reason I have always assumed it’s a German brand .. but here is a full explanation from Wikipedia : Mattus invented the “Danish-sounding” “Häagen-Dazs” as a tribute to Denmark’s exemplary treatment of its Jews during the Second World War, and included an outline map of Denmark on early labels. The name, however, is not Danish, which has neither an umlaut nor a digraph zs – ä is used in Finnish, Swedish and German, but Danish uses æ for the corresponding sound (both of these are contractions of “ae”), and zs is used in Hungarian – nor does it have any meaning in any language or etymology before its creation. Mattus felt that Denmark was known for its dairy products and had a positive image in the U.S. His daughter Doris Hurley reported in the PBS documentary, An Ice Cream Show (1999), that her father sat at the kitchen table for hours saying nonsensical words until he came up with a combination he liked. The reason he chose this method was so that the name would be unique and original.
My early morning flight out to Denver today went without incident (because I was sleeping most of the way). It was a different story trying to get to Denver downtown from the airport, though. The one part was our mistake (my colleague’s and mine) : agreeing with a friendly guy to share a taxi to the city to save a few dollars. He was dropped off first, and the detour added about 30 mins to our trip to the office. The other part was not our fault, though. The entire I-270 highway was closed in both directions from 3 am to 1 pm. Turned out a fugitive was shot in the early hours of the morning by the local police (non-life threatening injuries), and the highway was closed in both directions for an investigation. So what should have been a 30 min ride, took 1 hr and 40 mins stuck in traffic. Oy vey.
So the Seahawks got it, with a win of 23-15 over the Saints. The Hawks will host and play in one more game (tickets start at $415). That final playoff game to get to the Superbowl that is in New York City this year, is Sunday Jan 19. Meanwhile, I ran all my errands on Saturday, also tracking down my vacation mail that was still held at my request by the US Postal Service. Boy, did they made me work for it. USPS moved the mail hold location from my local post office to the SODO (South of downtown) district. I finally found the right building, and with some luck, someone that found my mail. There were no signs, no door and no service counter. Come on USPS, you can do better than that! By the time I got out of there, the fans had started to show up for the Seahawks playoff game. The hardy ones had been tailgate-partying in parking lots around the stadium since early morning already, not seeming to mind the blustery conditions.
