a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
We went out for a team dinner 
tonight here in downtown Walnut Creek (located on the northeast side of San Francisco Bay). It is the centennial this year for the city of Walnut Creek and the events to celebrate it are still going strong – even though summer is winding down. There are parades, art gallery shows and a walnut festival (of course).
We also saw new condo building and new shopping center projects under way here .. a mini-construction boom of sorts.
99% of almonds produced in the USA are from
California – but maybe not for much longer. The Golden State is on track to record its driest year in a century; possibly several centuries. So I buy the almonds while I can. As for the drought, the weather service has invented an additional category of dryness. There is Abnormally Dry, Moderate Drought, Severe Drought and Extreme Drought. Now they have added ‘Exceptional Drought’. I think they should go for ‘Drought of the Century’. Or ‘It Never Rains in (Southern) California’ Drought, after the 1972 song by Albert Hammond.
[From Wikipedia] The song concerns the struggles of an actor who moves out to California to pursue a career in Hollywood but does not have any success and deteriorates in the process. In the chorus, Hammond sings, “It never rains in California, but girl don’t they warn ya. It pours, man it pours.”
Our San Francisco-bound plane from Alaska Airlines this morning was parked way out, and away from the North Terminal.
So once we walked though the gate at the North Terminal’s boarding door, we went down- stairs and onto the tarmac. From there a constructed tunnel and a temporary, scaffold-like gangway got us into the airplane.
I ran into this situation again last week : I needed a file with technical information that I knew was only on my home computer’s drive. This while I was out in San Francisco. This is not a technology problem. I could leave my computer on and figure out how access it remotely (but I like to turn it off when I leave the house). Or I could drop all my files into Google Docs, or Dropbox, or an application called Evernote. These are all ‘cloud’ solutions, providing on-line access to documents from anywhere and at anytime.
I still weigh the risks of using the cloud vs. using an old-fashioned flash drive. On the cloud your data can get hacked into. The flash drive can get lost, or get stolen. For now, I still go with flash – but I know I have to move with the times soon, and go to the cloud.
Here’s a graphic from TIME magazine with some trivia about sandwiches around the world. The 1.96 million is the number of Facebook ‘likes’ for the Abu Dhabi-based ‘Just Falafel’ franchise that sells sandwiches with falafel balls on them (ground chick peas, deep-fried). Also mentioned are toast with kaya, a Southeast Asian spread made of coconut and sugar, the German fischbrötchen (a herring sandwich), a Japanese yakisoba-pan (sandwich stuffed with noodles) and the Australian Vegemite on toast (Marmite for me, thank you very much). Here in the USA we have the hoagie, a split roll that comes stuffed with meat, cheese and peppers. It actually goes by as many as 13 other names, among them sub, hero and grinder.
Well! It was supposed to be a short week with Monday being Labor Day and all, but my colleague and I ended up holding the fort at the project site until today. We finally got out of there this afternoon, and made our way to San Francisco airport across the San Mateo bridge. One of these days I will take the train (BART : Bay Area Rapid Transit).
I rented a VW Golf hatchback for the week, and all week we thought the trunk latch was broken. There was no reaction or audible pop when pressing the ‘unlock trunk’ button on the key fob. So today the car rental agent showed us to push on the big VW badge to make it tilt, and voila! The trunk opens. Could have fooled me – and actually did. (And not only me, I might add).
Our project team members have all come on board. I for one have joined the project ‘late’, towards the end of the design phase. That means documents with specifications have to be written up and deadlines have to be met. We’re working in a modern office building with all the necessary amenities, lunch rooms, meeting rooms, hotel cubicles and all, but the process to get us all our badges to move freely as we want is lagging somewhat. ‘We’re all just prisoners here’ said someone, referring to the classic 1977 song from the Eagles, the Hotel California.
From the song :
Mirrors on the ceiling,
The pink champagne on ice
And she said ‘We are all just prisoners here, of our own device’
And in the master’s chambers,
They gathered for the feast
They stab it with their steely knives,
But they just can’t kill the beast …
There were some glitches with my travel into the project office today – but nothing too serious. Early in the morning the Alaska Airlines bar code reader at the boarding door refused to cooperate. When it had finally been fixed, the attendant simply announced that ‘Everyone is welcome to board’.
After my arrival in San Francisco, it was my turn to rent a car for the team to share – but Hertz were out of cars. San Francisco had too many Labor Day weekend visitors that brought back their rental cars only this morning. But I finally got my car, and my colleague and I could take off for Walnut Creek by driving across the Bay Bridge.
It was Labor Day here in the States – a Federal holiday, so most workers had the day off (but not all). It’s back to school for kids this Wednesday, too. And the unofficial end of summer. It’s still very warm in Texas, I see, though (99 °F/ 37 °C). And we will have pleasant warm weather later this week in Seattle as well.
Here’s a graphic that shows an ideal productive day – one that keeps the labor we have to deal with in check and in balance with exercise and sleep ! It’s by Health Central, and here’s thelink
