a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
I completed my work on the project today, filed my time sheets and expense reports, sent a last few e-mails, and set up my out-of-office messages on my e-mail. ‘Away from work for an extended time, and not checking e-mail’. My bags are packed, my devices are charged, and my check-in with All Nippon Airways for the flight to Tokyo at mid-day tomorrow, is complete.
Here’s a map that I generated with Great Circle Mapper for my upcoming trip to Perth, Australia, with stops in Tokyo and in Hong Kong. The route looks a lot different than one plotted on a flat, projected map of Earth’s surface !
I’m still getting better at using my iPhone for preparing for upcoming trips. (Later this week I will travel to Perth, Australia for Christmas, with a stop in Tokyo on the way there).
I’m also trying to rely less on getting a local cell phone signal, to pull up the information that I need. So I have made sure I see my flights and hotel stays in airplane mode on my Google calendar, and made a calendar-view paper print-out to boot. I have also put the apps I will use in one place, and even created flight reservation and hotel details as ‘pictures’, and put those in an off-line photo album folder.
When did the tradition of Christmas trees get started? From history.com, this explanation: The fierce Vikings in Scandinavia thought that evergreens were the special plant of the sun god, Balder. Germany is credited with starting the Christmas tree tradition as we now know it in the 16th century when devout Christians brought decorated trees into their homes. It took a while before Christmas trees were adopted by early Americans, though. To the New England Puritans, Christmas was sacred, with no place for decorated trees – which were seen as part of ‘heathen traditions’.
The Seattle Sounders, our Major League Soccer team, won the 2016 championship title on Saturday night against Toronto. It was 28 °F (-2°C) at kick-off ! More than 90 minutes later it was still 0-0 and the game went into overtime. Swiss-born Sounders goalkeeper Stefan Frei made a monster save (below), and the Sounders went on to win the penalty shoot- out with the winning penalty kick by Roman Torres. Go Sounders!
It doesn’t snow every winter in Seattle – and I’m not used to snow, anyway! – so when it does snow, I run out and take some pictures. Here are two of my favorites of the pictures I took this time.
It was raining all day yesterday, and today in San Francisco. Our flight out was a little late, since Portland and Seattle is getting an inch or two of snow. It was still dry when I arrived at Seattle-Tacoma airport, but almost as soon as I stepped into the house, the snowflakes started to drift down.
The Beach Blanket Babylon is an over-the-top, musical comedy show. Its home is the Fugazi theater in North Beach (adjacent to the Fisherman’s Wharf). We went out to our end-of-project/ end-of-year team dinner tonight, and then to the theater.
Since it is almost Christmas, they added in a Santa Claus, and Christmas tree characters to towards the end of the show.
Here’s the giant Christmas tree in the middle of Union Square, donated by Macy’s department store. The tree is reusable (very San Francisco) and is decorated with more than 33,000 twinkling energy-efficient LED lights and 1,100 shining ornaments.
There was no sign of snow as I left my house this morning at 5 am, but then as we boarded the plane at Seattle-Tacoma airport a few snowflakes mixed in with the light rain, came down. The pilot said he could still get us out there without needing to call for a de-icing of the wings of the plane. I work in the city office for my final week on the project (yay!), and is cold here in San Francisco as well.
It was a cold but sunny day here in Seattle, and I chased myself out of the house in the early afternoon. The dark comes quickly (4.18 pm today), like a thief that stole the light while you were not looking. The weatherman says there may be a dusting of snow in the lowlands in the morning. I will be able to tell if he is right early on, but I will be heading out to the airport and to San Francisco one more time, in the early hours.
There was a great documentary by Japanese national broadcaster NHK on TV on Saturday, about the advances made to create self-driving cars. NHK mentioned four levels of sophistication, but I see Wired magazine uses five levels (credit to Wired magazine for the Level 0 to Level 5 pictures). Google is going for the making the software, and will sell it to car makers, much like it is selling Android software to mobile phone makers. Car makers are partnering with technology companies for the hardware and software that is needed for these cars. Other vendor companies to car makers are retooling and scrambling not to be left out, for the day when items such as rear-view mirrors for the driver, will be obsolete. NHK had a rear-view mirror manufacturer on that is rapidly transitioning to mirrors that show an image generated by a camera, instead of just being a mirror (presumably the rear-view mirror’s image is just part of the bigger all-around image that the car ‘sees’). Anyway, check out those levels of self-driving cars. Everyone wants a Level 5 car, of course!
So .. President-elect Donald Trump is not the only politician tweeting (yes, he is still tweeting). I hope he and his staff read Senator Chris Murphy’s tweets (member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee). Better yet, get briefed by the Foreign Relations Committee regarding the significance if his acceptance of a phone call from Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-Wen.
The Wikipedia entry regarding Taiwan-United States relations has already been updated: On December 2 2016, U.S. President-Elect Donald Trump accepted a congratulatory call from Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-Wen in a phone call, which was the first time since 1979 that an American President or President-Elect has publicly spoken to a leader of Taiwan. PRC Foreign Minister Wang Yi soon made a statement saying that China opposes any move to separate the country, without explicitly mentioning the phone call between Tsai and Trump.
Here’s my local Uncle Ike’s pot shop, the one on 15th Ave here on Capitol Hill. (It’s on my way to the grocery store, but I have not set foot inside of it yet). I see on the Uncle Ike website that they have multi-lingual ‘bud tenders’ .. a good thing given the dizzying array of cannabis products listed. Cannabis comes in all kinds of incarnations : flowers, concentrates, edibles (cookies), and of course – joints. I have also learned that the two major types of cannabis plants are Indica and Sativa.
