Month: November 2021

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Tuesday/ my iPhone setup is done

My temporary lock screen until I can find a more personalized one. (Dial from a 1950s Stromberg Carlson 1543 rotary phone, one of the most popular desk phones ever made).

The easy data transfer method (to set up my new phone) shown in yesterday’s picture stumbled, and I had to give up on it.

So I did a full iCloud backup of my old phone*, and an iCloud restore to the new phone, and that worked out fine.

*The backup took a while. Could it be that I have that many apps, and that much data? I wondered. It turned out most of the 22 Gb of backup data were photos, even though I had marked photos as excluded from the backup. I also deleted the 5,000+ pictures I had on the old phone, and deleted them from the ‘Recently Deleted’ folder as well, but they were still swept into the backup. They made it onto the new phone into the ‘Recently Deleted’ folder. Ah well, no harm done. They will disappear from there in 30 days.

There is still a little work after all the apps & data had been transferred to the new phone, to make sure everything is good to go.
• Check if home screen, main apps, phone contacts look OK.
• Log onto e-mail accounts, messaging apps, credit card & banking apps, and check that the Apple Wallet is set up correctly (vaccination card was missing).
• Request a new QR code for my Washington State vaccination card to put into the Apple Wallet.
• Connect my Tesla’s key card to the new phone.
• Download my preferred Siri voice onto the phone.
• Use iTunes on Windows (I have no Mac or MacBook) to sync my CD music collection into the Apple Music app & add my PC photo albums to my phone’s photo albums. It’s a known issue that the artwork for the CD albums sometimes get scrambled with the sync. All right, so I could not have that. Deleted all 4,105 synced songs and the Apple Music app (! – to get rid of invisible files & indexes). Downloaded the app back to the phone, and did the sync again. Issue solved.

Below are pictures shot with each of the phone’s three lenses: wide angle, standard and close-up.
(Note: These are 2560×1920 pixels. The blogging platform automatically scales them down from the original 4032×3024 pixels).

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Monday/ here comes the sun, and my phone

There was sunshine all day.
My new iPhone was out for delivery, and I had to wait for the FedEx guy to show up before I could venture outside. He showed up shortly after 1 pm.

The iPhone Xs (on the left), is transferring its information & settings over to the iPhone 13 Pro that came out of the little black box. I will go and take a few pictures tomorrow with the spiffy three-lensed camera on the new phone. The 13 is noticeably longer and thicker than the Xs, which I hope will still be OK.
Sun always follows rain .. mural art that I had found yesterday on the corner of Pine St and Third Avenue. The Columbia clothing store that was there is all boarded up and closed.
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Sunday/ darkness comes quickly

There was a break in the weather by 3 this afternoon, and I went down to Pike Place Market just to get out of the house for a while.
It is skull cap, scarf and glove time: 44 °F (7 °C) with a little wind chill.

Here comes the marine vessel (ferry)Tacoma from Bainbridge Island— it must have been the 2.55 pm sailing. The crossing is about 35 mins, and the time stamp on this photo was 4.38 pm*.
*Which is really 3.38 pm Pacific Standard Time. I forgot to turn off the Daylight Saving Time setting in my big Canon DSLR camera (it has no built-in Wi-Fi).
Upstairs from the viewing deck at Pike Place Market. The Mountain is not out (Mount Rainier), but there is a little blue sky. Finishing up the waterfront space that opened up with the demolition of the Alaska Way Viaduct is coming along. That speck at the top left is a Delta Airlines plane on the way to Seattle-Tacoma airport.
Now I walk down First Ave. for a bit. Here’s the Seattle Art Museum. See the 3-D optical illusion/’please slow down’ island in the intersection? I like it, but I wonder how many motorists notice it.
Qualtrics Tower, formerly known as 2+U and 2&U, is looking good, sitting on its massive V-shaped pillars. Its 37 floors were all leased out by September 2019, but I’m sure it has yet to fill back up again with workers and tenants.
There is a variety of ‘Welcome Back to Your Seattle’ signs adorning the lamp posts in downtown. This one is cute.
I like this one, too. A leaf happened to be stuck right on the swoosh line running around the Space Needle and skyscrapers.
The ten-story building (at 400 University St, on the southwest corner of the city block with the new Rainier Square Tower), is now complete as well.
Hey! Macy’s the store is gone, but the building is there*, and so is its iconic 160-ft tall star. If I’m not mistaken, it was switched on early this year.
*A real estate firm bought the building for $580 million earlier this year.
These lights lining Fourth Avenue came on just as I turned around (and just in time to better see those approaching e-scooter riders).
I was aiming to catch the No 10 bus at the old Convention Center building, but it rumbled by me while I was still a block away from the stop. I didn’t want to wait 20 mins for the next one, and ended up walking up to Capitol Hill.
Here’s Broadway. It’s 5 o’clock and the sun has been gone a good 15 minutes. A fat rat scurried away from me up ahead and disappeared into the little bit of greenery on the sidewalk.
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Saturday/ Daylight Saving Time: does not save Time, does not save Daylight

It’s that time of the year again in the United States, when we attempt to outsmart the universe.
We have to set our clocks back by one hour tonight.
Can we please pick one time and stick to it?

As David Policansky writes in The Washington Post:  “The people of Fairbanks, Alaska, show that it is possible to adjust to very early sunsets or very late sunrises. There just isn’t much advantage in shifting daylight around when you have only three hours and forty-two minutes of it on the shortest day. But in the Lower 48, in the mid-latitudes where most of us live, we complain”.

The Uniform Time Act of 1966 allows states not to observe Daylight Saving Time. That’s why residents of Arizona and Hawaii do not have to adjust their clocks twice every year. My vote for Washington State: Just Say No. Stop observing Daylight Saving Time.
[Infographic by the National Geographic at nationalgeographic.com]
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Friday/ the week looks better

What started as a bad week for the Biden Administration/ the Democrats, looked much better by late Friday night.
There were good October jobs numbers out this morning, and the Housed passed the $1 trillion infrastructure bill that includes transport, broadband and utility funding, sending it to the President’s desk.

531,000 jobs added in October to the US economy.
Writes Neil Irwin for the NYT: ‘Employers are paying more to get those workers, it’s worth noting. Average hourly earnings for private-sector workers were up 0.4 percent in October, and are up 4.9 percent over the last year. That is high by recent standards, but probably a bit below the inflation rate in that span. October inflation numbers are not out yet, but for the 12 months ended in September the Consumer Price Index was up 5.4 percent.’
[Graphic from the New York Times]
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Thursday/ the earthworms are happy

It rained most of the day. It is November after all, and so it rains a lot.
We are also coming out of a very wet October.
The rain gauge at Sea-Tac airport recorded 5.76 in of rain in October, two inches more than the average of 3.76 in.

Living dangerously (a meal for robins and crows): an earthworm on my lawn that is just beginning to green up, along with other unwanted little greenery. Earthworms are invertebrates and lack true skeletons, but maintain their structure with fluid-filled coelom chambers that function as a hydrostatic skeleton. The earthworm eats a wide variety of organic matter and the digestive system runs the length of its body.
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Wednesday/ a rough Election Day

From the homepage of The Washington Post.

Tuesday was a rough odd-year Election Day for Democrats, not boding well for next year’s mid-term elections. Trumpist Republican Youngkin won the Virginia governor’s race. Democratic governor of New Jersey, Phil Murphy, barely won his race.

Why has President Biden’s support, and that of the Democratic Party in general, been declining?

I guess it doesn’t help that the pandemic is dragging on. Republicans and their supporters fight the vaccine and mask mandates, though.
People don’t know, don’t care, don’t believe— that we have now lost 750,000 Americans. That’s more than the population of Alaska, or Vermont, or Wyoming.

Should the Democrats ring the alarm bell and finally pass the Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework & Build Back Better legislation?

Maybe it will help, but maybe not much. Paul Kane of the Washington Post writes ‘If history is any guide, Democrats will pass this massive agenda in the weeks or months ahead — and it will have little to no impact on their political standing in next year’s midterm elections’. He mentions several cases where the party in power passed transformative legislation aligned with its values (Obama 2009: Affordable Care Act, Trump 2017: Tax Cuts), only to be pummeled at the midterm elections thereafter.

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Tuesday/ the third shot

It’s been six months since I had my second shot, and so today it was time for the third one*. The pharmacist put a Spiderman band-aid on my arm afterwards. They must be gearing up for the influx of 5-11 year-olds that will come in for their shots from tomorrow.

*Pfizer’s booster shot is the same dosage strength as their primary series. Moderna’s booster dose is half the strength of its primary shots.

Big Pharma: “The third dose is recommended for people with certain preconditions”
African person: “Which preconditions?” (Sign says ‘Africa needs vaccines’)
Big Pharma: “Wealth”
[Cartoon by Swiss cartoonist Patrick Chappatte]
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Monday/ a closer look at Climate Pledge Arena

Sunday was a beautiful blue-sky day.
I took the No 10 bus to Westlake Center, and from there, the Monorail to the Space Needle, so that I could walk around  Climate Pledge Arena.

Just departed West Lake Center on the monorail train. Look for the Space Needle in the distance.
Arrived at the Space Needle. Climate Pledge Arena is just a short walk away.
I walked through the Seattle Armory building on the way to the Arena. Originally built in 1939 as the old Armory Building, it housed the 146th Field Artillery and its half-ton tanks. It now houses a food court and a little bit of some entertainment for families (games to play and a few TV screens).
The trees are bare — and the shadows are already long, even though it’s only 3.15 pm or so! The Pacific Science Center in the distance.
Food vendors at Seattle Center are connecting their offerings to the new Seattle Kraken franchise.
All right, here is the first view of the Climate Pledge Arena, this from its southeast corner.
Looking back at the Space Needle. The Arena and the Needle were both conceived and constructed for the 1962 World’s Fair.
Rounding the corner to the side facing 1st Ave N in Uptown, the neighborhood just south of Queen Anne. The roof looks heavy and is heavy: 44 million pounds or 22,000 tons (20 million kg or 20,000 metric tons).
Mt Baker (10,781′/ 3 286 m) is up north in Washington State near the Canadian border. The mosaic artwork is by artists Laura Hadad and Tom Drugan. That would be the Stanley Cup, and ribbons and rainbows morphing into tentacles, lashing at an ill-fated wooden ship on the oceans.
The center support beams, seen from 1st Ave N.
These black window frames (and window panes, I think) from the old Key Arena were salvaged and reused.
From the north side, one can stand on a low wall and peer into the bowl with the ice-rink bottom. The enormous LCD screen (46 ft wide by 25 ft high) is playing clips of local interest, and commercials. Just a few hours later, at 6.00 pm, the Seattle Kraken took on the New York Rangers right there on the ice. The Kraken lost 1-3.
Almost back to the corner where I had started.
Looking back at the Arena, as I enter Seattle Center park to walk back to the Monorail station.
Beautiful Art Deco entrance to the Armory building.
And here is the monorail train that will run back to Westlake Center. It’s just 1.3 miles, and there are two trains, so they arrive and depart every two minutes or so from each end.
Arriving at Westlake Center, and peeking through the skylight before stepping off the train. On the right is the new 58-story Rainier Square Tower, 850-foot (260 m) tall.