a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
My windows are back – so now I can spy on everyone walking by in the street in front of the house again. I could also sit on my little porch, we don’t do that anymore now, do we? Life has become too fretful and frantic.
It’s getting warm enough here in Seattle now (78 °F/ 26° C) so that I need to open my windows late afternoon and into the evening to let the cooler air in.
I check out these free-standing lattice radio antenna towers every time I walk over to Trader Joe’s (grocery store) across the street from them. The ground elevation there is about 410 ft above sea level, to which can be added the heights of each of the three towers – 594 ft (181 m), 637 ft (194 m) and 682 ft (208 m) for an elevation of the top of the towers of about 1,000 ft. A slowly blinking red light at the top warns low-flying objects (as well as UFOs) at night to steer clear !
There was a commercial for a 2016 Subaru Forester on TV tonight with haunting music that I had to look up. I did it the old-fashioned way* : by memorizing a sentence or two and typing it into Google to look up the lyrics. It worked after a few tries, and here it is : Time Will Tell (on YouTube). The singer-songwriter is Gregory Alan Isakov, whom I had not heard of. And lo and behold, he was born in Johannesburg in the year when I finished high school, immigrated to the USA as a child and was raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He has sung with the Seattle Symphony Orchestra. Man! I thought .. you sing such a mean song, one that reaches in and plucks at the strings of my heart.
*Apps such as Soundhound lets one’s iPhone ‘listen’ to music to identify the song
Check these out .. the Wall Street Journal reports that apartments for sale in Hong Kong (we call them condominiums/ ‘condos’ in the USA) are as expensive as ever : US$500,000 for a ‘mosquito’ apartment that comes in under
200 sq. feet.
(I did not make it out to San Francisco on Monday due to a bad cold). My old house’s wood-frame windows with their double glazing (two panes of glass filled with gas) had started to fog up inside with water vapor some time ago, and so it had become time to send them in for repairs.
I was barely up when Bryan and Paul (the famous and well-known among friends here ‘Double Dog’ contractors) showed up and in a shockingly short time had the four sets of double hung windows out of their frames. The Cherry Creek Window van (company that will repair the windows) was already waiting outside and took them in. So .. can someone not come and easily steal my house’s windows? I wanted to know from Bryan. The answer : the thieves would have to be inside the house – but then why would they? the windows are made for your house in a custom size.
So now I have a house with a hurricane-battened-down-the-hatches look for a few days until the windows come back!
The political pundits here in the States are already tracking the (so-far) 2016 Presidential candidates’ every move and appearance. On Saturday little-known (nation-wide) Martin O’Malley announced his bid as well (he was governor of the state of Maryland). There are many more Republicans than Democrats at this point .. with ex-Texas governor Rick Perry weighing his options as well. I did not know about his ‘Adios, Mofo’ comment directed at a journalist that grilled him about lack of school funding in Texas that he made when he thought his mike was off after the interview. The phrase is the title of a 2011 book about his disastrous legacy in Texas. From the book : .. The two words reveal as much about Rick Perry as his whole sorry record in Texas. He has led Texas to a point where it has the highest number of citizens under 25 years of age without high school diplomas as a consequence of the worst dropout rate in the country, has the largest population of uninsured in the nation along with the most children without healthcare coverage, the worst polluted air, according to the EPA, is along the lowest per capita income and is home to some of the poorest counties in America, is criss-crossed with crumbling roads and declining railways, gives support to consistent political attempts to block a woman’s right to choose, raised college tuition rates beyond the reach of middle class families, and sustains a State Board of Education that is determined to put religion in textbooks and teach evolution as a ‘theory’.
It was just a few weeks ago when all of Texas was in an extreme drought .. but that has all ended with the wettest month on record this May. Enough rain has fallen in May to cover the entire state in 8 inches of water. Friday’s storm alone in the Dallas area dropped nearly 5 inches of rain overnight at Dallas Love Field airport.
I was thinking I should run out and see the San Andreas earthquake disaster movie this weekend – but after reading the reviews, thought : no. Maybe later as a Netflix download or something. The movie is overdramatized, and the damage shown happening to buildings completely overdone. “You’re going to have pockets of destruction, pockets of collapse and casualties, but it’s not going to be Armageddon,” says Farzad Neaim, a structural and earthquake engineer in Irvine. “The toppling of buildings is very rare.”
I don’t feel very trim* but I can still fit into Nordstrom’s ‘Trim Fit’ shirts – ha! .. so that is what I ordered on-line and what landed on my doorstep today. I still like to go out to the store and look at clothes and buy it there as well, though.
*Too much work and not enough exercise!
We always
say here in the USA that Memorial Day is the unofficial start of summer. So here is the (somewhat cheesy) cover of a brochure of the summer events scheduled for the Emerald City. Check out the orca frolicking in the foreground right by Pier 57 (where the Ferris Wheel is) .. a very unlikely sight!
And I’m still getting used to the Ferris Wheel’s silhouette on the waterfront – but that would pale in comparison to the changes that will be brought when the Alaskan Viaduct (double-decker highway right above the waterline) eventually comes down when its replacement tunnel had been completed.
It was Memorial Day today here in the United States : a somber day to remember our fallen soldiers – and made more so by the cool gray weather we had in Seattle. The TV news tonight mentioned that it is roughly the 40th anniversary of the fall of Saigon in the Viet Nam War, with the last evacuations taking place there on April 29, 1975. Public support for the War had long waned by then : by 1970 only a third of Americans believed that the U.S. had not made a mistake by sending troops to fight in Vietnam.
So there it was! on Saturday .. Ireland became the world’s first country to vote for and approve same-sex unions* by referendum. 62% of voters said yes.
*Same-sex ‘civil partnerships’ were introduced in Ireland in 2010, but advocates for marriage equality said those fell short of the recognition and protections afforded by civil marriage.
The New York Times writes that in 1979, more than 1 million people turned out for Pope John Paul II’s visit to Dublin, a staggering crowd for a country with a population of just 3.4 million at the time. Looking back, that may have been the high point of the Catholic Church’s influence. A a tide of child sexual abuse scandals destroyed the church’s credibility in the whole area of sexuality, says Tony Flannery, a priest who was suspended in 2012 for criticizing the church’s views on women and homosexuality. It should be noted, though, that Ireland is not entirely beyond contentious cultural battles : abortion is still illegal (except if the mother’s life is in danger).
Each year I have to spend a number of hours on on-going training (mandated by my firm). This year I chose an on-line course about retirement (a little for learning some of this, is it not? Fortunately I seem to have done mostly the right things the last twenty years).
The training course notes that understanding wealth requires the mastering and understanding of three basic concepts : assets, income, and cash*. Income must be budgeted to make cash available. Cash must be used to acquire assets. Assets must be managed to produce more income. And so the cycle starts again.
*Cash is a very liquid asset, of course.
Unfortunately, comments the training course .. ‘Most Americans do not understand these relationships, nor how to put it to use. Most people live on economic myths and fairy tales, using depression-era concepts taken from their parents and grandparents’.
This week at the project site went by quickly .. must have been because we were very busy. I made a dash for the airport as usual, ran into a little traffic southbound after crossing the Bay with the Bay Bridge .. but nothing too serious. (The serious traffic jams start just a little later!).
One would have thought by now that banks have figured out how to put a stop to fraudsters rigging the bank’s ATM machine – but apparently that’s not the case. Check out this example of a debit-card hack (from the Wall Street Journal). And as the diagram below show, a compromised debit card can wreak havoc and clean out much more than just one’s entire savings account (check out the table below). Bankrate.com advises not to use debit cards at dicey ATMs, at gas stations, on the web for purchases, or at restaurants where the waiter disappears with the card and then brings the check to the table. All of this is a little bit unsettling.
We are wrapping up the third of four cycles of testing, and have plenty of defects that the testing team had logged, to sift through and resolve. Some defects are small coding bugs; others are combinations of bad data and missing system checks that are not catching the data flaws early enough. Finally – some ‘defects’ that had been logged are not really defects, but features that never made it into the design.
Example, using a car as a metaphor for a software product : testing the factory installed brakes of a prototype car may prove that they are a little too sharp and need adjustment (a defect), but the car not having an anti-lock braking system (ABS) is not a defect if the engineering design of the braking system never called for it !
These days, it is broad daylight as I step out of my house and into the cab at 5.30 am. The airport was busy this morning. I suppose we’re on the upswing toward the peak summer travel season. (Not that it matters too much : the airplane is filled to capacity every time I travel on it).
Here’s a nice Washington State quilt that caught my eye at a store where Bryan, Gary and I stopped by on Sunday. We also tried to get a nice close-up look at the Polar Pioneer oil rig, but it was not possible to drive right up to it .. which should not have been a surprise, I guess.
We have a huge oil rig destined for drilling off the coast of Alaska docked here in Elliott Bay at Terminal 5 in the Port of Seattle. There were plenty of protesters in kayaks our in force today on the water around the rig (called kayaktivists). I want to run out tomorrow and go and take a close-up look of the intimidating drilling monster. Here is the article in the Seattle Times that I borrowed the pictures from.
Here are some silly cartoons from the The New Yorker magazine I flipped through while I was waiting for my check-up at the doctor’s office on Friday. (All three very true, actually). Chiller Theatre was a local TV channel in New York City in the ’60s and ’70s that showed classic horror movies.
