My friends and I went ten-pin bowling for the first time in years on Saturday night. We did not do too badly, breaking a 100 for both the rounds. (Yes, a long way from the perfect score of 300, but spare a thought for President Obama’s bowling disaster while on the 2008 campaign trail. While attempting to woo blue collar voters in Pennsylvania, he bowled a 37. Several balls into the gutter. The late night comedians were relentless in making fun of it.) Afterwards we went to Jack’s BBQ. The owner (Jack, of course) that started the restaurant spent 12 years working at Microsoft and decided it was time to pursue his passion for making barbecue the way they do in Texas, and offering it to Seattle diners. The brisket that I had was great, and I give the black-eyed-pea salad top marks as a very tasty side dish.
Jack’s BBQ is a new restaurant in Seattle’s SODO (South of Downtown) district. They offer BBQ meals from Central Texas, such as brisket, ribs, pulled pork and sausage.
My two colleagues from China were in Seattle for the weekend, and wanted to go on a Boeing factory tour. Let’s go! I said, since I had not done that either. The factory is actually in Everett, 40 minutes north of Seattle. (There is another factory that produces 737s in Renton closer to Seattle, and some 787 work is done in North Charleston in South Carolina). The tour starts with a short film, and then we were taken into two of the cavernous construction hangars, one for the 747 and 777 and another for the new 787 Dreamliner. We entered by the utilities tunnel and then go directly up with the freight elevator to the third floor where we look down on the floor.
The factory is very, very, very large, by volume the largest in the world. The 777 is assembled with a crawling assembly line, until the plane is in its weight-on-wheels (WoW) configuration; then it is tugged along and outside the building to be painted. In contrast, the 787 is assembled in one place, with its major sections flown in from all over the world (wings from Japan, center fuselage from Italy, landing-gear system from France, main cabin lighting from Germany main cabin lighting, among others).
Some 6 million parts go into a modern airplane. That is counting each little rivet as a part, though. Since the fuselage expands under pressurization, it cannot have welds. I was also reminded that the wings are actually gigantic fuel tanks (I will try to forget that again by the time I fly on Monday!) and that the skin of the fuselage is no thicker than that of a dime (yikes). We could actually check a section of fuselage out up close and it is shocking how thin the skin is.
So! .. while we’re all very proud of Boeing and its manufacturing prowess, being a fierce international competitor and providing some 30,000 jobs to local communities around Washington State, does it make for a good corporate citizen? The Center For Effective Government reported in 2014 that Boeing Company’s 2013 tax filings noted that it had claimed $82 million in federal tax refunds, despite $5.9 billion in U.S. pre-tax profits for the 2013 tax year. ‘This represents an effective tax rate of -1.4 percent. Boeing paid just $11 million in state income taxes, an effective state tax rate of just 0.2 percent’. Fantastic for the shareholders, but the company makes almost no contribution to the Washington State coffers for the use of its infrastructure, and pays no Federal income taxes in spite of being the second largest federal contractor in the United States.
As for the machine workers that pop all those rivets, they should start learning to program and maintain the robots that are on the way to take over the work from them. This video is from Boeing’s web site itself, here.
Here is what a typical view inside the Everett Boeing factory looks like. (Pulled from the web; no cameras and no cell phones allowed inside the factory!). These are 777 jets. The green stuff on the fuselage is vinyl to protect the surface from corrosion and scratches until it is painted.This Antonov Volga 124-100 freighter aircraft sits right by the tour center. It has been contracted to help Boeing’s four ‘Dreamlifters’ that bring in parts for the 787. Everything is just-in-time these days and the strike at the West coast parts has delayed the shipping of some airplane parts that normally come in by container.
It was late afternoon before I finally got out of the house and away from work to go run a few errands. It helps that we now have an extra hour of sunlight in the evening (daylight saving time started last weekend). One of my stops was at the little postal store to check again if the Chinese lunar new year stamps had arrived – and they had. I can add them to my little collection.
Here are the 2015 Chinese Lunar New Year stamps. Are those fluffy sheep in a meadow? was my first thought. No – they’re white hydrangea on the lid of a tray with snacks : lotus root, spicy peanuts, and pistachios.
Flightaware showing the activity around Seattle-Tacoma airport, located at the south end of the Puget Sound. The KSEA is the airport navigation beacon’s identifier.
I’m home .. my flight went without incident. I sat in row 10 on the Alaska Air Boeing 737 the way I normally do. So why do we have a sound, and San Francisco has a bay? I wondered as we landed. Well. Did Wikipedia have an answer for me – and more :
In geography a sound is a large sea or ocean inlet larger than a bay, deeper than a bight, and wider than a fjord; or a narrow sea or ocean channel between two bodies of land (see also strait).
Now I know there is something such as a bight as well. A bight is a shallow sound.
The Wall Street Journal of Wednesday listed the following 12 ‘tech fails’ as the most annoying –
Never-ending Notifications (messages)
Battery Life Is Too Short
Updates Bog Down Old iPhones
Waiting for Android Updates
Privacy as a Luxury
Printers Are Still Terrible Die, Passwords, Die
Kickstarter Isn’t a Store
Inaccurate Fitness Biometrics
App Addiction Email: Older, but Not Wiser
Baffling Bills
I highlighted my two un-favorites in bold. Passwords is a major nuisance. I must log into the systems I work in a good 20 to 30 times a day. The automatic lock-out typically kicks in after 15 minutes, and I cannot change it. The abuse/ wrong is of e-mail is next on my list. Sending a Reply All message that says ‘Thanks’. Or not replacing the subject of a forwarded message for an e-mail that is about something completely different !
Hmm. So count me anong the sceptics, wondering if Apple will indeed sell a projected 15 million Apple watches this year. I doubt I will get one. After all, it will have to replace my cheap but beloved Seiko watch that I bought in Tokyo a few years ago and to which I have grown attached to.
But here I am, browsing through the models they will offer on apple.com, after Tim Cook’s press conference of yesterday. My favorite is this little black number with its Milanese loop in stainless steel and with the magnetic closure on the strap.
The Alaska Airlines flight this morning from Seattle to San Francisco left out of Terminal A this morning – all the way at its very end where gates A13 and A14 are located.
This work of art is called Pantopol V (1972), and the artist is Ted Jonsson. There’s two Willems in the reflection.And there is the painting on the window panes, just lit up from behind with the sunrise.
It’s official (say I) : we had no winter here in the Pacific Northwest. Yes, there was a little snow in November, as I noted in this post, and a few cold nights and mornings in December – but that was it. Check out the gorgeous blue sky from this picture on Saturday, as I walked down John Street to the gym, the temperature approaching 60 °F (15 °C).
I’m on John St, approaching Broadway, with the new Capitol Hill Light Rail station’s construction starting to emerge above the fence around it. The lime green building on the right is Queen Sheba, an Ethiopian restaurant.
The 2015 Iditarod dog sled race (link here) had its ceremonial start in Anchorage, Alaska, on Saturday. The race starts officially on Monday, but a little to the north of Anchorage. It is just the second time in 43 races and the first time since 2003, that officials had to do that, to find suitable trail conditions. There is simply not enough snow on the ground around Anchorage. Hey, and I learnt a new word while checking out the website : musher, the driver of a dogsled.
There was a beautiful full moon visible from between the trees, and perched on a rooftop, as I walked back from the grocery store on Thursday night.
In medieval times the moon was blamed for craziness or aberrant behavior (such as people turning into werewolves.. remember the 1981 movie An American Werewolf in London?). That’s why the word lunatic comes from the Latin luna, for moon.
I’m not sure if this is Mt Hood or Mt Rainier. Covered with snow from top to bottom, though.
What a crazy day .. jam packed with meetings and emergency e-mails (‘Can you send it right now? On a phone call; I need it right away’) and conversations. Forget about lunch – no time; had to leave at 1.30 pm to make my 3.45 pm flight. At 1.45 pm I got up, yelled at my colleague (his flight was later). ‘Pack it up! We’re leaving !’. We ran into some some traffic on the way to the airport, and at the Hertz Car Rental return, the attendant noticed a big scrape on the back wheel well. ‘What’s this?’ she asked. Shocked, I said ‘I have no idea when that happened or who did it’. I filled out a form to admit to the damage (a good thing that American Express insures our corporate car rentals), signed it, and now I had to make a run for the security checkpoint at International Terminal A. ‘Can I still check my bag?’ I asked at the check-in counter. ‘Yes, but they started boarding 5 minutes ago and we cannot guarantee that it will make it onto the plane’. Please check it, I said. (Thinking : the overhead bins are sure to be full by the time I get there. I could gate-check the bag at the plane, but then I’d have to throw out the toothpaste and shaving cream and a few other items to get it through security. Not doing that.) Anyway .. made it onto the plane with time to spare, and my bag made it onto the plane as well. I love Alaska Airlines.
Arrival at Seattle airport; I just stepped off the plane, around 5.30 pm. Our Boeing 737 is hidden behind the jet way on the left.
Here is a Boeing 787 Dreamliner from China Southern Airlines that I spotted at the gate next to ours as we arrived into San Francisco Airport. There is a mesh screen on the window that I took the picture through, unfortunately (the black dots in the picture). Click on the picture to make the Moiré pattern brought on by the reduced picture size below, disappear.
P.S. The cat is out of the bag regarding former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s e-mail address that I wondered about .. it is hdr22@clintonemail.com (or it was – it is most likely an account that is deactivated by now).
This Boeing 787 Dreamliner from China Southern Airlines. It is actually China’s largest airline and they are headquartered in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province
It was revealed today by a report in the New York Times that the presumptive 2016 Democratic nominee for President – Hillary Clinton – used a personal e-mail account throughout her entire tenure at the State Department as Secretary of State. This raises many questions. 1. Why? It’s sort of against the law. 2. Was the e-mail account secure? I am not even allowed to send work e-mail outside our encrypted e-mail system. And I don’t deal with state secrets. 3. Why has this not been raised before? By her aides, her advisors, by people receiving her e-mail. 4. Will this turn into a scandal that undermine her (as-yet-unannounced) bid for the White House in 2016 ? 5. What I want to know most of all : what was the account’s name? Presumably more formal than hillary@yahoo.com, right?
From the bookstore on Sunday – Extreme Soduku means (no doubt) that mental gymnastics are required – to fill out the almost empty 9×9 grids of numbers.
I sometimes take the No 43 bus to the University District to go to the bookstore there, and just to check out the joint .. and so that is what I did on Sunday.
There is a whole shelf of Soduku books. I am a Scrabble addict, but so far the Soduku bug has not bitten me. Per WIkipedia, Soduku was introduced in Japan by Nikoli in the paper Monthly Nikolist in April 1984 as Sūji wa dokushin ni kagiru (数字は独身に限る?), which also can be translated as “the digits must be single” or “the digits are limited to one occurrence.” The Times of London began featuring Sudoku in 2004.
The number of classic 9×9 Sudoku solution grids is approximately 6.67×1021 .. so players can rest assured that it will be a long, long time before they exhaust all the possible permutations !
San Fransokyo is the futuristic (fictional) city where the animated Disney movie ‘Big Hero 6’ plays out : our Saturday night home movie at the Bryan-and-Gary Cineplex. We liked it a lot. These 3D animated movies take monstrous computing power to animate and render fluidly. Check out the notes about this in the Wikipedia entry.
A software program called Denizen was used to create over 700 distinctive characters that populate the city, another one named Bonzai was responsible for the creation of the city’s 250,000 trees, while a new rendering system called Hyperion offered new illumination possibilities, like light shining through a translucent object (such as the robot Baymax’s vinyl covering). Development on Hyperion started in 2011 and was based upon research into multi-bounce complex global illumination originally conducted at Disney Research in Zürich. Disney in turn had to assemble a new supercomputing cluster just to handle Hyperion’s immense processing demands, which consists of over 2,300 Linux workstations distributed across four data centers (three in Los Angeles and one in San Francisco). Each workstation, as of 2014, included a pair of 2.4 GHz Intel Xeon processors, 256 GB of memory, and a pair of 300 GB solid-state drives configured as a RAID Level 0 array (that is, to operate as a single 600 GB drive). This was all backed by a central storage system with a capacity of five petabytes*, which holds all digital assets as well as archival copies of all 54 Disney Animation films. Pixar’s RenderMan was considered as a ‘Plan B’ for the film’s rendering, if Hyperion was not able to meet production deadlines.
*A petabyte (PB) is 1015 bytes of data, 1,000 terabytes (TB) or 1,000,000 gigabytes (GB).
The fictional city of San Fransokyo from ‘Big Hero 6’.The huggable robot Baymax saves the protagonist Hiro Hamada in a scene from the movie Big Hero 6.
I had to make a run for my flight at San Francisco airport today after my meeting in downtown but I made it. I took a brisk walk from Beale Street to the Embarcadero BART station, which took my right into the international terminal in SFO airport. Luckily I could use the expedited lane through security (besides being stuck in traffic, this is the other place where one gets tripped up when one is short on time!).
[From WIkipedia] The F Market Line (historic streetcar service) in San Francisco, opened in 1995, runs along Market Street from The Castro to the Ferry Building, then along the Embarcadero north and west to Fisherman’s Wharf. This line is run by a mixture of PCC* cars built between 1946 and 1952, and earlier pre-PCC cars.
*Presidents’ Conference Committee
Here is the No 1079 PCC Street Car, painted to commemorate Detroit’s PCC (Presidents’ Conference Committee) design streetcar. It was built in 1946!Here’s the south-bound airport train arriving at the Embarcadero station. It still takes about 35 mins for the 15 miles from there to the airport due to the many stops it makes on the away there.
I have a meeting tomorrow at our client’s head office in downtown San Francisco, and so I am staying over in downtown (instead of over on the east Bay side in Walnut Creek). The pictures are from around Market Street in the Embarcadero district.
The Hobart building is right by the Montgomery Street BART station. (Should an artist not be enlisted to paint something on the blank canvas that is the side of the building?).This ornate old streetlamp is at the corner of Market Street and Third Street. The bus and the bikers are on Market Street.The Hearst Building’s front entrance is on Third Street. The original Hearst building was completed in 1898 but destroyed by the earthquake and fire of 1906. A new one was built in its place (this one) and it opened its doors in 1911.
More and more robots are installed in factories (and by 2025 in homes, and offices and – the coffee shop?), says the Wall Street Journal in an article on Wednesday. Apparently the experts are still split over the question whether robots will eventually decimate or elevate the economy, since they have the potential to steal even the remaining jobs that humans are still better at. Machines have stolen our jobs ever since the Industrial Revolution, of course. (Already taken : bank tellers, travel agents, translators .. next up : neurosurgeons, taxi drivers, cooks, warehouse stockers?). Well, we will have to wait and see. A simple task such as folding laundry takes enormous computing power and dexterity, for example.
Here’s the Year of the Ram table advertisement for TsingTao beer (say ‘Ching-Dow’, advises the sign) at the Jade Garden (Chinese) restaurant where we had lunch today. It was a wild day, and I may have looked a little like this ram at the end of it .. and just very happy to get out of the office and call it done !
We had the Disneyland plane again to San Francisco on Monday morning. By now I can probably make my way out of San Francisco airport blindfolded!, I thought as I walked out to go to Hertz to meet my colleagues and pick up the rental car.
I’m about to step onto the sky blue Disneyland plane from Alaska Airlines at gate N14 at Seattle airport’s North Terminal. Check out the reflection of the gates in the window .. there’s N12, N14, N15, N16. In the distance is an Alaska Airlines plane with a big old salmon painted on its side.
