Category: General

The Safeway neighborhood grocery store here in Walnut Creek has closed its doors after 50 years. It was my go-to location to buy yogurt and bananas to help me through days when I would miss lunch.  Safeway is headquartered in Pleasanton, California, just a few miiles from our project office here in Walnut Creek.  Safeway is actually in private ownership as of January 2015 after a buy-out by private equity investors led by Cerberus Capital Management.

Tuesday was one of those in-the-belly-of-the-beast days for me.  The beast is our project and and the belly is all of the processes for submitting final updates to our specifications, our coding and the proof of testing in our Quality System. We work in a very large enterprise system and careless changes or updates can break large sets of production data and live functionality for other users. (Obviously a very bad thing!).  At the same time with all of this going on, we have started to train the end-users, and my team has fanned out over several remote locations in Northern California to sit in on the training. I got to ‘hold the fort’ here in Walnut Creek.

By the time I remembered to take a look at the ‘blood moon’ on Sunday night, it was too late.  It was 10 pm and the moon was again glowing bright white.  Oh well, so I resorted to checking out pictures of it on-line.  And I will have another chance to see it for real in 18 years!

Here is a very nice animation made by NASA.

My new iPhone 6s landed today and I finally got it set up.  I was about to abandon the sync to my desktop iTunes backup when some web site offered that one should try one’s old password for iTunes, and voila! it worked. (Apple, you have a bug to fix).   Setting up my business e-mail needed MobileIron; a product that offers encryption and security for businesses with BYOD policies. It’s a chore to set it up, but once it’s up it disappears into the background. Oh! and I lost my cable internet connection for awhile in between all of this just to make it a little more interesting.   

*Bring Your Own Device (an acronym that may be a little too close to BYOB Bring Your Own Booze, not?)

Here’s a nice diagram from Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal that explains what Volkswagen did to cheat during emissions tests of its diesel cars. The automaker could face U.S. fines of $37,500 per vehicle, the EPA told reporters last week. With around 482,000 of its diesel vehicles sold in the U.S. since 2008, this could mean a penalty of up to $18 billion.

This hard hat* is on display at the training center in San Ramon where I supported the training session.  P.G. and E. stands for Pacific Gas and Electric. PG&E was founded in 1905 and provides natural gas and electricity to most northern California, from Bakersfield almost to the Oregon border..

This week’s Federal Open Market Committee meeting was months in the making, with economists expecting as far back as January that by now the federal funds target rate here in the USA would move up from its current 0-0.25% rock bottom level.  The rate was taken down from 5.25% to zero in a very short time, to combat the world-wide 2008 financial crisis.  So here we are, seven years later and it is still right there at zero.  There is almost no inflation in the USA (at least officially).  Low inflation is not good in some respects; it means the economy is not very robust (providers cannot charge more for goods and services, and workers don’t get pay raises).  The other numbers are also mixed. Unemployment is down to 5.1% but the labor force’s participation rate is relatively low.  Check out this great graphic from Bloomberg Business magazine.

Here’s a bear – I am sure a California grizzly bear* – holding the State of California in its paws. The flowers are California poppies, the State flower.  (There is little natural history exhibit on display in the International Terminal at San Francisco airport).

*California grizzly bear was a sub-species of the large North American brown bear. The last hunted California grizzly was shot in Tulare County, California in August 1922. Later, in 1924, a grizzly known to roam an area of the Sierra Madre Mountains (Santa Barbara County) was spotted for the last time, and thereafter, grizzlies were never seen again in California.

I found this little ‘guide’ as to how to network at a party, from the Wall Street Journal’s Wednesday paper interesting .. even though this is NOT my kind of party.  There are too many people, it’s a room full of strangers or it’s a business event, and therefore not really a party, now is it?

There are at least a dozen wildfires raging in northern California, with the Valley Fire (west of Sacramento) and the Butte Fire (east of Fresno) two of the largest fires ever recorded in the State of California.  The Butte Fire has already scorched 65,000 acres (that’s 100 square miles).  Hundreds of homes and buildings in the town of Middletown CA (pop. 1,300) have burnt down, effectively destroying all of it.  Some 24,000 California residents have evacuated their homes.

Check out the 2015 California Fire Map here.

It was the 2015 US Open Tennis Mens’ Final today and I watched most of it.  I wanted Federer to win against Djokovic, but in the end he succumbed to the world No 1’s steadiness and nerves.   Federer turned 34 (!) in August, but promised he will be back at the US Open next year.   I am very happy about that.

From the US Open website’s report :  ‘Yet for the undisputed best player in men’s tennis, he received surprisingly little attention during his two weeks in New York – the media glare reserved for Serena’s run at the Grand Slam and the exquisite play of a resurgent Roger Federer, who advanced to the men’s singles final without the loss of a single set. But when the last ball was struck at the 2015 edition of America’s Slam, it was the steady Serb who was holding his arms aloft in triumph, bringing them down just long enough to wrap them around the men’s singles trophy. In doing so, Djokovic completed arguably the greatest Grand Slam season since Rod Laver won all four majors in 1969.

Photos are from usopen.org.

Apple has announced their new iPhone lineup at the geek hootenanny* known as Apple’s September Event last week.  I am going to spring for a new iPhone as soon as these are out, and I will have to choose between 6s and the bigger 6s Plus.  I will pick the smaller one I think, and then what finish color? .. probably again Space Gray. There’s Silver, Gold, Space Gray and Rose Gold (read : Pink! so no. Not for men, I would argue).  For some reason I have never liked gold for watch faces and watch bands, and so Gold is out, leaving the Silver, with its white bezel.

The other color to pick is the phone’s leather case and it’s really between black and a brown for me. Black is classic but maybe a little boring.    So .. Space Gray with Black bezel & Black Case or Silver with White Bezel & Brown case.

*An old country word for ‘party’, used in a Bloomberg Businessweek article that describes the tremendous engineering and design effort that went into the new 3D Touch and other features that come with the new phones.

The events of 9/11 in 2001 now lie 14 years behind us.  On the way to SFO airport today on one of the bridge overpasses on Highway 24, we noticed that the overpass had been decorated with lots of large and small American flags, with people waving at the cars below.

Security at the airport was not visibly tighter than normal, but on the plane the flight attendants were strict about not allowing passengers to stand at the front airplane restroom.    During the flight one of the passengers in first class had some medical problem and fainted, but a doctor on board seemed to be able to eventually revive him.   After we had touched down at Seattle airport, I think we were all just happy to be back on solid ground.

The Labor Day holiday here in the USA is called the ‘last day’ of summer (unofficially). The kids have to go back to school, and the weather starts to change.  For a weekly airplane commuter such as me, the difference is noticeable at the airport as well : fewer people and I might luck out with an open seat next to mine once in awhile on board.

Funnyman of The Colbert Report fame*, Stephen Colbert, is about to assume the role of the host of the Late Show on CBS, this Tuesday.  (David Letterman retired from the Late Show in May after being the longest-serving late night talk show host in American television history).   The Late Show is actually too late for me (it starts at 11.30 pm! – yikes), but I will definitely make an effort to check out the first shows hosted by Stephen Colbert.

*The Colbert Report was a satirically ‘conservative’ comedy show hosted by Stephen Colbert, but he once remarked during an interview, ‘I’m not someone with a particular political ax to grind. I’m a comedian. I love hypocrisy’.

I could finally unpack the paintings that I had shipped from South Africa that had arrived on Monday. One is a pastel drawing of my paternal grandfather, and the other two are oil paintings.

Some financial analysts argue that we’re in the early stages of a full-fledged bear market. Well, we will just have to wait and see. Many of today’s investors here in the United States (and as a consequence, the world at large) have lived through two fairly nasty bears: a decline of 58% from 2000 to 2002 and a 57% plunge from 2007 to 2009.

I just thought today of a special shipment I had sent from South Africa, and wondered when it will arrive here in the States, when the doorbell rang.  There it was, with the DHL Worldwide Express courier : three bubble-wrapped paintings bundled together with FRAGILE stickers all over it.  The air freight cost was not cheap at US$400 (actually it was, a previous quote had ran well over $1,000) – but the paintings had been done by my mom a very long time ago, had been in my parents’ house in Stellenbosch for many years, and so have a high sentimental value.   I promise I will show the paintings once I open up the wrapping !  I am shipping myself out to San Francisco in the morning and still have to pack!

I drove my mom out to Stellenbosch today and as usual we checked out the art shops that line Plein Street.  It was a beautiful and mild late winter day, but there are not a lot of tourists to be seen this time of year.