Category: General

There is a lot of discussion in the media about the legitimacy of public displays of the Confederate Flag in the wake of the terrible shooting last week, and menacing pictures that the gunman posted of himself on holding a Confederate flag.   Well, says the Washington Post :  ‘As long as we’re on the subject of flags that should and should not be flown in states, let’s take a moment to talk about state flags’ .. and then it proceeds to just mercilessly poke fun at the state flags of the USA, here.

I don’t water the patch of lawn in front of my house in summer, and so it dries out and goes brown .. but the hydrangea and slim rose bush are still there to bring a little color.  Actually : a scarlet red so brilliant that my phone camera sensor seems barely able to handle it.

One on the backyard fence, and its mate in the tree : as far as I can tell, these were woodpeckers called northern flickers.

[From Wikipedia]  The northern flicker is native to most of North America, parts of Central America, Cuba, and the Cayman Islands. It is one of the few woodpecker species that migrate. They eat fruits, berries, seeds and nuts, but their primary food is insects.Their tongues can dart out 2 inches beyond the end of the bill to snare prey.

Happy Father’s Day to all the dads!   You rock!  I am posting a picture in memory of my dad that was taken some ten years ago in 2005, at a wine estate close to Stellenbosch in South Africa.

So .. another week in the USA, another Republican presidential candidate (Donald Trump).   And another massacre, the chilling hate crime of a 21 year-old white kid methodically shooting 9 black people dead, each with multiple gunshot wounds, in Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.  This after sitting with them in a Bible study for an hour.   ‘We are peering into the abyss’ one more time, and ‘sorry : no jokes today’ said comedian Jon Stewart on his Daily Show.  Just check out the first few minutes of what he said at the Daily Show.  Then there’s Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz at a town hall meeting in Red Oak, Iowa on Friday : ‘You know the great thing about the state of Iowa is, I’m pretty sure you all define gun control the same way we do in Texas — hitting what you aim at’.

What’s UAT? Well, it stands for User Acceptance Testing in our work management implementation project.  The business users are invited to walk through the quality tested product that they are about to be given to work with.   At this point it is too late to make wholesale changes to the data, to the screen designs, and to the functions in general.  Still, we did find some flaws in the design of our solution and we worked long hours to fix them.

Hmm.  Doughnuts!  (Just a cute picture I found on-line).

Herman Zapf, the king of letter font design, recently passed away at 96, reports the New York Times.   He was born in Germany at the end of World War I and grew up in the turbulent times that followed that; planned to become an electrical engineer. Circumstances dictated otherwise, though.  He became interested in calligraphy, and was said to be able to write letters 1 mm in size without using a magnifying glass (I’m sure one would need a very sharp pencil for that).   After he became involved in type face (font) design he designed types for various stages of printing technology, including hot metal composition, phototypesetting (also called “cold type”), and finally digital typography for use in desktop publishing. His two most famous typefaces, Palatino and Optima, were designed in 1948 and 1952, respectively.

Let’s go! my two colleagues and I said to each other at 1.30 pm today.  We packed up or stuff, bundled into the rental car and headed for San Francisco airport.

‘These are big samoosas’ I said, after the Indian food our project manager had ordered, arrived at the office.   (Samoosas are potato-stuffed pastries). Yes, it must be a Punjabi recipe .. the Punjabis love their food, said my colleague.  (He’s from a neighboring province in India.   So I had to look up where Punjab is on the map, and here it is.

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.

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!

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’.

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.