Category: General

We had a project team outing last night : attending the Golden State Warriors – Los Angeles Clippers basketball game in the Oracle Arena in Oakland.

We went in style : we had a suite with food served up, and we could each have an ice cold beer while watching the game. (Some of us paid more attention than others to the action on the court down below!).   I kept an eye out for Steve Ballmer* making an appearance at the courtside as well, but did not spot him all evening.

*Former Microsoft CEO, and new owner of the LA Clippers team

Soo .. it was the mid-term* elections here in the USA today.  The Republicans won back control of the Senate, and kept their control of the House.   But Democratic President Obama can veto legislation that comes to his desk.  So if our do-nothing Congress will actually get anything done, remains to be seen.  (I’m not holding my breath).

*Mid-term because it is in the middle of the president’s term.

In my neck of the woods in Seattle, a gun initiative to enforce background checks on all gun sales (also at gun shows) passed.   My property taxes will go up to fund a new pre-kindergarten program, and we will pay 0.1% more sales tax and a $60 car-tab fee to expand the local bus service.  South of us in the state of Oregon, legalized marijuana sales will start in 2015.

Our Saturday night flick in the Gary Theater was the futuristic Edge of Tomorrow starring Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt (she’s British).  We liked the movie .. as someone said ‘It’s a great movie – and I’m not even a Tom Cruise fan’ (I am not, either).   It’s also a war movie – with the United Defense Force (somewhat as dysfunctional, just as the United Nations) against alien invaders called The Mimics.  The Mimics can reset time .. so there are sequences which are played over many times.  Remember Groundhog Day (1993)?  Or Guy Pearce with his amnesia in Memento (2000)?  There’s a little of both those in this movie.

My dad would have been 80 today.
So maybe that was why I found this eulogy in TIME magazine to a storied newspaper editor called Ben Bradlee – that I did not know of – very touching.
Says the writer (of Ben Bradlee’s charisma) : ‘When he glided through the vast newsroom, faces turned towards him like a field of flowers following the sun.  Impossible to define, this essence had to be felt to be comprehended. It was a palpable something-more-ness – magical, magnetic – as rare as the South China tiger’.  

We has a stormy Saturday night in the city with broken tree limbs and power outages in the outlying areas.   It rained on and off this morning, but then in the afternoon the sun came out, and I went for a brisk walk.  It was about 52°F/ 12°C.   I will probably step out in the rain tomorrow morning when I jump in the cab to go to the airport.

Some days we work too late to go to the hotel restaurant for dinner (it takes at least an hour by the time the food finally had arrived and everything had been squared away and paid for).  So on those nights I stop at the ‘fresh&easy’ grocery store on the way to the hotel and pick up a ready-to-eat salad, a sandwich and some yogurt.   (Don’t eat in your hotel room!  said a colleague one time. It’s dirty ..people have sex in hotel rooms, you know!  I just laughed).

Ebola hysteria is raging in the media coverage – and in the real world – here in the United States. A patient died in a Dallas hospital on Oct 8 and infected two nurses caring for him (so far). One of the two nurses had a fever, did the right thing by calling the Centers for Disease Control to ask if she could travel by airplane, but they nonetheless did not stop her from flying.   The airplane she was on made 5 more flights the next day before the airline got word of their passenger and pulled it from service. The plane had already been cleaned three times, and now the microfilters will also be replaced. The two pilots and four flight attendants on board the flight were placed on paid leave for 21 days (the maximum time it takes for Ebola to appear in newly infected people). Ebola screening at four major U.S. airports has been stepped up and some schools in Ohio and Texas temporarily closed.

Is all of this necessary, given that the disease is contracted through bodily fluids?  How about some alarm for the flu season that is upon is, and the fact that flu is much, much easier to contract from a sick person?  The 2009 H1N1 Flu Pandemic killed more than 10,000 people in the United States.  But does everyone get his or her flu shot?  No – not even half of the population here in the States do.

I developed a eye irritation that bothered me all Wednesday – and that is hopefully just an allergic reaction.  So off to Walgreens.  The pharnacist recommended the standard Walgreens brand called ‘irritated eye drops’.  So 1. Why is the container pink? and 2.  Are the eye drops ‘irritated’?  Finally, as I tried to use the stuff, it turned out it’s in a little glass bottle. So it’s not possible to gently squeeze it to make a drop come out. I ended up shaking the bottle, making a number of drops fly out and hoping that one hits my eye. Or if they end up close enough to my eye, my eyelashes can pick some of the stuff and I can get it into my eye that way.  All of which makes more than my eye irritated.

A colleague of mine (he was born and raised in Germany) teases me by calling me ‘Kaiser Wilhelm’ now and again.   Hopefully it’s just because of the similarity between our first names!

I read on Wikipedia of the Kaiser  ‘Bombastic and impetuous, he sometimes made tactless pronouncements on sensitive topics without consulting his ministers, culminating in a disastrous Daily Telegraph interview that cost him most of his power in 1908′..   He was partly responsible for starting World War I, then was an ineffective war leader, lost the support of the army, and abdicated in November 1918.

It was a quiet day for me .. I went about my business of doing my chores at home and getting ready as I always seem to do for my early Monday morning trip.   I remembered only late in the game that the Seahawks (football team) were playing the Dallas Cowboys (in Dallas).   By then it was 20-20 in the fourth quarter.  The Seahawks pulled ahead with a successful field goal, but then the Cowboys scored twice to make it 30-23.  Oh well.

Our Saturday night movie fare was ‘Particle Fever’, a documentary about the Large Hadron Collider. The confirmation of the long-postulated Higgs boson particle’s existence gave further credibility to the Standard Model, but the giant experiment’s results were inconclusive in another way.  The weight of the Higgs boson is thought to point to one or two completely opposite views of the universe.   One the hand the proposal is that there is one cosmos (universe) with a cosmological constant (that indicates the energy density of the vacuum of space – but don’t ask me what energy density of the vacuum of space is!).   The other proposal is that there are multiple universes, and that each has a randomly assigned cosmological constant. What the Higgs boson’s mass indicate?  Well, it fell right in the middle of the values thought to support the two opposite views!   Man!  We need more data!  (And as it turns out, the LHC is already getting warmed up for another series of atom smashing in early 2015).

 

Bryan, Gary and I watched a Netflix on Saturday night called ‘Tiny : A Story About Living Small’. movie.  The backdrop (from Wikipedia): In the United States the average size of new single family homes grew from 1,780 square feet (165 m²) in 1978 to 2,479 square feet (230.3 m²) in 2007, despite a decrease in the size of the average family.   The ‘small house’ movement – also known as the ‘tiny house movement’ is a return to houses less than 1,000 square feet, some as small as 80 square feet (7.4 m²).

The main story is about the effort of two young people who decide to downsize their lives by building a ‘tiny home’ on a flatbed trailer.  In the end it took a year and $26,000.  The movie features several other small houses as well.  To me, the larger points made are the most important.   Figure out what you want from life and how you want to live early on. In the really-big-picture perspective, life goes by in a flash.  Make conscious choices. Don’t just do what everyone else does (such as buy a house that’s so big and expensive that you can enjoy hardly anything else in life).  It is not necessary to keep up with the Joneses’ bigger house and newer car.  You are not a ‘better’ person because you own a big house !

 

I noticed an unusual handwritten poster on a tree as I went for my walk to Volunteer Park this afternoon.  Not of a lost cat or dog, but a report of a ‘plane crash’.  A plane crash right here in Capitol Hill?  Would I not know about it? Well, when I looked up the DJI FC40, I saw that it is actually a drone. (I guess drone is a word with bad connotations, but maybe say ‘quad copter’ and not ‘plane’?).

I ran out to the doc to get my flu shot today.  Getting a flu shot is nowadays even available at drug stores and at supermarkets here in the USA (I wonder why .. maybe they hope people that come in will buy $20 of groceries as well?).  Even so, less than half of the population get their shot every year.  Flu costs the USA more than $87 billion annually, including an estimated $10.4 billion a year in direct medical expenses and an additional $16.3 billion in lost earnings annually, according to a report released recently by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) Foundation.   I went with the standard needle, stuck into the muscle of my arm.   For the squeamish there is a fancy intra-dermal shot that uses a tiny 1/16-inch long micro-needle to inject the vaccine just under the skin.

Concord .. hmm, maybe they grow grapes there, I told my colleague as I noticed the sign post pointing there (Concord grapes, the ones they make jelly with).  We were stuck in traffic. We had just exited I-680 and making our way back to the hotel in Walnut Creek.   But no, I was wrong.  Yes, the Concord grape is a cultivar derived from the grape species Vitis labrusca (also called fox grape).  But the major growing areas are the Finger Lakes District of New York, Lake Erie, Lake Ontario, South-western Michigan, and the Yakima Valley in Washington.  And the original Concord grape hails from Concord, Massachusetts : developed in 1849 by Ephraim Wales Bull.  [Source for all this information : Wikipedia].

The iOS 8 upgrade* of my iPhone and iPad went without a hitch. (I have to wait until I get home to do these things, because I cannot afford to make my phone inoperable while I’m traveling).

Android users point out that most of the ‘new’ features on the iPhone have been on Android phones for a long time.  Oh well, that’s alright. It’s still all new to me.   On the other hand some Apple fanatics say ‘It’s like getting a new phone’.  Well, yes and no.  A new phone would have a longer-lasting battery, for example.  I wonder if the new iPhone 6’s are any better that way.  Bigger screens eat up more battery power.

What I should still do is clean up (delete) all the silly Apps on my phone that I don’t use.  I have way too many of those!

*iOS 8 is the operating system of the phone.  It’s like upgrading one’s desktop computer from Windows 7 to Windows 8.

.. says this Wall Street Journal write-up about the benefits of reading a real book, and not plowing through it in record time (the way I have to do many times at work when I have 15 minutes to review a document).

When I came home tonight, the original broadcast of the 9/11 events from 2001 was on MSNBC with minimal edits.  I was already in Seattle in 2001, living in a one bedroom apartment, and woke up to the sight on TV of one of the Twin Towers that had been struck by the hijacked airplane.   I called my dad and we talked on the phone for a little bit, and then I did not quite know if I should drive down to Weyerhaeuser Company where I worked at the time – but I did.

Here’s to never forgetting 9/11, all its victims and the first responders that lost their lives as well on that terrible day.

We went out for a team dinner tonight here in downtown Walnut Creek (located on the northeast side of San Francisco Bay). It is the centennial this year for the city of Walnut Creek and the events to celebrate it are still going strong – even though summer is winding down.  There are parades, art gallery shows and a walnut festival (of course).

We also saw new condo building and new shopping center projects under way here .. a mini-construction boom of sorts.