99% of almonds produced in the USA are from California – but maybe not for much longer. The Golden State is on track to record its driest year in a century; possibly several centuries. So I buy the almonds while I can. As for the drought, the weather service has invented an additional category of dryness. There is Abnormally Dry, Moderate Drought, Severe Drought and Extreme Drought. Now they have added ‘Exceptional Drought’. I think they should go for ‘Drought of the Century’. Or ‘It Never Rains in (Southern) California’ Drought, after the 1972 song by Albert Hammond.
[From Wikipedia] The song concerns the struggles of an actor who moves out to California to pursue a career in Hollywood but does not have any success and deteriorates in the process. In the chorus, Hammond sings, “It never rains in California, but girl don’t they warn ya. It pours, man it pours.”
I ran into this situation again last week : I needed a file with technical information that I knew was only on my home computer’s drive. This while I was out in San Francisco. This is not a technology problem. I could leave my computer on and figure out how access it remotely (but I like to turn it off when I leave the house). Or I could drop all my files into Google Docs, or Dropbox, or an application called Evernote. These are all ‘cloud’ solutions, providing on-line access to documents from anywhere and at anytime.
I still weigh the risks of using the cloud vs. using an old-fashioned flash drive. On the cloud your data can get hacked into. The flash drive can get lost, or get stolen. For now, I still go with flash – but I know I have to move with the times soon, and go to the cloud.
TIME magazine says we have evolved to ‘the cloud’ with storing our data. Well ! Some of us have, and only with some data, not all.
The VW badge is also a trunk latch button. Who knew? (This is a VW Beetle, but the one on the VW Golf works the same).
I rented a VW Golf hatchback for the week, and all week we thought the trunk latch was broken. There was no reaction or audible pop when pressing the ‘unlock trunk’ button on the key fob. So today the car rental agent showed us to push on the big VW badge to make it tilt, and voila! The trunk opens. Could have fooled me – and actually did. (And not only me, I might add).
It was Labor Day here in the States – a Federal holiday, so most workers had the day off (but not all). It’s back to school for kids this Wednesday, too. And the unofficial end of summer. It’s still very warm in Texas, I see, though (99 °F/ 37 °C). And we will have pleasant warm weather later this week in Seattle as well.
Here’s a graphic that shows an ideal productive day – one that keeps the labor we have to deal with in check and in balance with exercise and sleep ! It’s by Health Central, and here’s thelink
Here’s the charging station at BMW Seattle’s dealership. Charging time is three hours from a 220-volt household plug.The animated screen on the charging station shows that a charging card is used to activate the charger.
I tagged along with Bryan, his dad and Gary to check out the BMW i3, its first all-electric offering (a model with a small ‘range extender’ gas engine added in, is also available). We ended up going for a test drive and liked the smooth, snappy acceleration of the car. It is barely necessary to brake when one wants to slow down : taking one’s foot from the accelerator flashes the brake lights (for the cars behind) and engages the battery charger, which slows down the car automatically. It takes a little getting used to, but works well. The little car is not cheap, though .. better be prepared to pony up $42,000 for the all-electric car and some $4,000 more for the model with the gas engine.
As the salesman pointed out, though – if one buys this car, stick with the all-electric. Then you can drive around mean and clean, not worrying about ever putting gas or oil in. (Just keep an eye on the limited 70-110 mile range!). This is a city car, not really meant for road trips. The brake pads will last a very long time due to the engine-braking mechanism, and changing the tires every now and then is the only maintenance needed. BMW guarantees the battery for 8 years or 100,000 miles.
There it is .. we’re done with the test drive! It was fun .. the little stubby nosed car with its all-carbon fiber body and aluminum chassis accelerates well, and is very smooth and quiet.
The Vaal Dam is close to the town of Vereeniging, where I grew up and went to high school.
I’m still finding proper places for items I brought back from South Africa. One very special item is a book from my childhood that had been in my parents’ house for several decades, then traveled to Australia with my brother Chris (it was his book, gifted to him in 1967). When I mentioned earlier this year that I wonder where the book is and that I would love to find it, he brought it to South Africa and gave it to me for my birthday.
The book is out of print; it was printed in 1963. It is about a friendly, lonely dragon* in the Vaal Dam*. Well : the Vaal Dam is a real dam, and we went there many times when I was little. I would later waterski on it behind my dad’s motor boat. In 1975 when I started high school, the dam overflowed and my hometown of Vereeniging was flooded. My parents’ house and its parquet flooring was spared, but only by inches. There was flood water everywhere – in the front yard as well as the back yard.
*Here is a synopsis from Google Books. (I’m impressed that I could find the book on there). Deep in the murky water behind Vaal Dam, lived a monster called Valie. Although Valie had scales on his back and a huge tail, Valie was a friendly monster, but there were no other monsters at the dam, and Valie was very lonely. One day, a man came to the Vaal Dam to catch some fish. To his surprise, he hooked Valie! The man went running away but came back with more men with guns. Valie pretended to be dead and when the men came close, Valie popped up to surprise them. They all ran away, except one boy, who learned that Valie was gentle and friendly and who figured out a way to make everyone happy.
Here is Valie (say ‘fah-lee’) trying to make friends with a fisherman (who is scared out of his wits). To this day the theme of dragons make for good stories. Just recently in 2010 there was the animated film ‘How to Train Your Dragon’ with a sequel to it released this year.
I took an early morning flight into San Francisco to resume my work on my new project. Alaska Airlines now has its passengers print their own checked luggage tags and put it on their luggage. This is done at the same machine that is used for airport check-in and printing one’s boarding pass. Then go and drop it onto the conveyor belt at a baggage drop counter. The ground agent still checks one’s ID and boarding pass.
Alaska Airlines now has its gates at the International Terminal ‘G’ at SFO. (The others are Terminals 1, 2 and 3). The pictures below are from display cases in the Airport Museum in the International Terminal.
The Jolly Green Giant, the Pillsbury Dough Boy and Mr Peanut are among the characters that sell food items.I am not familiar with any of these characters .. but they all look cute and charming in their own way.The Mido robot promoted watches from a luxury Swiss watchmaking company, founded in 1918. … A comic strip from this era featured the Mido Robot and its adventures.
I’m heading out to San Francisco again tomorrow, and I hope that the earthquake activity there is winding down. A magnitude-6.0 earthquake struck around 3:20 a.m on Sunday morning in the Napa valley. About 120 people were injured, 3 of which are critical. At least 15 buildings were rendered uninhabitable.
This map from http://earthquaketrack.com/ shows the big 6.0 quake and multiple aftershocks in the San Francisco Bay area.
These are Strelitzia, also called Bird of Paradise flowers, or Crane flowers. They are native to South Africa.
Tuesday was my birthday. I had a lot of stuff to take care of after my mom, my brother and I had gone for a quick birthday lunch. I tried to transfer the two registered cars from my dad’s name to my mom’s name with a pack of forms laboriously filled out by hand and others from the estate executor in hand, but came away unsuccessful. The motor vehicle department in Stellenbosch would not accept my US Passport as proof of identity! Has to be a South African ID document. Whoah, people. I don’t have one anymore. Be reasonable! I’m not stealing my mom’s car and shipping it to the USA.
Waiting at the traffic light. (Yes, I should not fiddle with my phone, even at a red light, I know). Stellenbosch was rain-soaked on Tuesday. It’s a very busy student town at this time of year as well.
Here is the chardonnay bottle’s label.Here is the Bloemendal wine estate’s restaurant. The food was good, the wine was great. The immediate surroundings is not quite a match for a number of other wine estates in the area though. (No gardens, old historic buildings, or foot paths).I had to pose for a picture at the V&A Waterfront with the sun setting across the ocean from Table Mountain. (I should have tucked in my shirt! Oh well).
It was a gorgeous late winter day here in the Cape Town area today with blue skies and mild temperatures. We did make it out to Bloemendal wine estate for our lunch. The restaurant is not up high enough to provide the panoramic views shown on their home page, though. The chardonnay that I had with my lunch was quite nice. My friend Marlien is visiting as well, and we made it out to the V&A (named for Queen and her son Prince Alfred) Waterfront by late afternoon.
The family plans to have lunch at a wine estate here in the Durbanville area tomorrow. The estate is called Bloemendal, loosely translated to mean ‘valley with flowers’. The estate produces Malbec, Merlot, Pinotage, Shiraz, Sauvignon Blanc, and Shiraz Rose wines. The hills in the area offer beautiful vistas of the surrounding landscapes, and on a clear day Table Mountain and Lion’s Head are visible in the distance.
That’s Table Mountain in the distance on the right of the picture, with Lion’s Head to its right.
The Dutch are not shy to voice their opinions, and certainly not about other countries, either. They were among South Africa’s harshest critics in the apartheid years, and while Nelson Mandela was still in prison. Here is a magazine I spotted in the stands (didn’t buy it, now think I will when I go through there on the way back home). It declares on the front page ‘America is a nasty bloody country* .. *for those who are not millionaires’. In the purple bubble, Mr Maarten opines : ‘Compared to the US, the Netherlands is a paradise’.
I suspect the death penalty in the USA informs this opinion, affordable healthcare that is still not available to all Americans, our expensive college education, the list goes on. I’m curious to see if the article acknowledges that the USA is a force for good in the world as well, though.
Since my mom’s house was sold a few weeks ago, we need to clear everything out of it before the end of the month. There are loose household items and decorations still remaining as well – the most important (read : sentimental) of which are my mom’s paintings on the walls. Some of the artwork date back to when my mom was in art school fifty years ago. So we just feel we have to keep as many of them as we can, in the family. (My mom’s new apartment home can only accommodate a few paintings).
I am going to an international mover tomorrow to have a few paintings shipped to Seattle in the States. They have to be packed carefully, and before shipping, the wood frames and canvases have to be inspected for beetles and insects as well, I’m told. Yikes, I had never thought of that !
This painting is one of several versions my mom have painted, of a fisherman’s village with the wooden boats in the front and the whitewashed cottages in the back.This painting is older than I am! I remember it well .. of African people hanging out in an urban environment.An arrangement of king proteas, indigenous to the Western Cape area here in South Africa.
I spent the day out in the field at a natural gas pressure metering and regulating station. These metering stations are placed periodically along natural gas transmission pipelines. The stations allow gas utility companies to monitor, manage, and account for the gas in the pipes as it is transmitted over long distances. Compared to a gas compressor station (with big noisy gas turbines for pressuring the natural gas for transmission), the types equipment found at a metering station are simple and not too complicated.
Natural gas transmission and distribution pipelines are made of steel in diameters of 6 inches to up to 48 inches. Across the United States, there are more than 210 gas pipeline systems that total more than 305,000 miles of interstate and intrastate pipelines.
[From gedigitalenergy.com] This diagram shows the typical infrastructure for natural gas transmission and distribution. The text on the diagram is a little small; unfortunately I could not find a bigger picture on line.
*one of the lines from the 1981 song ‘Here is the News’ by Electric Light Orchestra
I happened upon a group of stargazers at Volunteer Park tonight right after sunset. ‘I have found Mars!’ said one guy. (Should I have asked ‘Can I see, too?’ I didn’t). I read on earhsky.org that this is a good time of the year to watch for Perseid meteor showers as well : they come late July and early August. Watch for them now, is the recommendation. The moon is full on August 10, and its light will interfere with the 2014 Perseids’ peak.
The white spot in the picture is the wide waxing crescent moon. Mars is to its left, reddish, but I could not see it with the naked eye and certainly had no hope at all to catch it with my iPhone camera ! Follow the moon down to the horizon to see a silhouette of the Space Needle.
I have new neighbors moving in, and so this U-haul Venture-across-America #116 truck with the striking picture of a goshawk from Alaska’s Tongass National Forest was parked in the alley this morning. The iconic white-and-orange trucks for do-it-themselves movers can be seen anywhere in the country. I love the gorgeous graphics that they put on the sides of the trucks. The whole collection can be seen on U-haul’s website, here.
Here is the U-haul Venture-across-America #116 truck with the goshawk from Alaska’s Tongass National Forest that was parked in the alley by my house this morning ..
.. and a fun thing to do is to look for Sammy the U-haul guy in these pictures. See him? A little guy running with a big U – in the water to the right of the goshawk’s throat.
Here are some of the interesting pictures I came across this weekend with my iPad (and a Scrabble picture).
Hey! I discovered I can switch my iPad Scrabble to German. (Yes, I ‘won’ against the computer but 1. I take a very long time to play and 2. I used all 4 of my ‘find the best word’ assists).This close-up map of Gaza from the New York Times. They also publish harrowing pictures of people dead and wounded from the war there every day, and families grieving over those they lost. Can we not live together in peace on the planet? ‘Before’ and ‘After’ Images of the block marked on the previous picture.There is a severe drought in California and in the south and mid-West of the USA. The darkest red indicates the driest areas.From the Wall Street Journal : Air travel accidents and fatalities statistics over the decades. 644 fatalities so far this year*, and still 5 months to go. *Does not seem a lot, given how many millions of people travel by air, right? It’s just that it’s shocking to learn of a big airplane crash.
Why do Americans Stink at Math? is the question a New York Times article asks in an article that I read on the airplane. Check it out here New York Times article.
As reported by the NYT, better ways to teach math has been invented several times in the USA, and applied successfully elsewhere in the world but not here. And school kids with poor math skills turn into adults that are shockingly innumerate. From the article : A 2012 study comparing 16-to-65-year-olds in 20 countries found that Americans rank in the bottom five in numeracy .. One of the most vivid arithmetic failings displayed by Americans occurred in the early 1980s, when the A&W restaurant chain released a new hamburger to rival the McDonald’s Quarter Pounder. With a third-pound of beef, the A&W burger had more meat than the Quarter Pounder; in taste tests, customers preferred A&W’s burger. And it was less expensive. A lavish A&W television and radio marketing campaign cited these benefits. Yet instead of leaping at the great value, customers snubbed it.
Only when the company held customer focus groups did it become clear why. The Third Pounder presented the American public with a test in fractions. And we failed. Misunderstanding the value of one-third, customers believed they were being overcharged. Why, they asked the researchers, should they pay the same amount for a third of a pound of meat as they did for a quarter-pound of meat at McDonald’s. The “4” in “¼,” larger than the “3” in “⅓,” led them astray.
Here is a $1 Presidential coin from 2009, depicting John Tyler, the 10th US President, that I bought at the Denver Mint gift store. It has an edge added to it, possibly of aluminum. It’s a bit of a mystery to me, and I couldn’t find any information about it on-line!
I had a busy day here at the Denver office : wrapping up the hand-over of my duties to new team members, cleaning out my desk and cubicle, and finally doing the rounds and bidding my project’s team members good-bye.
This giant souvenir penny can also be bought at the Denver Mint gift store for $5. I found it irresistible, and so here it is with a real penny. It is made of a light metal alloy. I guess the S stands for souvenir! (Other coins have a D for Denver or a P for Philadelphia in that position to indicate at which mint they were struck).
So when a little bit of time opened up, I thought ‘You cannot have worked in Denver for almost a year, and not make it to the Denver Mint .. let’s go!’. I didn’t have enough time for a tour, and one has to sign up for that weeks ahead of the actual day of the tour anyway – but I could go to the gift shop and ogle the coins and souvenirs on display. I did came away with some souvenir coins. There were $1,600 one-ounce gold coins for sale as well, but I steered clear of those!
On Thursday night reports came out that 298 people were killed on board Malaysia Airlines MH17, apparently shot with a ground-to-air missile even though it was flying at 33,000 ft ! So who did it, and how to get to a crash site that is in a Ukranian rebel-controlled war zone?
From NPR news : As they try to piece together how Flight MH17 was brought down, U.S. experts are analyzing a recording released by Ukraine’s government that it says is a string of intercepted phone calls in which separatist rebels acknowledge that they shot down an airliner.
However, as NPR’s Dina Temple-Raston reports, U.S. intelligence has not yet publicly authenticated the recording.
“Privately, U.S. officials say they suspect separatist rebels were behind the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17,” Dina reports. “U.S. officials say they are still analyzing the audio. They are also using algorithms and mathematics to pinpoint where the missile was fired from.”
The fate of the flight’s “black box” data recorders remains in question. After the separatists said they had recovered them from the crash site, Ukrainian officials disputed that account. And while some reports stated that the flight recorders might be sent to Russia, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov says Moscow has “no plans to seize the flight recorders,” according to state-owned news agency RT.
The maps are all from the New York Times’s online edition.
California – but maybe not for much longer. The Golden State is on track to record its driest year in a century; possibly several centuries. So I buy the almonds while I can. As for the drought, the weather service has invented an additional category of dryness. There is Abnormally Dry, Moderate Drought, Severe Drought and Extreme Drought. Now they have added ‘Exceptional Drought’. I think they should go for ‘Drought of the Century’. Or ‘It Never Rains in (Southern) California’ Drought, after the 1972 song by Albert Hammond.
