Category: General

There will be a little more snow than expected : a total accumulation of 2 to 6 inches, said the weatherman in an updated forecast.    But it will clear up later in the morning.

It was very mild outside today here in Denver, but that is about to change. The high temperature will plummet by 33°F (19°C) and there will be an inch or two of snow on the ground, making for an icy commute into downtown. What I have to do is watch my step on the sidewalk for the two blocks that I have to walk.

 

I sat next to a pilot on Friday night on the way to Seattle, and he tracked the flight all the way on his iPad.  What app is that? I wanted to know – I want it too! Well, it costs only $35, but one needs to be a pilot to get an activation code.  It is an ‘electronic flight bag (EFB)’ application.  Flight maps and other essential pilot information that used to be carried into the cockpit in flight bags weighing up to 40 lbs/ 18 kg can now be replaced with iPads or other tablet devices. It is now possible to store all the aeronautical charts for the entire world on a single three-pound/1.4 kg tablet.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is encouraging pilots to ditch their flight bags in favor of its electronic version, but there’s still a long way to go.  Not all airlines are going with the iPad, either. Delta Airlines has announced that it’s equipping its 11,000 pilots with Microsoft Surface tablets and not with iPads.

We know there is going to be a big conference center event in Denver next week, because we are getting pushed out of our Hilton hotel and back to the venerable and well-worn old Warwick hotel.  I noticed the SC13 lamp post banners this morning while walking to the office.  Turns out SC13 stands for SuperComputer, and I see on the program there will be workshops for ‘Graph Partitioning and Data Clustering’ and ‘Building on the European Exascale Approach’.  Hmm.  I would have loved to understand what that is all about – but it’s still heads-down for us, with our plain vanilla SAP systems work on the project.  We have to get the design phase all wrapped up before the ’13’ in SC13 is gone!

 

Quick!  What is the Denver basketball team called?  The Denver Nuggets*, and they played the LA Lakers tonight, and besting them with an 111-99 score. (Both teams had injuries to deal with). There was a handful of decent tickets given to us by our client, but we were all swamped with work, and felt we could not go .. preparing for a big system design review next week, and preparing the project plan for the next phase.   So at 6.30 pm the PwC project manager, exasperated and worried that the tickets will go to waste, shooed six technical team members out the door and said ‘Go! Just go!’  And so they did.  The game was on the Pepsi Center, barely a mile from where we work.

*Gold nuggets, of course.   A reference to the state’s gold mining and prospecting history.

It was a long day, and I had a quick dinner at the Vietnamese noodle place here in downtown Denver. Hey, I wanted to check up on the path of the typhoon Haiyan over the weekend, and did not get to it, I thought.  Check out the detailed maps and some photos from the New York Times.   I see the storm skirted by Vietnam before ending up in GuangXi province in China.  One of the nuclear power stations that we put the work management and logistics computer system in for in 2012, is actually right there on the border of Vietnam and on the coast (Fang Chen Gang). A good thing the winds were down to 50 and 60 miles per hour by then.

I saw the movie Gravity today .. here is its trailer on YouTube.  It’s a survivor film, but also draws attention to the problem of debris in space. Bharath Gopalaswamy writes on the Huffington Post blog that there are now 22,000 trackable pieces of debris in low earth orbit. From the blog : U.S. Strategic Command’s Joint Space Operations Center monitors space debris with a worldwide network of 29 ground-based radars and optical sensors. The center also provides notifications to commercial space operators of potential risks to their satellites from space debris.  In 2010 alone these warnings resulted in 126 satellite maneuvers to avoid collisions with other satellites or debris.  But no country on its own has the resources, the technical expertise, or the geographical reach to resolve the problem of situational space awareness, thus making international cooperation a pivotal element towards mitigating risks to objects in space.

I never knew : there are gold mines (in production) in the USA, and right here in Colorado. An old friend from South Africa was here in Denver on a business trip; he works for AngloGold Ashanti that is headquartered in Johannesburg.   The gold price has dropped about a third from its highs in recent years, but that is not stopping mines in South Africa from approaching the 4000 m mark (2.5 miles) underground.  Eight of the world’s 10 deepest mines are found in one area in South Africa, says this  mining technology website.

Check out this map of continents and countries.  It is from Ezra Klein’s ‘wonk blog’ hosted by the Washington Port.   I found it just stunning to realize that the surface area of the continent of Africa is equal to : China + Mexico + Western Europe + Eastern Europe + the U.S. of A. + India.

The comedy show Saturday Night Live here in the USA opened last night with ‘Kathleen Sebelius’ offering some tips on how to get by all the glitches of the new healthcare.gov website that enables more people to apply for health insurance (political name of the program ‘Obamacare’, otherwise known as the Affordable Care Act).   ‘Have you tried restarting your computer?’ was her first tip, then a low-res website offering a YES and NO button, followed by signing up in other languages such as Icelandic. Here’s a video clip .. WSL Blog.    So now we have Republicans that shut down the government and flirted with the debt ceiling over the new healthcare law, calling for Sebelius’s resignation.  They say ‘We’re looking out for the interests of the people’.  Well, it’s not that simple.   The Republicans are representing rich people.  The healthcare law is mostly aimed at poor people, at healthy young people, and sick people (with so-called pre-existing conditions that have disqualified them from healh insurance so far), and at people out of work, who used to get health insurance from their employers.   I don’t have sympathy for the argument that the country cannot expand Medicaid (a means-tested program run by the states, supported by the federal government), and at the same time we need to stop the really glaring flaws in affordable health care that a really rich country’s citizens can get.  If you’ve lost your job, why should you lose your health insurance?  If we are all equal citizens, and you are born into a poor family, why should your mother not have access for herself and for you to health insurance?   Every time someone goes to the emergency room, we all pay for it sooner or later .. so we should move toward more preventive care, more access to doctors and nurses and clinics for everyone, not less. The health care industry in the USA is a $2.8 trillion dollar industry.  We spend $0 on some people, and 2.5 times the OECD average on others.   As for those people that ‘have health insurance’ that will ‘lose’ it through Obamacare (an accusation from the Republicans) : many of those are on a plan that costs $50 per month, that offers $2,000 of cover for medical expenses.   That is not health insurance.

I checked again today at lunch time with the bank if they had new $100 bills, and they did.   The teller emerged from the vault with a crisp new stack of one hundred $100 bills (so : $10,000; enough to choke a horse?) and peeled off two for me.  The new bills have a blue appearance and is not radically different from the old – but it does have some nice touches of color with the blue and the orange.

Last weekend I found the car battery was completely dead when I had jumped into the car to run an errand.  Well – nothing to be done before last Monday’s early departure to Denver.    So this Friday I found the cause : I left my car’s trunk lid not completely pushed shut .. and the light inside drained the battery completely.   So this weekend I could borrow a trickle charger from Bryan to put some voltage in the battery, and it it’s taken care of.   It did not lost its charge overnight, and the car started as usual two or three times when I took it out.  I guess I don’t get to buy one of those shiny new cars at the car show, just yet.  But I will, sooner or later.

I downloaded and installed Windows 8.1.  It works a little better now.  It is finally ‘usable’, say some tech commentators.  The Surface 2 tablet will come out just about as Apple is to announce its iPad 5 and possibly an improved iPad mini.   I know Windows are trying to lure some business users to the Surface with its Windows applications, but I for one cannot just see myself using the Surface 2 for work – ever.  Even if some day my firm would be able to put all the PC apps on the Surface, there are the obstacles of pure physics.  I need all 15 inches of my notebook computer’s screen, and I need a proper keyboard with keys and key caps.   And my finger will never, ever be as sharp as a mouse pointer.

We had a nice team dinner on Tuesday night at a restaurant called Willie G’s, a seafood and steak place.  I had some halibut and vegetables with a nice white wine.  It was quite a walk down there from the hotel, but I am sure the ‘exercise’ was good for me.  And I got to check out the Denver clock tower (also called the Daniels & Fisher tower) from up close.

P.S.  Soo .. the US Government is set to open in the morning, and the debt ceiling has been raised from its $16.7 trillion level to some level that will pay the bills through Jan 15 next year.  Hooray?

Wells Fargo became my bank after my home mortgage had ended up with them some 10 years ago. (This was after the initial mortgage that had been issued had changed hands 3 or 4 times between short-term mortgage brokers.  I am very sure all of this was unnecessary, and symptoms of the US real estate bubble of 2007).   The bank has been around a long time, founded during the California gold rush in 1852.  It survived the collapse of the California banking system in 1855, and hey – it also survived the US financial crisis of 2008.  It is Warren Buffett’s favorite bank and getting ever larger (which is not necessarily a good thing!).  It has assets of $1.44 trillion and deposits of $1.01 trillion.   It’s difficult to comprehend how much money that is!

Soo .. how is the USA today?  Well : never mind that it’s day #8 of the US Government shutdown.   1.   The debt ceiling deadline is approaching.  Will we breach it? What will that do?  Here’s erstwhile large animal veterinarian Ted Yoho, now a Tea Party congressman from Florida weighing in today : ‘I think, personally, it [not raising the debt ceiling], would bring stability to the world markets’, since they would be assured that the United States had moved decisively to curb its debt.    2.   There’s a story on the front page of the USA today of a 9-year old boy that slipped through three layers of airport security, and got onto an airplane from Minneapolis to Las Vegas.  How was that possible?  3.  The new $100 bills are officially out.  Over lunch time I actually went to the giant branch of Wells Fargo Bank to see if they have the newly designed $100 bill for me to trade for an old one. (No.  Maybe by Christmas, said the teller).

I took out the DVD for the recent sci-fi flick ‘Oblivion’, and we watched it on Saturday night.  I would have to agree with the ‘Rotten Tomatoes’ website that says its consensus is that the film is ‘visually striking but thinly scripted’.   I have trouble latching onto any Tom Cruise character emotionally anyway, but I he did a good job to carry the movie.   I see the film was shot in the summer in Iceland, so the spectacular scenery of black lava rock and snow is actually real and not visual effects.   It is hard to say what is real and what is not in movies nowadays!

I don’t come in ‘too late’ from my trips to Denver on Thursday nights (about 10pm), but it’s hard to just step into the house and go to sleep.  I’m too excited to be home; there’s a mailbox full of junk mail; and I can make something to eat if I missed dinner.  I can also check if there is any worthwhile news of the government shutdown (no, none), or .. I can watch the pandas on Atlanta Zoo’s panda cam on the computer.  I sleep like the one on the right, but I love the way that other cub is sleeping on its back.  Aw.

That Washington circus that we sometimes call the US Government is at it again. Not Washington State, Washington DC .. and to be fair, the circus is in the House of Representatives, not so much the Senate or the rest of the government.  Right now it looks like the US government will shut down at midnight on Tue Sept 30th – which is surely some kind of joke. How long will it stay ‘shut down’? Will the armed forces stop their work? (No.) Will Medicare and Social Security payments stop? (No.) Will the National Parks close? (Yes.) Will the government offices close? (Yes.) The Tea Party Republicans just cannot get over ‘Obamacare’, for which registration officially starts Oct 1.  Just this Monday a woman across the aisle on the airplane from me told her seat neighbor:  ‘I know what they (the Government, the Democrats, the President) are doing, and it’s socialism’*.

*No, it is not. It is helping the citizens of the country to buy more affordable health insurance. It is democracy. It helps everyone compete in a capitalistic system on a more level playing field.  Socialism is an economic system characterized by social ownership of the means of production and co-operative management of the economy [Wikipedia].   And Republicans that support corporations and business throw the word around at a time when ‘social ownership’ of the economy is at a 50-year low.   Wealth is more concentrated at the top than ever.  Fortune 500 corporations sit on tens of billions of dollars of cash. Unemployment is still way too high.

I walk by the Africa lounge in terminal A at Seattle-Tacoma airport every Monday morning these days.  The lounge is just an ordinary airport bar with a bar counter, and some tables and chairs, but still makes me smile.  Why?  It makes me think of Africa, and the one time I saw a real lion up close on my grandfather’s property he owned in Botswana.   I have a close-up picture of the beast glaring at us on the open Jeep(!), and I will have to look for it the next time I get home in Seattle, and post it on here.