Category: General

So .. the due date for the birth of Prince William and Duchess Kate’s baby has come and gone.  When will it be? It’s got to be soon, right?  (I know nothing about babies).  The Royal Mint in the UK has announced that they will send a lucky 2013 sliver penny to parents whose babies are born on the same day as Kate and William’s.  The parents have to apply on the Royal Mint’s Facebook page.  There are only 2013 (the quantity) 2013 (the date) pennies available, which should suffice : on a typical day 2,000 babies are born in the UK.

‘I distrust camels and anyone else who can go for a week without a drink’ says this sign outside the Smith restaurant and bar here on 15th Ave.  Joe E. Lewis was an American comedian and singer (1902-1971), and was married briefly to Martha Stewart.  Even camels need to drink water after four or five days in peak summer, but in winter they are known to get by without actually needing to drink water, for months.  I suppose Mr Lewis would have abstained entirely of socializing with the little fennec fox – here’s an old post with its picture – that can live its entire life in the desert without free water (though it will drink water if it finds it).

The jury in the (in)famous George Zimmerman case here in the USA – which involved the shooting of a 17-year old black teenager out on the streets of a gated community in Florida, by a neighborhood watchman (Zimmerman) – reached a verdict on Saturday night : not guilty. Wow! I thought, since I was surprised, and I think it is fair to say most people that had been following the media coverage of the case, were, too.  USA Today newspaper points out the difficulties of the case, though – and that the media likes to paint with black and with white, and no shades of grey :   ‘Life is packed with nuances and subtleties and shades of gray.  But the news media are often uncomfortable in such murky terrain. They prefer straightforward narratives, with good guys and bad guys, heroes and villains. Those tales are much easier for readers and viewers to relate to.. 

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/07/14/zimmerman-trayvon-martin-nbc-news-column-rieder/2516251/

I had time to stop by the sports store after work tonight and spotted these ‘little team mates’ Pittsburgh Steelers. From left to right it is the quarterback (currently Ben Roethisberger in person), the referee, and the running back.  The franchise has so far triumphed in six Super Bowl Championships : 1974, 1975, 1978, 1979, 2005, 2008.

Soo .. on this Thursday the Miami Heat got their second straight NBA Championship, the Dow Jones takes a 2.3% hit and : the Farm Bill fails unexpectedly in the House of Representatives.  The Farm Bill has been around since the Great Depression and the New Deal in various forms, and is not just about farms.  It is the primary agricultural and food policy tool of the US Federal Government.  It outlays spending of a trillion dollars over the next 10 years.  Why did it fail? Oh so many reasons why. It’s worth noting the White House signaled it would veto it in its current form anyway, had it passed.  The cuts in the allocated money for food stamps was too much.   I will leave it up to the pros at the Washington Post to explain the rest of the politics.  This was supposed to be a bill with broad partisan support, though. It now looks as if this Congress is not capable of passing any legislation whatsoever.  That pending immigration reform bill?  Best to forget about it.  http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2013/06/20/8d04ba3a-d9de-11e2-a9f2-42ee3912ae0e_story.html

‘Would you happen to sell bicarbonate of sodium?’ I heard an elderly man ask the store clerk at the grocery store today.  ‘Of course the store does’, I thought.  It’s baking soda.  Well, the clerk was nonplussed, did a search on the computer, went to the medicine aisle, searched for a minute then declared they don’t have any and that Walgreens might have some .. at which point I decided to go for it and intervene.  I grabbed a little box of baking soda from the baking aisle, showed it to the customer, and explained to him ‘This is baking soda, and it really is bicarbonate of soda.  Might this be what you are looking for?’ Yes, yes! he said.  ‘Look, he found it!’ he yelled at the store clerk.  So there : my good deed for the day.  (What did he need it for? To clean his dentures with). The funny thing is that I bought a little packet of baking soda just for fun this Sunday at the Uwajimaya store.  I couldn’t resist the packaging with the cute picture showing all the uses for baking soda, and I think the picture reminded me of my mom : ).

Happy Father’s Day to all the dads – and especially to mine!  The picture is from Google’s home screen.   Looks like the dad is taking a coffee break while tinkering in his garage.

The long summer break for schools here in the USA have started.  So for many parents the typical day of getting the kids up out of bed, into the car, to school, work until school gets out, taking care of everyone’s needs until bedtime, and then sneak in a few hours of work or personal time late at night, is upended.  It’s three months of unstructured ‘chaos’ ahead.  School calendars in the USA are on the low end of number of school days (180), compared to as many as 240 in Japan.   The shorter number of days in the USA is compensated for somewhat by longer hours of instruction -but there are many other differences.  In the USA each state determines its own curriculum while in Japan (and many other countries), the government decides what each school must teach, how to teach it, and even what books to teach it with.  Less choice, but  far fewer disparities in student education when the time comes for a student to compete nationally to qualify for higher education after school.

Alright, so the deepwater horizon oil spill it was not – just a major coffee spill all over my workhorse lenovo t430 notebook computer shortly after lunch.   i jumped up, turned the machine sideways so that the coffee drained off the keyboard, mopped it up with a towel, and went to the washroom and tried to dry it out further with the powerful dryers our office building has in.   one of the usb ports was wet inside, got that dried out, but i still don’t have a shift key. CAPS LOCK can get me uppercase characters, but i cannot get the symbols that i need to log onto my lotus notes e-mail.  lotus notes does not allow me to cut and paste from Word into the password field either.  other keys are sticky now.  got to use the keyboard.   so .. off i am tomorrow to the pittsburgh pwc office to get some help.  they tell me they can do a shell swap – just install this machine’s hard drive into a new shell.  that will make me very happy.

Here’s a t-shirt I saw on Saturday. It shows two face-to-face T-Rexes and the phrase ‘T-Rex hates high fives’.  Aww.  Turns out there is a whole slew of T-Rex is trying  to (do something for which it needs longer arms). Check out the link below the picture for Morgan German’s collection of pictures.  Some of the ‘T-Rex is Trying’ memes are very funny! http://pinterest.com/morganrosegerms/t-rex-trying/

.. the ‘thing’ being my Prius rental car that makes no vibration, no peep, no nothing as it sits at the traffic light.  Put then you step on the ‘gas’ (cannot say that, have to say step on the ‘accelerator’), and it moves.   It’s magic.

We’re done with the workshops for the week, and heading back home. My flight out to Seattle with a stop in  Chicago is early Friday morning.

 

Is there such a thing as a black flower? I wondered as I found some on the sidewalk Friday night that certainly appeared black.  Alas, no – there is not – says Interflora’s web site.  ‘Black’ flowers merely have very dark shades of purple or red.  So soot-black flowers are the stuff of fantasy and fairy tales.

Memorial Day is a somber holiday here is in the USA, a difficult day for families that lost loved ones in a war. CNN has a page that shows the names, the home locations and the battlefield locations (here http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/war.casualties/index.html) of the coalition troops that have been killed in the Afghanistan and Irag wars.  The toll for these two wars now exceeds 8,000, with some 50,000 wounded.  The war in Iraq is over, of course .. but the figures for Afghanistan show 23 casualties as recently as May 20.

I spotted these ‘bloplets’ on a leaf on Wednesday night by my friends’ house before we went out.  The leaf surfaces are waxy, of course, and so the water forms big blobs instead of droplets.  The Wikipedia entry has an interesting video clip of a water droplet on a superhydrophobic surfacs getting cut in two by using a superhydrophobic knife.   Here is the link  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_tension.

Here is a map of the damage brought by Monday’s tornado in Moore, OK.  (This is just a section of the 17 miles in total that the tornado traveled).  The map is from the New York Times website, with pictures as well.  State officials have lowered the death toll to at least 24, revised down from Monday’s estimate.  If anything, it’s amazing that not many more people lost their lives in the buildings that collapsed and the flying debris.   http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/05/20/us/oklahoma-tornado-map.html?ref=us

A really big tornado caused extensive damage and tragic loss of life (51 people found so far, of which 20 are children from an elementary school) in the Oklahoma City area on Monday.  The tornado was more than a mile wide, with winds of 180 mph or more. It flattened everything in its wake, ripped the bark from trees with its debris and swept cars and like trucks up like Matchbox toys. There is footage of the funnel cloud and the damage  on the website of the public news service PBS at this link http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/weather/jan-june13/tornado_05-20.html

So .. it’s not hard to see why Microsoft is encountering resistance from their installed Windows 7 user base that have been forced into the gaudy Start screen tiles of Windows 8 that screams color and wiggly little updates at them.  What a shock to one’s senses if one had a desktop with a dreamy wallpaper background ! It’s in your face, and it’s ‘noisy’.  And of course Microsoft prods its users to sign up for a Microsoft account for many of the apps – such as Mail, Skydrive, the Store.  You can even sign in onto your machine with a Microsoft account (not local a password) which will then save your settings in the cloud and make your desktop, Surface tablet and Microsoft phone all look the same (does anybody have all of those?).  No thanks, I think.  If that account password gets lost in the clouds, or hacked, then I am toast.

As for the problem of landing on the Metro Start screen at boot-up, I actually found a remedy for that, at extremetech.com ..  http://www.extremetech.com/computing/139960-how-to-shut-down-windows-8-easily-and-how-to-boot-to-the-desktop.  So now I boot up directly into the desktop, the way Windows 7 did.   I still don’t have a Start button and Start menu, but that’s OK since I have shortcuts on the desktop or below on the task bar for all the apps I use every day.  Everything is now an ‘app’ I guess .. even the monstrous Office products Excel and Word.  Which by the way, in the 2013 versions now run in the cloud as  well, and allows you to store your documents in the cloud.  ‘So that your files are accessible from anywhere’.  Yes, OK, but not when you’re actually in the cloud flying at 30,000 ft and your airline still does not have wi-fi on board.  And so it goes.  Some new things are really cool, and others solve some problems – but create others.

My new ThinkCentre with Windows 8 has arrived, and I managed to fire it up successfully on Thursday night.  I have to move some files (especially my large library of pictures), and do some consolidation.  I will write about my impressions of Windows 8 later.  The ‘desktop’ part of it is much like Windows 7.

Got something confidential that you want to send to ‘The New Yorker’ magazine for publication.. but you want to remain completely anonymous?  To do that, previously there was the mailing address of the magazine (1925), later joined by a phone number (1928) and much later by an e-mail address (1998).  But e-mail addresses and the location of the computer from where it was sent is traceable and not good for super-secret communications.  So now in 2013 there is the ‘Strongbox’ on the Tor network.  Check out the steps below .. I am no encryption expert but it looks pretty cloak-and-dagger, spy-versus-spy super-secret to me!   On the upside The New Yorker cannot divulge their confidential sources to say, the FBI .. but on the downside : they cannot verify the authenticity of the material easily, either.

I watched an animated movie called ‘Grave of the Fireflies’ from Ghibli studios last night – because the cover had a quote from movie critic Roger Ebert that said it belonged on a list of the 10 best war movies of all time.   Well, I did not quite know what to expect, but it was harrowing to watch.  This is not a feel-good pop-cultury Pixar movie.  To me the message was ‘War is brutal, and its consequences show no compassion to defenseless people’ (such as children).