Category: General

Flu shot, that is. The 2012-13 Northern winter season’s flu shot offers protection against three strains of the flu : two strains of human flu H1N1 H3N2 and one of swine flu. (Sounds like pig farmers should still not get too close to their piggies!).  Here’s a nice YouTube video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ug-M1nIhfIA that shows how flu viruses mutate, and explains where the H1N1 and H3N2 numbering comes from.  P.S. Got to love those words hemagglutinin and neuraminidase from the video .. sure to leave your Scrabble opponents in a ‘dase’ if you build one of those bad boys!

Alright, so I never thought I’d find a word game to seriously challenge the fondness I have for Scrabble, but Spelltower does.  (Check out the video at  http://www.spelltower.com/).  It is very addictive.  (‘A great time waster’ says one reviewer. Aw. Is that a way to compliment a game that makes you think hard?).  It reminds me of a little bit of the ’80s classic Tetris.  In Spelltower you cannot move the tiles around, but you can build words forwards, backwards and diagonally.  Any which way you can, as long as the letters are directly connected.

And what did I buy? Why, a new LG refrigerator. Yes, it’s a lot of money – but I cannot go on with my old fridge that has been repaired a few times before, and is again on the fritz.

There was a little bit of rain in the city on Friday, more on the way Saturday night and Sunday. Friday night found me at the Elysian Brewing Co. on Capitol Hill. With Halloween looming and Thanksgiving after that, the pumpkin ales come out, in the same way that Starbucks is offering their pumpkin spice lattes. (Horror or horrors : there have been reports of Starbuckses running out of pumpkin spice lattes).

One of our regular waiters at the Elysian is packing up and moving to Sidney, Montana to start a food-serving truck business with a business partner.  It is all part of the North Dakota oil boom :  http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2012/apr/29/north-dakota-oil-boom-provides-hope-and-prosperity/.  They will serve up gyro sandwiches to the oil industry workers there.  (A gyro is a Greek dish of meat roasted on a vertical spit. To make a sandwich, add tomato, onion, and tzatziki sauce, wrapped in pita bread).

I made my way back to Seattle on Wednesday morning, starting out in Pittsburgh’s airport.  This print of Queen Ntombi Twala of Swaziland*, is one of a series of four ‘Reigning Queens’ made by Andy Warhol in 1985.  The prints are in concourse C of the airport.  The other three queens are Queen Elizabeth II, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands and Queen Margrethe of Denmark. Warhol once said ‘I want to be as famous as the Queen of England’.

*Swaziland is a tiny kingdom, land-locked by South Africa and Mozambique. I have to confess I did not know about the Queen of Swaziland’s existence while I grew up in South Africa.  The Queen has since been succeeded by her son, King Mswati III.  Check out http://www.gov.sz/

We don’t see any Tea Party political ads in Washington State – we’re a blue state and an Republican hoping to win office had better position himself more or less in the middle (left is liberal and right is conservative in American politics).   But here in Pennsylvania’s Senate race, incumbent Democratic U.S. Senator Bob Casey, Jr. is running for re-election to a second term against Republican nominee Tom Smith.  Tom Smith is for (see http://tomsmithforsenate.com/): a flat tax code with no loopholes, for reducing annual spending to 20% of GDP (that is a massive reduction, given that the US is almost at 40% of GDP), for ‘ending oppressive regulation that suffocates growth and kills jobs, for energizing our future (mostly by producing more oil and using coal) and for reducing health care (repeal Obamacare) and Social Security.

I am not much of a handyman, but I am lucky enough to have a friend who is !  – Bryan :). So we thought we’d take a crack at it with a Google search for ‘asko dishwasher D1760’ and see if someone out there had run into a problem similar to what I have.   The dishwasher fills up and starts washing, but then fails to complete the wash cycles and does not get to the rinse cycle.  To make a long story short, a combination of the symptoms and taking a look at what’s going on underneath the washer pointed to a valve and controller that failed.   I ordered the part on-line.  It arrived after a few days, we put it in, and voila! it fixed the problem.

.. the surprising 7.8% September unemployment rate for the USA, that is.  Scarcely were they out, or ex-General Electric CEO Jack Welch (and very obviously a Republican) accuses the Obama Administration of interfering with the Bureau of Labor Statistics!  Quite outrageous, his claim, and dismissed by just about everyone.

It is not only statements from the Presidential debate last night that are getting fact-checked.   Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has made some contentious statements at the Oracle OpenWorld 2012 conference this week, disparaging SAP ‘s latest technology called SAP HANA (High-Performance Analytic Appliance).

From Vishal Sikka’s blog at http://www.experiencesaphana.com/community/blogs/blog/2012/10/02/setting-the-record-straight–sap-hana-v-exadata-x3  :  ‘The statement Mr Ellison made about HANA, when talking about the release of a new Exadata machine, that has 4TB of DRAM and 22TB of SSD, is false.  He referred to HANA being “a small machine” with 0.5TB of memory. He said his machine has 26TB of memory, which is also wrong (SSD is not DRAM and does not count as memory, HANA servers also use SSDs for persistence)..

.. the largest HANA system deployed so far is the 100-node system built earlier this year with Intel and IBM.  It has 100TB of DRAM and 4000 CPU cores.  Mr. Ellison is welcome to come to Santa Clara and see the system working himself, with workloads from several customers’.

I watched most of the first of three Presidential debates tonight with friends over beers and pizza.  We were a little dismayed that the consensus among the political pundits (and a poll conducted by CNN) was that Romney ‘won’ the debate, even though there were no obvious zingers or knock-out punches.  CNN summed it up in one line as ‘The Republican candidate says the president’s vision is one of big government, while Obama challenged his rival’s plans as unworkable’.

Only about 3 out of 4 high school students graduate in the US every year (75%).  That is shocking. I watched a documentary last night on PBS channel where the question was asked ‘What does it take to save a student?’.  Well, sometimes it takes a lot, and too many times it just cannot be done despite the best efforts of special counselors and assistants at schools. Of the 4 students followed in the PBS documentary, one’s mom was in jail, one was facing deportation, another had a 2-yr old baby and a fourth one only wanted to play football and not go to class.

Here are some numbers from a study done at Northeastern University some years ago.

The Lifetime Net Fiscal Contributions of Adults 18 to 64 Years Old, U.S., 2007

Over their working lives, the average high school dropout will have a negative net fiscal contribution to society of nearly -$5,200 while the average high school graduate generates a positive lifetime net fiscal contribution of $287,000. The average high school dropout will cost taxpayers over $292,000 in lower tax revenues, higher cash and in-kind transfer costs, and imposed incarceration costs relative to an average high school graduate. Adult dropouts in the U.S. in recent years have been a major fiscal burden to the rest of society. Given the current and projected deficits of the federal government, the fiscal burden of supporting dropouts and their families is no longer sustainable.

Republican presidential candidate brought withering criticism onto himself this week with his remarks that surfaced from a private fund-raiser (see first picture).  During the same speech he also said (I’m paraphrasing) ‘if I get elected as president the economy will do better even if I do nothing’.  Really? The United States is spending $1.3 trillion every year that it does not have, adding to the $16 trillion national debt.

Alright, next up to fix/ get fixed is my 10-year old dishwasher : it goes through the cycle, but only a little bit of water seems to enter the machine.  I had a Sears technician scheduled to come and take a look but when he called to confirm the appointment he said no, he cannot help me.  Sears does not repair Asko dishwashers (Swedish manufacturer).  So back to square one.  There is a lot of helpful repair information on the internet these days and I should check one or two simple little things myself.  For example, the float valve might be stuck, fooling the machine into thinking the water level in the bottom is higher than it really is.

P.S. ‘How Stuff Works’ says Josephine Cochrane invented the modern dishwasher in 1886.  She was a wealthy socialite whose servants kept chipping her fine china while hand washing it.  So she developed a rack and water jet system that debuted at the 1893 Chicago World Fair. The company she founded eventually became KitchenAid.

My 1996 Toyota Camry (yes! I know it’s an old car) is in the shop for serious repairs : the radiator, water pump and timing belt all have to be replaced.  I decided to graph out the average annual capital cost from when I bought the car (in 1996, new), along with the average annual maintenance cost, all adjusted for inflation.  I left out insurance and gas costs but included tires and lubricants.  The bottom line : money-wise there is still no justification for replacing the car.  But there is a lot more such as confidence in the car’s reliability, the ‘image’ projected by driving a 17-year old car and missing out on the new technology and better fuel consumption of today’s cars.

I am back in Seattle from my New York-Pittsburgh trip.  This little saki cup* made from 100% tin is a souvenir that I bought back. *I bought it in a Japanese book store in New York.  For some reason I just feel attracted to metal items that’s a 100% pure element (gold and silver coins fall in that category!).  And I know there are controversies around tin : the big tin mines in Indonesia have an appalling safety record, and there is a mine in Democratic Republic of Congo controlled by a renegade militia.

(Wednesday evening). Here’s my little black rental ‘number’ that I motored around with from the airport to the hotel and to client meetings in the Pittsburgh area.  It’s a 2012 Volkswagen Jetta SE (2.5-liter five-cylinder engine puts out 170 hp, price around $US 19k).  It’s a very nice, very solidly built car with precise handling and sharp braking. It’s just smaller than the car size I’m used to with my Toyota Camry.  The smaller steering wheel bothered me a little as well.

P.S. Yes, it’s my 1,000th post! How about that?

The New York Public Library is just over a century old and with 53 million items in inventory its size is second only to the Library of Congress.  One wonders how many of the books are available on-line .. it must be just a matter of time?

.. it is simply the second full moon in a calendar month, and they come by every two or three years.  So this Friday most of the world had a blue moon, but not everyone.  For earthlings that live in the far eastern parts of the globe such as New Zealand, the full moon came on Sept 1.  (Japan’s blue moon came in at 10.58pm on Friday night, so with an hour to spare).

So the Republican National Convention started a day late .. tropical storm Isaac passed by on the west of Tampa and became a Category 1 Hurricane as it made landfall in New Orleans.   The countdown to the USA presidential election now approaches 60 days, and most polls show president Obama in the lead in the ‘battleground’ states, though.  (The winner of each state gets a number of ‘electoral college’ votes, and first to 270 wins the election).