a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
So fall* is officially here! It was supposed to rain on Saturday in the city but it didn’t .. we did get some rain on Sunday. When it stopped, I was ready to get out of the house for a bit, and went for a walk on 19th Ave. *We say fall in the USA and Canada, elsewhere it is autumn!
It’s Bumbershoot weekend, Seattle’s annual music festival by the Space Needle. I have to confess that I am not soo into the music scene and the headliners that include Heart, Death Cab for Cutie, MGMT and Bassnectar are all unfamiliar to me. Does that mean I should listen to more music? Broaden my horizons? The thing with live music is : it’s never quite the same as its recorded version that you have come to love, the one on your boombox or iPhone or iPad. But yes, it’s nice to see the band of humans that actually make the music, make it for real up there on the stage – and share the experience with a crowd of fans .. right?
Businessweek magazine says there are 3,200 utilities (!) that make up the U.S. electrical grid. They sell $400 billion of electricity every year, mostly derived from burning fossil fuels in centralized power stations, and distributed over 2.7 million miles of power lines. (In the Pacific Northwest we generate up to 70% of our energy with hydropower stations). Says Businessweek : Regulators set the rates, utilities get guaranteed returns, investors get sure-thing dividends. It’s a model that has not changed much since Thomas Edison invented the light bulb. And it’s doomed to obsolescense. There is a confluence of green energy and computer technology, deregulation, cheap natural gas and political pressure that, says David Crane of NRG Energy, poses a mortal threat to the system. Rooftop solar in particular, is turning tens of thousands of businesses and homes into power producers : ‘distributed generation’. Of course, it’s going to be a long haul to see how all of this plays out. But it seems certain that the energy and technology sectors will no longer be supplier and customer. They will be competing directly with each other.
I am sure Friday’s surprise announcement of CEO Steve Ballmer’s departure sometime over the next year, caused a buzz in the Microsoft world over on the ‘east side’. (A reference to the main campus in Redmond and the city of Bellevue east of Seattle across Lake Washington). Ironically, with the jump in the stock price, Mr Ballmer saw some $700 million added to his net worth. Yes, the juggernaut is struggling to transition to a ‘devices and services’ company, and Windows 8 has not found traction so far. But for fiscal 2013, Microsoft reported revenue of $77.85 billion, 6% increase over the previous year. It sits on a $68 billion pile of cash. They still have their operating system sitting on 91% of workstations(45% Windows 7, and 37% Windows XP : a product that is now 12 years old to the day). Will it be a sales guy that replaces Steve Ballmer, or a product guy* (as the late Steve Jobs was)? I would say the latter, but time will tell.
*I should say person and not guy. For example, there is Meg Whitman leading the charge on Hewlett-Packard’s long comeback trail.
We all went out to Paul’s ‘cabin-in-the-woods’ (it’s really a house) in Hansville on Kitsap peninsula and some of us stayed over on Saturday night. The peninsula is covered with pine trees – very green – and surrounded by water from the Puget Sound. So the tide comes in and goes out, and there are sea gulls, bald eagles, heron, kingfishers and osprey to be seen. (I need a long-range telephoto lens to have any hope of taking nice pictures of the birds, though).
On my walkabout Monday night I saw that the empty Chutney’s Grille on the Hill restaurant building here on 15th Ave is now clad in wood. The building is ultimately destined to make way for a new four-story, mixed-use apartment building.
This cute pamphlet from the Seattle Animal Shelter arrived in my mail on Saturday.
1. Friday saw a 35-day day streak broken here in the city with a few welcome rain showers. (Per the Seattle Weather blog July was the driest in 50 years here! .. but we did have plenty of rain in April).
2. I spotted a new (new to me, at least) ‘Big Belly’ solar trash compactor on the corner of Yale and Stewart. It looks like a US Mailbox. It uses solar power to compress trash put into it, and electronically alerts trash collectors through a web-based system when its belly is full. The smarty pants trash can with the big belly comes at a price, though : they cost about $5,000 apiece.
On Saturday Gary got me out of the house to go to the Elysian Brewery Co. for a quick bite. After that we walked down two blocks to check out the Capitol Hill Block Party. The ‘party’ consists of a few Capitol Hill city blocks that are fenced in, with four stages of live music, and beer and food that’s available. I don’t drink enough beer (had my one at the Elysian already!), and I don’t really listen to live music so : not for me. It was still early, and that may be why the crowds appeared to be a little thin. There was also the ‘Seafair Torchlight’ Parade going on in downtown Seattle (which admittedly is more of a family affair than the Block Party).
It was a beautiful warm, sunny day here in Seattle (85°F/ 29°C). The pictures are from Fifth Ave in downtown, near the Convention Center.
Big Bertha the tunnel borer is ready to start her duties here in Seattle, and there was a dedication ceremony today that Bryan and I attended. The borer is very big, the biggest in the world, and built in Osaka, Japan by Hitachi’s heavy construction division. Check out the excellent write-up by gizmodo that also shows in an animation how the digging, earth removal and tunnel construction works.
I walked by the Capitol Hill train station’s construction site. The tunnels to the station have been completed. Here is a Youtube clip of the tunnel breakthrough. But there is still a long way to go to fill in all the construction that makes up the rest of the station !
There is an intriguing structure on display in downtown Seattle’s Westlake Center. I walk by there on the way to my firm’s downtown office sometimes, and I finally took a picture. So what is it? Well, it’s a polychoron, but a very complicated one with 1-4-8-4-1 outside vertices (with the bottom vertex cut off to make it stand on its own!). Polychora are closed four-dimensional figures, with cells inside. A tesseract has 8 cells, but the one at Westlake Center has too mind-bogglingly many too count.
Saturday and Sunday were beautiful summer days here in the Pacific Northwest, but I have a nasty cold and could not go out with my brother and his family that were visiting from California. My brother and I checked out the Ballard Locks last when he visited in April, here Ballard Locks. At that time there was nary a fish in sight in the water, but by now the full-grown salmon have started to migrate into the rivers, and are swimming upstream to spawn. (The Ballard Locks are in the canal that links Lake Union to Puget Sound, and so the canal is effectively an artificial river to the salmon).
It’s nice to be back home and to be able to use my internet connection without watching the minutes and agonize over the time it takes to upload a single picture. I can read all kinds of things such as ‘Boeing stock tumbles after another fire on a 787’, ‘Microsoft announces massive company-wide reorganization’ and ‘Seattle among the snobbiest cities in the USA’ (this one according to a survey done by Travel & Leisure magazine) .. aw, are we that bad? I once worked with a young Texan from Dallas here in the Seattle area, and he was very adamant that Texas has many more beautiful women than Seattle does.
Fremont is a neighborhood here in Seattle that was originally a separate city, but annexed to Seattle in 1891. Fremont bills itself as the ‘Center of the Universe’, and on the Saturday closest to the summer solstice each year, it hosts a ‘solstice parade’ that celebrates the sun. The parade is ‘notorious’ – said King5 TV news tonight – for its naked bicyclists (but it did not show any of them even on the late night news). Here are some of the pictures that I took today.
Today was the longest day of the year here in the north with the sun setting at 9.10pm. The Seattle Post Intelligencer newspaper reports that the beautiful sunsets this year are due to forest fires in Siberia. Check out this accelerated video clip of a sunset from the Seattle PI blog, and watch for the lights on the Space Needle to start flashing as the sun sets. Here is the link : http://blog.seattlepi.com/thebigblog/2012/07/11/thank-russia-for-seattles-gorgeous-sunsets/
It’s summertime, and today was very pleasant and mild outside. There were rain showers in the forecast, but there were certainly none here where I live in the city. The sun sets after 9pm, which means I can have my dinner and still go out for a walk. (I am supposed to make it out to the gym, but what a production it is to get one’s kit together, get down there, work out, and all that. I will go tomorrow!).
It was a gorgeous day here in Seattle, with the sun out and the temperatures mild and perfect for a walk outside.
I went up to Seattle’s University District on Saturday afternoon in pursuit of my out-of-print and not-on-Amazon book from 1966 that the Central Library said they would have here – but it turned out they did not, either. But it was all worth the trip because I bought two nice books at the Half Price Bookstore close by. I will write about them in a later post.
