a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
I drove back to Sacramento airport on Thursday, taking Highway 99 (it runs through Chico). I would have loved to spend more time walking around Chico, or even to stop in Sacramento, but there just was no time for that. The airport is north of the city of Sacramento, so I did not get to see any of the California capital. Maybe next time!
We walked by the substation to the Substation to get a sandwich for lunch today. Inside they played ’80s music : Come On Eileen (Dexy’s Midnight Runners, 1983) and Tainted Love (Soft Cell, 1981). The guy behind the counter inquired ‘Which part of the Empire are you from?’ as soon as I placed my order. I should have said the Galactic Empire* but instead said ‘South Africa, but I now live in Seattle‘. Ah, and you speak Afrikaner (sic)?. Yes yes, I said, my native language is Afrikaans.
*A Star Wars reference
We had a very long day at work, but made time afterwards to stop by the Sierra Nevada Brewing Company here in Chico for some brewski and a bite to eat.
Here are some pictures of my arrival at Sacramento airport. The airport is not nearly as big as San Francisco International or the sprawling LAX (Los Angeles) airport, but I the Terminal B where I had arrived is practically brand-spanking new (it opened in 2011). The $1 billion terminal contains $6 million of public art. Its construction created some 2,400 jobs over 2 1/2 years during a recession that had left state and regional unemployment hovering around 12 percent.
The days are short here in the Northern Hemisphere – sunset is a little after 4 pm – so I feel I have to strike out and run my errands early on. I have done well : had my hair cut, cleaned my house, charged my car’s dead battery*, took some old pillows, wheeled suitcases and an oven toaster to Goodwill, a big box of used packing ‘peanuts’ to the UPS store for them to re-use, did my laundry, and packed my bags for one last trip for 2015 to California in the morning. It’s to Sacramento this trip, with a drive up north from the airport.
*I did not shut the driver’s door properly, and the dome light drew down the battery’s charge. Hmm. And I want to get an electrical car. I will have to do better, right?
Friday’s good US jobs report for November, makes a Federal Funds Rate increase in mid-December ‘all but a done deal’, say most economists. (The rate has been at zero for more than 6 years). US interest rates are going in the opposite direction of those in Europe, though. Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank, dissatisfied with the performance of the eurozone economy, recently cut Central Bank interest rates from an already negative 0.2% to -0.3%. What does that even mean? Well, Europeans now pay the bank interest to hold their euros. So .. better to keep it in the freezer? Under the mattress? It can still get stolen from there, so I guess if I were them, I’d still go with putting my cash in the bank. Grrr.
Here are some financial graphs from the New York Times.
I drove out to the airport in pouring rain today : a cats-and-dogs rain at times ! The rain had cleared up somewhat by the time I got to the airport.
With news of a mass shooting* here in San Bernardino California (about 60 miles east of Los Angeles), I guess I’d better pay attention to the Quick Reference Guide for Active Shooter Events that had been posted in several places in our project office’s building. What a sad state of affairs. Even sadder : politicians doing nothing about laws that still allow mentally ill people to buy guns at auctions, that still allow the sale of assault weapons, and no mandate that gun manufacturers to put vanilla iPhone fingerprint technology on gun triggers. So the killing continues.
*14 people dead in today’s shooting. Does it seem like we have one every other day here in the USA? Well, we kind of actually do.
Check out the tips for gift giving from my hotel newspaper (the Wall Street Journal). It says men are tougher to buy gifts for than women are !
Here’s my crossing of the Bay Bridge at 1.15 am on Monday morning with very light traffic. Man! I see there had been lots of issues during the construction of the bridge (with a $6.4 billion price tag, by the way), some of them still unresolved.
Bay Bridge problems (as reported by sfgate.com, here)
Recent issues with the Bay Bridge eastern span:
Cable: Bridge maintenance experts urged Caltrans to retrofit the span’s main cable to protect it from corrosion, and the project’s chief designer warned that leaks raised the threat of corrosion in the cable’s two anchorages.
Tower rods: Water has flooded most of the 400-plus rod sleeves in the tower foundation. One rod has failed, and others developed tiny cracks. Caltrans says the rods aren’t in danger.
Deck concerns: Several of the 14 giant steel boxes that form the two bridge decks did not fit together neatly during construction. The bridge’s chief designer acknowledged that some joints are likely to suffer “local damage” in a big earthquake.
Leaks: Water has been leaking into the hollow bridge structure since at least 2012. Caltrans says there has been no damage, but outside experts say there are indications of rust and corrosion.
I had a late night flight out of Seattle to San Francisco on Sunday night. Freezing fog conditions made for an even later departure, though. Our scheduled departure was pushed back so much that it was 1.15 am by the time I picked up the rental car at San Francisco airport. Luckily the little ‘air train’ out to Hertz still runs at that time, and the rental car facility operates around the clock. And hey : there is almost no traffic on the Bay Bridge in the dead of night.
The COP21 ’21st Conference of the Parties’ starts on Monday in Le Bourget, France (it’s in the greater Paris area). The conference is the annual meeting of all countries which want to take action for the climate.
Black Friday comes after Thanksgiving. The ‘door buster’ video footage of customers charging into mall stores seems to be a thing of the past (thankfully) .. but even so, overall 2015 holiday sales here in the USA are forecast to reach an all-time high of $630 billion. Of that, $93 billion will be spent online, up almost 10 percent from 2014. I was checking out the merchandise on offer on-line .. with a new digital camera is still in my shopping cross-hairs. ‘Cyber’ Monday is coming, of course – a term used to promote on-line sales just, what, 5 years, 10 years ago – that already seems outdated and almost quaint.
It is Thanksgiving Day here in the United States. I had taken this picture from the inside of the Chihuly Garden and Glass Museum here in Seattle in 2013.
Here’s a cute story that ran 
in Monday’s edition of the Wall Street Journal, of a slice of country in Germany that was an accident of careless map drawing after World War I. I love maps, and to boot, I was born in the Free State province of South Africa. (It used to be called the Orange Free State, after the Orange River. After 1994, it was simply renamed to the Free State province).
Here is the link to the WSJ story.
I think all travelers – and especially those of us traveling internationally – are scratching our heads a little, as to what to make of the ‘Worldwide Travel Alert’, issued on Monday by the US State Department. I am more or less always careful when I travel overseas, and I don’t advertise my nationality. (But make no mistake : I am sure I do stick out like a sore thumb with my gigantic Canon camera and its frequent use to take pictures, when I travel. Ah well). I have been fortunate in that the worst that has happened over many years of travel is the surreptitious stealing of my wallet from my backpack in Hong Kong. On a different occasion a customs agent in Lagos airport that took my passport, and then could not find it when returned as instructed with my luggage, to get it back. (They found my passport after 20 mins in a desk drawer).
I finally made it to Amazon’s book store to go check it out. The book store is a good size but not nearly as large as a typical cavernous Barnes & Noble book store. (The world’s largest book store has been on line, for a very long time, of course). The store seems to offer a carefully selected set of books, almost all with ‘customer reviews’, on various topics. I was a little disappointed with the smallish sections for math, science and information technology, but admittedly my book preferences may not be very mainstream. There are Kindles on display (of course), and fairly large children’s and youth book sections. I really hope that there will always be a plenty of book stores around, with new books, old books, serious books and books just for fun. And I still want at least some of my books – the really good ones that I treasure – printed on paper.
It was March 2012 when I was approaching the end of working in China, and one year after the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster (in Japan, after the earthquake and tsunami), that the influential news magazine The Economist declared nuclear power ‘the dream that failed’. The writers did admit that nuclear power will stick around for a long time (conventional reactors as opposed to fusion reactors, that is).
South Africa for one, is looking to add eight new eight new reactors at an estimated cost of some $50 billion to the sole nuclear power plant* on African soil. This would pump an extra 9,600 megawatts (MW) of power into the national grid. China, France, Russia, South Korea and the United States are bidding to construct the plants, with the winner expected to be announced early next year. It will be fascinating to see who wins the award. China and Korea are contending that they can construct standard international nuclear power plant designs (such the AP1000 from Westinghouse-Toshiba) for 50% of the typical capital cost.
*The Koeberg reactor north of Cape Town that contributes 2,000 MW or 4% of the country’s electrical power generation.
One week on from the terrorist attacks in Paris, it is clear that the psychological blast zone extends well across the Atlantic and into the political discourse here in the USA.
‘Register all Muslims in a database’ says Donald Trump. ‘We have no way to properly vet these (Syrian) refugees’ says the other Republican candidate for President, Ben Carson. (Not true. Syrian refugees are mostly families with small children and have gone through several rounds of rigorous screenings and interviews by groups such as the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, the International Organization for Migration, Homeland Security and the State Department before reaching the USA. The vetting process for Syrian refugees is very thorough and can take several years).
Unfortunately the public has always been prone to refugee and immigrant panic at times like these. After Pearl Harbor, there was the forced relocation and incarceration of some 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry who lived on the Pacific coast, in camps in the interior of the country [Wikipedia]. Horrible things were said of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany. And now Syrian refugees get the blame for what has happened in Paris because of one attacker’s Syrian passport. (The rest were French and Belgian nationals. So should we stop French and Belgian people from coming to the USA?).