a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
We spent some time today at Tide Park beach – part of the larger Solana Beach area to the north of the San Diego metro area. I even dipped my toes into the California surfer culture by going out on a standing-up paddle board for a bit, with some coaching from my brother. The surfing area by the beach is called ‘Table Tops’ because of a reef right there. Absolute beginners such as me were wise to steer completely clear of the surfers, of course.
I traveled to San Diego on Friday afternoon for a weekend visit to my brother and his family. We went to dinner in the Little Italy neighborhood in San Diego downtown. Afterwards we strolled around the waterfront on North San Diego Bay.
The first of the Presidential debates started tonight here in the USA with the 17 – seventeen! – candidates for the Republican party squaring off in two groups. I had the TV on and listened with half an ear. Republicans have a very different world view from mine! And was there anything really new? Not really. Cut taxes, repeal Obamacare, make war with the Middle East. Maybe I’m being a little unfair .. there were brief exchanges on a number of other topics too. Jeb Bush defended the Common Core standards for schools that he is a proponent for. John Kasich had to ‘defend’ his expansion of Medicaid in his home state of Ohio. Mr. Trump had to defend the four bankruptcies his businesses had gone through, and awful comments he had made in the past about women from his Twitter account.
I had to assist with a 
demonstration to an important prospective client via a WebEx* conference call on Wednesday. ‘We are so happy that you can do this .. you are a known quantity‘, said a colleague, one of the organizers – which made me chuckle.
The other non-human phrase that people sometimes use at work is : do you have any bandwidth to do this? Well yes, I will find some time to do it.. I am not a radio station or a robot that broadcasts with bandwidth !
*WebEx displays your own computer screen over the internet at a remote location.
I am lucky .. I don’t have to drive in the city of Seattle in rush hour. (I take the bus to my office downtown). This picture with mark-ups of the traffic violations was posted on the Seattle section for ‘reddit’, an online bulletin board system, by an irate bicyclist.
It was just getting dark tonight at 8.45 pm when I noticed something on my fence outside. Hey! that’s not a cat ! I thought, and then there were three and soon a whole family of four raccoons. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen the little bandits out and about, which is good, I suppose. I am sure they smell the food scraps that we now put in our yard waste bins here in Seattle for recycling into compost by the public utility company. It may be time to lock up the lid of my yard waste bin. If a raccoon gets trapped in there it’s going to scare the heebie jeebies out of the garbage collector .. or out of me!
I drove out to Carkeek* Park on the northern outskirts of the Seattle metropolitan area this Sunday afternoon to enjoy some of the sunny weather. The Park is big .. 216 acres, and offers hiking trails and playgrounds in addition to the strip of pebbles and rough along Puget Sound. I waited for a train to come by, and my patience was rewarded : a Burlington North-Santa Fe oil train came along. I counted about 110 cars on the train!
*named after an English building contractor who came to Seattle in 1875.
This cartoon is from John Atkinson’s ‘Wrong Hands’ cartoon blog, here. For my readers that may not know what the heck Instagram is, and what the cartoon pokes fun at, let me help. Instagram is an online mobile photo-sharing service. Its users (you need to set up an Instagram account first) take pictures and share them on Facebook and Twitter. People take all kinds of silly pictures with their phones, and many times of the food or dessert that they are about to eat : a totally 21st century social media phenomenon. So here we have a smart and dexterous kitty cat called Max, using his mobile phone and an Instagram account to post pictures of his food everyday. Go Max! How about a mouse?
It was a long haul back from Kettleman City to LAX International Airport. I dropped off the rental car without refueling it since I was cutting it close for making my flight. Then our Hertz rental car shuttle bus was packed, and the Alaska Airlines stop was the last one (of six stops! Man! Are the contractors done yet with that LAX Train/ Automated People Mover System as it is called?). I see the now-infamous LaGuardia airport in New York City (it opened in 1939) is finally going to get a $4 billion make-over with a high-speed ferry and train connections. Construction of the project’s first half is expected to start in 2016, with completion scheduled for 2021.
It was a scorcher .. the temperature in the outskirts of Kettleman City here in the sun-scorched Central Valley in California went up al the way to 110°F/ 43°C today. Here are pictures of the old-fashioned ‘Wild West’ storefronts along the main plaza in Kettleman.
The Governor Edmund G. Brown California Aqueduct is a system of canals, tunnels, and pipelines that conveys water collected from the Sierra Nevada Mountains and valleys of Northern and Central California, to Southern California – across hundreds of miles. I drive across three aqueduct bridges from my hotel here in Kettleman City* to the training sessions. There are signs by the orchards here that says ‘No Water = No Jobs’ and ’25 million Californians are not getting millions of gallons of water they paid for’.
*I’m going to report them to Governor Jerry Brown. The sprinklers for the little bitty green lawn by the hotel entrance were on this morning. Sorry, but the lawn needs to go. Put some rocks and cactuses in!
I had to get up early on 
Monday morning to go out and help with the training of our system’s new users, located in Kettleman City in the Central Valley in California. (There is a big gas pipeline compressor station there). Kettleman City is a small town just off of I-5. I took a flight out to Los Angeles airport and did the three-hour drive up north from there. It is hot out here – of course. At 7 o’clock this evening, it was still 96°F/ 36°C.
On Sunday morning we had a little
breakfast at the Hans Grille, and then made for the Bainbridge ferry terminal. The online page for the terminals give a count of the number of places on the ferry that remain for cars, and we were cutting it close for the 11.30 am departure*. As we pulled up to the payment booth, the clerk removed the 11.30 am sign and said we were ‘questionable’ for making the 11.30. But we made it, albeit with only two cars behind us. Yes!
*Worst thing that can happen when one does not make a departure, is to have to wait patiently for the next sailing, about an hour later .. except if it is the last one of the day of course. Then you would have to drive around the Sound like we did coming in. (And if it was that important to catch the ferry, one should have allowed more time to wait upfront, right?).
Illahee State Park is a 75-acre Washington state park located in the hamlet of Illahee, just north of East Bremerton, on Port Orchard Bay, part of Puget Sound. The word ‘Illahee’ means earth or country in Native American tradition. [Source : Wikipedia].
We made a stop there on Saturday as part of an overnight outing to Paul’s place in Hansville. There was rain and cool weather on the Kitsap Peninsula on Saturday, which we welcomed. The rain did not make it all the way across the sound to the city, but it may get there on Sunday.
This empty house on the corner of 16th Ave E and Thomas St here on Capitol Hill is by the bus stop for the No 8 and No 43 bus (that I take sometimes), and so I had known since May that its days were numbered. Still, I was a little shocked to see the house all broken down when I walked by tonight. Built in 1900, it held out until now – but was in such disrepair that it was simply time to break it down and build something new in its place.
Amazon reported blow-out earnings today. The company’s cloud computing business -which include Amazon Web Services – is up a whopping 81% from a year ago. Sure, Amazon sells and ships $23 billion of stuff in a single quarter, but it is only making 2% of profit on those sales. Its cloud computing business is now a $6 billion-a-year business and growing rapidly. The other thing that’s growing rapidly is the office space that Amazon is devouring in Seattle’s Lake Union District. The Seattle Times reports that Amazon may occupy as much as 10 million square feet in downtown Seattle in another few years. By comparison, Microsoft occupies an estimated 14.6 million square feet spread across the greater Seattle area.
My ‘little toaster oven that could’, a cheap Black & Decker model, finally gave out after 12 years of service, so it was time for a new one. The new Black & Decker went for $60, but there was also a stainless-steel clad ‘Breville’ brand toaster oven (no, it’s not French or German, it’s made in China all the same). So I uhm-ed and ah-ed the way I sometime do in the store : do you really need a $150 model? Well, the more expensive oven won out. It had more heating elements for a perfect toasted cheese, and the crumb tray at the bottom is super easy to draw out and clean (not the case with the Black & Decker).
*There is no Windows 9. ‘It didn’t feel right to call it Windows 9’ said one executive. How about WindowsOne, to indicate it will serve as one same/ similar OS for the desktop, tablets and mobile phones? Well, the ‘One’ moniker has been used in many other Microsoft products already. And there has been a Windows 1.0 already after all – back in 1985 when the PC world was in its infancy!
Monday was ‘moon day’ : the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969, now 46 years ago in the rear view mirror. We may no longer land on the moon (or Mars, as people surely thought back then, we would be by now) .. but we are certainly exploring our galaxy with telescopes and unmanned spacecraft. ‘Our galaxy’ is the Milky Way, of course. And ‘our’ sun is but one of 200 billion stars in the Milky Way. That makes for about 11 billion other planets that are orbiting their suns in the habitable zone : at a distance not too warm and not too cold, so that there could be liquid water on the planet. And where there is water, there may be life.
