a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
The week out at the project site is over .. and the flight out to Seattle went without incident. We arrived at 6 pm at Seattle airport, and then I took the light rail train to Capitol Hill, and the No 10 bus from there up to 15th Ave to get me in the door by 7. I took out the junk mail from the mailbox, watered my new plants in the pots, made dinner, and watched the day’s news on TV. Less than eight weeks until Election Day now.
Every night this week, after taking the bus uphill to the hotel, I have walked back down to Union Square and Market Street to get something to eat.
The sun sets at 7.15 pm, leaving just enough daylight to check out the buildings that line Post, Taylor and O’Farrell Streets.
My mode of transport to the office this week is by Muni bus, the No 38 (the others : on foot, BART, Uber, taxi, street car). The bus is crowded, and carries the world : Indian people, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, European (tourists, but just one or two), African American and hey, even a South African American.
*Not really an option for me, unless I pack a folding bicycle like the one dude that got into the elevator today.
Monday was the start of another week for in San Francisco for me, and I’m staying in the Courtyard Marriott ‘Union Square’. The name of the hotel is a little bit of a stretch, seeing that Union Square is five blocks away. The area around the hotel does have a good inventory of art deco buildings, and art galleries.
Well, hard to believe it’s been 15 years since the terrible events in New York City (and elsewhere) happened on Sept.11, 2001. At the commemoration in New York City, Democratic Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton fell ill and stumbled a few steps from her motorcade van. (Not good). It turns out she had been diagnosed with pneumonia on Friday. Elsewhere in the country, the new season’s National Football League matches started up. In New York City, the 2016 US Open Tennis Men’s final was played, and won by Stan Wawrinka (Swiss), over Novak Djokovic (Serbian). Check out the beautiful pictures of the tennis stadium and the giant American flag at the start, here.
I took the light rail train down to Pioneer Square on Saturday to check out the ice cube (that I wrote about last Sunday). It’s pretty cool (icy, to be exact), but not a solid cube. Afterwards I walked up six blocks to University Street station and stopped along the way to check out The Mark, a new high-rise building under construction on Fifth Avenue.
Well. I 
drew cash at the fancy Wells Fargo Bank ATM from my account, in downtown San Francisco on Wednesday. Cool! I thought. I can get whatever I need: $1s, $5s, $20s and $100 bills. (When one travels, those $1s and $5s for tips or even small purchases are still very handy).
Then on Thursday, news broke of the massive fraud committed by Wells Fargo’s own employees over many years. ‘Our entire culture is centered on doing what is right for our customers’, says their tweeted apology. Oh really? Since 2011, Wells Fargo employees opened roughly 1.5 million fraudulent bank accounts (to earn more fees for the bank) and applied for 565,000 credit cards. 5,300 employees had been fired. How many executives? None.
It’s Thursday, and I ran out of the office promptly at 1.30 pm, roller bag in tow, to the Embarcadero station on Market Street to make it out to the airport. Our first week of workshops went well, given all the materials we had to scramble to put together. Our new project is about projects*. It is about improvements to a project portfolio management solution. In other words, it is about the systems tools that a large organization uses to track, prioritize, fund and manage its large inventory of capital projects year in and year out.
*So, a metaproject. ‘Meta’ means ‘a concept which is an abstraction from another concept’. Another example: metadata is data about data.
I still get to ride in ‘new’ street cars (‘new’ to me, not new to the world!) – and so here they are, the ones that took me to the office on Tuesday morning and Wednesday morning.
There is a skyscraper construction boom going on in and around San Francisco’s financial district. This is 181 Fremont, with a floor count of 54 and a height of 802 ft (244m). The Salesforce Tower that is under construction nearby will boast 61 floors, and stand 970 ft (295m) tall.
It was the Labor Day holiday today in the United States (so: no work), marking the unofficial end of summer. Back to school for the kids this week (finally), and back on the road for me. I took a late flight out to San Francisco. Our workshop starts too early in the morning for me to make it in with a morning flight. I took a taxi from San Francisco airport for the 14 miles or so to get me to the hotel in Fisherman’s Wharf. Kind of too late to take BART, and the Embarcadero station is still 2 or 3 miles away from the hotel.
On September 9th a 9-10 ton ice cube, with 80 inch (6.7 ft) sides, is going to be placed in Occidental Park in downtown Seattle. The temporary ‘art’ installation is designed by Seattle architecture firm Olson Kundig (OK), and will ‘showcase the stages of the natural water cycle as the ice shifts from opaque to translucent’. I see weather blogger Cliff Mass has issued a challenge to his readers : to estimate the amount of time it will take for the cube to melt. Hmm. Some of the calculation will involve very well known parameters, such as the Specific Heat Capacity* of Ice (2.108 kJ/kgK) and the Latent Heat of Melting** (334 kJ/kg). What one would have to estimate: what the starting temperature of the block of ice will be (it could be well below freezing), and what the surrounding temperature will be.
*The energy required to raise the temperature of one unit of mass of a given substance by a given amount (usually one degree).
**The energy it takes to melt ice and make it into water, with no temperature change.
I went down to Lake Union on late Saturday afternoon to check out how Lake Union Park was coming along. (Also: Google is slated to build new Seattle campus buildings starting in 2017 there, a stone’s throw from the Lake). The park looks OK; I would say it still needs some big trees, though. The pond and surroundings with the Canadian geese is more or less under control. (The geese are notorious for making a big mess with their droppings!).
It was nice to catch two floatplanes on the maneuvering on the lake, one from Kenmore Air, and one from the local TV station.
Hurricane Hermine is making trouble up along the East Coast, causing a lot of flooding. But a New York Times article reports that even ‘sunny day’ flooding has increased sharply in recent years.
From the article: Federal scientists have documented a sharp jump in this nuisance flooding — often called “sunny-day flooding” — along both the East Coast and the Gulf Coast in recent years. The sea is now so near the brim in many places that they believe the problem is likely to worsen quickly. Shifts in the Pacific Ocean mean that the West Coast, partly spared over the past two decades, may be hit hard, too.
Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump made a surprise visit to Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto on Wednesday, acting (gasp!) almost presidential during the whole affair. Alas, the much anticipated speech he then gave on Wednesday at a campaign stop in Phoenix, Arizona, erased once and for all, any hope that he might strike a conciliatory tone regarding his views and proposed policies on how to deal with illegal immigration. (One of his statements has him deport an estimated 5-7 million immigrants in the first hour of his presidency).
The Pew Research Center says in a new national survey, conducted August 9-16 among 2,010 adults, that a large majority (76%) of respondents says that undocumented immigrants are as hard-working and honest as U.S. citizens, while 67% say they are no more likely than citizens to commit serious crimes. The survey also finds continued public opposition to building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border: 61% oppose this proposal, which is little changed from earlier this year.
August has run out all its 31 days. The days are getting shorter, and weather is cooling down.
Check out the animated Trump ‘constellation’ in this article from The Guardian. The inner circle of planets around the Trump Sun endorsed him; a little further out are the ‘supporters’ (but no endorsement), then the wait-and-see Republicans (time is up, people! make your statements), and finally – reminder : you’re still a Republican, same as Trump – the ‘Never Trumpers’. The question is what will happen that first Tuesday in November. Will the orange sun explode into a supernova? (President Trump) .. or lose its heat and become a red dwarf? (Fade from the media glare and attention).
From the article : Marsha Blackburn REPRESENTATIVE, TN : ‘I think he is going to be the next president of the United States and he would be an incredible president of the United States’. Incredible, yes. (Impossible to believe).
I came down with a cold and an ear infection (as I learned when I visited the doctor on Monday) over the weekend, and so: no travel to San Francisco for me this week.
These days we have all the technologies for collaborating remotely – e-mail and text messaging of course, conference calls, remote screen sharing, and so on. What is still rare to this day, in my experience, is using video conferencing. Our on-line meetings are mostly a telephone conference only, and then we use the WebEx meeting software to look at a presenter’s computer screen. And if needed, someone else can be made presenter, and share his or her screen, and so on.
CNN mentions the photographs of Chris Forsyth, a 20-year old Montreal resident in an article, and I loved to check them out. Hey, I have even been to a few.
I have never studied economics formally, and so I had to look up the ZLB and Great Moderation that economist Paul Krugman refers to in a blog post in the New York Times. ZLB stands for ‘Zero Lower Bound’ and means that a central bank (such as the Federal Reserve in the United States) has no ability, or a very limited one, to stimulate the economy with interest rate cuts. The ‘Great Moderation’ refers to a reduction in the volatility of recessions and economic growth cycle fluctuations, that started in the mid-80s. The reduction is attributed to central bank independence (from politics), monetary policy and improved economic structures. But here we are in August 2016 with near-full employment, near-zero interest rates, some eight years after the Great Recession, and wages not going up for the average worker. We still cannot pay workers a living wage (the federal minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 since 2009).
