a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
Another Thursday fly day has come, and it felt good to get in my little rental car with its semi-flat-or-not-who-knows tires and head out the San Francisco International airport. It was a hectic week at work, and on Tuesday there was no water and no air conditioning in the office. We had to go outside to makeshift Honeybucket construction toilets! Man!
I see I messed up : 
there were copies of this weird-looking USA Today newspaper in the hotel lobby this morning, and I did not grab one. I should have! Strange, I thought : USA Today changed their logo. Well, the iconic 1989 ‘Back to the Future’ movie with Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) had a copy of the USA Today from the future in it.
The future was today : Oct 22, 2015.
So USA Today printed a special edition of the newspaper that looked like the one in the movie. I see they were for sale on their website, but are now sold out there as well. Aw.
I had to rush this morning
to get into the morning commute traffic on highway I-680 South to drive down to San Ramon for an 8 am meeting. Well, I had been in the rental car (it’s a red Toyota Corolla) only a minute when I noticed the tire pressure warning light on the dash was on. Now what? And which tire? The dumb little light does not say, of course. Better hope there is still enough air in to make it down to San Ramon, I thought. After I stopped in San Ramon and checked out the tires, it looked as if the front tire was underinflated. So this afternoon before I headed back, I found a gas station. Luckily all California gas stations are required by law to provide free air and water, so it was easy to add some pressure to the two front tires. That did not take care of the warning light, though. So there. Who cares. Now I drive around, probably with overinflated front tires, and a warning light that still says some tire is underinflated.
My Monday started early, but our departure was delayed by a ground stop due to fog in San Francisco. I guess it was time .. we have gotten away with fog-free Monday mornings in San Francisco for too long, I guess.
I don’t have a lot of games on my iPad, and don’t play much – but Scrabble is still a mainstay. In expert mode the Scrabble opponent ‘CPU1’ plays a mean game, plunking down 7-letter words every other turn sometimes. PROCAINE = a local anesthetic, PERFECTA = a bet in which the first two places in a race must be predicted in the correct order, ORBATID = a genus and species of mite, TOUZLE = a disheveled or rumpled mass, especially of hair. QUAGGIER was my word. And at this critical junction in the game, man! I needed an open N or S to build AILERONS. But alas, there was none, and I lost the game.
We watched ‘San Andreas’ last night : a 2015 disaster movie with Dwayne Johnson ‘The Rock’ and earthquakes and a tsunami in California. So of course, I felt I wanted to separate fact from fiction by looking up a few things. Magnitude 9 earthquakes in California? Not real. The complete collapse of Hoover Dam? Not real. One or two tall buildings toppling over in downtown San Francisco? Yes, that’s possible, but not all of them. The movie mentions the biggest earthquake recorded in history – (with a little help from Wikipedia) : The 1960 Valdivia earthquake (Spanish: Terremoto de Valdivia) or Great Chilean earthquake (Gran terremoto de Chile) of Sunday, 22 May 1960, was the most powerful earthquake ever recorded, rating a 9.5 on the moment magnitude scale. It occurred in the afternoon (15:11 local time), and lasted approximately 10 minutes. The resulting tsunami affected southern Chile, Hawaii, Japan, the Philippines, eastern New Zealand, southeast Australia, and the Aleutian Islands.
Our local Seattle elections are coming up again and I got my ballot, so I have to study up on the candidates and initiatives. (Washington State is one of 24 in the USA that allow voter initiatives – so the citizens can gather signatures and put initiatives on the ballot).
Some of this years initiatives : an initiative proposing that the State of Washington crack down harder on people trading dead animal parts (including those of a pangolin), one proposing higher property taxes for early childhood education for underprivileged kids, another proposing for $12 a month in property taxes for maintaining and improving Seattle’s transport infrastructure, and a Charter Amendment for increased oversight into police actions.
Thursday came quickly this week since the countdown for our November Go-Live has started. There is a Go/ No-Go meeting on Monday to garner agreement from all the major stakeholders that – the data conversions had come together, end-user training had gone well enough, and that the business is ready to start using the new work management solution that we are rolling out.
I spent the last five days working
with the BW and BOBJ team here to make some corrections to critical reports that we need for our go-live in November. Any SAP installation is a giant database with tens of thousands of tables and hundreds of millions of records.
BW stands for Business Warehouse, SAP’s data warehouse product. To be sure, a data warehouse is also a database, but one with pre–processed statistical data that is ready for reporting. It typically contains statistical daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly figures of costs and numbers of transactions of certain types from the raw SAP database so that reports can quickly and efficiently be produced ‘on demand’. (With no data warehouse, it will could 20 minutes or longer to produce a report. And then you find out oh! I want to select other data as well, or adjust the selections .. another 20 minutes. And so on everyday). So what is BOBJ? It stands for (SAP) Business Objects, and it is a product that runs in a web browser, and provides quick access to the business critical information available from any device and from anywhere. (How much of this product have we sold today? What percentage of the scheduled work for today is done? and so on).
Electric and hybrid cars abound in California, since drivers can use them in the HOV (high occupancy vehicle) lane – and the State mandates that car manufacturers sell a lot of zero emission vehicles. By the 2025 model year, automakers that sell vehicles in California will have to make 15.4 percent of them ZEV. But the New York Times report in an article that there are not nearly enough charging stations yet : one public charger for every 10 electric vehicles; about 15,000 in California (33,000 in all of the USA). One woman says of a man that hogged a public charging space while not charging his car and said ‘he has to run one more errand’, then walking off, that she seriously considered keying his car. What is that? I wondered .. and then found out uh-oh! it’s running your car key along someone’s car, making a deep long scratch in it.
It’s Monday, and there is no Columbus Day holiday for me. No holiday? asked the cab driver early this morning. No, no, I said, and ‘in fact Columbus Day has been abolished in the city of Seattle’. It is true : more cities are recognizing Native Americans on Columbus Day, and activists are pushing for a renaming of Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples Day.
Hmm .. I thought as I walked by this poster on Sunday. 
Would have been sort of interesting to check out the crowd and hear the arguments for a basic, guaranteed income. It is worth it to note that the State of Alaska has a system which provides each citizen with a share of the state’s oil revenues – although the amount that has averaged around $1,300 p.a. in recent years, is far from enough to live on [Wikipedia]. Switzerland may actually hold a referendum on the issue. The date is not yet determined and it is not an initiative supported by the Swiss federal government .. but the proposal is for some $2,800 per month for each citizen. Now that is starting to sound like real money to me.
We had an inch or more of rain in the city on 
Saturday, and with the dry summer months behind us* gardeners can now certainly curtail the watering of their lawns and other greenery. The leaves are coming down from my neighbor’s big maple tree and I sweep them up every weekend. That way I have enough room in the yard waste bin every week – and I don’t have to go out and buy 25 giant yard waste paper bags, the way I had to one year when I waited until Thanksgiving !
*Yes, it rains a lot less in summer in Seattle. Check out the little graphic : only 0.7 and 0.9 inches on average for all of July and August.
An estimated 250,000 Syrians have been killed and some 11 million have fled the country to escape the civil war* that has now been raging 4½ years. The USA’s limited involvement has made little difference so far, and now Russia has joined in the conflict as well. The map is from Friday’s issue of TIME magazine.
*What’s so ‘civil’ about war anyway?, as Guns’n’Roses noted on their 1993 song ‘Civil War’
Thursday came as it always does, and I could head out to SFO and to get onto the Alaska Air flying machine to Seattle. I was dozing off when I thought I smelled ketchup .. is that ketchup? Why yes, the guy next to me was the culprit : slathering a hamburger he brought onto the plane with ketchup while watching The Incredible Hulk on his computer.
Our project team went to Palomino’s for munchies and a beer on Wednesday night, in the shadow of the Bay Bridge and the Salesforce Tower. Just this morning (Thursday) there was talk on the radio that the Salesforce Tower could be a harbinger of another tech bubble that is about to burst. Consider : the building is going to cost a billion dollars. And from Wikipoedia : ‘ .. as of 2015, it is one of the most highly valued American cloud computing companies with a market capitalization of $50 billion, although the company has never turned a GAAP profit since its inception in 1999′.
So ..! My loyalties are divided in the upcoming 2015 Rugby World Cup match-up between South Africa and the (gasp!) American team, scheduled for Wednesday afternoon in The Stadium, Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, in London. Yes! There actually is an American team playing rugby. South Africa suffered a completely unexpected loss in their pool match against Japan and is still holding out hope that they can make it through to the final matches. As for tomorrow’s game against the USA, let me just say : may the best team win.
I made it into SFO for another week on the project. The end of the project is in sight : we have started with what we call the ‘Dress Rehearsal’ data conversions. This is for a roll-out of the pilot solution in November, and then there is one more in December. And then we’re done! Yay!
Sunday was the wettest day on record for the city of Columbia with 6.71″ that was measured at Columbia Metropolitan airport. By Sunday morning at 7 am, some areas on the South Carolina coast had gotten 20 inches of rain in just 4 days. State officials the rain from hurricane Joaquin that is churning out in the Atlantic as a thousand-year storm.
My friends and I went to the Cinerama movie theater here in downtown Seattle on Saturday to go check out The Martian, the movie of Andy Weir’s self-published book about a marooned astronaut (portrayed by Matt Damon) on Mars, written in 2011. I am told the movie could not nearly capture all the technical and scientific details from the book .. which is probably understandable because of time and mass-appeal constraints in the movie! Nonetheless, we liked the movie a lot. I will now have to go read the book even though I know how it all ends.
