a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
I cook my veggies with a little light olive oil and water with the lid on the pan, and I tried some red cabbage on Friday night. I love green cabbage, but I see red cabbage has ten times more vitamin A and twice as much iron as green cabbage, so maybe I should stick with the red.
We don’t know where humans first started to cultivate cabbages, but it was most likely somewhere in Europe around 1000 BC. By the Middle Ages it was widely grown and eaten in the Middle Ages in Europe.
At 12 noon I got an automated notification from Alaska Airlines that my flight was delayed by 1h 20m, but then as the original departure time approached, they canceled the delay and changed it back to the original departure time! Luckily I a. noticed the new message* and b. still had enough time to make it out to the airport for the flight.
*I turned off almost all ‘push’ messages from the apps on my phone to try to stem the tsunami of messages. So no messages from New York Times or King5 news. No, I do not want to get updates about another mass shooting, this time at a community college in Oregon. What is there to say? A crazy guy with a gun that was way too easy to get/ that he should not have been able to get, shoots 10 people dead. Everyone is shocked. (Is everyone still shocked?).
The Safeway neighborhood grocery store here in Walnut Creek has closed its doors after 50 years. It was my go-to location to buy yogurt and bananas to help me through days when I would miss lunch. Safeway is headquartered in Pleasanton, California, just a few miiles from our project office here in Walnut Creek. Safeway is actually in private ownership as of January 2015 after a buy-out by private equity investors led by Cerberus Capital Management.
Tuesday was one of those in-the-belly-of-the-beast days for me. The beast is our project and and the belly is all of the processes for submitting final updates to our specifications, our coding and the proof of testing in our Quality System. We work in a very large enterprise system and careless changes or updates can break large sets of production data and live functionality for other users. (Obviously a very bad thing!). At the same time with all of this going on, we have started to train the end-users, and my team has fanned out over several remote locations in Northern California to sit in on the training. I got to ‘hold the fort’ here in Walnut Creek.
It’s Monday but I don’t have an airplane picture to show. Check out the
California sky from my hotel room as I checked in tonight. (Earlier than usual; usually it’s dark!). I had an isle seat on the plane and people squeezed in beside me before I could take a picture (how rude!). And a little later when I had my tray table down and notebook computer open and three other things on it, and then the window passenger needed to get out. So – ahem – bad timing with that request for me to get up – but hey, normally I welcome the opportunity to get up and stretch my legs. And we all know that ‘trapped’ feeling if you’re squished against the window and you have to go !
By the time I remembered to take a look at the ‘blood moon’ on Sunday night, it was too late. It was 10 pm and the moon was again glowing bright white. Oh well, so I resorted to checking out pictures of it on-line. And I will have another chance to see it for real in 18 years!
Here is a very nice animation made by NASA.
I joined Bryan and Paul at Fort Flagler State Park on Saturday wh
ere Paul’s RV trailer was parked. The State Park is basically located at the northeast corner of the big Olympic Peninsula.
Here is more information from Wikipedia : Fort Flagler State Park is a Washington state park on the site of Fort Flagler, a former United States Army fort at the northern end of Marrowstone Island.
Fort Flagler was a Coast Artillery fort. It was established in 1897 and activated on in 1899. The post was named for Brigadier General Daniel Webster Flagler, an American Civil War veteran who served as the Army’s Chief of Ordnance. The fort was closed in June 1953.
From Fort Flagler State Park, visitors can see Port Townsend to the northwest, the cranes at the Navy base on Indian Island to the west, and Whidbey Island eastward across Admiralty Inlet. Flagler Road (SR 116) terminates inside the park.
My new iPhone 6s landed today and I finally got it set up. I was about to abandon the sync to my desktop iTunes backup when some web site offered that one should try one’s old password for iTunes, and voila! it worked. (Apple, you have a bug to fix). Setting up my business e-mail needed MobileIron; a product that offers encryption and security for businesses with BYOD policies. It’s a chore to set it up, but once it’s up it disappears into the background. Oh! and I lost my cable internet connection for awhile in between all of this just to make it a little more interesting.
*Bring Your Own Device (an acronym that may be a little too close to BYOB Bring Your Own Booze, not?)
It was a busy week and our work
on the project is not nearly done for the week, but at least I got to go home on Thursday and work in Seattle on Friday. There was news of a terrible accident on the Aurora bridge in Seattle, though : a ‘Ride the Duck’ ‘amphibious’ tourist vehicle colliding with a bus, killing four international students and wounding many others. It was really an accident that involved two cars, one bus and one boat-on- wheels.
Here’s a nice diagram from Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal that explains what Volkswagen did to cheat during emissions tests of its diesel cars. The automaker could face U.S. fines of $37,500 per vehicle, the EPA told reporters last week. With around 482,000 of its diesel vehicles sold in the U.S. since 2008, this could mean a penalty of up to $18 billion.
This hard hat* is on display 
at the training center in San Ramon where I supported the training session. P.G. and E. stands for Pacific Gas and Electric. PG&E was founded in 1905 and provides natural gas and electricity to most northern California, from Bakersfield almost to the Oregon border..
Our training day started on time – no mean feat, since the trainer had to set up a router with a bunch of notebook computers in the room given to us, and also fretted she did not have enough printed binders – but it all worked out in the end. At the end of the day at 5 pm, I decided to stick around a little before attempting to drive up to Walnut creek on Interstate 680. It paid off : traffic was moving nicely by the time I headed north.
My travel for this week
is a little different : it is Sunday night and I have already arrived in San Jose here in the south end of the Bay. I have to support a training session that starts at 8 am in the morning close by. No way to make it in to the airport AND drive out here in traffic that early! On the way here I saw streets called Technology Drive and Woz Way*.
*Nickname for Steve Wozniak, inventor, electronics engineer and computer programmer that single-handedly developed the 1976 Apple I, the computer that launched Apple (from Wikipedia).
This week’s Federal Open Market Committee meeting was months in the making, with economists expecting as far back as January that by now the federal funds target rate here in the USA would move up from its current 0-0.25% rock bottom level. The rate was taken down from 5.25% to zero in a very short time, to combat the world-wide 2008 financial crisis. So here we are, seven years later and it is still right there at zero. There is almost no inflation in the USA (at least officially). Low inflation is not good in some respects; it means the economy is not very robust (providers cannot charge more for goods and services, and workers don’t get pay raises). The other numbers are also mixed. Unemployment is down to 5.1% but the labor force’s participation rate is relatively low. Check out this great graphic from Bloomberg Business magazine.
Here’s a bear – I am sure a California grizzly bear* – holding the State of California in its paws. The flowers are California poppies, the State flower. (There is little natural history exhibit on display in the International Terminal at San Francisco airport).
*California grizzly bear was a sub-species of the large North American brown bear. The last hunted California grizzly was shot in Tulare County, California in August 1922. Later, in 1924, a grizzly known to roam an area of the Sierra Madre Mountains (Santa Barbara County) was spotted for the last time, and thereafter, grizzlies were never seen again in California.
I found this little ‘guide’ as to how to network at a party, from the Wall Street Journal’s Wednesday paper interesting .. even though this is NOT my kind of party. There are too many people, it’s a room full of strangers or it’s a business event, and therefore not really a party, now is it?
There are at least a dozen wildfires raging in northern California, with the Valley Fire (west of Sacramento) and the Butte Fire (east of Fresno) two of the largest fires ever recorded in the State of California. The Butte Fire has already scorched 65,000 acres (that’s 100 square miles). Hundreds of homes and buildings in the town of Middletown CA (pop. 1,300) have burnt down, effectively destroying all of it. Some 24,000 California residents have evacuated their homes.
Check out the 2015 California Fire Map here.
Here’s my Monday morning picture, from my airplane seat at about 6.45 am. There was fog at San Francisco airport which delayed us by an hour, but we made it in fine (with no gremlins on the airplane engine right next to me*).
*Such as the gremlin making trouble for the airplane in ‘Nightmare at 20,000 ft’ in the Twilight Zone episode from 1963 and Twilight Zone, The Movie (1983).
It was the 2015 US Open Tennis Mens’ Final today and I watched most of it. I wanted Federer to win against Djokovic, but in the end he succumbed to the world No 1’s steadiness and nerves. Federer turned 34 (!) in August, but promised he will be back at the US Open next year. I am very happy about that.
From the US Open website’s report : ‘Yet for the undisputed best player in men’s tennis, he received surprisingly little attention during his two weeks in New York – the media glare reserved for Serena’s run at the Grand Slam and the exquisite play of a resurgent Roger Federer, who advanced to the men’s singles final without the loss of a single set. But when the last ball was struck at the 2015 edition of America’s Slam, it was the steady Serb who was holding his arms aloft in triumph, bringing them down just long enough to wrap them around the men’s singles trophy. In doing so, Djokovic completed arguably the greatest Grand Slam season since Rod Laver won all four majors in 1969.
Photos are from usopen.org.
Apple has announced their new iPhone lineup at the geek hootenanny* known as Apple’s September Event last week. I am going to spring for a new iPhone as soon as these are out, and I will have to choose between 6s and the bigger 6s Plus. I will pick the smaller one I think, and then what finish color? .. probably again Space Gray. There’s Silver, Gold, Space Gray and Rose Gold (read : Pink! so no. Not for men, I would argue). For some reason I have never liked gold for watch faces and watch bands, and so Gold is out, leaving the Silver, with its white bezel.
The other color to pick is the phone’s leather case and it’s really between black and a brown for me. Black is classic but maybe a little boring. So .. Space Gray with Black bezel & Black Case or Silver with White Bezel & Brown case.
*An old country word for ‘party’, used in a Bloomberg Businessweek article that describes the tremendous engineering and design effort that went into the new 3D Touch and other features that come with the new phones.