Willem's Planet – Page 192 – a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010

July 14, 2015July 14, 2015

Monday/ we are in PR1

I am not in San Francisco on the project site, but I am still working on it ! In fact, our code and configuration settings for our solution made it into the production system which is called PR1. SAP installations are gigantic databases with all kinds of associated database servers, application servers, web servers and other connections. The PR1 refers to the Production system server installation, and distinguishes it from other supporting installations such as a QAS-Quality Assurance and DEV-Development installation.

Anyway, making it into the Production system after 15 months of work is a big deal. I thought : I guess we can say our solution has shipped. ‘Ship’ is a cult word in information technology. It is the ultimate deadline in a series of deadlines in delivering a new product, or a major upgrade of a product. There is money involved, and careers, and reputations – all of which could be tarnished with a missed shipping date. Ouch.

Shipping — A page from Bloomberg’s ‘What is Code?’ issue from a few weeks ago. Check out the programmer ‘productivity enhancers’ !

July 13, 2015

Sunday/ Gas Works Park

Gas Works Park here in Seattle is a 19.1 acres public park on the site of the former Seattle Gas Light Company gasification plant. It is located on the north shore of Lake Union. The park contains remnants of the a coal gasification plant that had operated from 1906 to 1956. The city bought the facility to make a park out of it, which opened to the public in 1975. Here are some pictures. I had never been to Gas Works Park (in spite of its hosting of the 4th of July fireworks every year), a situation that had to be corrected immediately !

GW Park — Gas Works Park is located on the north of Lake Union. I marked the location of the Google Seattle office and the Fremont Troll (a cement sculpture under the Aurora Bridge.

IMG_3924 sm — Looking west from the Park toward the Aurora Bridge and the Fremont Cut that connects Lake Union to Puget Sound.

IMG_3927 sm — Another view of the old Gas Works equipment.

IMG_3918 sm — Parts of the old Gas Works plant’s insides are on display and open to the public as well.

IMG_3929 sm — These paragliders were just checking out their equipment and getting ‘the hang of it’ on the mound in the park. I don’t think there is nearly enough elevation there to take off from.

July 12, 2015

Saturday/ the tallest 20 in 2020

I have not checked up recently on the world’s skyscraper constructions .. so here is an update! (In another life in another universe I would have been an architect, I believe). The Kingdom Tower is under construction in Jedda, Saudi Arabia. It will be the first tower to reach all the way up to 1,000 m with an inhabitable floor count of 167 (2 below ground), and a total height of 252 floors if the uninhabitable ones in the spire of the tower is counted as well. It is estimated cost is US$ 1.23 billion, and it was designed by American architect Adrian Smith, who also designed Burj Khalifa.

Check out http://www.skyscrapercenter.com/ and Tallest 20 in 2020 for beautiful line drawings of the world’s skyscrapers.

July 12, 2015August 22, 2017

Friday/ it’s a goblin shark

It’s Shark Week on Discovery Channel here in the USA .. and here is a goblin shark gobbling up a fish. These stills are from the Discovery website, here. This creature is a living fossil – in that it is the only one remaining from a family of sharks with a lineage dating back 125 million years. Its specialized jaws can snap forward to capture prey. The elongated flattened snout is covered with ‘ampullae of Lorenzini’ that enable it to sense minute electric fields, as little as a 10 millionth of a volt.

July 10, 2015

Thursday/ getting around like a tourist

I could tell the tourist season is in full swing when in 3 minutes I spotted the Emerald City Trolley, the Duck and the monorail during my visit to downtown on Wednesday. Tourists that go up in the Space Needle report that there is a haziness in the air looking north, and even looking south to Mt Rainier. Much of the haziness is actually smoke from wildfires from way across the border in British Columbia, Canada!

IMG_8182 sm — The Emerald City trolley does several tours. The cheapest deal is a one day hop-on, hop-off Scenic Downtown Tour pass that goes for $29.

IMG_8184 sm — And here’s the Duck from Ride-the-Duck tours (cost $29). And look! the venerable monorail train from the Space Needle is just arriving at Westlake Center.

Westlake-Center-Tour-Route — The Ride-the-Duck tour route.

July 9, 2015July 9, 2015

Wednesday/ glitch hunt

Wednesday was a rough day for big technology in the United States. First, a computer problem in United Airlines’s reservation system caused the FAA to impose what is known as a ground stop at 8:26 a.m. ET. The stop only lasted about two hours, but this impacted 4,900 flights worldwide. Then at 11.32 am ET the New York Stock Exchange went out for 3 ½ hours. While this was unnerving, these days there are some 11 other exchanges that could still be used for trading, though. Finally, Microsoft announced it was laying off 7,800 jobs as its mobile phone unit and Nokia acquisition continue to struggle. Far, far away in Finland, the head of web communications in the Prime Minister’s Office, Pekka Pekkala minced no words about the impact of these layoffs on the city of Salo (pop.54,000).

July 8, 2015July 8, 2015

Tuesday/ sweating in Seattle

IMG_8186 sm — My air conditioner, as ‘installed’ in my bedroom. (It is a temporary installation).

It was the warmest June ever here in Seattle with eight days at 85°F (30°C) or higher in June. On Sunday, east of the Cascade Mountains, the mercury hit 113°F (45°C) in Walla Walla in central Washington State. Yikes!

I usually manage to cool down my bedroom during warm summer evenings by opening the window for a few hours .. but that strategy has not worked these last few weeks. So it was a relief to get my hands on a used portable conditioner, and now I can cool down the bedroom nicely before bedtime.

July 7, 2015July 8, 2015

Monday/ is that a gun in your pocket?

.. or are you just looking to get shot? The New York Police Dept sent out a tweet discouraging people from buying this cell phone case. I looked it up – it was on sale on the web site http://www.japantrendshop.com/ but they pulled the item from the catalog. (Smart thing to do). Go for the ‘Samurai Umbrella’ instead, also on offer on the website.

July 6, 2015July 6, 2015

Sunday/ the Space Needle panocam

Check out the cool Space Needle ‘panocam’ at this link. If it is night time, one can always click on the ‘Best Views’ links on the panel on the right to see recorded views from previous days. This one below shows a cruise ship at one of the two terminals here. In 2015, Seattle will host 192 cruise ships and more than 895,000 passengers. (I still have to take my obligatory cruise up to Alaska! Yes!).

July 5, 2015

Saturday/ 4th of July

We celebrated Independence Day on Saturday here in the United States. Here is a picture of the fireworks over Seattle’s Lake Union. The colors of the fireworks were mostly red, white and blue (of course).

0596 — Fireworks on Saturday night over Seattle’s Lake Union. (Source : http://lakeunionbeat.com/)

July 4, 2015May 30, 2021

Friday/ protonic blue metallic

This gleaming low-slung machine that I spotted here on Republican St and 15th Ave may look as if it is about to vroom across the intersection – but it actually made no sound as it accelerated forward and turned left.

It is BMW’s plug-in hybrid sports car made from carbon fiber and aluminum, the i8. Tesla owners can rightfully point out their cars are completely electric .. but it’s a bit of an apples-and-oranges comparison. The i8 is shaped like a supercar. I see a reviewer reports that the seats are so low that you ‘roll’ out of it after nudging the butterfly doors up and away from you.

IMG_8117 sm — The BMW i8 is a plug-in hybrid sports car made from carbon fiber and aluminum. You’re going to need to part with at least $135k to buy this machine. BMW calls the color ‘protonic blue metallic’.

July 3, 2015July 3, 2015

Thursday/ falling off a cliff

Check out these charts of the Shanghai Stock Exchange’s composite index. As of the end of the day Friday in China, the index is down 27% from its June 12 peak, wiping out some $2.4 trillion of value. Individual investors* account for about 80 percent of trading on mainland Chinese exchanges.

*Investor or trader or speculator? I’d say one would you have stay in the market for oh, one year, to be called an investor.

SSE Comp 1 yr — Where will it stop? A one year view of the Shanghai Stock Exchange composite index shows how far it has gone up in one year (150%). But even with a 27% loss from its recent high there is still lots of room to fall.

SSE Comp MAX — Twin peaks? This chart shows the massive 460% commodities-driven boom in 2006-2007 which fell back to earth with the index going sideways for 6 years before the recent run-up to 5,000.

July 2, 2015July 2, 2015

Wednesday/ will the Grexit happen?

Will the Grexit happen? (Greece exiting from the Eurozone and going back to the drachma, and forge ahead on its own). Greece owes its creditors way more than it can pay, even after several years of painful austerity that has crimped its economy by 25%, and left half of young people unemployed. On Tuesday night it defaulted on a key payment to the International Monetary Fund, becoming the first developed nation to ever default on its international obligations.

So now there is a referendum on Sunday, which makes no sense in a way. As the New York Times says : Imagine the fate of your country hangs on a yes-or-no question. The question is drafted in cryptic, bureaucratic language and asks you to decide on an economic program that no longer exists. Leaders in neighboring countries are begging you to vote yes. Your government is begging you to vote no.

150702094217-greece-bailout-flow-new-custom-1 — A graphic from CNN.com showing what might happen after the referendum.

July 1, 2015July 1, 2015

Tuesday/ the Venus and Jupiter conjunction

There was a smattering of stargazers and their telescopes out at Volunteer Park on Tuesday night when I walked by there. I soon found out the excitement was over the two brightest planets in the night sky – Venus and Jupiter – that were to appear very close together in the night sky. They only appear to do so, though, because of their locations in the night sky. At the time of the conjunction, Venus was 49 million miles from Earth while Jupiter was more than 10 times farther, 564 million miles. Check out this video from NASA. As time goes by, the planets appear closer together.

June 30, 2015

Monday/ the heat is on

It’s already warm here in Seattle with temperatures heading toward 90 °F/ 32 °C for the weekend. (The warm weather usually arrives after the 4th of July weekend). The dry conditions and warm weather is not a good combination, of course. A fire in the Wenatchee area in central Washington State has destroyed 24 homes and heavily damaged three businesses since Sunday, and thousands of people have been told to be ready to evacuate on a moment’s notice. Hopefully more fires can be contained early on. The 2014 Carlton Complex was the largest wildfire in Washington State history : the fire burned 300 homes and 400 square miles.

June 29, 2015

Sunday/ rainbows in the crosswalk

The City of Seattle has painted 11 crosswalks in the Capitol Hill neighborhood with rainbow colors to just in time for the weekend’s Gay Pride celebrations. It’s not an original idea, though – the Castro neighborhood in San Francisco has had a few of these since October of last year.

IMG_8074 sm — This rainbow-colored crosswalk is at the corner of Pike and Broadway in Seattle’s Capitol Hill.

June 28, 2015June 28, 2015

Saturday/ Greenwood car show

We went to the annual Greenwood Car Show on Saturday. It is organized by the Greenwood Knights and a fundraiser event for local non-profit organizations. Vintage car owners are invited to exhibit their driving machines along Greenwood Avenue North in the Greenwood and Phinney neighborhoods of Seattle.

IMG_3881 sm — Here’s the scene at Saturday’s Greenwood Autoshow. This is a 1970 second-generation Corvette Stingray. The chrome bumper on the front soon after disappeared (in model years after 1972).

IMG_3906 sm — This restored Seattle City bus hails from 1963. It is 40 ft long and seats 51 people. The bus was built in Loudonville, Ohio and dubbed a “Transi-Cruiser”, one of a fleet of buses that enabled Seattle Transit to extend service north of 85th Street to 145th Street.

June 26, 2015June 28, 2015

Friday/ a landmark ruling on same-sex marriage

It turned out to be a very eventful week here in the USA. Says CNN : ‘After a momentous week, same-sex couples can now marry in all 50 states, the Confederate flag’s historic hold on the political institutions of the Deep South is fraying by the hour and Obamacare, after defying another attempt to dismantle it, is now reaffirmed as the law of the land’. In another win for the President (he had to fight his own party), the Trans-Pacific Partnership was approved by the Senate by the absolute minimum of votes that were needed (60) on Wednesday. This is a 12-nation trade deal years in the making, that would link 40% of the world’s economy — including the United States, Japan, Australia, Canada and Mexico.

6-26-2015 10-19-32 PM — Whoah. The White House lit up in rainbow colors, to celebrate the Supreme Court’s ruling on same-sex marriage.

June 26, 2015June 28, 2015

Thursday/ R for Rainier

I love this red R neon sign in the window of the Union Bar in Hillman City where we had a bite to eat on Wednesday night. It is a nod to the Rainier beer brand (which is no longer brewed*), and indirectly to Rainier Mountain and the Rainier valley. Hillman City is located a mile further south than Columbia City, and in August 2013 Seattle Weekly named Hillman City the “Best Up-and-Coming Neighborhood” in Seattle. The original neon “R” from the brewery is now on display at Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry.

*Correction posted 6/28 : Rainier beer is still being brewed, but by the Pabst Brewing Company that now owns and markets the brand.

IMG_8222 sm — Here’s a 2013 picture from inside the main hall of the Museum of History and Industry in South Lake Union in Seattle with the Rainier brewery display in the back.

June 25, 2015

Wednesday/ ‘every state flag is wrong’

There is a lot of discussion in the media about the legitimacy of public displays of the Confederate Flag in the wake of the terrible shooting last week, and menacing pictures that the gunman posted of himself on holding a Confederate flag. Well, says the Washington Post : ‘As long as we’re on the subject of flags that should and should not be flown in states, let’s take a moment to talk about state flags’ .. and then it proceeds to just mercilessly poke fun at the state flags of the USA, here.