a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
I don’t water the patch of lawn in front of my house in summer, and so it dries out and goes brown .. but the hydrangea and slim rose bush are still there to bring a little color. Actually : a scarlet red so brilliant that my phone camera sensor seems barely able to handle it.
One on the backyard fence, and its mate in the tree : as far as I can tell, these were woodpeckers called northern flickers.
[From Wikipedia] The northern flicker is native to most of North America, parts of Central America, Cuba, and the Cayman Islands. It is one of the few woodpecker species that migrate. They eat fruits, berries, seeds and nuts, but their primary food is insects.Their tongues can dart out 2 inches beyond the end of the bill to snare prey. 
Happy Father’s Day to all the dads! You rock! I am posting a picture in memory of my dad that was taken some ten years ago in 2005, at a wine estate close to Stellenbosch in South Africa.
I have a bad cold and so I missed the Fremont (it’s a Seattle neighborhood) Solstice Parade with its naked* bicycle riders this year. *OK, they have body paint on, but they are an evergreen source of titillation for the crowd. The parade celebrates the start of summer here in the Northern Hemisphere.
I did make it out of the house to go gather some food at my local grocery store, though .. and found some nice Japanese gummy candy to cheer me up.
So .. another week in the USA, another Republican presidential candidate (Donald Trump). And another massacre, the chilling hate crime of a 21 year-old white kid methodically shooting 9 black people dead, each with multiple gunshot wounds, in Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. This after sitting with them in a Bible study for an hour. ‘We are peering into the abyss’ one more time, and ‘sorry : no jokes today’ said comedian Jon Stewart on his Daily Show. Just check out the first few minutes of what he said at the Daily Show. Then there’s Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz at a town hall meeting in Red Oak, Iowa on Friday : ‘You know the great thing about the state of Iowa is, I’m pretty sure you all define gun control the same way we do in Texas — hitting what you aim at’.
The week took its toll on me and I was very happy to pull into the rental car garage at SFO. The airport was full of summer travelers that milled around, not seeming to know where to go or what to do. In a way I envy them : they’re not frequent fliers, and probably on their way to exotic islands or getting ready to fly across the Pacific to Asia !
What’s UAT? Well, it stands for User Acceptance Testing in our work management implementation project. The business users are invited to walk through the quality tested product that they are about to be given to work with. At this point it is too late to make wholesale changes to the data, to the screen designs, and to the functions in general. Still, we did find some flaws in the design of our solution and we worked long hours to fix them.
‘I’ll have a Japanese soda’, I told the waitress at the sushi restaurant where we ate on Monday. (That’s all the menu said : ‘Japanese soda’). Hello, what’s this? I thought when the bottle with the narrow neck and the blue plastic top fused onto the glass bottle arrived. There is a carbonated marble in the top that you push into the drink when you open it. Wikipedia says Ramune is one of the modern symbols of summer in Japan and is widely consumed during warm festival days and nights. It has been around since 1876.
We arrived an hour late into San Francisco on Monday morning again (yes, it the fog). As we were leaving the airplane, I noticed a big hand-written note held by the woman in front of me. It said she speaks no English and to ‘Please help me find my connecting flight to Singapore’, her final stop on her way to Kathmandu in Nepal.
Hmm. Doughnuts! (Just a cute picture I found on-line).
Check out this week’s Bloomberg Businessweek What is Code? issue, explaining what computer code is, and how pervasive it has become. Bloomberg says any young person starting out with a career needs to be able to at least read computer code. (Resistance is futile? We will be assimilated?). What about me? I can read the business enterprise software SAP’s proprietary ABAP language – sort of. I have made a career out of telling people what SAP can do, what its data structures look like, and how to configure its basic functions. I’ve mostly been the facilitator interpreting my clients’ business user requirements and telling the ABAP coders how to extend or adjust SAP’s prepackaged functions.
Herman Zapf, the king of letter font design, recently passed away at 96, reports the New York Times. He was born in Germany at the end of World War I and grew up in the turbulent times that followed that; planned to become an electrical engineer. Circumstances dictated otherwise, though. He became interested in calligraphy, and was said to be able to write letters 1 mm in size without using a magnifying glass (I’m sure one would need a very sharp pencil for that). After he became involved in type face (font) design he designed types for various stages of printing technology, including hot metal composition, phototypesetting (also called “cold type”), and finally digital typography for use in desktop publishing. His two most famous typefaces, Palatino and Optima, were designed in 1948 and 1952, respectively.
Let’s go! my two colleagues and I said to each other at 1.30 pm today. We packed up or stuff, bundled into the rental car and headed for San Francisco airport.
‘These are big
samoosas’ I said, after the Indian food our project manager had ordered, arrived at the office. (Samoosas are potato-stuffed pastries). Yes, it must be a Punjabi recipe .. the Punjabis love their food, said my colleague. (He’s from a neighboring province in India. So I had to look up where Punjab is on the map, and here it is.
Southern China Air is the world’s third largest airline, and will soon offer direct flights from San Francisco to Guangzhou .. in southern China, of course. Guangzhou is about an hour’s train ride from Hong Kong. Check out the Guangzhou blog entry I made back in 2011 of a quick trip there. The new SFO> Guangzhou flight will operate 4 times a week non-stop using a Boeing 787 Dreamliner.
I was finally well enough to travel to my project in San Francisco on Monday morning, and off I went. It was already bright and sunny at 5.30 am when my taxi picked me up, and the airport was crowded with summer travelers. It was a very warm 99 °F (38 °C) here in Walnut Creek today. At the end of the day when I got to the hotel room and opened my roller bag that had been in the rental car’s trunk all day, my clothes were warm to the touch – as if it had come out of my tumble dryer !
We walked around Pike and Pine Streets on Capitol Hill to check out how the building boom (of apartments) is progressing – along with the interesting people that are out and about on the street. Here are a few pictures.
My windows are back – so now I can spy on everyone walking by in the street in front of the house again. I could also sit on my little porch, we don’t do that anymore now, do we? Life has become too fretful and frantic.
It’s getting warm enough here in Seattle now (78 °F/ 26° C) so that I need to open my windows late afternoon and into the evening to let the cooler air in.
I check out these free-standing lattice radio antenna towers every time I walk over to Trader Joe’s (grocery store) across the street from them. The ground elevation there is about 410 ft above sea level, to which can be added the heights of each of the three towers – 594 ft (181 m), 637 ft (194 m) and 682 ft (208 m) for an elevation of the top of the towers of about 1,000 ft. A slowly blinking red light at the top warns low-flying objects (as well as UFOs) at night to steer clear !
There was a commercial for a 2016 Subaru Forester on TV tonight with haunting music that I had to look up. I did it the old-fashioned way* : by memorizing a sentence or two and typing it into Google to look up the lyrics. It worked after a few tries, and here it is : Time Will Tell (on YouTube). The singer-songwriter is Gregory Alan Isakov, whom I had not heard of. And lo and behold, he was born in Johannesburg in the year when I finished high school, immigrated to the USA as a child and was raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He has sung with the Seattle Symphony Orchestra. Man! I thought .. you sing such a mean song, one that reaches in and plucks at the strings of my heart.
*Apps such as Soundhound lets one’s iPhone ‘listen’ to music to identify the song
