Willem's Planet

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?)

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..

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?