A really big tornado caused extensive damage and tragic loss of life (51 people found so far, of which 20 are children from an elementary school) in the Oklahoma City area on Monday. The tornado was more than a mile wide, with winds of 180 mph or more. It flattened everything in its wake, ripped the bark from trees with its debris and swept cars and like trucks up like Matchbox toys. There is footage of the funnel cloud and the damage on the website of the public news service PBS at this link http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/weather/jan-june13/tornado_05-20.html
I learned a new word while listening to a discussion of the Denny Substation’s progress on the city council’s web site : there will be a utilidor for the station. Utilidor is short for utility corridor (really just a utility tunnel, to carry cabling and to house equipment underground). There’s not much to see behind the Denny Substation Project site yet .. right now they are scooping up the top two to four feet of soil to clean up oil and grime from the old Greyhound bus station maintenance facility. It’s still a ways to 2016 when the substation will be complete.
The sign on the fence at the Denny Substation Project site. I like the symbols for the substation and transmission (at the bottom). Transmission lines are the high-voltage lines from the power plant to the substation. But the lightning bolt for ‘Distribution’ from substation to homes is a little off .. it should have been one of those wooden poles with a cluster of drum-shaped transformers, not?
So .. it’s not hard to see why Microsoft is encountering resistance from their installed Windows 7 user base that have been forced into the gaudy Start screen tiles of Windows 8 that screams color and wiggly little updates at them. What a shock to one’s senses if one had a desktop with a dreamy wallpaper background ! It’s in your face, and it’s ‘noisy’. And of course Microsoft prods its users to sign up for a Microsoft account for many of the apps – such as Mail, Skydrive, the Store. You can even sign in onto your machine with a Microsoft account (not local a password) which will then save your settings in the cloud and make your desktop, Surface tablet and Microsoft phone all look the same (does anybody have all of those?). No thanks, I think. If that account password gets lost in the clouds, or hacked, then I am toast.
As for the problem of landing on the Metro Start screen at boot-up, I actually found a remedy for that, at extremetech.com .. http://www.extremetech.com/computing/139960-how-to-shut-down-windows-8-easily-and-how-to-boot-to-the-desktop. So now I boot up directly into the desktop, the way Windows 7 did. I still don’t have a Start button and Start menu, but that’s OK since I have shortcuts on the desktop or below on the task bar for all the apps I use every day. Everything is now an ‘app’ I guess .. even the monstrous Office products Excel and Word. Which by the way, in the 2013 versions now run in the cloud as well, and allows you to store your documents in the cloud. ‘So that your files are accessible from anywhere’. Yes, OK, but not when you’re actually in the cloud flying at 30,000 ft and your airline still does not have wi-fi on board. And so it goes. Some new things are really cool, and others solve some problems – but create others.
Here’s the infamous Windows 8 ‘Metro’ Start screen that has ex-Windows 7 users up in arms. Good for a phone or a tablet, but really too ‘in one’s face’ for a desktop computer. I have moved some tiles around and hidden others, but there is still a ways to go. But I plan to spend most of my time in the desktop screen, anyway.Is this not a better way to go? I think it is. (Massive file back-up migration going on in the background .. all the pictures files I have from 1995 and earlier to this day, all 48,000, are getting backed up). Check out the red shutdown button in the left corner that I added as well. (In standard Windows 8 I have to pull up the side menu – the ‘charms’ menu – and do two clicks to shut down).
The picture is from Thursday. I am standing on the corner of 7th Ave and Olive Way. I had just left the Vessel bar/ watering hole where I had a beer with a few colleagues after work. The ‘Olive 8’ condo tower still has 5 units left, but it seems like the opportunity to snap up a condo on the cheap from the distressed developer has now come and gone. The building was completed in 2009, and one bedroom condos typically listed for $500,000. One condo for sale on the property website Zillow had been sold in Nov 2010 for $328,000, probably by the developer to a speculator. The listing price (it’s a one bed, one bath condo) is now back up to $495,000.
On the left is the still-new Olive 8 condo building on Olive Way and 8th Ave in downtown Seattle, outlined against the afternoon’s clear sky.
My new ThinkCentre with Windows 8 has arrived, and I managed to fire it up successfully on Thursday night. I have to move some files (especially my large library of pictures), and do some consolidation. I will write about my impressions of Windows 8 later. The ‘desktop’ part of it is much like Windows 7.
This is the De Haar Castle in Netherlands, from my new machine’s rotating desktop wallpapers of European castles. (I did not know there were castles in the Netherlands!).
Got something confidential that you want to send to ‘The New Yorker’ magazine for publication.. but you want to remain completely anonymous? To do that, previously there was the mailing address of the magazine (1925), later joined by a phone number (1928) and much later by an e-mail address (1998). But e-mail addresses and the location of the computer from where it was sent is traceable and not good for super-secret communications. So now in 2013 there is the ‘Strongbox’ on the Tor network. Check out the steps below .. I am no encryption expert but it looks pretty cloak-and-dagger, spy-versus-spy super-secret to me! On the upside The New Yorker cannot divulge their confidential sources to say, the FBI .. but on the downside : they cannot verify the authenticity of the material easily, either.
I watched an animated movie called ‘Grave of the Fireflies’ from Ghibli studios last night – because the cover had a quote from movie critic Roger Ebert that said it belonged on a list of the 10 best war movies of all time. Well, I did not quite know what to expect, but it was harrowing to watch. This is not a feel-good pop-cultury Pixar movie. To me the message was ‘War is brutal, and its consequences show no compassion to defenseless people’ (such as children).
One of the happier scenes from the movie. Seita has to take care of his little sister Setsuko after they lost their parents in the aftermath of World War II.Movie critic Roger Ebert’s comment on the Rotten Tomatoes website. (Roger Ebert passed away earlier this year).
A few of us from Seattle with family will go on the Princess Cruise shown below. We will try to manage the potential hazards as best we can (sinking ship, adrift with no power, seasickness!). I have really not been outside of London except for a train ride up to Birmingham, so I am really looking forward to see Ireland and Scotland (and the Loch Ness monster*).
*The Loch ness monster is a cryptid, from the Greek “κρύπτω” (krypto) meaning ‘hide’. It is a creature or plant whose existence has been suggested but is not yet recognized by scientific consensus. Kind of like Bigfoot (Sasquatch), the ape-like creature that some people believe inhabits the forests here in the Pacific Northwest.
It looks as if two weeks of dry weather is coming to an end today, and we had beers on Bryan and Gary’s deck tonight to enjoy the last of it. Check out Bryan’s ‘Elysian Superfuzz Pale Ale’ beer, brewed with blood orange to give it a citrussy taste. I buy the little blood oranges here at the grocery store when I see them. They are small and sweet and make you feel like a vampire when you bite into the juicy dark red fruit. Njarr !
The Elysian microbrewery’s Superfuzz Pale Ale is brewed with blood oranges .... like these. It really does look as if there is blood in the orange!
Rocket man Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors, had a great week. His electric car company reported $11 million in profit for the latest quarter (first time it’s in the black, or is that in the green?), and the company’s stock is up 38%. The Tesla Roadster uses a three-phase Alternating Current (AC) induction motor. The AC induction motor was first patented by Nikola Tesla in 1888, is about the size of a watermelon, and can run at up to 14,000 rpm .. but instant torque is available at any rpm (Whoah). I’m reading all of this here on the Tesla Motors website http://www.teslamotors.com/roadster/technology/motor.
Tesla, aged 37 in1893, photo by Napoleon Sarony (from the Wikipedia entry for Tesla).
Nikola Tesla (born 1856, died 1943) was a Serbian-American, an electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, an inventor that worked for Thomas Edison for some time, but then struck out on his own – and how. He would build fantastic inventions and show them off, was capable of speaking eight languages, could memorize entire books, and visualize his machines and contraptions in his head. In 1960 the unit of measure for magnetic field strength was named a ‘tesla’ in his honor.
The ‘crisis’ in the Dow Jones pre-crisis and post-crisis the the Wall Street Journal refers to in its front page article about the DJIA reaching 15,000 for the first time on Tuesday, is the Lehman Brothers/ World Financial/ Great Recession crisis of 2008, of course. But there are other crises that have certainly not played themselves out fully – such as the European debt crisis, the repeated US debt-ceiling wrangles in Congress and the US unemployment crisis. And the USA is still awash in cheap money with the Federal funds rate sitting at zero almost 5 years after 2008.
From the front page of today’s Wall Street JournalHere’s a better view of what’s really going on .. the historic average P/E ratio of the S&P 500. The ‘now’ referred to in ‘is falling sharply now’ is Aug 2010. (I couldn’t find an up-to-date graph). The average S&P 500 P/E ratio today is about 15 or 16 – so it has stabilized (or is heading up again?) and sits at about at the long term average.
The ABBA museum has opened in Stockholm. (Yes, yes. I’m an ABBA fan. Is there anyone that is not?). There’s a red telephone in the museum for visitors, and supposedly ‘only four people in the world has the number’ (named Agnetha, Björn, Bennie and Anni-Frid). Hmm. So if it rings, pick it up, says the website (can I wrestle it away from the person that dared get there ahead of me?). Björn Ulvaeus was very modest when Natalie from the Today show (morning TV show in the USA) interviewed him, saying that their timing was right and for some reason many, many people around the world just liked the music that they produced. He also said that it was ‘a little weird’ to play such a big part in creating a museum for oneself — but the city of Stockholm had been asking them for many years to do that, and they obliged.
Here’s a picture from a Swedish newspaper DN’s website. Björn Ulvaeus is being interviewed inside the museum. That’s a much younger Björn behind him in the famous park bench photo shot for the cover of the first ABBA’s Greatest Hits album. That’s Agnetha on the left; they were married at the time – but later divorced. The album (in vinyl of course) was one of the very, very first music albums I bought. I loved every song on it.
Temperatures reported by Kin5 TV on Monday. Monday’s high was 87 ºF (30.6 ºC) and the previous record high from 1957 is 79 ºF (26.1 ºC).
I thought it was warm on Monday – but didn’t realize until the evening news that the 87 ºF (30.6 ºC) we had in the city was quite an aberration. It was the highest May 6 temperature on record, and by a wide margin.
So .. does a beach have to have sand? Madison Beach here alongside Lake Washington does not really have sand, and the water is not salty. We have to make do with what we have since it’s a heck of a drive out to the open ocean’s beaches here from the city !
The scene at Madison Beach park at 5 pm on Sunday afternoon. The water is still cold, so only the bravest souls venture in this early in the season. It is 2.2 miles from where I live (A) to Madison ‘beach’ on Lake Washington (B). I walked out there; it’s downhill most of the way. And then I cheated and caught the No 11 bus to bring me back three-quarters of the way.
It feels like summer here in Seattle with the warm temperatures lingering into the evening after sunset. Saturday was also the official opening of Seattle’s boating season, and so the summery weather is a happy coincidence to that.
I spotted this ‘Tokyo dog’ truck here on 15th Ave on Capitol Hill. If I find it again I will try their Shinjuku veggie dog : apple sauce sausage with butter teriyaki onions, wasabi mayo and nori (seaweed).And here is a t-shirt that’s for sale from their website. Looks to me like a play on Godzilla – that gargantuan ‘dog’ stalking the Space Needle.
We have a high-pressure cell hovering over us this weekend – keeping the clouds of the jet-stream away, and giving us a beautiful clear blue sky* and warmer temperatures (70’s º F/ 20’s ºC).
*And just why is the sky blue? Because of Rayleigh scattering. In plain English, the molecules of the earth’s atmosphere scatter the shorter wavelengths of light from the sun more than the longer ones, and the human eye sees the blue. If our eyes were more sensitive to violet light, the sky would have been violet. When the sun sets, the scattering of the red color wavelengths become more predominant, and we see red and pink).
The Seaboard building with Friday’s blue sky behind it. Constructed in 1910 as offices, the upper floors have now been turned into condominiums for people that like to live right in the city.Here’s a Google street view photo (same building on the left). After work I walked up Pike St (center of the picture) to catch one of the buses on the right that stopped by the white arches of the Convention Center in the distance, to take me to my home on Capitol Hill.
Speaking of capitalism (Wednesday’s post), I will have to wait until October before I can get my grubby fingers on the new US$100 bill. The first $100 bills were issued in 1862 .. and by the end of 2010, a total of 7 billion hundred dollar notes were in circulation according to the Federal Reserve (more than two-thirds of these overseas). Of course the new note has several new security features – to make it harder for counterfeiters such as North Korea that is known in particular for producing extremely high-quality but fake $100 bills. My favorite security features from what I read on-line are the blue 3D ribbon woven into the note’s fabric, and the micro-printing reading “The United States of America” on Ben’s collar.
This sticker on the back of a parking sign here on 15th Ave in Seattle promotes the anarchists’ point of view (the faq stands for Frequently Asked Questions).
With Wednesday being May 1, there were street marches for workers’ rights and immigration reform here in Seattle. Everything went OK but after 6 pm things turned ugly in downtown Seattle. Most of the marchers had dispersed by then, but a small group of self-described ‘anarchists’ started confronting the police, and damaged cars and windows by throwing rocks. So some 17 people were arrested, and 8 police officers hurt – but mostly bumps and bruises. My take? Hey, you’re not going to get an argument from me that we’re doing just fine with capitalism in the USA. Capitalism is killing our morals and our future, argues Paul Farrell on the Wall Street Journal’s website Marketwatch : http://www.marketwatch.com/story/capitalism-is-killing-our-morals-our-future-2013-04-27?link=kiosk. We cannot put everything up for sale. The examples he mentions : “for-profit schools, hospitals, prisons/ outsourcing war to private contractors/ police forces by private guards, almost twice the number of public police officers/ drug companies’ aggressive marketing of prescription drugs directly to consumers, a practice prohibited in most other countries.” But to think we can live in a society with almost no government, no laws and no police (libertarian socialism, which seems to me pretty close to what anarchists stand for) – that is just a pipe-dream.
I had to get up with the birds on Tuesday – at 5 am, to make sure I was ready for an important 6 am conference call. But what was that noise outside? Light pellets of hail like we had the other day. Amazing. Anyway, let me jump in the shower and wash my face, I thought. The directors I talked to were in Chicago, I only had a 5-minute slot with prepared remarks, and I did not want to sound like I just rolled out of bed! Conference call over with, I went back to catch another 30 minutes of sleep. My stomach was still a little queasy from something I ate the night before, but I had to head out to the Red Lion hotel in downtown Seattle. It was the location of a rare event : my firm had most of the 400 or so of the Seattle team attend a whole afternoon workshop. So I wanted to attend and see all the faces and meet lots of new people. Done with the workshop, we could get refreshments and socialize, which I did as well. To socialize is hard work for me, since it does not come quite naturally the way it does for that ‘business pro’ guy in the National Car commercial that mixes business with .. business. Then it was time to catch the bus up the hill to kick back and make some dinner. Yay! I made it to the end of the day.
