a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
Thursday comes quickly when you are busy, and we were very busy this week, trying to squeeze in a last few hours of work before bidding each other a nice holiday on Thursday as we headed out to the airport. It would be Monday January 5 before the project team convenes again and take up our challenges. First, it is time to go home and take a break.
We have had on and off rain here since Monday. I read on-line that San Francisco has received 8.43 inches this month, the most for a December since December 1950 ! Hmm. And it definitely feels a little like Seattle here this week.
This is our last week on site for 2014 here at the project, and the Project Manager wants all – or he will settle for ‘most of’ – the specifications done – D.O.N.E. – by Friday. Are you done yet, with yours? he asked me today. Well .. define ‘done’, I hedged. (Done could mean it’s complete but not reviewed, or it could have been reviewed but the review comments still need to be incorporated, or it could have been reviewed with comments already incorporated, and approved). It’s always a challenge : is the specification complete enough and defined enough so that the developers can go ahead and code the conversion program, or the custom function that we want to create to extend the standard SAP functionality.
The airport was surprisingly full of travelers on Monday morning – that did not know what to do, or where to go (so they were infrequent travelers, and in a way I envy them). Maybe some of them were in Seattle for the Seahawks-San Francisco 49ers football game (the Seahawks beat the 49ers again). My flight was delayed again, and by the time we were in the air it was almost 10.00 am. There was fog and rainy weather in San Francisco, and they had to close one of the runways.
As we approach the winter solstice the days are getting ever shorter here in the North. The sun now sets at 4.18 pm already .. so it was completely dark when I went for a walk.
My neighborhood of Capitol Hill does not go overboard with Christmas decorations, but I would say one in three or one in four houses has some lights up on the house, or on the fence, or in the garden. Does my porch light count? (No, I would say not!). That’s all I have. I put ‘icicles’ on my front gutter one year, but that was several years ago.
Bryan, Gary and I watched an episode of ‘Rome’ last night (an HBO TV series that aired some time ago, and is now available on Amazon Prime as streaming video). We were not too wild about it, but it prompted us to check refresh our history knowledge : over which years did the Roman Empire exist? We know of course, that the Romans were around at the birth of Jesus Christ in the year 0. And certainly, before that, the Romans did not refer to the years as 100 BC, since they could not peer into the future. It turns out the Roman empire was at its height in 117 AD. So, after the birth of Christ. Anno Domini means ‘In the Year of our Lord’. There is no year 0 between the years designated as 1 BC and 1 AD. The Roman Calendar was made over by Julius Caesar and became the Julian Calendar, and several centuries later the Gregorian Calendar came about.
Check out these cool maps of the Roman Empire that I found on-line, at this link.
My enthusiasm for playing Scrabble against my iPad has not waned, and shows no sign of doing that. In fact, I discovered I can switch to German, if I ever get tired of English (sadly, there is no Afrikaans on-line version of Scrabble). The iPad comes up with words that make one say ‘Say whaaat? Are you sure about that one?’ .. such as TEEEI. What is that? Then you realize it is TEE EI = tea egg, just written together. The others are PAAREM = a couple of (PAAR = pair), ESTER-N = plural of ester (a chemical compound), and YIN of course from ‘yin and yang’. And check the bizarre combination of tiles on my rack : Q (with a U, luckily), X and the weird A with the umlaut.
The West Coast was getting soaked with rain today. I did not have a rental car for the week – a good thing, since I could take the train and not worry about accidents and flooding on the freeways.
My Alaska Airlines flight made it out of San Francisco airport after a delay of an hour or so. It was a choppy take-off in San Francisco, with no in-flight beverage service and a bumpy landing in Seattle! Yikes. I guess we are all a little spoiled with smooth flying. Not used to flying in rough weather.
A ‘pineapple express’ from Hawaii is making its way to California, and is slated to arrive by midnight on Wednesday and continue into Thursday. The ‘pineapple express’ is an “atmospheric river” of precipitation carried in on a jet stream from the Pacific (Hawaii). So schools are shut down and shops are barricaded. We are all hoping it does not disrupt our travel plans for tomorrow, but we will have to wait and see !
The US Senate Intelligence Committee’s 600-page report on the CIA’s extensive use of torture – and lying about it, and covering it up – in the wake of 9/11, was finally issued on Tuesday. Torture is a complete violation of human rights. But I guess one has to believe there is such a thing as human rights, and sadly – not everyone does.
Here’s what I read on the plane on the way to San Francisco today – to our perfectly bland cubicle farm in the Walnut Creek office. (It’s from a TIME magazine article about Mark Zuckerburg’s quest to connect the world with Facebook. Facebook now has 8,000 employees, 1.35 billion users, and generated $7.87 billion of revenue last year, a billion and a half of that in profit). Check the full story out here.
When you walk into Facebook’s headquarters for the first time, the overwhelming impression you get is of raw, unbridled plenitude. There are bowls overflowing with free candy and fridges crammed with free Diet Coke and bins full of free Kind bars. They don’t have horns with fruits and vegetables spilling out of them, but they might as well.
The campus is built around a sun-drenched courtyard criss-crossed by well-groomed employees strolling and laughing and wheeling bikes. Those Facebookies who aren’t strolling and laughing and wheeling are bent over desks in open-plan office areas, looking ungodly busy with some exciting, impossibly hard task that they’re probably being paid a ton of money to perform. Arranged around the courtyard (where the word ‘hack’ appears in giant letters, clearly readable on Google Earth if not from actual outer space) are restaurants—Lightning Bolt’s Smoke Shack, Teddy’s Nacho Royale, Big Tony’s Pizzeria—that seem like normal restaurants right up until you try to pay, when you realize they don’t accept money. Neither does the barbershop or the dry cleaner or the ice cream shop. It’s all free.
You’re not even in the first world anymore, you’re beyond that. This is like the zeroth world. And it’s just the shadow of things to come: a brand-new campus, designed by Frank Gehry, natch, is under construction across the expressway. It’s slated to open next year.
I walked down 12th Avenue to the new Starbucks Reserve Roastery and Tasting Room that opened here in Capitol Hill in Seattle on Friday. The feel of the inside is somewhat like that of a microbrewery, with the industrial equipment in use and on display. I’m sure it’s quite a treat to see the roasted coffee beans come out of the roaster, but I did not have time to wait for the next batch to come out. I just did a quick walk-through and checked out the equipment on display. The place was packed with people.
So how do you like your coffee? I checked out Wikipedia’s entry for coffee roasting, and compiled this list –
22 °C (72 °F) Green Beans
165 °C (329 °F) Drying Phase
196 °C (385 °F) Cinnamon Roast
205 °C (401 °F) New England Roast
210 °C (410 °F) American Roast
219 °C (426 °F) City Roast
225 °C (437 °F) Full City Roast
230 °C (446 °F) Vienna Roast
240 °C (464 °F) French Roast
245 °C (473 °F) Italian Roast
250 °C (482 °F) Spanish Roast
Check out the spectacular graphics that came with this week’s issue of Bloomberg Businessweek. They chronicled 85 disruptive ideas or technologies, to celebrate the magazine’s 85-year history.
The U.S. economy added 321,000 jobs in November. 
The economy has now added at least 200,000 jobs for 10 straight months, the longest such stretch in more than 30 years. In Oklahoma City a gallon of gas goes for $1.99 .. the first time in the US that has happened since July 2010. Finally, the Dow Jones Industrial Average continues to go higher and almost got to 18,000 this week. I had to look it up and remind myself that it was at 6,626 in March 2009 ! Yikes .. so starting to look a little scary, quite frankly. The rest of the industrial world is still not doing great.
Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson’s 
mug appears on some Alaska Airlines planes. He is the ‘Chief Football Officer’. Passengers with a No 3 Russell Wilson jersey are invited to board early with the frequent flyers.
And how are the Seahawks doing anyway, this season? Well, they look like the favorites to win their Division and go on to the playoffs. (The playoffs involve six teams from each of the league’s two conferences. The winners of the two conferences play in the Super Bowl).
It’s finally raining in California – and how! Check out these rainfall totals from tonight’s local news here. Not that one rain storm is going to end the drought, but hey, it seems like a great start. San Francisco Airport got more rain in the last five days than in all of 2013.
So .. as I was adding detailed tasks to our project plan on Tuesday, I thought wryly : which one of the six (cynical) phases of the project would we find ourselves in?
These are –
1. Enthusiasm,
2. Disillusionment,
3. Panic,
4. Search for the guilty,
5. Punishment of the innocent, and
6. Praise and honor for the nonparticipants.
It’s always flight 222 on Monday mornings to San Franscisco for me : an easy number to remember. Flight numbers are usually taken out of use after a crash or a serious incident, and the lower numbers are used for premium flights. So is there an Alaska Airlines Flight 1? Why, yes. It’s the flight that departs Washington, D.C. every day at 8 am, for Seattle.
It’s back to San Francisco tomorrow, and so my bags are packed. I see I missed a story last week of a woman that brought her ’emotional support’ pig onto an airplane in Connecticut. (The pig ended up not flying; see the report from ABC News > here). Since I don’t have a pig to take traveling with me, I will confess that back when I traveled to China for three weeks at a time, I would take a book that I loved, and would make very sure I have my iPad with my TIME magazines downloaded and my favorite music on it, though. (To ’emotionally support’ me while traveling).
We woke up to a dusting of snow here this morning in Capitol Hill .. just a half inch or so that stuck to the ground, but not really to the slightly warmer street and sidewalk surfaces.
