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Saturday/ all things LEGO

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Picture from the LEGO website. The reindeer is new .. and that’s an elf hat on its head
Le·go
ˈleɡō/

noun
trademark

1. a construction toy consisting of interlocking plastic building blocks.
2. from the Danish phrase leg godt, which means ‘play well’.

We watched The Lego Movie last night .. a non-stop animation action flick of all kinds of Lego characters, vehicles and sets. (Spoiler alert : two humans, a dad and his son, make an appearance at the end). The movie has a good message : ‘Everyone is special, and capable of doing great things – even if you sometimes think you’re not’.

I read on Wikipedia that the movie is an American-Australian-Danish collaboration, and from an idea that goes back to 2008. Most of the animation is computer-generated, but the animators used only available LEGO characters and building blocks. It’s hard to imagine how many countless hours must have been spent putting all the scenes together. If I had a DVD for the movie I would stop at some scenes and just check out everything that was built to make up some of the very elaborate backdrops. Some are of the city, some of the Wild West with horses and pigs and all, and some are of outer space.

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Friday/ now panic and freak out

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A sobering graphic from TIME magazine about containment and a worst case scenario. Inaction is not an option.
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The left part of the graphic is a poster from Work War II in Britain. (It was rediscovered in 2000 and is now seen everywhere in print and on t-shirts). The right part is a spoof.

Ebola hysteria is raging in the media coverage – and in the real world – here in the United States. A patient died in a Dallas hospital on Oct 8 and infected two nurses caring for him (so far). One of the two nurses had a fever, did the right thing by calling the Centers for Disease Control to ask if she could travel by airplane, but they nonetheless did not stop her from flying.   The airplane she was on made 5 more flights the next day before the airline got word of their passenger and pulled it from service. The plane had already been cleaned three times, and now the microfilters will also be replaced. The two pilots and four flight attendants on board the flight were placed on paid leave for 21 days (the maximum time it takes for Ebola to appear in newly infected people). Ebola screening at four major U.S. airports has been stepped up and some schools in Ohio and Texas temporarily closed.

Is all of this necessary, given that the disease is contracted through bodily fluids?  How about some alarm for the flu season that is upon is, and the fact that flu is much, much easier to contract from a sick person?  The 2009 H1N1 Flu Pandemic killed more than 10,000 people in the United States.  But does everyone get his or her flu shot?  No – not even half of the population here in the States do.

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Thursday/ more Embarcadero

I found myself spending the last hours of this week’s trip in the Embarcadero again, to attend a meeting.  Afterwards I had to run out and take BART to the airport, but managed to snap a few pictures (of course).

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I’m standing on the corner of Mission and Fremont St. The building across the block is 100 1st St and belongs to the University of San Francisco. Built as recently in 1988, I see it has a ‘postmodern’ style (which is hard to explain, even after reading up about it!).  The blue billboard in the middle quotes Steve Jobs : ‘If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.’
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And here is a brand new building going up right there at the same street corner, for the global cloud-computing company called Salesforce.com. They are somewhat of a competitor to SAP and as with SAP, whole consulting practices have sprung up, dedicated to help big companies implement their software.
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Wednesday/ irritated eye drops

I developed a eye irritation that bothered me all IMG_5764 smWednesday – and that is hopefully just an allergic reaction.  So off to Walgreens.  The pharnacist recommended the standard Walgreens brand called ‘irritated eye drops’.  So 1. Why is the container pink? and 2.  Are the eye drops ‘irritated’?  Finally, as I tried to use the stuff, it turned out it’s in a little glass bottle. So it’s not possible to gently squeeze it to make a drop come out. I ended up shaking the bottle, making a number of drops fly out and hoping that one hits my eye. Or if they end up close enough to my eye, my eyelashes can pick some of the stuff and I can get it into my eye that way.  All of which makes more than my eye irritated.

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Tuesday/ I am ‘Kaiser Wilhelm’

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Wikipedia’s picture of Kaiser Wilhelm II. 

A colleague of mine (he was born and raised in Germany) teases me by calling me ‘Kaiser Wilhelm’ now and again.   Hopefully it’s just because of the similarity between our first names!

I read on Wikipedia of the Kaiser  ‘Bombastic and impetuous, he sometimes made tactless pronouncements on sensitive topics without consulting his ministers, culminating in a disastrous Daily Telegraph interview that cost him most of his power in 1908′..   He was partly responsible for starting World War I, then was an ineffective war leader, lost the support of the army, and abdicated in November 1918.

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Monday/ on the wing

I had just settled into my seat at 20C on the Alaska Air flight out to San Francisco this morning, when a woman with a pink track suit came by, and lifted up a very large garment bag – also pink – into the overhead bins.  It filled two whole side-by-side bins, taking up six feet of space!  Ahh .. of course, can only be one thing : a wedding dress,  I thought.  Sure enough, that’s what it is, she confirmed soon after when someone inquired what it was inside.

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It’s 6.30 am and I’m sitting in row 20 on the Alaska Air flight at the gate in Seattle.
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Quiet Sunday

It was a quiet day for me .. I went about my business of doing my chores at home and getting ready as I always seem to do for my early Monday morning trip.   I remembered only late in the game that the Seahawks (football team) were playing the Dallas Cowboys (in Dallas).   By then it was 20-20 in the fourth quarter.  The Seahawks pulled ahead with a successful field goal, but then the Cowboys scored twice to make it 30-23.  Oh well.

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We don’t seem to have much oranges and reds in the way of fall colors here in Seattle .. but then there are many trees that are evergreen. This tree is on 16th Ave close by my house.
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Saturday/ multi-verse or not?

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[From Wikipedia] The Higgs boson stands on its own in the updated Standard Model of elementary particles (electrons, protons and neutrons are made up of these and are therefore not elementary particles).
Our Saturday night movie fare was ‘Particle Fever’, a documentary about the Large Hadron Collider. The confirmation of the long-postulated Higgs boson particle’s existence gave further credibility to the Standard Model, but the giant experiment’s results were inconclusive in another way.  The weight of the Higgs boson is thought to point to one or two completely opposite views of the universe.   One the hand the proposal is that there is one cosmos (universe) with a cosmological constant (that indicates the energy density of the vacuum of space – but don’t ask me what energy density of the vacuum of space is!).   The other proposal is that there are multiple universes, and that each has a randomly assigned cosmological constant. What the Higgs boson’s mass indicate?  Well, it fell right in the middle of the values thought to support the two opposite views!   Man!  We need more data!  (And as it turns out, the LHC is already getting warmed up for another series of atom smashing in early 2015).

which one
On the left is the Standard Model that says there is one universe, underpinned by the Higgs boson that gives mass to all the particles. Its mass is thought to be 125.6 GeV. (Giga electron-volt. Electron-volt measures energy, but at this sub-sub-atomic level, units for mass and energy are interchangeable). Anything significantly heavier than that would have pointed to us living in one of several universes – AND that there is really no such thing as a ‘standard model’ of elementary particles.

 

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Friday/ it’s falling

The leaves from the big maple tree next door are starting to IMG_5727 smcome down in large numbers.  If I sweep them every weekend, I can manage to get away with not buying giant yard waste paper bag at the home depot store.   (I put them in my giant yard waste bin).

And luckily, the big dog next door that used to bark at me from the fence while I sweep the leaves, left with his owners when they moved out.  Voertsek!*, I would bark back at it when I could no longer ignore the ruckus.

*An Afrikaans word, from the Dutch ‘voort seg ek’ , commonly applied to animals.  It means ‘go away!’ or ‘get out of here!’

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Thursday/ the little boxes of Daly City

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Here’s the view from my BART train on the way back to the airport today, as we were approaching Daly City, south of San Francisco.

[From Wikipedia] ‘Little Boxes’ is a protest song written and composed by Malvina Reynolds in 1962, which became a hit for her friend Pete Seeger in 1963.   The song was reportedly inspired by the boxy houses of Daly City and expresses alarm at conformity and loss of individuality.   Well, the little boxes are still there today, but I see in writings of historians and sociologists that the people populating them are actually quite diverse with large Filipino and other Asian communities there.

Here are the words for the song.

Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky tacky
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes all the same,
There’s a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look the same.

And the people in the houses
All went to the university
Where they were put in boxes
And they came out all the same
And there’s doctors and lawyers
And business executives
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

And they all play on the golf course
And drink their martinis dry
And they all have pretty children
And the children go to school,
And the children go to summer camp
And then to the university
Where they are put in boxes
And they come out all the same.

And the boys go into business
And marry and raise a family
In boxes made of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same,
There’s a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

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Wednesday/ too many #%@! fonts

10-9-2014 4-29-29 PMWe had to work hard this week to round up the hundred-some documents for our solution’s design.  These are done in formatted Microsoft Word documents with imbedded tables and several fonts, and then posted onto Microsoft SharePoint. (SharePoint enables users that collaborate on documents to access them via the intranet).

So what went wrong? Well, we found that documents checked out of SharePoint and checked back in again, lose their formatting.  So Big Bold Headings now disappeared into the body of the text on the pages, and indented sections are flush against the left margin.  It took a lot of time to fix – too much time, and in the end we chose substance over style.  We will fix the formatting later.  Grrr.

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Tuesday/ super sandwich

We ran out to our favorite sandwich shop here in Walnut Creek today at lunch time. I ordered a vegetarian one with ‘everything’ on : cream cheese, lettuce, bean sprouts, cheese, green pepper, cucumber, sunflower seeds and raspberry jam.

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Monday/ The Embarcadero

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I’m on BART (blue dot) and my way from the airport to The Embarcadero – where my firm’s office and our client’s head office are (red pin).

I finally got to ride on BART today : the veritable and well-ridden by now – Bay Area Rapid Transit – in service since the ’70s and showing it.  Taking it to Walnut Creek at rush hour was a crowded, sweaty affair!

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The San Francisco Ferry Building was completed in 1898. The clock tower is 245 feet tall. The inside was renovated in 2002, and the ground floor is now filled with restaurants and food shops.
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Here’s the Bay side of the Embarcadero, and the Bay Bridge. (It is the older western section that connects downtown San Francisco to Yerba Buena Island).
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This is the gorgeous inside of the Ferry Building, the second floor. The second is mostly empty (not full of stores and people, the way the ground floor is) and a guard wanted to know what I wanted. ‘I want to take a picture’ I said. May I? Yes, no problem, go ahead, he said.
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Here’s what the BART train looks like. Not too shabby on the outside, right? Most of the BART stations seem very utilitarian, not splashy or with artsy displays at all.

Over lunch time I got to see some of the sights in the Embarcadero area in downtown San Francisco.  It was a warm cloudless day. I did not have a lot of time and just walked straight to the waterside to check out the Ferry Building to see the water in the Bay.

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Sunday

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It’s a 40 minute walk to the north end of the Washington Arboretum from my house.

It was a mild blue sky day here in the Pacific Northwest (72 °F/ 22 °C).  So off I went this afternoon, for a little urban walk down hill and up to the Washington State Arboretum.  That took about 40 minutes, and I then I hopped on the bus to get back to the house to get my laundry done and pack my bags for San Francisco.

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Saturday/ living ‘tiny’ (with large thoughts)

Bryan, Gary and I watched a Netflix tinyon Saturday night called ‘Tiny : A Story About Living Small’. movie.  The backdrop (from Wikipedia): In the United States the average size of new single family homes grew from 1,780 square feet (165 m2) in 1978 to 2,479 square feet (230.3 m2) in 2007, despite a decrease in the size of the average family.   The ‘small house’ movement – also known as the ‘tiny house movement’ is a return to houses less than 1,000 square feet, some as small as 80 square feet (7.4 m2).

The main story is about the effort of two young people who decide to downsize their lives by building a ‘tiny home’ on a flatbed trailer.  In the end it took a year and $26,000.  The movie features several other small houses as well.  To me, the larger points made are the most important.   Figure out what you want from life and how you want to live early on. In the really-big-picture perspective, life goes by in a flash.  Make conscious choices. Don’t just do what everyone else does (such as buy a house that’s so big and expensive that you can enjoy hardly anything else in life).  It is not necessary to keep up with the Joneses’ bigger house and newer car.  You are not a ‘better’ person because you own a big house !

 

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Friday/ at the aeroporte

I am at the airport here in San Francisco, heading home.  It is Friday and even at the early hour of 2.30 pm there was a little more traffic on the freeways* on the way here than we have on Thursdays.

*I should not say freeway.  I see on Wikipedia that the word freeway was first used in February 1930 by Edward M. Bassett, but it is now an outdated word.  We should just go with highway.  Or parkway.

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The Japan Airlines Boeing 787 snuck in here to where I am sitting without me noticing it. They actually have 15 of these new ‘birds’ in their fleet.
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Thursday/ wait for the synch

Before and After
Here’a a before and after synch of the Alaska Airlines mobile app on my phone. The ‘after synch’ screen (on the right) shows that I have checked in, that the flight is on time, and that my seat has changed from the back of the bus to closer up front.

Systems and applications are going ‘mobile’ – even colossally large corporate enterprise system such as SAP.  Of course, only small parts of its ‘back-end’ functions and data are getting deployed to mobile devices.  The deployment is in the form of the little apps that appear on the mobile device (such as an iPhone or iPad).

In the case of SAP, part of the project that we are working on is to provide field technicians with a mobile device that shows their work orders for the day, along with the technical documentation that they need to perform the work. (It’s a mobile deployment of SAP Plant Maintenance  called ‘SAP Work Manager’).  Every day before the technician goes out to the field, they will ‘synch’ their mobile device with the back office.  The synch can also be done several times a day.   Nothing is instantaneous, though!  We still live in the real word.  There are real zeroes and ones that need to get transmitted in little wireless internet protocol packets, so that the data can be written as magnetic zeroes and ones in the memory of the device.  And out in the field the band-width may be limited – or there may be no connection at all.

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Wednesday/ the SAP Plant Code

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Here is where Plant Codes are set up in the SAP configuration menu. It’s not a matter of jumping in and doing it in 5 minutes! It takes many weeks of discussion and collaboration with the business to settle on what needs to be set up for the ‘enterprise’ as SAP likes to call it.
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‘Complete Plant’ says this defunct neon sign at the dry cleaner by my house in Seattle. We’re actually headed back there with little local power plants (solar or otherwise) getting installed into new buildings.

We started configuring our new solution for our project on Wednesday.  Company Codes and Plant Codes are critical underpinnings of the whole SAP installation for a company, and one has to get these right to make the system work.   I can write a book about the SAP Plant Code and how it should be set up (but I will not do that here !).   The Plant Code is where lots of equipment are co-located – that the company uses to make stuff or to run its business.  How many to create, or where to draw the lines for separate Plant Codes is sometimes hotly debated !

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Tuesday/ California almond milk

Hey! you’re in California, FullSizeRender (2)where 99% of the USA’s almonds are grown, I thought as I grabbed this almond milk in the grocery store tonight.  It is very tasty – but they’ve cheated of course, adding vanilla flavor to it.

A sandwich, a salad and the milk did it for me.  Not a fancy dinner but such a nice break from eating in the hotel restaurant downstairs and waiting for one’s food to eventually appear on the table!

 

 

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Monday/ speed boarding

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I sat in row 14 on Monday morning, so I did not get to go down the stairs outside and board our flight at the back door!

It was interesting for me to see on Monday morning that Alaska Airlines sometimes uses the aircraft’s rear door for boarding the back rows of the airplane.  It’s not something that is done often !

I think there are studies out there that show that boarding all window seats first, then all middle seats, then all aisle seats is the quickest – but to do that in practice is a major challenge.   The airline will likely upset the super platinum elite frequent fliers that like to all board first – to go sit in the front of the airplane, or to go sit in their chosen seat further back.