a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
We were all glad to call this week’s trip out to the project office good, and get out 
of there. I drove my little rental car out to San Francisco International Airport across the San Mateo Bridge, dropped it off at Hertz, and stood in line at TSA’s security check point. I hate those big millimeter wave scanners; they have those at SFO. (The ones where you step into a giant cylinder, do a Hands up! and hold still while the machine does a whole-body image scan).
Some days we work too late to go to the hotel restaurant for dinner (it takes at least an hour by the time the food finally had arrived and everything had been squared away and paid for). So on those nights I stop at the ‘fresh&easy’ grocery store on the way to the hotel and pick up a ready-to-eat salad, a sandwich and some yogurt. (Don’t eat in your hotel room! said a colleague one time. It’s dirty ..people have sex in hotel rooms, you know! I just laughed).
We have major project milestones 
coming up very rapidly on our project. Some teams are falling behind and are being subjected to daily ‘special attention reviews’ : a formal way to describe the daily reporting of the team’s progress against detailed activities. Yikes. My team and I agreed that we don’t want that kind of attention ! Better to knuckle down and get it done – and avoid getting some ‘special attention’.
Hmm .. very interesting, I thought, 
the paint on the Alaska Airlines fuselage, as we stepped into the front door. Could it be a mushroom? What could it be?! I never saw the entire airplane since it was out of sight as I stepped out of it in San Francisco as well.
So I had to resort to an on-line search .. and here is the answer to the mystery. It’s Minnie Mouse’s red polka-dot hair bow. It was a ‘Disneyland’ Alaska Airlines plane that I flew on. Says the DisneyWiki : Minnie Mouse is the girlfriend of Mickey Mouse created by The Walt Disney Company. Minnie is sweet in nature and fun-loving. She is widely recognized by her pink or red polka-dot hair bow.
I voted for the upcoming local elections for the City of Seattle and for King County tonight. (It’s low tech to vote : fill in oval circles with pen, fold up your ballot, stuff in an envelope, and send it in the mail. I guess it’s sort-of high tech when it comes to counting votes. They run the ballots through a scanner. Will voting ever become fully electronic? Maybe not, just the same as paper money that will not go away any time soon).
JAMES YAMASAKI
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.
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.
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).
I developed a eye irritation that bothered me all 
Wednesday – 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.
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.
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.
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.
The leaves from the big maple tree next door are starting to 
come 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!’
[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.
We 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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Bryan, Gary and I watched a Netflix 
on 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 !