Paso Robles is about a 3 hr-drive down from San Francisco on Highway 101.
It turned out to be quite a day of travel for me. After arriving at San Francisco airport, my colleague and I rented a car and drove out to Walnut Creek – on the east side of the Bay. So that allowed me to check in and meet the project’s team members. HOWEVER, there are annual maintenance activities scheduled for a facility in the Paso Robles area, and moi is going to represent the team there tomorrow to observe the work methods and gather information for suggestions as to which improvements could be made to the systems that support the scheduling and execution of the work. So we figured I’d better hit the road sooner rather than later to escape the traffic around San Francisco, and off I went around 2.30 pm. The drive went well, and I pulled into Paso Robles off of US-101 right at about 6.00 pm tonight.
Here’s our Alaska Airlines flying machine (Boeing 737-800) parked at the gate at San Francisco airport. Check out the gloomy fogginess in the air !Here we’re crossing the new eastern span of the Bay Bridge complex. The old truss bridge on the right is scheduled for demolition and will be gone by 2016.Alright, I have to confess I was driving while I took this picture of the blue sky and green signboards on Highway 101 .. but I had both hands on the steering wheel with the phone between them, and took one picture. And there were no cars directly in front of me or behind me.
Google’s home page doodle celebrates John Venn’s 180th birthday. A Venn diagram shows objects that share the same properties graphically in overlapping shapes (usually circles). ‘Transport Has Wings’ is what I will use Monday morning to get to San Francisco!
Here I go .. I’m off early in the morning to San Francisco to my new project at the gas utility company. I don’t know what the work place will look like; I have only worked with one of my firm’s team members before, and with none of our client team. So : brave new world for me.
Bryan, Gary and I went for a walk-about in the Pike & Pine streets on Saturday night as the sun was setting. Here are some pictures.
This is at Pike & Belmont Street. The clouds colored up in beautiful pinks and grays as the sun was setting. It’s still summer for sure, but the days are getting shorter.Vostok Dumpling House serves up Soviet inspired dumplings.Mural art celebrating Moe’s Mo’Roc’N Café’s 20the anniversary. They serve up grunge and rave music, and Middle- Eastern food.
I need some new shirts and pants for work, and went out to Nordstrom’s here in downtown Seattle the way I normally do. I like the Nordstrom brand clothes best : not cheap, but still good value for money. It’s not long before a friendly salesperson comes up and offers to help, which is fine .. but I get my guard up when he/ she brings $220 shirts to the fitting room. The classic ‘up sell’ strategy, it seems to me. The price is never mentioned, just the brand and the quality of the fabric. OK. But the few tailored shirts I had made in Hong Kong when I worked in China – of good Italian fabric – cost $150. The store should come in way below that for a shirt straight off the rack.
The Nordstrom shirt on the left was on sale for $42, a great value. The Hugo Boss shirt was $90, marked down from $150. Expensive even at the sale price – but I couldn’t resist it.
*one of the lines from the 1981 song ‘Here is the News’ by Electric Light Orchestra
I happened upon a group of stargazers at Volunteer Park tonight right after sunset. ‘I have found Mars!’ said one guy. (Should I have asked ‘Can I see, too?’ I didn’t). I read on earhsky.org that this is a good time of the year to watch for Perseid meteor showers as well : they come late July and early August. Watch for them now, is the recommendation. The moon is full on August 10, and its light will interfere with the 2014 Perseids’ peak.
The white spot in the picture is the wide waxing crescent moon. Mars is to its left, reddish, but I could not see it with the naked eye and certainly had no hope at all to catch it with my iPhone camera ! Follow the moon down to the horizon to see a silhouette of the Space Needle.
The trail head sign in the parking lot off of Mountain Loop Highway.Here’s a nice map of the topography of the area. The trail zig-zags across the water flowing down from Lake Twenty Two and the mountain slopes, and most of the trail is in a forest. The trail then lassos around the lake, after which the hikers take the same way down (the way they came up).On the way up, in an area where the forest is not very dense.Here is the view of the lake looking south. Part of the trail around it is a wooden board walk ! How nice after the tree roots and the rocks we had to negotiate on the way up!Lots of green – it is summer after all – and also some colorful flowers.We made it! The obligatory ‘Summit Picture’ (taken with Dave’s camera on timer mode) : Dave, Bill and Willem with Lucy and Ethel in front.
I took a day off from work to go on a hike with my friends Bill and Dave. We hiked a trail up to Lake Twenty Two. (I’m not sure why this lake has a number! Most other lakes in the Mt. Baker- Snoqualmie National Forest here in Washington State have names!).
The drive out there from the city is about two hours. The trail length is 5.4 mi (8.6 km) round-trip. Most of the hike is through forest, but some sections of the trail are out in the open. The lake is at the high point of the trail, with an elevation gain of 1,350 ft (411 m) to the lake’s surface. It’s a nice reward after some 90 minutes of trekking uphill !
Across from the lake is Mount Pilchuck’s sheer northern face. The peak is at 2,400 ft (731 m), so about 1,000 ft (320 m) above the lake surface. Even at this time of the year, thin white waterfalls cascade down on the rock face, and two melting snow packs are still visible on the slopes south of the lake.
The train ride from the airport to Walnut Creek is about an hour.
I got confirmation today that I will start to work on my next project assignment on Monday. It is at a utility company located in the Bay area.
San Francisco airport (SFO) is where I will fly to, but the location of our project office is in Walnut Creek to the north-east of the city of San Francisco. I could fly into Oakland airport as well, but the flights there are not as plentiful as the ones to SFO.
I have new neighbors moving in, and so this U-haul Venture-across-America #116 truck with the striking picture of a goshawk from Alaska’s Tongass National Forest was parked in the alley this morning. The iconic white-and-orange trucks for do-it-themselves movers can be seen anywhere in the country. I love the gorgeous graphics that they put on the sides of the trucks. The whole collection can be seen on U-haul’s website, here.
Here is the U-haul Venture-across-America #116 truck with the goshawk from Alaska’s Tongass National Forest that was parked in the alley by my house this morning ..
.. and a fun thing to do is to look for Sammy the U-haul guy in these pictures. See him? A little guy running with a big U – in the water to the right of the goshawk’s throat.
Here are some of the interesting pictures I came across this weekend with my iPad (and a Scrabble picture).
Hey! I discovered I can switch my iPad Scrabble to German. (Yes, I ‘won’ against the computer but 1. I take a very long time to play and 2. I used all 4 of my ‘find the best word’ assists).This close-up map of Gaza from the New York Times. They also publish harrowing pictures of people dead and wounded from the war there every day, and families grieving over those they lost. Can we not live together in peace on the planet? ‘Before’ and ‘After’ Images of the block marked on the previous picture.There is a severe drought in California and in the south and mid-West of the USA. The darkest red indicates the driest areas.From the Wall Street Journal : Air travel accidents and fatalities statistics over the decades. 644 fatalities so far this year*, and still 5 months to go. *Does not seem a lot, given how many millions of people travel by air, right? It’s just that it’s shocking to learn of a big airplane crash.
We lost our friend Robin to cancer recently. She passed away on June 15, 2014 after a long and courageous battle, at age 60. As her sister Kate told us, “Our bird has gotten her wings.” She was able to spend the last few months of her life in Cincinnati with her sister Kate, step-father, and many nieces and nephews.
So Robin’s good friends Ken and Steve hosted a commemoration today for us : just a few of Robin’s friends and colleagues, telling stories of how she touched our lives.
Why do Americans Stink at Math? is the question a New York Times article asks in an article that I read on the airplane. Check it out here New York Times article.
As reported by the NYT, better ways to teach math has been invented several times in the USA, and applied successfully elsewhere in the world but not here. And school kids with poor math skills turn into adults that are shockingly innumerate. From the article : A 2012 study comparing 16-to-65-year-olds in 20 countries found that Americans rank in the bottom five in numeracy .. One of the most vivid arithmetic failings displayed by Americans occurred in the early 1980s, when the A&W restaurant chain released a new hamburger to rival the McDonald’s Quarter Pounder. With a third-pound of beef, the A&W burger had more meat than the Quarter Pounder; in taste tests, customers preferred A&W’s burger. And it was less expensive. A lavish A&W television and radio marketing campaign cited these benefits. Yet instead of leaping at the great value, customers snubbed it.
Only when the company held customer focus groups did it become clear why. The Third Pounder presented the American public with a test in fractions. And we failed. Misunderstanding the value of one-third, customers believed they were being overcharged. Why, they asked the researchers, should they pay the same amount for a third of a pound of meat as they did for a quarter-pound of meat at McDonald’s. The “4” in “¼,” larger than the “3” in “⅓,” led them astray.
The air plane on my cup of tea looks just like the one that I was sitting in – a Boeing 737-800 with its turned-up wing tips. In the seat on my right was a young Alaska Airlines pilot reading a dog-eared paperback copy of ‘Lone Survivor’ .. a non-fiction book about Navy Seals in Afghanistan.
My United Airlines flight back to Seattle was booked for the usual Thursday night fly-back (bought and paid for three weeks ago), but I wanted to take the first flight out Thursday morning*.
*Flight MH17, Air Algerie crash in Mali last night with 166 on board, Taiwan airplane crash on Wednesday that killed 48 .. maybe all of this made me just want to get the flying over with and get home!
Anyway – these days airlines charge $200 for any ticket change, and I wanted to avoid paying the penalty. My firm’s travel agent recommended to go to the airport early Thu morning, and have the airline agent change the ticket on the spot – then there would no change fee. ‘Plenty of seats left’, there should be no problem.
Alright. That meant I had to get up at 4.30 am, be there at 6.00 am for the 8.04 am flight. I actually did a check of the seats on the flight as I left the hotel : 5 open ones. So I had a shot at it. But forty minutes later when I showed up at the United Airlines counter to claim one, they were all gone. No other flights until the afternoon, and the afternoon flights were full, anyway. Of course. Great. (Not great). Plan B could have been to go to the gate for the 8.04 am flight and hope that seats for no-shows will open up .. but no – ‘I’m not going to do that’, I told the United Airlines agent.
What to do? Spend 12 hours at Denver airport? No. Go get a hotel room to catch up on the sleep I lost this week? Let me check Alaska Airlines, I still have some frequent flier miles in my account, I thought, as I considered my options. Sure enough, there was a 7.00 am flight with open seats. I booked it with miles – hey, why is the internet so slow? It’s 6.05 am already and I have to make it through security and to the gate! I thought.
Security was painfully slow, but done with that, I ran to gate A-52 (52 means it’s a long way there!) .. and made it with just a few minutes to spare. I was on my way home early. Yes!
And here is the real flying machine after we had landed at Seattle-Tacoma airport.
Here is a $1 Presidential coin from 2009, depicting John Tyler, the 10th US President, that I bought at the Denver Mint gift store. It has an edge added to it, possibly of aluminum. It’s a bit of a mystery to me, and I couldn’t find any information about it on-line!
I had a busy day here at the Denver office : wrapping up the hand-over of my duties to new team members, cleaning out my desk and cubicle, and finally doing the rounds and bidding my project’s team members good-bye.
This giant souvenir penny can also be bought at the Denver Mint gift store for $5. I found it irresistible, and so here it is with a real penny. It is made of a light metal alloy. I guess the S stands for souvenir! (Other coins have a D for Denver or a P for Philadelphia in that position to indicate at which mint they were struck).
So when a little bit of time opened up, I thought ‘You cannot have worked in Denver for almost a year, and not make it to the Denver Mint .. let’s go!’. I didn’t have enough time for a tour, and one has to sign up for that weeks ahead of the actual day of the tour anyway – but I could go to the gift shop and ogle the coins and souvenirs on display. I did came away with some souvenir coins. There were $1,600 one-ounce gold coins for sale as well, but I steered clear of those!
It was warm here in Denver today : 94 °F (34 °C), the skies clear for most of the day.
I took a few more pictures during lunch time and after work of my favorite Denver buildings.
The blues of the sky and the browns of the Brown Palace come together nicely in this view. The Brown Palace Hotel was built in 1892 of sandstone and red granite and is Denver’s second oldest operating hotel. (Yes, old hotels are nice to look at but generally not very nice to stay in – even if they have been renovated!).
This is the entrance to the Colorado Dept of Education building on Colfax Avenue. The state seal shows that Colorado achieved statehood in 1876, a hundred years after Independence Day for the USA. Indeed, ‘Centennial State’ is one of the monikers of Colorado. And the motto ‘Nil sine numine’ means ‘Nothing without providence’.Every bit of scaffolding has finally been removed from the Colorado State Capitol, bringing its $17 million renovation to completion.
Release your inner geek! Picture featured on the NIMBL company’s home page.
It’s my last week working in Denver on the SAP implementation project for the oil and gas company here. The project only goes live at the end of the year, but I cannot stay. I will start working soon on a different project, at a gas and electric utility company in California.
So this last week or so I have been handing over my responsibilities to consulting colleagues from a company called Nimbl. Be nimble! is their tag line (naturally). I would say ‘nimble’ is a word that is not used in everyday language. And it reminds me of a guy called Jack*.
*From the nursery rhyme –
Jack be nimble
Jack be quick
Jack jump over
the candlestick.
[From Wikipedia] Jumping candlesticks was a form of fortune telling and a sport. Good luck was said to be signaled by clearing a candle without extinguishing the flame. A variation of this rhyme is featured in the classic song, ‘American Pie (1971)’, sung by Don McLean. It goes as follows:
Jack be nimble,
Jack be quick
Jack Flash sat on a candlestick
‘Cause fire is the devil’s only friend.
The boom of new apartment construction going on in and around my neighborhood of Capitol Hill is probably the most in several decades. The Capitol Hill Seattle blog has a map that shows all the construction, current and planned here. So it’s nice to see older buildings getting a make-over, or a fresh coat of paint – as was the case with the Canterbury Alehouse on 15th Avenue. The medieval castle gate in the middle of the building is the best ! .
The newly remodeled Canterbury Alehouse on 15th Avenue.
I picked up this awe-inspiring picture below (awe at the destructive force of fire) from King5 News .. and I had to find out exactly where it was. The picture’s description only noted it to be in Tumwater canyon, but that was good enough. There is a tell-tale mile marker and ‘left turn ahead’ road sign in the picture. By zooming all the way in, I could just barely make out that the first digit on the mile marker might be a 9. Then I did a virtual mouse click ‘drive’ all along Highway 2 with Google Streetview and voila! there was the combination of mile marker 92 and the left turn sign, shown in broad daylight. The three tall pine trees on the right was a match as well. Will those tall trees survive the fire? Probably NOT. More than a 100 homes have been lost already in other fires nearby.
[Copyright : Michael Stanford] This is what Tumwater canyon looked like on Friday/ Saturday. That is mile marker 92 on US Highway 2 in the middle of the picture, with the Wenatchee River running alongside it.This must be close by as well, looking up.Here’s a Google Streetview picture of the mile marker 92, shot in 2013.And here is Highway 2 on the map, with the section from Cole Corner Market (mile marker 85) to the town of Leavenworth (mile marker 99) currently closed to traffic.
This is Thu night after my arrival from Denver, at Sea-Tac airport. I am waiting in line with about a dozen people for an empty little Yellow Cab to show up (like the one in the background). P.S. Yes, we’re a bunch of greenies here in Seattle – the taxi company is trying hard to make its patrons NOT feel guilty about taking the taxi and not the light rail train or a bus!Tracy Taylor from King5 news telling drivers to the Mariners (baseball) and Sounders (soccer) games this weekend to pack a lot of patience. Westbound highway I-90 is going from 4 lanes to one for a week, and 60% of the drivers will have to find alternative routes into the city.
Ah, the joys of summer : long days of sunlight, nice weather*, hopefully some time away from work to relax. But for frequent travelers (me), there are even more people at the airport, the airplanes seem even fuller, and sometimes you have to wait 15 or 20 mins for a taxi whereas in winter there is no wait at all. (Admittedly winter brings other travel challenges like snow!).
*Or not so nice? It’s warm and very dry, and out in eastern Washington State howling winds fan a set of wildfires called the ‘Carlton Complex’ that have scorched 213,000 acres so far.
On Thursday night reports came out that 298 people were killed on board Malaysia Airlines MH17, apparently shot with a ground-to-air missile even though it was flying at 33,000 ft ! So who did it, and how to get to a crash site that is in a Ukranian rebel-controlled war zone?
From NPR news : As they try to piece together how Flight MH17 was brought down, U.S. experts are analyzing a recording released by Ukraine’s government that it says is a string of intercepted phone calls in which separatist rebels acknowledge that they shot down an airliner.
However, as NPR’s Dina Temple-Raston reports, U.S. intelligence has not yet publicly authenticated the recording.
“Privately, U.S. officials say they suspect separatist rebels were behind the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17,” Dina reports. “U.S. officials say they are still analyzing the audio. They are also using algorithms and mathematics to pinpoint where the missile was fired from.”
The fate of the flight’s “black box” data recorders remains in question. After the separatists said they had recovered them from the crash site, Ukrainian officials disputed that account. And while some reports stated that the flight recorders might be sent to Russia, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov says Moscow has “no plans to seize the flight recorders,” according to state-owned news agency RT.
The maps are all from the New York Times’s online edition.
I had previously posted a picture of the Denver Gas and Electric building lit up in orange and blue. Here is one of it lit up in lavender, the way I found it on Tuesday night after we had dinner. It’s hard to say if this building or the Colorado State Capitol is my favorite Denver building .. but I’d say this one wins!
