Train – the American pop rock band from San Francisco, that is. They were at it, playing on a set-up stage for a street party crowd here in downtown Denver. I stopped outside for a while, thinking I might hear them play ‘Drops of Jupiter’, but no luck. It was late and I was tired. Play the song on your iPad before you go to sleep, I thought.
Here are some of my favorite lyrics from the song, about someone traveling very very far away, and the other person (a lover?) missing her.
From ‘Drops of Jupiter’ (2001) by Train
But tell me, did you sail across the sun?
Did you make it to the Milky Way to see the lights all faded
And that heaven is overrated?
Tell me, did you fall for a shooting star–
One without a permanent scar?
And did you miss me while you were looking for yourself out there?
Now that she’s back from that soul vacation
Tracing her way through the constellation, hey, hey, hey (mmm)
She checks out Mozart while she does tae-bo
Reminds me that there’s room to grow, hey, hey, hey (yeah)
There was a street party of sorts going on with the band Train entertaining attendees to the National Apartments Association’s annual convention here in Denver.
A sign inside the restaurant. The flag at the top left makes a statement. The three red stars under a green banner is the flag of the Syrian National Coalition that is fighting the Assad government. (The Assad government flag has TWO GREEN stars under a RED banner).
Six of us had baba ghanoush, hummus and chicken kabob for dinner tonight at the Shish Kabob Grill. It is across from the Colorado State Capitol here in Denver. The casual sit-down restaurant is owned by a Syrian American family. A sign by the entrance says ‘Syrian Americans for a free Syria’ and another ‘Victory is near’ (meaning victory against the Assad regime). Even if that were the case (is it?), it’s going to be a long way back with parts of the country in ruins and the economy in a shambles.
The Colorado State Capitol on Colfax Street in Denver.
Stout Street is just a few blocks from our hotel here in Denver. We had pizza for dinner nearby. This sign shows the profiles of the Colorado State Capitol, the Clock Tower, the Wells Fargo Bank Building and the Denver Art Museum.
Monday is done. Yay!
It’s summer, school is out, and so the airports in Seattle and Denver are full of families traveling everywhere. Even at 4.30 am this morning, there were lots of cars dropping off passengers, something we do not normally see.
It was warm here in Denver today, with temperatures reaching 88°F/ 31°C.
Happy Father’s Day to all the dads, especially to the ones in my family! We salute you. It was my first Father’s Day without my dad, which made for a day of reflection and remembrance for me.
My dad and I in 2005 at a wine estate in Stellenbosch, South Africa. Yes, we love the Mercedes SL500 – not ours, of course. My dad loved cars. He started out with Fords and Chevs but later in his life owned several different Mercedes Benz models, and would trade in his 5 or 6 yr old model Benz for a newer one at the local dealership, every few years.
My kitchen counter cow made to pose with butter that I bought here at my grocery store. It’s from the state of Wisconsin.
‘O-K ! I give up!’, I thought on Saturday when I saw TIME magazine’s cover story that said : ‘Eat butter : Scientists labeled fat the enemy. Why they were wrong’. And I went out to the store and bought some butter. I love my toast with Marmite and avocado, and from now on I will put butter on it and not margarine of any kind.
TIME says ‘New research suggests that it’s the overconsumption of carbohydrates, sugar and sweeteners that is chiefly responsible for the epidemic of obesity and Type 2 diabetes’ .. but that ‘The war over fat is far from over. Consumer habits are deeply formed, and entire industries are based on demonizing fat.’
So .. the World Cup 2014 has started! Check out the evolution of the soccer balls from the early days through today’s high-tech soccer balls, from an article in the New York Times. (Although the Jabulani ball of 2010 was harshly criticized for its fickleness and aerodynamics, says the article). Let’s hope the 2014 ball gets better reviews from the players.
Traffic was so bad out to Denver airport today that my taxi driver never got to use interstate I-70 the way he normally does. There were several construction activities and lane closures to deal with. We ended up driving all the way along 56th Ave that runs parallel to I-70. My appeal to airport planners : please please please do not build an airport 30 miles out of the city, and notprovide mass transit to and from it – a train or a shuttle bus (with a bus lane). A freeway filled with 10,000 cars does not work anymore.
I’m in the taxi on the way to the airport. ‘Stop the World and Let me On’ says the train in Denver downtown .. a play on the old Waylon Jennings country song ‘Stop the World and Let me Off’ ? Unfortunately it does not yet go out to the airport, or I would have taken it... and here is this week’s construction report of the new Denver airport hotel. The glass window fittings are going slower than I thought, but there is progress to be seen.
We are wrapping up Cycle 2 of our system’s testing, but there is no rest for the wicked. We have a big planning meeting for Cycle 3 tomorrow. If we were building a Boeing (which we are not, luckily), we have now tested the wings, the fuselage and the engines separately in what is called Cycle 2/ String Testing.
In Cycle 3/ Integration Testing, we will put them all together and see if our ‘airplane’ can actually fly. So! Can we walk through all the screens from start to finish for an integrated business process with real data, and without stoppages or data errors? The final cycle, Cycle 4, is called User Acceptance Testing.
We walk by the beautiful Trinity United Methodist Church on Broadway on the way to the office every day. There was a sprinkle of rain on Wednesday night, but I managed to get to the hotel without getting too wet.
Here are pictures from my walk after work in Denver downtown on Tuesday night.
On the left is the Denver Dry Goods Company Building : a historic department store building on 16th and California St. Built in 1889, it was for a while the largest department store west of Chicago.The Byron White United States Courthouse has a grand Neo-Classical design and was built in 1916.[From Wikipedia] This is the Byron Rodgers Federal Building right next door to the Courthouse. Completed in 1965, the building was renamed for Colorado Congressman Byron G. Rogers in 1984. In 1996 and 1997, the criminal case against bomber Timothy McVeigh was conducted there.And here is Sakura Sqaure on 19th and Larimer : a plaza with a small Japanese garden and busts of Ralph L. Carr, Governor of Colorado from 1939 to 1943, Minoru Yasui, a Japanese-American lawyer, and Yoshitaka Tamai (1900–1983), a Buddhist priest who lived in Denver.‘The highest life is when everything results in a feeling of gratitude’ says the inscription on the left of the statue of Yoshitaka Tamai.
Bloomberg Businessweek writes in a story in the latest issue of a Chris Dancy here in Denver that collects information about himself : what he sees, what he does, what he thinks, what he eats eats .. from 10 devices he wears or carries, and 13 more in his home and car. He started five years ago by archiving his tweets, so that he could search them (at the time Twitter did not allow searches); did the same with his Facebook posts, and eventually ended up funneling all his data in his Google calendar, the world’s most thorough, searchable diary. (Hmm. Maybe I should zap my blog entries into a Google calendar?). According to Dancy, the proliferating array of information is full of unexpected correlations, such as measuring exactly how much TV and when one has watched it, monitoring and changing one’s diet – and so on. Chris managed to lose 100 lbs as his first self-improvement project. He left his job as IT director at a software company earlier this year to make full-time presentations about ‘data-assisted living’.
The Seattle area’s mild and sunny weather has continued into the weekend .. and so Bryan and I went with Paul to his cabin in Hansville on Saturday for the day, and came back on Sunday morning. (Hansville is an unincorporated community on the Kitsap peninsula in Puget Sound west of the city).
This is Saturday afternoon. We had been ‘inspecting’ Paul’s neighbor’s fancy aluminum gangway, and continued walking along the beach.I am tending to the ‘dogs’ and buns on the grill. The ‘dogs’ are actually chicken and apple sausages.This is the view up along the trunk of one of the Douglas fir trees around the deck at the house.We’re on the ferry on the way back from Kingston on the Kitsap Peninsula to Edmonds on the mainland. In the distance is a container ship from the Far East that is headed for Tacoma harbor. Fltr is Bryan, Paul and Sam (a Brittany spaniel).
‘Halfpad Een Ding’/’Half of One Thing’ was written and published earlier this year in Afrikaans and in English. The author Zirk van den Berg is from Namibia, but now lives in New Zealand.
Today was the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings in Normandy, France.
I finished reading my book about another war, last night on the flight home : the Second Boer War (1899-1902) in South Africa. The fictional story revolves around a New Zealander called Gideon Lancaster that joins the British forces in the Boer War, and becomes a spy. Soon, ‘the enemy’ and ‘betrayal’ became impossible to pin down in his mind. Legendary Boer general Christiaan de Wet, and scheming to capture him, is also part of the story. (The general never was captured. But his brother Piet de Wet who was also a successful Boer general, was captured by the British toward the end of the war. He then became a member of the National Scouts – Boers serving with the British forces!).
It was madness (OK, all wars are madness) for the Boers to take up arms against the British Empire, of course. We learned of Lord Kitchener’s ‘scorched earth’ policy in school : burning down farmsteads and slaughtering all the live-stock. And during the later stages of the war, the British rounded up and isolated the civilian Boer population in concentration camps, one of the earliest uses of this method by modern powers. To this day the United States Army uses case studies from the Boer War to teach ethics in combat.
It’s Thursday, and so I get to go home. As I stepped into the taxi outside the Denver office, it started to rain : big fat splattering drops. Soon after, hailstones came down with the rain as well.
My view from inside the taxi on the way to the airport : highway I-70 and its traffic getting pummeled by heavy rain and hail. The hail pellets were plentiful but too small to cause any damage.And the latest picture from the Denver airport hotel and convention center, viewed from the check-in counters inside the airport. I suspect by next Thursday the glass windows will have been added all the way to the top.
[From Wikipedia] The Logan Sapphire is a flawless specimen from Sri Lanka, a cushion-cut stone which possesses a rich deep blue color and is the second largest (blue) sapphire known, weighing 422.99 carats (84.6 g). It is currently on display at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.The 800-lb gorilla company of business software (SAP) is hosting its annual ‘Sapphire’ conference this week, in Orlando Florida. Since I have never been to one – even though I have made a career out of working with SAP – I try to read about the conference proceedings on-line, and hear from my colleagues that attended, what was said.
Well, everything is moving to the cloud*, and that includes the sprawling suites of business enterprise software that SAP has been so successful in selling worldwide to large companies since the 1990’s. The challenge for SAP is that its marketing team has to assure its customers that they can move their SAP software to the cloud at their own pace, and that their concerns about security and system performance and availability will be addressed.
SAP CEO Bill McDermott noted that ‘The most intractable CEO issue of our time is complexity’ and that ‘At SAP, we see a dream for a simpler world, for a simpler SAP, and for a simpler customer experience’. Also check out this recent front-page article from Bloomberg Businessweek that it callsThe Trouble with IBM as it relates to the ‘cloud’.
*What is the ‘cloud’? Let me borrow some words from an on-line post from PC magazine here : In the simplest terms, cloud computing means storing and accessing data and programs over the Internet instead of your computer’s hard drive. The cloud is just a metaphor for the Internet. It goes back to the days of flowcharts and presentations that would represent the gigantic server-farm infrastructure of the Internet as nothing but a puffy, white cumulonimbus cloud, accepting connections and doling out information as it floats.
There is an entirely different “cloud” when it comes to business. Some businesses choose to implement Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), where the business subscribes to an application it accesses over the Internet. (Think Salesforce.com.) There’s also Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), where a business can create its own custom applications for use by all in the company. And don’t forget the mighty Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), where players like Amazon, Google, and Rackspace provide a backbone that can be “rented out” by other companies. (Think Netflix providing services to you because it’s a customer of the cloud-services at Amazon.)
I read this article in the New York Times with interest, since it mentions ‘accountants in the middle of their firm’s busy tax season’ and it also explained the success of the Costco wholesale store, which we I visited just this Saturday in Seattle.
From the New York Times article :The way we’re working isn’t working. Even if you’re lucky enough to have a job, you’re probably not very excited to get to the office in the morning, you don’t feel much appreciated while you’re there, you find it difficult to get your most important work accomplished, amid all the distractions, and you don’t believe that what you’re doing makes much of a difference anyway. By the time you get home, you’re pretty much running on empty, and yet still answering emails until you fall asleep. Here’s the rest of the article in the New York Times‘Why You Hate Work’
Results from the survey of the Energy Project (mentioned in the New York Times article) which was done in 2013.
Denver has four major taxi companies operating at the airport. A fifth one’s application was turned down by the authorities in 2008; the founders sued, the Colorado Supreme Court finally found in their favor, and now Mile High Cab will start operating as well. Then there are the new digital age taxi business start-ups called Uber and Lyft that operate very differently. Drivers bring their own cars, are ordered by one’s smartphone with all one’s payment information set up already, enabling the passenger to literally hop in and out of the car without ever needing to deal with cash or a credit card to pay the driver.
For now I still use the traditional taxi companies when I emerge out of the airport, mostly because there are always cabs available at the taxi stand right there. So the wait time for me is zero. Yes, on the back-end I have to pay with cash or credit card – not as smooth as it would have been with say, Uber, but that’s OK. If I had used Uber, I would have more trouble to deal with up front : wait for a little bit, and then be on the look-out for the driver/ his car’s number plate, or tell him exactly where I am.
Here’s the view from Brighton Blvd as my Freedom Cabs taxi approaches downtown Denver from the airport on the way in on Monday morning. My cab looks the same as the one in the picture ! When Freedom Cabs started in 1995, it was the first completely new Denver cab company allowed to launch in nearly fifty years. But now there is a new business model around with Uber and Lyft.
It’s a little after 10 am here in Denver and I made it into the office. I got to bed so late on Sunday night that I slept all the way here on the flight from Seattle. One of those flights where I go ‘Oh, are we landing already?’ as I wake up !
This is 4.55 am on Monday morning at gate A5 at Seattle-Tacome airport. The sun comes up very early this time of year! .. at 5.14 am. I’m sitting by the window, and on the wing in 12A.
We are into a long stretch of sunny and mild weather days here in Seattle, and Saturday was beautiful outside. We will still have to see what the summer weather brings, though. I read on Cliff Mass’s weather blog that we have had the wettest spring and early summer on record here in the Seattle area. We have now broken the previous rainfall record total for 1972. It didn’t feel that ‘wet’ to me, but I suppose with all the travel I do away from Seattle, that my perceptions of the local weather are skewed.
A lamp post poster I found Saturday in downtown Seattle for an upcoming bicycle festival. Mr Anteater is evidently enjoying his bike ride, with his tongue hanging out (or is he tired?). Anteater is actually a generic name for several species of these creatures, and this one looks like a tamandua. (I suspect a giant anteater would have trouble riding a bike, even in a cartoon).
I took a package to the post office on Friday and as usual inquired what ‘nice’ new stamps they might have. Yes, the ‘forever’* ones with the little birds on, I said. The mountain bluebird on one of them reminded me of an article I read recently in the New York Times of a writer whose mother was a member of the North American Bluebird Society (NABS). Their mission : ‘A non-profit education, conservation and research organization that promotes the recovery of bluebirds and other native cavity-nesting bird species in North America’. Sparrows are not native to North America, and said her mother: ‘think of them as feathered sharks’. Read the rest of it here : The Truth About Sparrows. It is somewhat shocking what some Bluebird Society members will do to save the bluebirds! But I guess it needs to be done.
*Note to United States Postal Services : Nothing is forever! .. not even your forever stamps! (Forever means these stamps are good for first class mail, no matter if there are future increases in the stamp prices. Hmm. I’m going to wait 20 years and send a letter with one of these stamps).
