a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
The project team stays in the Denver Sheraton this week. There is a big conference in the Colorado Conference Center, and the Hilton ‘kicked us out’ for the week. (They can get more money from the conference goers. We are on a special low long-term rate with them).
Anyway : I am too happy just to have a hotel room to go to, relax a little and then go sleep. I tested the bed’s mattress already : firm, just the way I like it. Who wants to sleep on a bed that is soft as a marshmallow?
My ole house needs a new coat of paint! .. and I’m going for a shade greener compared to what I have put on some 10 years ago. Below is a picture I took this morning of a little experiment we did on the back of the house.
Six of us ordered in Dominoes pizza on Saturday night, and then settled in around a few games of Mexican train. Everyone starts with 11 dominoes, and tries to be the first to dispense of all of them on the ‘Mexican train’. Chess or scrabble it is not, as far as strategy or mental sharpness go, but hey : great for socializing and teasing the ones that get stuck and have to draw extra dominoes from the pool.
In the news from the home front this week for me: what started as a blockage in a downstairs toilet, turned out to have been caused by a serious blockage in the sewer line going from my house to the street (it was plugged up with several feet of a fine network of plant roots).
In the news for the USA this week : 1. Obamacare enrollment for its inaugural year ended Monday. The new law is a success: 7.1 million people signed up, exceeding the target despite the glitches in the healthcare.gov website all October of last year. 2. An Iraq vet being treated for mental health issues killed thee people on the Ft Hood base in Texas before killing himself. 3. The March jobs number is 192k, falling short of the 200k expected. Unemployment unchanged at 6.7%. 4. Will the searchers ever find that lost Malaysian Airlines jet?
It’s April, but we had an inch or two of snow on the ground this morning, and snow flurries while walking to the office. We always fret a little when the weather is bad on Thursdays, because it could impact our flights back home. We have people from Los Angeles, Houston, Dallas, Seattle (moi) and even New York, working on the project.
I have a nice view from my Hilton Garden Inn hotel room this week, looking out on the Colorado Convention Center with its blue bear (looking in). It’s spring, and there’s been reports of bears roaming around in the ‘burbs in California, looking for food. Colorado has an estimated 15,000 black bears.
In the distance is the Pepsi Center, home for the Denver Nuggets of the National Basketball Association, the Colorado Avalanche of the National Hockey League, and the Colorado Mammoth of the National Lacrosse League (yes.. didn’t know there was a National Lacrosse League here in the USA, now did you?) .
We had dinner tonight at the Watercourse restaurant : a place that serves up tasty vegetarian & vegan food on 17th Ave in Denver. I had a stir-fried Thai pasta with tofu .. quite good, actually.
It’s Monday, and it’s the already end of March in 2014. Time flies !
Here’s what happens when you stay at the same hotel 3 or 4 nights every week : you become a ‘Diamond’ member in six months or so. (Or ‘Platinum’ – it depends on the hotel chain). The membership cards arrived in quick succession from the Hilton, each promising more exciting travel experiences. Or the frequent traveler can get an upgrade to a nicer room, or stay for a few more free nights at any property of the hotel. I see Conde Nast says there was a major program devaluation in March, so Hilton points don’t go nearly as far as they used to. Oh well. So there’s a little less of a free thing. And if you travel year-round, the nicest vacation is staying put right at home.
I watched the ‘The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)’ on Saturday night with Bryan and Gary. The movie is quite a spectacle of excessive partying, drug use (abuse), sex and money worship .. and getting away with it for the most part. It is by most accounts an accurate depiction of stockbroker Jordan Belfort’s rise and fall in the 90’s. Today Belfort owes $100 million in restitution, of which he has paid some $10 million. (Paling in comparison against fraudster Bernie Madoff’s $17 billion owed in restitution, though). Belfort spent only three years in prison.
So .. what to take away with from the movie? One assumes/ hopes the vast majority of Wall Street firms operate with much more integrity than that demonstrated in the movie! And have things gotten better after the 2008 financial crisis? I’m not so sure. The federal funds rate still sits at 0% almost six years later. Here in the USA, student loan debt has quadrupled to $1 billion over the last ten years. What is very clear is that each of us has to look out for our own money interests. ‘Socialism never took root in America,’ John Steinbeck wrote, ‘because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.’*
*Credit to Matt Zoller Seitz for mentioning the Steinbeck quote is his review of the ‘Wolf of Wall Street’.
The Emerald City Comicon (‘comic convention’) is held this weekend here at the Washington State Convention Center. It is billed as the premier comic book and pop culture event in the Pacific Northwest. As I walked by there this morning (on the way for a quick stop at the office), I thought for a moment I should go – but later found out all three days are sold out.
Another week done at the Denver project office.. it went by quickly. I presented how we are going to test our solution at the end of April (Cycle 2, of four test cycles) to six different teams. I had to prepare only ONE set of presentation materials, so that helped !
I went to dinner tonight with some directors and a partner from my firm. We went to a swank new steakhouse here in downtown Denver called Guard and Grace. The offering of steak on the menu is extensive. I have to confess I did not really know there was another grill option below rare : blue rare or simply ‘blue’. Even so, with all these options, I opted for the Alaskan black cod – and it was delicious.
It must have been a very tough day in the Oso and Darrington area in Washington State with 14 people now confirmed dead, and many, many more still reported as missing. Hopes that anyone may still be pulled out of the debris are fading.
Here is a before-and-after slider photo of the massive landslide. The area received double the amount of the normal rainfall this season.
I got booted from my 10 D aisle seat this morning (actually, the flight attendant asked nicely if a family of three could sit there). The exit row on the wing still had open seats, and I picked one by the window .. a mistake. The seal on the exit door is not perfect, and the airplane hull is a little thinner there, and cold to the touch. So I was cold all the way to Denver. Had my warm jacket on but my legs and feet were cold, and there were zero blankets on board. Where we fly at the top of the troposphere at 35,000 ft*, the air is at about minus 55°C/ minus 67°F outside. Surprisingly, from thereon up in the stratosphere, the temperature of the air increases again. The layer of ozone in the stratosphere absorbs sunlight, which makes it warmer again as one goes up .. and there is a lot of up from there!
*alongside Ruppell’s Vulture, amazingly – see the diagram below
I walked down to Madison Park and the Japanese Garden here this afternoon. It was a beautiful day with sunshine and blue sky, but it is still not short sleeve weather (got up to 53°F/ 12°C). I was hoping to find cherry blossoms on the cherry tree from Mt Fuji in the garden, but it’s too early for that. Washington DC is famous for its cherry blossoms as well, and I see the ‘peak bloom’ there is forecast for between April 7 and April 11.
Saturday brought news of a deadly landslide that happened east of the town of Oso here in Washington state. Three people have been killed, more in critical condition in the hospital; 6 houses destroyed and 16 others damaged. As of Saturday night a rescue effort was still underway to find more people trapped in the debris. The mud and debris also blocks the Stillaguamish river, and people are warned to stay out of the downstream area. The blocked body of water is increasing in size, and can break through at any time.
Spring has arrived here in the northern hemisphere, and it was a beautiful day in Seattle today (51 °F/ 10°C). I had time tonight to check out more pictures from the Big Bang research that had been done with the BICEP2 radio telescope at the South Pole in Antarctica. And no, BICEP is not a muscle – it’s short for Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarisation. The equipment measures gravitational waves caused by the Big Bang. Check out the spectacular pictures of BICEP2 at this link.
Be sure to also read the Wikipedia entry for the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. The sun has just set there, and there is a six month night ahead! I hope those scientists stationed there have sun lamps, to stop them from going absolutely bananas. The South Pole is the only place on land where this happens (the North Pole is in the sea).
‘Capitol Hill, Olive Way Exit, please’ is
what I tell the little Prius Yellow Cab driver every Thursday night when I get into the taxi at Seattle airport. (It’s the exit to take from Interstate 5 to get to Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood). We arrived late again last night – we departed late – and by the time the taxi pulled up at my house it was exactly midnight. The front porch light that I had left on on Monday morning, was out, I noticed. I have to replace the bulb. And there was something lying in the street .. oh, a paperback. I picked it up and brought it into the house. So now I will have to read it, right? It’s ‘Never Let Me Go’ from Kazuo Ishiguro. One review of the book says the writer poses the fundamental question ‘What makes us human?’ in the book. Hmm. And I thought we were all computers. (Just kidding!).
Colfax Avenue (named for Schuyler Colfax, 17th Vice President of the United States from 1869–1873), is the main street that runs east-west through the Denver-Aurora metropolitan area here in Colorado. As U.S. Highway 40, it was one of two principal highways serving Denver before the Interstate Highway System was constructed.
