This is 8 pm and there is a little more snow on the sidewalks and streets.
The blue-sky weather of Monday had gone by today. By early evening, the winter chills from the North Pole refrigerator pushed the temperatures here down to 12 ºF (-11 ºC). I could still make it to the hotel with my woolen hat, scarf and gloves. But if that +12 ºF were to go to -12 ºF (-24 ºC), all bets would be off !
We are approaching the end of Cycle 1 on our project. There are 4 cycles on our plan, each progressively building out and testing bigger chunks of the solution we are deploying. We had a team dinner scheduled for tomorrow night, but (mercifully) that got canceled. Yes! I thought, when the cancellation notification popped into my inbox.
Here’s the 7 pm view from the corner of 18th Ave and Broadway in downtown Denver. The powdery snow is just starting to stick to the streets. (No, the white SUV is not traveling at nearly the speed of light; it’s my panning left to right with my phone camera that compressed it length-wise!).
I made it in to Denver, and made it through Monday. It was beautiful outside today here in Denver, but a cold front swept in at around 4 pm and chilled the air down to below freezing by the time we walked back to the hotel.
Check out the custom silver lettering on this Mercedes that I spotted from the way in to Denver downtown this morning. It’s an E-class coupe as far as I can tell. It says ‘LITTLE RICH’. Is it the vehicle’s pet name? Perhaps a reference to Richie Rich ‘the poor little rich boy’ from the comic book series? I’m not sure. (The 2014 E-coupe starts at $51,000 .. and I put the $$ on the number plate to obscure the license number).
We stopped by our friend Paul’s house tonight for cake and ice cream. Paul is celebrating a nice round number tomorrow. Happy Big Birthday, Paul !
Paul is about to blow out the candles on the cake, one for each decade, and some on the letters that said ‘Happy Birthday’. From left to right : Kim, Paul, Tim, Linda, Thomas, Bryan, Joe, Bill, Dave, Ken and Steve.
Here is a Tlingit whale carved into stone by the artist Ron White.
I ran some errands in downtown Seattle on Friday, and stepped on a Seattle City Light manhole cover (below) as I waited for the traffic light to change. Ok, I thought : I recog- nize this American Indian style of art, but I’ll be darned if I can figure out of this is an eagle or a bear or .. what? Turns out it’s a Tlingit whale.
[From Wikipedia] The Tlingit are an indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest Coast of North America. Their name for themselves is Lingít, meaning “People of the Tides”. They are actually not whale hunters. Delineating the modern territory of the Tlingit is complicated because they are spread across the border between the United States and Canada, they lack designated reservations, other complex legal and political concerns make the situation confusing, and there is a relatively high level of mobility among the population.
.. so let’s see if we can figure this picture out. Looks to me as if the tail is right above ‘Seattle’ and then clockwise around from it, is the head and the jaws of the whale. These hatch covers have been around for awhile. Artist Nathan Jackson was commissioned in 1976, and produced a Tlingit whale relief, originally carved in wood and later cast in iron. Thirty-two of these were made.
Their secret weapon? A beer fridge in the Canadians’ Olympic quarters can be opened only with a Canadian passport. It is stocked with Molson Canadian, the country’s signature beer. [Picture from a tweet by Molson Canadian].Hmm. I see the Canadians beat the Americans in the women’s ice hockey final, and then today beat the USA men’s team as well. I guess that gives them bragging rights. So! No reason to be rude to me the next time I stop over in one of their airports. (The customs officials seem to be rude to me almost every time I arrive there and show my US passport).
P.S. I sat next to a young woman last night on the way in from Denver. She had a cake that she was bringing to Seattle to celebrate her grandmother’s 96th birthday with her. Wow! That’s good going, I said. And she made a trip to Ghana and South Africa last year. They went to the Kruger National Park and saw all big the ‘big five’ game animals : lion, African elephant, Cape buffalo, leopard and rhinoceros.
We joke sometimes and say the hotel is our ‘home away from home’ – but it really is not, now is it? Nothing in there is yours. You check out and clear out completely. Here’s a picture of my hotel room this morning just before I started scrambling to get everything packed up. (It’s actually been a very long time since I have left anything behind). My basic hotel room rule is not to put anything away in a dresser, a drawer or a nightstand. That way I can do a 360° scan and grab anything that catches my eye. Watch out for those white items on the white bed linen, though! They can hide in plain sight. But white is a plus for an iPhone charger and its cable and head phones, though. It makes those stand out in the shadows of the hotel room.
An old Whatsapp message exchange from my iPhone. (Translation : Hey! I am now on WhatsApp as well. Great! Here is my message back from WhatsApp.)
My colleagues and I are shocked by Facebook’s US$16 billion acquisition of the text message application WhatsApp, announced on Wednesday. The little application sells for $0.99 in the USA. It’s used on smart phones for free text, voice, video and picture messaging, and works over wi-fi connections.
It seems to me before Wednesday that most technology analysts believed with 450 million users world-wide that WhatsApp was worth oh, somewhere north of US$ ONE billion.
And who are the founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton that struck it so rich? Here is what I gleaned from Wikipedia and Forbes magazine : Jan Koum is Jewish and grew up in a village outside Kiev in Ukraine. He moved to California with his mother and grandmother in 1992. Brian Acton was the 44th employee at Yahoo. In 1997 Jan Koum was hired by Yahoo as an infrastructure engineer, shortly after he met Acton while working at Ernst & Young as a security tester. Over the next nine years, they worked at Yahoo. Acton invested in the dotcom boom, and lost millions in the dot-com of 2000. In September 2007 Koum and Acton left Yahoo and took a year off, traveling around South America and playing ultimate frisbee. Both applied, and failed, to work at Facebook. “We’re part of the Facebook reject club,” Acton says. Koum was eating into his $400,000 in savings from Yahoo, and drifting. Then in January 2009, he bought an iPhone and realized that the seven-month old App Store was about to spawn a whole new industry of apps. He visited the home of Alex Fishman, a Russian friend who would invite the local Russian community to his place in West San Jose for weekly pizza and movie nights. Up to 40 people sometimes showed up. The two of them stood for hours talking about Koum’s idea for an app over tea at Fishman’s kitchen counter.
.. depends on what you know down there, says the home page picture of one of the oil well data management systems that we are working with.
It is important to get the surface data (oil wells, attached equipment, makes and models) accurate in one’s systems. But it is even more critical to get the sub-surface data correct and complete as the equipment and infrastructure goes in during construction. For the stuff above ground, one can usually make corrections and additions with an audit. But once equipment and pipelines are buried, and that oil well starts gushing all kinds of hydrocarbons, it will be near-impossible to know what’s down there. Or to go in and find out !
Picture from the home page of a company called EnergyIQ. They provide software and data management products to the oil and gas industry.
5.00 am on Monday morning had me in my airplane seat already. (Yes, it was raining).And here is my lunch time view of the gilded Colorado State capitol dome today. The gilded dome is emerging nicely from its $17 million rehab.
My Monday started out early and rainy, but later in Denver it was a gorgeous, mild weather day. It was so nice outside that it was hard for us to go back to the office after lunch. It went up all the way to 67 °F /19 °C. Denver boasts around 300 sunny days per year on average, compared to Seattle’s 71. (Source : Wikipedia’s entries for the two cities).
I have a little toy United Airlines airplane on my desk. (The logo has changed after its merger with Continental Airlines, but no matter : I like the old logo much better).
I have a very early flight out to Denver – 5.20 am – so I have to ‘hit the sack’ here. My bags are packed, my shoes are polished and my shirt is ironed. No time for any of that when I wake up! I see it’s heavy going in the north east with all the snow that has fallen over the weekend. I’m sure there will be flight cancellations and delays in that part of the country.
Several rain storms are moving across the Pacific Northwest this weekend (bringing snow in the mountains, not rain). It has not been a very wet winter, though; we’re at about 75% of the normal precipitation so far. But much further south on the west coast it is bone dry, for the third straight year. California is experiencing its driest year on record, dating back 119 years, and reservoirs throughout the state have very low water levels. Santa Clara county reservoirs are at 3 percent of capacity or lower.
Keeping dry under my umbrella. This is at a pedestrian/ traffic mirror in the South Lake Union area. I had just completed my Saturday afternoon workout at the gym, and was walking back to my car.
.. the sadly neglected old house with its corner turret here on 16th Avenue on Capitol Hill. It’s just a block from my house and I have walked by it many times. I knew it could be gone by the next time I had returned from Denver, though – that excavator was an ominous sign!
This house here on 16th Avenue has been torn down. I am not sure what is being built in its place, probably a set of 6 or 8 condominium homes.
I am at Denver airport. Our work week at the site is done, and we are on the way home. (More work from the home office tomorrow). There was a lot of traffic clogging the freeway out here, but not because of weather. Just too many cars! The Denver travelers are grateful for the mild temperatures and absence of snow and ice this week. We could walk outside to go to lunch, and not worry too much about travel delays and flight cancellations.
The Northeast is dealing with lots of lce and snow, and there is more on the way for the weekend.This is the shuttle train’s departure point after the security check point at Denver International airport. On the way out it stops at Terminal A, B and C, and on the way back (when starting at Terminal C) at Terminal B, A and Baggage Claim.
What is an arepa? I wanted to know when we walked by a food truck selling them here in Denver. Well, it’s the Venezuelans’ daily bread. The little round bread is made of corn (somewhat similar to an English muffin). It can be eaten as is, with butter, or really with anything that can act as a filling. The ones from the food truck had mozzarella, salmon, baked beans, and many other fillings.
A food truck on the street outside our office this week is selling arepas.
A ‘mini warrior’ from an iPad game with the same name.
I got to ‘sleep in’ until 6.30 am today. I had a teeth cleaning and check-up scheduled at the dentist for 7.30 am. It was raining and I thought I would take the car to the dentist, come back to the house and have the taxi (to the airport) pick me up there. But at 7 am I discovered the car was dead as a dodo – man! I thought, how strange, since it started perfectly fine on Saturday. (Time for a new car? is always the question).
Anyway, I saw on my iPhone that the next no 10 bus with its stop close by my house was just 4 minutes away, so that became Plan B, and got me to downtown (the dentist) in good time. The taxi picked me up at the dentist at 8.30 am, took me home to pick up my luggage, and off to the airport we went. The 11 am flight was delayed by 30 minutes, which was a good thing for me. (Not so good for the people with tight connections in Denver). Another taxi from Denver airport to downtown, and it was 4 pm by the time I rolled into the office. What a day.
(Hey! I see I have made 1,500 posts on this blog, how about that?). Saturday night’s snow had long stopped by the time I got up on Sunday morning .. but I felt compelled to go out and walk to Volunteer Park. We don’t get snow that often here in the city, and some of those times I would find myself away from home.
A panorama view of the street in front of my house.And here is a picture of Volunteer Park here on Capitol Hill.
Seattle’s weather report for Sat. night. After the temperatures in Denver this week, 34°F/ 1°C does not seem so cold at all !
It is snowing here in Seattle. It started around 6.30 pm, just as we walked a few blocks from my house to the Thai restaurant on 15th Ave. Earlier I understood from the weather forecast we could expect a few flurries and not much more, but the time we left the restaurant at around 8 pm, the snow had already started to stick on the streets. It is powdery and dry, and goes crunch-crunch-crunch as you step on it on the sidewalk.
Here are Dave, Bill, Steve, Paul, Ken, Gary and Bryan. We had just stepped out of the restaurant and are waiting to cross the street. ‘Hey! Take a picture of us instead!’ they yelled, as I was taking a picture of the intersection.This is 17th Ave here on Capitol Hill around 10 pm. There is about an inch of snow on the ground and on the streets, and not much more is expected.
I watched the Games’ opening ceremony that ran on NBC here in the USA on Friday night, and I have to admit I liked the artistry and cultural images and pageantry.
Marc Chagall was a Belarusian-French artist. He died in 1985 at the age of 97. We should all take up art – it makes for a long life?Alexander Pushkin is considered by many to be Russia’s greatest poet. But he only lived to 37; died in a duel (with swords, I assume) with a French officer that tried to seduce his wife.It was said that one of the ceremony’s most enduring images for the audience was that of the glowing white troika of horses and chariot immortalized in Nikolai Gogol’s novel ‘Dead Souls’.This scene must have been very impressive as well; modern technology enabled a football sized (or bigger?) image of a ship sailing across moving waves in the ocean to be displayed on six gigantic screens built into the ground surface. On the ‘deck’ of the ship there were 10 or 12 real human ‘sailors’. The ship sailed across the floor, and then in a clever move the sailors disappeared from sight by clambering into the black rectangle (a box or something like that) on the deck.
Google’s homepage for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. The colors match that of a rainbow flag. This is also on Google’s home page in Russia.
So .. the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi is under way. Will gay athletes get in trouble talking about gay rights? (In July 2013, President Vladimir Putin signed into law a bill banning the “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations to minors”. ‘Propaganda’ being open to interpretation by police and vigilante citizens, of course, and encouraging violence against gay people). Assurances have been given by Russian officials that the law will not be enforced on athletes at the Games.
And what does the Olympic Charter have to say anyway? Well, nothing specific about sexual orientation (this falls under the phrase ‘other discrimination’ in Principle 6 of the Charter). It’s just disappointing that the International Olympic Committee did not take a stronger position, or made much about it publicly (at least not that I’m aware of).
From the Olympic Charter : 6. Any form of discrimination with regard to a country or a person on grounds of race, religion, politics, gender or otherwise is incompatible with belonging to the Olympic Movement.
