Willem's Planet

We threw in the towel this morning, and took a shuttle van that the hotel provided for us, to work.  It was -13 °F/ -25°C outside.  I see the Wall Street Journal reports that we all are ‘obsessed with the weather’ and ‘reveling in winter’ .. hmm.  I’m not so sure about ‘reveling’!

And then at work, it was a very unsettled day.  Our Basis team set up the SAP systems that we use, and then the Functional teams configure its functions.  So these two parties had a disagreement which almost got out of control. But we found a solution, and set up the SAP access and controls in a way which was acceptable to both parties.

*SAP stands for Systems, Applications and Products and is the world’s most popular system for the finances, supply chain logistics, work management and human resources of large companies.

We are at zero here in Denver (that’s 0 °F/ -17°C), but my colleague and I were up to it to walk the few blocks back to the hotel.  We brought wool sweaters to pull over our dress shirts (with a stuffed overcoat), and heavy wool hats to pull over our heads and ears.   I covered the rest of my face with my gloves as I walked. Yikes! You have to!  The cold is stinging. The real hazards to watch for though, are the slippery sidewalks and street crossings.   Watch for cars at the intersection.  You may have permission to ‘Walk’ from the green man on the traffic light, but incoming cars may not be able to stop!

I read about Imgur (say ‘imager’) in today’s issue of BloombergBusinessweek. The company only has 11 employees, but the start-up is already profitable thanks to a stream of display ads from movie studios and video game makers.  It gets more than 120 million unique visitors a month posting images and searching for jolts of humor and insight.  About 1/4 of the user-submitted images feature cats or dogs.

The project team went to dinner tonight at Willie G’s here in downtown Denver.  Some of the dinner conversation : ‘we should not eat any fish from the Pacific’ (dangerous due to Fukushima radiation). Well, that’s nonsense.  And do we know of Indian superstar Shahrukh Khan? (No).  Well, his arrival at Vancouver airport almost shut the place down due to security and fans, something that would never happen with a Hollywood star.  Which is your favorite James Bond? Do you like Daniel Craig?  Some of us did, some did not. I have no opinion on the matter!  And did we know of the Hungarian wedding tradition of the ‘money dance’?  The father or best man announces that the ‘bride is for sale’ while Hungarian wedding music plays in the background.  Guests then pay, and twirl the bride around, usually just for a few seconds, and this provides the newlyweds money for their honeymoon and start of their new life.

‘Let’s see if your numbers add up’ .. ‘but let’s not have another 40 something votes’ on the health care law, was the challenge from the President to the Republicans in the State of the Union speech tonight.   And the Huffington Post reported that the award for the first GOP congressman to call Pres. Obama a ‘socialistic dictator’ goes to Rep. Randy Weber (R-Texas).  (Who would do well to stop using big words he does not know the meaning of). The longest ovation went to war hero, the Army Sergeant Cory Remsburg.  Pres. Obama met him at Omaha Beach in France, at a D-Day commemoration.   Cory was later injured by a roadside bomb during his 10th deployment (in the Iraq war, I think), in a coma for three months and emerged partially paralyzed.

We made it in fine this morning from Seattle.  We landed early even though there was light snow falling at Denver airport.  But the snow persisted all day long, and had not stopped by the time we closed up shop at the office.  So my colleague and I walked two blocks in the snow to a restaurant, had our dinner .. but then called a taxi to take us the eight blocks to the hotel.

It looks like the sun will come out tomorrow, but then there’s more snow in the forecast for Thursday and Friday.

I love the Tintin series of comic books (from Belgium), and know it very well.  It turns out there is also a more recent French comic book series, with a heroine called Adèle Blanc Sec.  I only learned all of this after picking up the French-made film Les Aventures extraordinaires d’Adèle Blanc-Sec/The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc Sec (2010) at the DVD store.  (And watched it Saturday night with Bryan and Gary).  The title character was played by French actress Louise Bourgoin. The plot of the film is developed nicely. The film opens with an Indiana Jones-esque tomb-raiding scene and plays out in 1912 in Paris after that.  Some of the main characters (men) have large ears, others have large noses or flamboyant moustaches, and of course they wear clothing true to the period.    The adventures also feature a pterodactyl and a ladies’ tennis match, one that could very well have been inspired by 1920s French tennis legend Suzanne Lenglen (her Wikipedia entry here).

The Apple McIntosh is 30 years old, and Apple is celebrating it with a timeline on their website, here.  (Click on Mac timeline). In 1987 when I was a student, I did use the university’s Apple Mac II. (The basic system with its 20 MB drive and monitor cost more than $5,000).  Today we carry hundreds of times more powerful computing power and storage capacity in our pockets, of course .. AND we are connected to the internet, back then barely in existence and certainly not available outside research and military institutions.

So what do I use today? Well, an IBM Thinkcentre desktop with Windows 8 at home, a Lenovo Thinkpad with Windows 7 for work, and then my Apple iPad and Apple iPhone.  Each has its own area of strength, and they are somewhat connected, but not fully.   For example, I back up my digital media onto the W8 desktop with Apple’s iTunes, and the rest to an attached external drive. Everything does not always work nicely together.  Just this morning the lastest iTunes software update turned out to be incompatible with Windows 8.  I took awhile to fix it, grr.  1. Rebooting everything did not help.  2. Reinstalling iTunes did not work.  Of course, no earlier iTunes version to download, either. 3.  Forget Windows Troubleshooter to find the problem.  4. Now it is war. Uninstall everything Apple, including a software app called Bonjour.  Good day and good-bye, since I don’t even know what you do monsieur!  5. Reinstall iTunes with Internet Explorer’s download, in case using Google Chrome for downloading did something different.    6. Try again .. voila!  It works.

Ever since I started working in Denver in September, the Colorado State capitol had been shrouded in a scrim : a curtain that can be heated, and withstand strong winds, so that workers could complete its $17 million rehab with no interruption.  The entire dome is covered in thinner-than-paper Colorado gold.  The gold bullion used for the new gild was donated in 2011 by mine owner AngloGold Ashanti. The 24-karat gold, valued at more than $116,175, was shipped off to Florence, Italy, and milled into gold leaf.  The Capitol had been constructed from 1886 to 1903, and the dome was initially covered in copper. [Information from a report by the Denver Post dated 12/26/2013].

We ‘recoiled in horror’ on Monday night as our server in the restaurant sneezed, turned around and immediately blew his nose. This was right after putting our food on the table. He had a heavy cold, poor guy. But were our plates full of germs? What about the glasses of water? Should we drink those?  I guess it helps not to think about these things too much .. it will surely turn one into a germophobe, unable to touch anything or anyone.

I worked on adding to my iPad music library this weekend.  I also discovered that I can read Adobe .pdf documents with the iBook application.   So I decided to try and salvage the contents from a CD that I bought in 2000 in South Africa with large collection of Afrikaans poetry on it (‘Die Groot Verseboek’/ ‘The Big Book of Poems’).   It wasn’t easy.  The CD had customized reader software on it, that could only run on pre-Windows 7 computers.  I dusted off an old notebook computer that still had Windows XP on.  Then I had to manually cut and paste the content from the reader frame into MS Word.  The reader application crashed several times during these attempts : either because it was unstable, or because it was loathe to give up its digital treasure.   But hey, I bought the CD, and I want to transfer the content over to my iPad.  So I ended up with a 600 page Word doc, which I will reformat and see if I can add an index and links into.

I show one of my many favorite poems below, with a rough translation of the last verse in English.  It is by Gottfried Watermeyer, was written in 1948 and is titled ‘Ballad of the Drunk Party’.

Love is the bitter glass
the dry glass, the dark glass;
love is the after-sorrow
that fits the hollow of the heart.