Bertha, Seattle’s tunnel boring machine, is making some progress. Check out the Washington State Dept of Transportation’s web page here.
Sunday/ where’s Bertha now?
Saturday/ o! it’s an o-no
My friends Dave and Michael and I were at the Coastal Kitchen here on 15th Avenue on Saturday night. The ‘special’ menu item is ono, said the waitress. Ono? Is that a white fish? I wanted to know. (Yes). And so I ordered it, but had to look up the fish at home. Ono is its Hawaiian name; it is also called a wahoo. (Not to be confused with Yahoo, of course).
Black Friday/ caveat emptor
So Thanksgiving Day behind us, the shopping for Christmas can start in earnest. This year the Black Friday sales events at stores started on Thanksgiving evening already, on Thursday. The ugly face of capitalism clashing with family time? Yes. Should there be a law to keep stores closed? Probably not. Can a store force its workers to come in on Thanksgiving Day? Of course. But then it may have to deal with an unhappy workforce (or maybe it will keep the store in business, and save some jobs?). Doorbusters! 30% off ! screams the headlines. But most items were not meant to sell at the ‘full price’ at any time of the year, anyway. It’s marketing hype and marketing theater. As had been said already in the times of the Roman empire : caveat emptor. Buyer beware.
Happy Thanksgiving!
I am using my little feathered friend the peacock, to represent everything I am thankful for. Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
Wednesday/ holiday weekend rush
The days are so short this time of year! – the sun sets shortly after at 4 pm. So when there is a long holiday weekend just ahead as well, it adds a sense of urgency to get things done before night has fallen and everyone is settled in, and you are not. So I write two e-mails for work, and then took some old clothes to Goodwill, dropped old electronics and light bulbs at a recycler and also made a stop at the Asian grocery store Uwajimaya. I cannot claim that I am a foodie, but I do like to ogle all the fresh and outlandish food that is on offer there. I came away with more mundane items like green tea from Japan, and a six pack of Asahi beer.
Tuesday/ a million miles .. or more
Chris Burton is vice president for global sponsorships at the technology company SAP, and writes in the New York Times about his extensive travels around the world .. also that he has racked up 6,343,603 miles on Delta Airlines. Which made me wonder how many miles I have. Well, I added it up for the three airlines I travel most frequently on, and it comes to 1,316,314 miles.
Then there’s Tom Stuker, the real-world equivalent of George Clooney’s character in the 2009 movie ‘Up in the Air’ that logged 10,000,000 flier miles on United Airlines. United named a Boeing 747 in his honor.
Monday/ nog eggnog?
I’m playing with words in the heading .. it asks ‘more egg nog?’. (The Afrikaans word ‘nog’ loosely translates to ‘more’). Well, I have my new iPhone, and the two pictures below were taken with it. Amazing how crisp the pictures are.
Sunday/ checking in at REI
It’s been awhile since I stopped by the flagship REI store (Recreational Equipment Inc.) here in Seattle. I need new gloves and was looking for a jacket for wearing in Denver. The Hilton Garden Inn is much further from the office, and a 15 to 20 minute walk. Indeed, there were forests of ski jackets to wade through, with inner layers and outer layers and Gore-Tex and all .. but they all seemed a little too much, and too colorful, too sporty to wear as an outer layer for an office job. So I will keep looking. The departments stores are sure to offer blander jackets and coats. It’s just that the Christmas season onslaught of music and displays and the Salvation Army jingling their bell all day long outside the Pacific Place mall have now started.
Saturday/ iPad Air notes
Alright! So I sprung for the iPad Air, since my iPad 2 was getting a little long in the tooth. (Apparently it is ‘Apple upgrade week for me’, since my iPhone 5s is waiting at the office for me to get picked up. I will do that on Monday).
Setting up the new iPad took a little bit of time, since I had to fix my music library on the PC that I synch to. (It’s a long story; some of the music files did not get transferred over to my new PC that I upgraded to earlier this year, and I had to manually import the 50 or so music files into the iTunes library one CD at a time. Only my iTunes music purchases were on the Apple cloud, and that’s still only about 5% of my music collection).
So what do I use my iPad for – now that I have had one for two years? Check out my punch list below. The iPad has its place, but I have an iPhone, and my 15 inch notebook computer from work, almost always with me to use as well. (Whatever happened to the idea that we will all have one and only one device for everything? My answer : Evolution and reality. A big screen is needed for maps and for reading, and a proper keyboard is needed for typing).
What I use my iPad for
> Read digital subscriptions for TIME magazine, Bloomberg Business Week and New York Times (more and more; I still get paper copies in the mailbox but I am about to cancel the paper copies completely)
> Read Twitter’s news feed (as opposed to e-mail, which I read mostly on my phone, and respond to mostly with my notebook computer)
> Do not read books on the iPad (prefer my books in paper mode!)
> Do not take pictures with the iPad (use my phone or full-fledged digital camera)
> Play Scrabble and SpellTower (and really nothing else at this point, so no Angry Birds or Candy Crush)
> Listen to music (on the airplane; as opposed to listening to music on my phone)
> Look at pictures in my synched photo albums (occasionally)
> Watch YouTube videos
> Do not watch movies on it yet (movies bought from the iTunes store, that is .. at home my whole movie collection is on DVD and Blu-ray. I have stopped buying movies on those formats since the whole disk format way of dealing with movies is rapidly changing to on-line streaming and downloading content – similar to what has been under way with music for many years now)
> Surf the web with Google Chrome
> Use various other really cool little apps, among my favorites is Google Translate (and I’m trying to figure out how to best use EverNote for reminders and notes)
Friday/ Jet A for that up, up and away
Jet A is jet fuel : the stuff that modern jet airplanes burn in their engines. Jet A specification fuel has been used in the United States since the 1950s. In the rest of the world Jet A-1 is used. Wikipedia says the primary difference is the freezing point : Jet A’s is −40 °C (−40 °F), Jet A-1’s is −47 °C (−53 °F). There is also Jet B which is a fuel in the naphtha-kerosene region, a blend of 30% kerosene and 70% gasoline, with a freezing point of −60 °C (−76 °F). It is for use in very cold temperatures (those expeditions to Antarctica?).
Anyway : my project team compadres and I were very happy to go home after a long week of reviews that were well received. A project such as ours at this stage is at an inflection point : the team has to report back to the sponsors and show what has been designed, and what the system will cost to construct. And they might just say : Whoa! That’s too much, we cannot let you go forward. But we are OK and should get the green light to go ahead.
Thursday/ snow
There will be a little more snow than expected : a total accumulation of 2 to 6 inches, said the weatherman in an updated forecast. But it will clear up later in the morning.
Wednesday/ dropping fast
It was very mild outside today here in Denver, but that is about to change. The high temperature will plummet by 33°F (19°C) and there will be an inch or two of snow on the ground, making for an icy commute into downtown. What I have to do is watch my step on the sidewalk for the two blocks that I have to walk.
Tuesday/ stars for stars
Monday/ made it in
I got to wake up more than an hour later this Monday morning, since I was on the 6.40 am flight to Denver instead of the 5.15 am*. Even so, I ended up almost missing this later flight. The taxi driver showed up very late at my house, and that ate up all 20 mins of the spare wait time I allowed before boarding. But there I was, sitting on the plane at 6 am watching the light rain come down, and shortly after that we were on the way to Denver.
*The 5.15 am flight was cancelled due to a shortage of planes that made it to the West coast on Sunday night. There was a large storm system making its way through the Midwest on Sunday.
Sunday/ the Electronic Flight Bag
I sat next to a pilot on Friday night on the way to Seattle, and he tracked the flight all the way on his iPad. What app is that? I wanted to know – I want it too! Well, it costs only $35, but one needs to be a pilot to get an activation code. It is an ‘electronic flight bag (EFB)’ application. Flight maps and other essential pilot information that used to be carried into the cockpit in flight bags weighing up to 40 lbs/ 18 kg can now be replaced with iPads or other tablet devices. It is now possible to store all the aeronautical charts for the entire world on a single three-pound/1.4 kg tablet.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is encouraging pilots to ditch their flight bags in favor of its electronic version, but there’s still a long way to go. Not all airlines are going with the iPad, either. Delta Airlines has announced that it’s equipping its 11,000 pilots with Microsoft Surface tablets and not with iPads.
Saturday/ Edmonds Underwater Park
On Saturday we made a quick day trip to Paul’s getaway cabin on Kitsap peninsula. We drove up to Edmonds, and took the ferry to Kingston. At Edmonds we just missed the 10.30 am departure of the ferry, and walked over to the water’s edge while waiting for the next departure. Immediately to the north of the ferry terminal is Edmonds Underwater Park : an area of seabed stretched across 27 acres of tide and bottom lands. The park was established in 1970 as a marine preserve and sanctuary by city ordinance. The primary attraction for divers is the man-made reefs constructed of concrete blocks, tractor tires, PVC pipes of various sizes, sunken navigation buoys, an old tree trunk, sunken boats & ships, even old pieces of the 520 floating bridge. There were 20 or so divers to be seen on Saturday. It looked deceptively calm and shallow to me, given that a diver died in there 2005 and two more in 2010 in separate incidents. (Malfunctioning equipment, cross currents). Events like these send shock waves through the diving community, since there are so many diving protocols dedicated to safety – but I guess accidents are bound to happen with some 25,000 divers going there every year.
Friday/ the SC13 conference to start
We know there is going to be a big conference center event in Denver next week, because we are getting pushed out of our Hilton hotel and back to the venerable and well-worn old Warwick hotel. I noticed the SC13 lamp post banners this morning while walking to the office. Turns out SC13 stands for SuperComputer, and I see on the program there will be workshops for ‘Graph Partitioning and Data Clustering’ and ‘Building on the European Exascale Approach’. Hmm. I would have loved to understand what that is all about – but it’s still heads-down for us, with our plain vanilla SAP systems work on the project. We have to get the design phase all wrapped up before the ’13’ in SC13 is gone!
Thursday/ Tarantula Billiards and other dive bars
Two of my colleagues and I had dinner at the Little India restaurant on Thursday night. On the way back to the hotel we walked through a part of downtown that featured the Shag Lounge, and Tarantula Billiards, among others. And – we were asked twice for money on the street. The first guy wanted a dollar (we gave him one), and then there was a woman with a child in a stroller that told a long story of bad luck and a broken car, and that she needed money for a little gas for the car. We gave her some money as well.
Wednesday/ Go Nuggets!
Quick! What is the Denver
basketball team called? The Denver Nuggets*, and they played the LA Lakers tonight, and besting them with an 111-99 score. (Both teams had injuries to deal with). There was a handful of decent tickets given to us by our client, but we were all swamped with work, and felt we could not go .. preparing for a big system design review next week, and preparing the project plan for the next phase. So at 6.30 pm the PwC project manager, exasperated and worried that the tickets will go to waste, shooed six technical team members out the door and said ‘Go! Just go!’ And so they did. The game was on the Pepsi Center, barely a mile from where we work.
*Gold nuggets, of course. A reference to the state’s gold mining and prospecting history.
Tuesday/ typhoon Haiyan
It was a long day, and I had a quick dinner at the Vietnamese noodle place here in downtown Denver. Hey, I wanted to check up on the path of the typhoon Haiyan over the weekend, and did not get to it, I thought. Check out the detailed maps and some photos from the New York Times. I see the storm skirted by Vietnam before ending up in GuangXi province in China. One of the nuclear power stations that we put the work management and logistics computer system in for in 2012, is actually right there on the border of Vietnam and on the coast (Fang Chen Gang). A good thing the winds were down to 50 and 60 miles per hour by then.
