Good to go : my view from seat A1 on the Denver-bound United 737-900 at gate A12 at Seattle airport at 6 am this morning.
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.
Flight maps and other essential pilot information that used to be carried into the cockpit in a flight bag filled with paper maps are now available on the iPad with in-flight tracking.
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.
The Edmonds-Kingston ferry brings cars and pedestrians from the mainland to Kitsap Peninsula and back. It’s $10.70 if your vehicle is under 14′ in length, $13.55 for under 22′, and it goes up from there the longer your vehicle is. Ferry capacity is limited by total length of vehicles loaded, much more than total mass.
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.
The divers are not supposed to go closer than 300 ft to the ferry terminal (that’s the Edmonds ferry terminal on the left). I think these guys are just checking their equipment, since all the other divers that went down into the water were over a little further to the right, with a breakwater separating them from the ferry terminal.The life cycle of a crab from a tile in a wall by the waterside. It could have come straight out of a high school biology book!Since I did not go into the water myself with scuba gear and a GoPro head-mounted underwater camera, I will have to make do with this artist’s rendition of what it looks like on the seabed of the underwater park. This is from a sign at the waterside. There are maps available as well, but some of the items on the floor bed shift around with the tides, so the map is not very reliable.
Kingston is on the north of Kitsap Peninsula, and they welcome visitors (that bring money, of course).I snapped this picture of kayakers from Paul’s deck at his cabin just before we headed back.
The SC13 is a supercomputing conference, scheduled for next week in the Colorado Conference Center in Denver.
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!
Should one watch out for hairy spiders at the Tarantula Billiards lounge? This is on Stout Street in downtown Denver.
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.
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.
It’s 11.12.13, says the USA Today. The outline of the Philippines is a nod to the news still coming out of there in the aftermath of 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.
It is Veterans Day here in the USA .. a day that started out in 1918 as Armistice Day after the end of World War I.
I still traveled out to Denver, and there was a lot of blue sky here, but it is getting chilly as night falls. It was down to 0°C/ 32 °F tonight when we walked back to the hotel from the office.
It’s 9 am on Monday. Three airplanes lining up, one United and two Southwest, at Denver airport for as I am leaving for Denver downtown by taxicab this morning.
I saw the movie Gravity today .. here is its trailer on YouTube. It’s a survivor film, but also draws attention to the problem of debris in space. Bharath Gopalaswamy writes on the Huffington Post blog that there are now 22,000 trackable pieces of debris in low earth orbit. From the blog : U.S. Strategic Command’s Joint Space Operations Center monitors space debris with a worldwide network of 29 ground-based radars and optical sensors. The center also provides notifications to commercial space operators of potential risks to their satellites from space debris. In 2010 alone these warnings resulted in 126 satellite maneuvers to avoid collisions with other satellites or debris. But no country on its own has the resources, the technical expertise, or the geographical reach to resolve the problem of situational space awareness, thus making international cooperation a pivotal element towards mitigating risks to objects in space.
Don’t let go .. Sandra Bullock’s and George Clooney’s characters in dire straits in space.The space shuttle in the movie was called ‘Explorer’. There were a total of six space shuttles in NASA’s program (now shut down) and they Enterprise, Atlantis, Discovery, Challenger, Columbia and Endeavour. (Table from Wikipedia).
The poster for this year’s wild mushroom show here in Seattle, the 50th.
The mushrooms in my back yard seem to favor this time of year to sprout up in my back yard, and I took out about a dozen of the red ones with white speckles today. I wash my hands carefully after I had taken them out, since they might be poisonous. Even edible mushrooms have a tendency to absorb heavy metals, so they should not be harvested in the wild if they are near roads or industrial areas.
Best that I can tell these mushrooms from my back yard are ‘Amanita muscaria’, commonly known as the fly agaric or fly amanita. They are poisonous and psychoactive and associated with fir trees says Wikipedia. That is exactly where they grow in my backyard as well, close by the fir trees there.
I had some spare time on the way to the airport in my rental car on Friday, and I accidentally ended up stopping at the Denver Art Museum. I had to : the buildings an outdoor artwork there are quite eye-catching as one approaches it.
The Denver Art Museum opened its first exhibit in 1918. The Frederic C. Hamilton wing was added in 2006. Designed by Daniel Liebeskind, some critics panned its form as ‘too aggressive’. The red sculpture in front by artist Mark di Suvero is ‘Lao-Tzu’, named after the Chinese monk Lao-Tzu who is traditionally credited with the foundation of Taoism.This giant broom and dustpan, titled ‘Big Sweep’ was installed in June 2006. The 30-foot-tall piece was the work of world famous artists Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen.These seems to me to be offices and condos, right across from the Denver Art Museum. I suppose in such a location, a building can certainly not be just a plain square or rectangle!This is the North Building of the museum, and it opened in 1971. The building was designed by Italian modernist architect Gio Ponti. In front of it is an outdoor American Indian styled sculpture. The white building in the background is the one that is lit up in lavender at night and that I posted a picture of, yesterday.Yet another red outdoor artwork : the red painted steel chair is 21 feet tall and ten feet wide, and the painted fiberglass pony is six feet tall at the ears. The sculpture spent 1997 in New York City’s Central Park, where it was widely acclaimed before traveling to Denver in 1998 for permanent installation. It is called ‘The Yearling’.
This ‘chia pod’ has chia seeds, coconut milk and banana in.
I bought this ‘chia pod’ to snack on at work, partly because I liked the container and the stubby little spoon. (The spoon reminds me of the wooden ‘spoons’ that used to come in the rum-and-raisin ice creams we bought on the street from the ice cream man as kids). So what is chia? It’s a flowering plant in the mint family, native to Mexico and Guatemala, cultivated by the Aztec in pre-Columbian times. (Source : Wikipedia). The seeds have lots of good stuff in : omega-3 fatty acids among others, hence its availability in fancy packaging in city food stores.
I went for a quick little jaunt around the city with my rental car that I have tonight, and here are some of the sights I took pictures of.
‘East2West Source Point’ by Larry Kirkland was installed in 2003 in front of the Wellington Webb building at 14th Street and Colfax Avenue. It’s made of carrara marble, cast bronze and gold leaf. The gold leaf on the plumb bob likely represents the gold seekers that were so much a part of Colorado history.Another angle that shows the faces of the East2West Source Point sculpture.This lavender lighted dome is from the Denver City and County building off Colfax Avenue ..
I never knew : there are gold mines (in production) in the USA, and right here in Colorado. An old friend from South Africa was here in Denver on a business trip; he works for AngloGold Ashanti that is headquartered in Johannesburg. The gold price has dropped about a third from its highs in recent years, but that is not stopping mines in South Africa from approaching the 4000 m mark (2.5 miles) underground. Eight of the world’s 10 deepest mines are found in one area in South Africa, says this mining technology website.
My friend is about to step off the Light Rail train in downtown Denver, at the 18th & California station. He is here on a business trip in the area and we went to dinner. The light rail system here has 46 stations and 6 lines : way more than what we have in Seattle !A map of the gold mines around the world, operated by AngloGold Ashanti. Number 10, the Cripple Creek & Victor mine, is just a two hour drive from Denver.
It was 29 °F (-2 °C) when we arrived in Denver on Monday morning at 9 am .. and we may see snow flurries tomorrow. It’s a good thing I packed my gloves and woolen skull cap hat (it is for keeping my ears warm, though – not my skull).
Here’s this Monday’s Boeing engine picture (757-200) at sunrise as we fly southeast. P.S. Is that engine really as big as it looks, and the wing that it hangs on, as tiny as it looks?!Inspiration from this tequila advertisement mural : Decide what to be, and go BE IT.
The strict rules for turning off electronic gadgets are set to be relaxed by the FAA. (Check out the nice graphic by the Wall St Journal). Voice calls are still not allowed : a good thing in my opinion. Fliers are split 50-50 on the question if blabbing on the phone should be allowed. It ‘adds to the noise pollution in the cabin’ says some, and I agree. Some inconsiderate (oblivious?) passengers don’t need phones to talk loudly all through the flight, of course. Time to deploy those 33 dB noise reduction rated earplugs, or Bose noise-canceling headphones!
So .. Daylight Savings Time has come to an end. It’s time to ‘fall back’ one hour. Today was a blustery day here in the Seattle area with wind and rain. I cleaned up the leaves at the front and the back of the house as usual, knowing that I don’t have to get all of it .. it just keeps coming down, and I will get the rest next weekend.
A small maple leaf from the tree next door with brilliant yellows and oranges.
Friday night at 6.30 pm in Sea-Tac airport’s Terminal A. We have just stepped off the plane, and how great it feels to be free to walk out to baggage claim and go home !
The shooting incident on Friday at Terminal 3 in Los Angeles (LAX) airport that left a TSA agent dead shattered the sense I had that airports are safe inside the security zone. Yes, it’s illegal to bring a firearm anywhere inside an airport building, but of course that does not help to stop anyone bent on shooting people. In this case TSA agents were targeted. They are not armed, so the shooter got into the secure area and all the way to the food court by the departure gates before getting shot by police. He confronted one passenger with his assault rifle, asking if he was TSA, and then moved on. What was the motive? Who knows? Does it really matter? Another 50 or 60 people will be killed across the country this weekend in gang violence, domestic disputes, by mentally ill people and in accidents, pointed out Tom Ridge, the first head of the Dept. of Homeland Security, in an interview on CNN. We are our own worst enemy.
Two minions from Despicable Me 2 are having an argument.
Thursday was Halloween, of course – and we went for a full celebration here at work on the project. Our floor was the minions from the Despicable Me movies from Universal Studios. We had a popcorn machine in a big meeting room going, and awarded prizes for ‘cutest costume’, ‘scariest costume’ and more. My team won the team competition.
Here are the minions. Most of us wore yellow, but there are few purple ones in there from the Despicable Me 2 movie as well.
Here’s a poster from the hotel advertising the hotel restaurant and bar, called Pi (as in the mathematical symbol). Check out the happy hour* that runs from 3.14 pm to 6.28 pm : very geeky. I’m not so sure that think and drink go well together, though! Those blocked ‘Br’ and ‘Ba’ are chemical symbols, for bromide and barium respectively.
*Happy hour means you get your booze at half-price, or at least at a discount.
