a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
My new ThinkCentre with Windows 8 has arrived, and I managed to fire it up successfully on Thursday night. I have to move some files (especially my large library of pictures), and do some consolidation. I will write about my impressions of Windows 8 later. The ‘desktop’ part of it is much like Windows 7.
Got something confidential that you want to send to ‘The New Yorker’ magazine for publication.. but you want to remain completely anonymous? To do that, previously there was the mailing address of the magazine (1925), later joined by a phone number (1928) and much later by an e-mail address (1998). But e-mail addresses and the location of the computer from where it was sent is traceable and not good for super-secret communications. So now in 2013 there is the ‘Strongbox’ on the Tor network. Check out the steps below .. I am no encryption expert but it looks pretty cloak-and-dagger, spy-versus-spy super-secret to me! On the upside The New Yorker cannot divulge their confidential sources to say, the FBI .. but on the downside : they cannot verify the authenticity of the material easily, either.
I watched an animated movie called ‘Grave of the Fireflies’ from Ghibli studios last night – because the cover had a quote from movie critic Roger Ebert that said it belonged on a list of the 10 best war movies of all time. Well, I did not quite know what to expect, but it was harrowing to watch. This is not a feel-good pop-cultury Pixar movie. To me the message was ‘War is brutal, and its consequences show no compassion to defenseless people’ (such as children).
A few of us from Seattle with family will go on the Princess Cruise shown below. We will try to manage the potential hazards as best we can (sinking ship, adrift with no power, seasickness!). I have really not been outside of London except for a train ride up to Birmingham, so I am really looking forward to see Ireland and Scotland (and the Loch Ness monster*).
*The Loch ness monster is a cryptid, from the Greek “κρύπτω” (krypto) meaning ‘hide’. It is a creature or plant whose existence has been suggested but is not yet recognized by scientific consensus. Kind of like Bigfoot (Sasquatch), the ape-like creature that some people believe inhabits the forests here in the Pacific Northwest.
It looks as if two weeks of dry weather is coming to an end today, and we had beers on Bryan and Gary’s deck tonight to enjoy the last of it. Check out Bryan’s ‘Elysian Superfuzz Pale Ale’ beer, brewed with blood orange to give it a citrussy taste. I buy the little blood oranges here at the grocery store when I see them. They are small and sweet and make you feel like a vampire when you bite into the juicy dark red fruit. Njarr !
Rocket man Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors, had a great week. His electric car company reported $11 million in profit for the latest quarter (first time it’s in the black, or is that in the green?), and the company’s stock is up 38%. The Tesla Roadster uses a three-phase Alternating Current (AC) induction motor. The AC induction motor was first patented by Nikola Tesla in 1888, is about the size of a watermelon, and can run at up to 14,000 rpm .. but instant torque is available at any rpm (Whoah). I’m reading all of this here on the Tesla Motors website http://www.teslamotors.com/roadster/technology/motor.
Nikola Tesla (born 1856, died 1943) was a Serbian-American, an electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, an inventor that worked for Thomas Edison for some time, but then struck out on his own – and how. He would build fantastic inventions and show them off, was capable of speaking eight languages, could memorize entire books, and visualize his machines and contraptions in his head. In 1960 the unit of measure for magnetic field strength was named a ‘tesla’ in his honor.
The ‘crisis’ in the Dow Jones pre-crisis and post-crisis the the Wall Street Journal refers to in its front page article about the DJIA reaching 15,000 for the first time on Tuesday, is the Lehman Brothers/ World Financial/ Great Recession crisis of 2008, of course. But there are other crises that have certainly not played themselves out fully – such as the European debt crisis, the repeated US debt-ceiling wrangles in Congress and the US unemployment crisis. And the USA is still awash in cheap money with the Federal funds rate sitting at zero almost 5 years after 2008.
The ABBA museum has opened in Stockholm. (Yes, yes. I’m an ABBA fan. Is there anyone that is not?). There’s a red telephone in the museum for visitors, and supposedly ‘only four people in the world has the number’ (named Agnetha, Björn, Bennie and Anni-Frid). Hmm. So if it rings, pick it up, says the website (can I wrestle it away from the person that dared get there ahead of me?). Björn Ulvaeus was very modest when Natalie from the Today show (morning TV show in the USA) interviewed him, saying that their timing was right and for some reason many, many people around the world just liked the music that they produced. He also said that it was ‘a little weird’ to play such a big part in creating a museum for oneself — but the city of Stockholm had been asking them for many years to do that, and they obliged.
I thought it was warm on Monday – but didn’t realize until the evening news that the 87 ºF (30.6 ºC) we had in the city was quite an aberration. It was the highest May 6 temperature on record, and by a wide margin.
So .. does a beach have to have sand? Madison Beach here alongside Lake Washington does not really have sand, and the water is not salty. We have to make do with what we have since it’s a heck of a drive out to the open ocean’s beaches here from the city !
It feels like summer here in Seattle with the warm temperatures lingering into the evening after sunset. Saturday was also the official opening of Seattle’s boating season, and so the summery weather is a happy coincidence to that.
We have a high-pressure cell hovering over us this weekend – keeping the clouds of the jet-stream away, and giving us a beautiful clear blue sky* and warmer temperatures (70’s º F/ 20’s ºC).
*And just why is the sky blue? Because of Rayleigh scattering. In plain English, the molecules of the earth’s atmosphere scatter the shorter wavelengths of light from the sun more than the longer ones, and the human eye sees the blue. If our eyes were more sensitive to violet light, the sky would have been violet. When the sun sets, the scattering of the red color wavelengths become more predominant, and we see red and pink).
Speaking of capitalism (Wednesday’s post), I will have to wait until October before I can get my grubby fingers on the new US$100 bill. The first $100 bills were issued in 1862 .. and by the end of 2010, a total of 7 billion hundred dollar notes were in circulation according to the Federal Reserve (more than two-thirds of these overseas). Of course the new note has several new security features – to make it harder for counterfeiters such as North Korea that is known in particular for producing extremely high-quality but fake $100 bills. My favorite security features from what I read on-line are the blue 3D ribbon woven into the note’s fabric, and the micro-printing reading “The United States of America” on Ben’s collar.
With Wednesday being May 1, there were street marches for workers’ rights and immigration reform here in Seattle. Everything went OK but after 6 pm things turned ugly in downtown Seattle. Most of the marchers had dispersed by then, but a small group of self-described ‘anarchists’ started confronting the police, and damaged cars and windows by throwing rocks. So some 17 people were arrested, and 8 police officers hurt – but mostly bumps and bruises. My take? Hey, you’re not going to get an argument from me that we’re doing just fine with capitalism in the USA. Capitalism is killing our morals and our future, argues Paul Farrell on the Wall Street Journal’s website Marketwatch : http://www.marketwatch.com/story/capitalism-is-killing-our-morals-our-future-2013-04-27?link=kiosk. We cannot put everything up for sale. The examples he mentions : “for-profit schools, hospitals, prisons/ outsourcing war to private contractors/ police forces by private guards, almost twice the number of public police officers/ drug companies’ aggressive marketing of prescription drugs directly to consumers, a practice prohibited in most other countries.” But to think we can live in a society with almost no government, no laws and no police (libertarian socialism, which seems to me pretty close to what anarchists stand for) – that is just a pipe-dream.
I had to get up with the birds on Tuesday – at 5 am, to make sure I was ready for an important 6 am conference call. But what was that noise outside? Light pellets of hail like we had the other day. Amazing. Anyway, let me jump in the shower and wash my face, I thought. The directors I talked to were in Chicago, I only had a 5-minute slot with prepared remarks, and I did not want to sound like I just rolled out of bed! Conference call over with, I went back to catch another 30 minutes of sleep. My stomach was still a little queasy from something I ate the night before, but I had to head out to the Red Lion hotel in downtown Seattle. It was the location of a rare event : my firm had most of the 400 or so of the Seattle team attend a whole afternoon workshop. So I wanted to attend and see all the faces and meet lots of new people. Done with the workshop, we could get refreshments and socialize, which I did as well. To socialize is hard work for me, since it does not come quite naturally the way it does for that ‘business pro’ guy in the National Car commercial that mixes business with .. business. Then it was time to catch the bus up the hill to kick back and make some dinner. Yay! I made it to the end of the day.
I like Kirin beer and when I saw an alcohol-free version of it in the Uwajimaja grocery store that carries products from Asia, I thought .. hmm, let me try it. It’s no Moose Drool, but drinkable. Kirin says it’s made from ‘an unprecedented new recipe containing barley malt and hops just like regular beer’. It has only 37 calories in the 11.3 oz (334ml) bottle that it comes in. I read on-line that earlier methods of making alcohol-free beer involved evaporating the alcohol from it, but tended to leave it with an ‘industrial’ taste.
There’s definitely a market for alcohol-free beers (pregnant women, beer-lovers on medication) .. but the market probably excludes college students out to getting their throats wet with the real stuff while they play beer pong!
I had time on Sunday to swing by King Street station just south of downtown Seattle. The station was originally constructed in 1906 but recently renovated inside and out. Wikipedia says it has Italianate architecture and Beaux-Arts architecture (OK! so now I know what that looks like as well). The station is a stop on the Amtrak Cascades route that runs along the Cascade Mountains on its east, up from Eugene, Oregon to Vancouver in Canada.
‘I will have a moose drool, please’ said I on Wednesday at a ‘connectivity event’ after work. Moose Drool is a brown ale made by the Big Sky Brewery in Montana. And so I had to look up if we actually have moose in Washington State (we do, in the northeast). The creatures are roaming all over Canada and Alaska.
Here are two pictures from Friday. I took the bus the the gym and back late afternoon (nice not to deal with the crush of traffic downtown). There was still some sun left after that, and so I walked down to Broadway (the main out-and-about street here in Capital Hill) to see what’s going on there.
