Willem's Planet

It was the second Presidential debate last night and President Obama was FIRED UP.  He won the debate, even though the Republicans say it was a ‘draw’. Uh-huh.

Asked if he would support equal pay for equal work for women, Romney didn’t really answer the question, said he had ‘binders full of women’ (their resumes, that is) when he was governor of Massachusetts.  But he didn’t solicit the resumes.  It was given to him by an equal opportunity group.  He did appoint lots of women to the state government and would have done better to just say that.   Instead the blogosphere and twitterverse lit up with the phrase ‘Binders full of women’.

• NEW: Barack Obama, Joe Biden take on Mitt Romney’s ‘binders’ comments on campaign trail; Romney responds on Twitter
• Romney’s comments on using “binders full of women” in hiring; contraception could hurt his standing with some women
• Obama and Democrats rush to paint Romney as someone who doesn’t have the best interests of women in mind
• Romney will now have to score messaging points on the economy while clarifying stance on women’s health issues

Flu shot, that is. The 2012-13 Northern winter season’s flu shot offers protection against three strains of the flu : two strains of human flu H1N1 H3N2 and one of swine flu. (Sounds like pig farmers should still not get too close to their piggies!).  Here’s a nice YouTube video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ug-M1nIhfIA that shows how flu viruses mutate, and explains where the H1N1 and H3N2 numbering comes from.  P.S. Got to love those words hemagglutinin and neuraminidase from the video .. sure to leave your Scrabble opponents in a ‘dase’ if you build one of those bad boys!

Alright, so I never thought I’d find a word game to seriously challenge the fondness I have for Scrabble, but Spelltower does.  (Check out the video at  http://www.spelltower.com/).  It is very addictive.  (‘A great time waster’ says one reviewer. Aw. Is that a way to compliment a game that makes you think hard?).  It reminds me of a little bit of the ’80s classic Tetris.  In Spelltower you cannot move the tiles around, but you can build words forwards, backwards and diagonally.  Any which way you can, as long as the letters are directly connected.

And what did I buy? Why, a new LG refrigerator. Yes, it’s a lot of money – but I cannot go on with my old fridge that has been repaired a few times before, and is again on the fritz.

There was a little bit of rain in the city on Friday, more on the way Saturday night and Sunday. Friday night found me at the Elysian Brewing Co. on Capitol Hill. With Halloween looming and Thanksgiving after that, the pumpkin ales come out, in the same way that Starbucks is offering their pumpkin spice lattes. (Horror or horrors : there have been reports of Starbuckses running out of pumpkin spice lattes).

One of our regular waiters at the Elysian is packing up and moving to Sidney, Montana to start a food-serving truck business with a business partner.  It is all part of the North Dakota oil boom :  http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2012/apr/29/north-dakota-oil-boom-provides-hope-and-prosperity/.  They will serve up gyro sandwiches to the oil industry workers there.  (A gyro is a Greek dish of meat roasted on a vertical spit. To make a sandwich, add tomato, onion, and tzatziki sauce, wrapped in pita bread).

I made my way back to Seattle on Wednesday morning, starting out in Pittsburgh’s airport.  This print of Queen Ntombi Twala of Swaziland*, is one of a series of four ‘Reigning Queens’ made by Andy Warhol in 1985.  The prints are in concourse C of the airport.  The other three queens are Queen Elizabeth II, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands and Queen Margrethe of Denmark. Warhol once said ‘I want to be as famous as the Queen of England’.

*Swaziland is a tiny kingdom, land-locked by South Africa and Mozambique. I have to confess I did not know about the Queen of Swaziland’s existence while I grew up in South Africa.  The Queen has since been succeeded by her son, King Mswati III.  Check out http://www.gov.sz/

We don’t see any Tea Party political ads in Washington State – we’re a blue state and an Republican hoping to win office had better position himself more or less in the middle (left is liberal and right is conservative in American politics).   But here in Pennsylvania’s Senate race, incumbent Democratic U.S. Senator Bob Casey, Jr. is running for re-election to a second term against Republican nominee Tom Smith.  Tom Smith is for (see http://tomsmithforsenate.com/): a flat tax code with no loopholes, for reducing annual spending to 20% of GDP (that is a massive reduction, given that the US is almost at 40% of GDP), for ‘ending oppressive regulation that suffocates growth and kills jobs, for energizing our future (mostly by producing more oil and using coal) and for reducing health care (repeal Obamacare) and Social Security.

I am not much of a handyman, but I am lucky enough to have a friend who is !  – Bryan :). So we thought we’d take a crack at it with a Google search for ‘asko dishwasher D1760’ and see if someone out there had run into a problem similar to what I have.   The dishwasher fills up and starts washing, but then fails to complete the wash cycles and does not get to the rinse cycle.  To make a long story short, a combination of the symptoms and taking a look at what’s going on underneath the washer pointed to a valve and controller that failed.   I ordered the part on-line.  It arrived after a few days, we put it in, and voila! it fixed the problem.

.. the surprising 7.8% September unemployment rate for the USA, that is.  Scarcely were they out, or ex-General Electric CEO Jack Welch (and very obviously a Republican) accuses the Obama Administration of interfering with the Bureau of Labor Statistics!  Quite outrageous, his claim, and dismissed by just about everyone.

It is not only statements from the Presidential debate last night that are getting fact-checked.   Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has made some contentious statements at the Oracle OpenWorld 2012 conference this week, disparaging SAP ‘s latest technology called SAP HANA (High-Performance Analytic Appliance).

From Vishal Sikka’s blog at http://www.experiencesaphana.com/community/blogs/blog/2012/10/02/setting-the-record-straight–sap-hana-v-exadata-x3  :  ‘The statement Mr Ellison made about HANA, when talking about the release of a new Exadata machine, that has 4TB of DRAM and 22TB of SSD, is false.  He referred to HANA being “a small machine” with 0.5TB of memory. He said his machine has 26TB of memory, which is also wrong (SSD is not DRAM and does not count as memory, HANA servers also use SSDs for persistence)..

.. the largest HANA system deployed so far is the 100-node system built earlier this year with Intel and IBM.  It has 100TB of DRAM and 4000 CPU cores.  Mr. Ellison is welcome to come to Santa Clara and see the system working himself, with workloads from several customers’.

I watched most of the first of three Presidential debates tonight with friends over beers and pizza.  We were a little dismayed that the consensus among the political pundits (and a poll conducted by CNN) was that Romney ‘won’ the debate, even though there were no obvious zingers or knock-out punches.  CNN summed it up in one line as ‘The Republican candidate says the president’s vision is one of big government, while Obama challenged his rival’s plans as unworkable’.