Posts

Posted on

Monday/ Ginza district

Monday’s weather was perfect for being out and about.    This Ginza district lamp post with the Fenghuang (mythological bird of East Asia) on top has  a decoration with up-faces/ upside-down-faces on.   The Ginza street scene shows Matsuya Ginza, an upscale department store with a design museum on the 6th floor (white building on the right).   I love the chess set but didn’t make a note of who the artist was.   The Klein & More clock replica dates back to 1956 (a little pricey at  ¥ 47,250/ US$600, though).   Elsewhere in the store the Issey Miyake jackets went for $400 or so.  (Miyake was born in Hiroshima and witnessed and survived the atomic bomb at age 7 in 1945).   I ran into the Ichiro picture (from the Seattle Mariners) in the subway.  He is promoting Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation and yes, that’s a Starbucks store name reflected at the top of the picture.    And back in the hotel I can watch high-definition manga animated stories.   The artwork is stunning, but of course the dialog is in Japanese!

Posted on

Sunday/ arrived in Tokyo

Here is the Boeing 767-300 of All Nippon Airlines that brought us to Tokyo, at a wet Hong Kong airport.   (An ANA plane was involved in a hair-raising incident on Sept 6.  Flight 140 with 117 passengers en route to Haneda -Tokyo’s other airport- briefly flew virtually upside down after a co-pilot mistakenly operated a key steering mechanism.  Whoah!  Amazingly, just two flight attendants were slightly injured, and six passengers reported that they felt ‘unwell’ after landing).    Today I sat in coach but that didn’t stop me from enjoying a Kirin beer.   Wish I knew what the little sticker on it said ! of course I don’t !   So that was 4 hours in the air.   Then I took the Narita Express train to Tokyo (it’s been a long day, does it show in my face?).   It helped a lot that I have the Tokyo subway figured out and that I came to the same Marriott I stayed in, in May.

Posted on

Saturday/ going to Tokyo

I have a few days off from the project this coming week, and since it’s too short to go back home I decided to go to Tokyo.    My short stay-over there in May was just too short to see enough of the city!     This time of year the typhoons keep rolling in from the Pacific – another one hit the Phillipines just today – so that is something to keep an eye on.    The temperatures in Japan have gone down already from the summer highs.   The 27 27 25 at the bottom of NHK TV’s weather map is for 大阪 Osaka, 名古屋市Nagoya and 東京都 Tokyo respectively.   (25ºC is 77ºF).   

Posted on

Friday/ National Day of the People’s Republic of China 国庆节

Saturday October 1 is the National Day of the People’s Republic of China.   The PRC was founded on October 1, 1949 with a ceremony at Tiananmen Square.    The flags are from lamp posts on the way to work, and the other picture is from Baidu’s home page.   Baidu is sometimes called the ‘Google of China’.   

‘Baidu’ is a quote from the last line of Xin Qiji’s classical poem Green Jade Table in The Lantern Festival  saying something like  ‘Having searched for her hundreds and thousands of times in the crowd, suddenly turning back by chance, I find her there in the dimmest candlelight’.

Posted on

Thursday/ the SAP transport

We are starting to build our solution in the SAP Development system.   That means we are creating transports – little packets of table entries or program code, and pushing the ‘truck’ button on the Transport Organizer screen.   

The SAP screens that make up the user interface sit atop a gigantic database of connected tables.  So how many are the Germans up to these days in a typical standard SAP system anyway, I wondered?  Well, there is a ‘mother of all tables’ with all the table names by the name of DD02L.  So we can check the number of names in that table.   Not everything that masquerades as a ‘table’ is a true table though.   Some are virtual tables or structures, so those should not be counted.     Finally, let’s filter out any custom tables (in most SAP systems there would be no more than a few 100, anyway).   And the answer is – drum roll ..  –  80, 674.     That’s a lot !   

Posted on

Wednesday/ the Aloha Beach Club has pizza

On Wednesday we went to the Aloha Beach Club, a place on the water close to work.   (They offer pizza for lunch, that was the draw).   There was a nice map of the area on the wall.   My cell phone picture is a little blurred, but the land mass on the south west corner of the map is Dapeng Peninsula, and the little bay right above it is Dapeng Bay.   It is shallow for the most part, making it ideal for windsurfing.    The cute little car with the surfboard is a BYD, from the Shenzhen-based car manufacturer with the same name.   Its 2010 sales of 519,800 units made it the sixth largest Chinese car-maker by units sold.

Posted on

Tuesday/ thank you party

Some 20 project team members are staying in the hotel here in Dameisha and we were all invited to a ‘General Management Thank You’ party on Tuesday night.   The food was wonderful and there was live music.   A singer belted out Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance, some Creedence Clearwater Revival songs from way back then and even some country music.   Quite a range of genres!   But then I see Wikipedia says that CCR’s genres were  roots rock, country rock, blues rock, swamp rock and southern rock.    Not that I can tell the difference, but swamp rock sounds the best to me !

Photo from Wikipedia : Creedence Clearwater Revival, 1968. L-R: Tom Fogerty, Doug Clifford, Stu Cook, and John Fogerty

 

Posted on

Monday/ the Little Bunny has my laundry

It’s still the Year of the Bunny (Rabbit) and the Little Bunny is doing our laundry.    Coupons are not nearly as prevalent in China (yet?) as they are in the USA, but this is a nice one – complete with hologram sticker and all.  (¥12 is about US$2).

Posted on

Sunday/ Shenzhen Civic Center

Shenzhen’s Civic Center is a great place for spending some time on a Sunday.   Only today it was rainy outside, so I took a few quick pictures of the sweeping roof of the Shenzhen Museum nearby, and then went inside.    The kids are dribbling and twirling their basket balls, waiting under the enormous roof for the rain to clear.     There is an art store for students inside the Center with portfolio books of reprinted artwork.    So the pictures are from those books : cranes in a pine forest, hoopoes in a loquat tree, and a portrait study.    The loquat tree is indigenous to southeastern China.   And so are the hoopoes with their cute tufty feathered heads, to my surprise.   We had them in the garden in South Africa; they are found in most of Africa as well.  To add a final twist to the tale of the hoopoe : it is Israel’s national bird.

Posted on

Saturday/ first snow on Fuji-san富士山

Mount Fuji watchers report that the first snow came one day earlier than last year, about 7 days earlier than on average.  (Picture from the TV here).    Mt Fuji is a very symmetrical stratovolcano mountain.  Other such mountains are of course Washington State’s Mt Rainier, and Kilimandjaro in Africa.

Here’s how the numbers stack up for the three mountains.

Mt Fuji 3,776 m 12,388 ft last eruption 1707
Mt Rainier 4,392 m 14,411 ft last eruption 1894
Mt Kilimandjaro 5,895 m 19,341 ft none in recorded history

And hey – I have a Mt Fuji in my wallet as well : the back of a ¥1,000 note (that’s about US$13).

Posted on

Friday/ I will click ‘OK’

After a long week I was happy to just kick back in the hotel and relax Friday night (instead of making my way to Hong Kong as I frequently do).    On the Japanese TV game show, I admired the colorful graphics but could not make out much more.   Check out the rotating cube with characters to arrange to make a phrase.   Of the solution I have no clue, but hey – I can be the team member that click that ‘OK’ button by the yellow arrow, how’s that? :  )

Posted on

Thursday/ where to, pigeon?

This carrier pigeon (I assume it’s one! looking at the rings on its feet) landed on my hotel balcony.   I suppose it’s taking a little break from its travel back to its home.    The homingpigeon.com website features a solar wind meter (indicating the strength of disruptions caused in the earth magnetic field by flare-ups on the surface of the sun) .. but there is evidence that the birds actually use freeways and man-made structures to navigate with.

In September 2009, a South African IT company based in Durban pitted an 11-month-old bird ‘Winston’ armed with a 4GB memory stick against the ADSL service from the country’s biggest internet service provider, Telkom.  The pigeon took 1 hr 8 mins to carry the data 80 km (50 miles).   That turned out to be vastly quicker than the ADSL connection could deliver the data !   (I believe the ADSL connection speed will beat the pigeon today).

Posted on

Wednesday/ 3-D map of Dameisha

This 3D map of Dameisha was put on bus stop billboards here recently.   It has a lot of detail on, right down to the fiberglass figures on Dameisha Beach (I took the beach figure picture some time ago).   That’s the Yantian Expressway curving around the beach town.

Posted on

Tuesday/ it pours when it rains

This ‘water painting’ picture from Monday night’s ride home from work as seen through the bus window– it was pouring.   I felt sorry for people on the street !   It’s still warm here, but despite the rain last night the humidity was much lower than normal today.

Weather for Shenzhen, Guangdong, China

81°F | 27°C Tue Wed Thu Fri
Mostly Sunny Mostly Sunny Mostly Sunny Partly Sunny
Scattered Clouds
Wind: NE at 13 mph
Humidity: 61% 88° 70° 91° 72° 91° 73° 88° 73°
Posted on

Monday/ azimuthal equidistant projection

This cool map (click to enlarge) comes from the All Nippon Airlines in-flight magazine.   Tokyo was put at the top of the globe and every other point projected around it, radially along the longitudinal lines.   So distances measured from the center of the map along the longitudinal lines are accurate, but all other measured distances are not.   And the farther away a continent or a country is, the more distorted its shape comes out!    (There is actually a map with this projection on the United Nations flag, with the North Pole at the center).

Posted on

Sunday/ in Dameisha

Everything went fine and I am in the hotel in Dameisha/mainland China, ready to get a few hours sleep.   The ‘Welcome to Japan’ sign is full of Japanese icons (as it should be, of course).      There is the United bird (and old one with creaky seats!) that brought us into Narita airport, and the robot is from an airport toy store.

Posted on

Saturday/ at Seatac

I’m at Seatac airport waiting for the flight to Tokyo (about 10 hrs duration).    The All Nippon Airlines website announced the first Boeing 787 Dreamliner routes : Tokyo(Haneda)-Frankfurt and Tokyo(Haneda-Beijing).    It also notes that Japan makes about 35% of the plane – the forward fuselage, the center wing, and some structural components. 

 

Posted on

Friday/ heading out again

I’m leaving Saturday morning for Hong Kong, this time via Tokyo.   A United flight gets me into Tokyo’s Narita airport, and then All Nippon Airways will get me to Hong Kong.   (Picture of ANA’s iPhone app).    The flight track from today’s United flight is from Flightstats.com, showing the routing right over Alaska and across the Bering Sea.   I will arrive very late Sunday night into Hong Kong.  It’s still weird for me, the 24 hrs that disappear out of my local date and time reference, with these westward flights across the International Date Line in the ‘wrong’ direction.

Posted on

Thursday/ dinner in Ballard

I had dinner in Ballard with Bill and Dave, and the pictures are from Bergen Place Park – the triangular site between Leary Avenue, 22nd Avenue NW, and Market Street.  The ‘trees’ are artist Jenn Lee Dixon’s ‘Witness Trees’.   Bergen (in Norway) is one of Seattle’s international sister cities, and the mural leads me to believe the first Norskamerikanere (Norwegian Americans) arrived here in 1869.  Some eight centuries after Bergen’s founding in 1070 !

Posted on

Wednesday/ USA vs Russia in the RWC11

The Rugby World Cup of 2011 started last Friday and is the seventh Rugby World Cup, a quadrennial International Rugby Union competition.  This year it is played in New Zealand, the country’s largest sporting event ever with some 90,000 visitors expected.    20 teams are competing, and the USA and Russia have teams as well.   Live TV coverage in the USA is only available as special sports packages from NBC’s Universal Sports channel.  Some matches are shown in full after a day or two, though.  Says the official website (http://www.rugbyworldcup.com) of Thu Sep 15’s match-up in Pool C between the Cold War foes : ‘USA and Russia are prepared for an intense battle in what might be their only chance to record a victory at Rugby World Cup 2011’.  Oh boy. Better go for it, then.   Go USA!  

Of course, I root for South Africa as well; the Springboks are the defending champions and eked out a 1 point win over Wales on Sunday in a Pool D match.  Go Bokke !

The map of New Zealand showing the stadiums is from Wikipedia.   Where is Christchurch located, site of the 6.5 earthquake in Feb?  It sits on the nub sticking out from the south eastern part of the South island (so no stadiums there).