It’s back to San Francisco tomorrow, and so my bags are packed. I see I missed a story last week of a woman that brought her ’emotional support’ pig onto an airplane in Connecticut. (The pig ended up not flying; see the report from ABC News > here). Since I don’t have a pig to take traveling with me, I will confess that back when I traveled to China for three weeks at a time, I would take a book that I loved, and would make very sure I have my iPad with my TIME magazines downloaded and my favorite music on it, though. (To ’emotionally support’ me while traveling).
This is the corner of 17th Ave and Roy St at 8 am on Saturday.
We woke up to a dusting of snow here this morning in Capitol Hill .. just a half inch or so that stuck to the ground, but not really to the slightly warmer street and sidewalk surfaces.
Watch your step! The sidewalk in front of my house is not slippery – yet. If the melting snow tuns into ice it can get very slippery.
It was Black Friday today (the infamous shopping day after Thanksgiving, with people trampling over one another and fighting over items that are on sale). It was wet and cold here in Seattle, and on top of all that, I saw on the news tonight that there was a ruckus in downtown (again) at the lighting of the Christmas tree there. Protestors, still over the Ferguson police shooting, crowded into the Westlake shopping mall, and tried to disrupt the proceedings at the tree lighting. So a good thing I ventured no further than the grcoery store here two blocks from my house !
On a happier note, I see our Cinerama movie theater has reopened after extensive renovations. It’s been many years since I’ve been there, and I should go check it out.
Uh-oh, were you monkeying around with your smart phone and dropped it? Luckily for you it has Gorilla Glass 4!
I had a classic little kitchen accident today : dropped a glass on the floor, shattering it into big and small pieces. So I thought : man! glass is terrible, the way it shatters when you drop it.
Well, there’s plastic cups (no, those will not do), and melamine, which is a resin. I have some melamine serving trays, but I still prefer glass over melamine for dinnerware and well, a drinking glass.
For flat surfaces and touch-screen devices, there’s ‘gorilla glass’, the patented sheet glass from Corning Inc. It is manufactured through immersion of the glass sheet in a molten alkaline salt bath. An ion exchange in the chemical process produces a stronger surface that also prevents cracks from propagating. On November 20, Corning introduced Gorilla Glass 4, which was a significant improvement over Gorilla Glass 3 and also most other competing cover glass in the market.
Apple is up almost 50% for the year – quite a feat/ come-back story for such a juggernaut of a company.
Apple ‘s market capitalization is at about US$700 billion : a very, very large number. (Google is at $US 369 billion). Will its market cap hit $1 trillion at some time in the future? It certainly looks possible – or probable – would some analysts say. But it will technically not be the first company with a trillion-dollar market cap.
[From Investopedia] ExxonMobil’s market value topped $500 billion in late 2007 amid surging energy and commodity prices. It was during this energy boom that a relatively lesser-known entity – and a non-U.S. company at that – achieved the distinction of becoming the first-ever company to be valued at $1 trillion. PetroChina (PTR), China’s biggest energy producer, achieved this feat on Nov. 5, 2007, when its shares almost tripled on the first day of trading following its IPO on the Shanghai exchange. But the stock could not stay at those lofty levels for long, and by June 2014, it had a market cap of less than $250 billion, which was still enough to make it the world’s 15th-biggest company.
A scene here from downtown Seattle, from local television station King 5’s web site. A small group of protesters making their case for social justice .. but there there are lots of long-standing and unresolved complexities involved in the Michael Brown case, and no easy answers.
The decision of the grand jury in St Louis, MO was issued tonight : no indictment of the police officer that shot and killed Michael Brown. Yes, the 18-year old should not have been killed. And did the policeman really have to use deadly force? But then the young man should also not have been involved in an altercation with a store clerk (over buying cigars) and then blocked traffic by walking in the middle of the street and then engaged the policeman in hand-to-hand combat after he was pursued and told to stop.
So as I was sitting in my kitchen here, the TV turned off since every single station seemed to cover the event, I heard a helicopter hovering close by. What’s going on? I wondered, and then drew the connection : we are having a protest over the Michael Brown announcement even here in downtown Seattle.
I keep telling myself it’s time for a new DSLR* Canon or Nikon camera – but do I ‘deserve’ one? It’s been five years since I bought a new camera, so time for a new one, no? I did an on-line survey, and here is the result (one of four outcomes).
Awesome! You don’t spend money too easily on gear. You know your style of photography and what equipment is needed to achieve your goals. You have every right to spoil yourself once in a while with a nice new toy. Because you’re making good use of it. And anyone who buys your used gear is fortunate because you take good care of things. The top-of-the-range mirrorless will do for you. You’ll even deliver with a point-and-shoot. And give full-frame a try!
*Digital Single Lens Reflex
The corner of Olive Way and Broadway here on Capitol Hill on Friday night. The No 43 bus has just pulled up to the stop in the background. This is an iPhone 5 picture.
I couldn’t resist posting these animal pictures I found on-line. (The puma one is a little cruder .. my apologies if it offends! .. but what a cool cat).
I did get caught up with the week’s serious news here in the USA on Friday as well, courtesy of NBC News, here.
1. Obama unveils deportation relief for immigrants. It affects 5 million immigrants that are in the US illegally. The Republicans have no substantive response. After issuing all kinds of impeachment and legal threats over immigration, they sue Obama over the Affordable Care Act* and go home early for the Thanksgiving break. *Obama’s signature health-care law. Nothing to do with immigration. Last year the Supreme Court ruled in favor of it.
2. Seven feet of snow fell this week in Buffalo, NY. A dozen people have now died in the massive snowstorm that has brought some 7 feet of snow since Tuesday in the Buffalo, New York, area. 3. Florida State University gunman that wounded 3 was paranoid of government: cops. Yet another mentally ill person with a gun going into a school/ university and shooting people. 4. Michael Brown’s father calls for calm. A grand jury in St Louis, MO is about to issue their decision as to whether the policeman killing Michael Brown should be indicted. 6. Bill Cosby quiet as another accuser surfaces. Bill Cosby is accused by several women of him drugging them (this was decades ago) and molesting or raping them. Cosby’s lawyer says he is being villified.(Which is true, but still leaves the question as to whether he is a villain?).
Alaska Airlines still uses the classic paper boarding pass paper stock at San Francisco airport and (looks to me) a main-frame program to print the details. The ELECTRONIC only means the ticket is electronic. (I’m old enough to remember the days when the gate attendant would rip off the top part of a paper ticket and hand the carbon copy below it back to the passenger). I could certainly go with an electronic boarding pass as well : the square bar code from the Alaska Airlines app on my mobile phone. But with the paper boarding pass I can ‘scoff’ at (scoff back at?) the tech geeks fresh from doing business in Silicon Valley, that fly back to Seattle with me. I read in my Bloomberg Businessweek that paper coupons for packaged goods at the grocery store and elsewhere are thriving – even in this age of smartphones and electronics. People just love to clip them out and take them to the store. Will paper ever go away completely? Not any time soon.
A familiar sight for me by now : the British Air 747 taxiing out to fly to London. The Japan Airlines plane (tail on the far right) was to depart for Tokyo’s Haneida airport soon after. It rained all day in San Francisco on Thursday.
Boge Brothers Bake Better Bread. But is the Boge’s bread sign bogus? I thought. Actually, no : it turns out it was a wholesale bakery in Spokane in Washington State until 1995, at which time it was sold to Franz bakery.
We went out for a sandwich for lunch on Wednesday here in Walnut Creek. The sandwich shop has a number of colorful vintage signs, some for Pepsi-Cola, and some for bread and bakery items. Check out the dagwood (multi-layered) sandwich with olives from the Boge’s bread sign.
Dagwood sandwiches are named after Dagwood Bumstead, a central character in the comic strip Blondie (first drawn in 1936).
In the Sunday paper in South Africa, the comic strip was called ‘Pantoffelregering’ .. loosely translated as ‘slipper government’ to indicate that Dagwood was ruled by the person wearing the slippers in the house (Blondie). Blondie at the time, was cast in the comic strip as the traditional housewife and homemaker, wearing slippers for the better part of the day.
Halloween was just a few weeks ago, and Thanksgiving is still approaching here in the USA. So with a lot of pumpkin around, it finds its way into all kinds of products. My pumpkin yogurt, part of my in-room dinner tonight, was not bad. (But not as good as pumpkin pie).
Here is a beautiful picture I found on Monday’s King5 TV on-line report. Check out the deep orange with Mount Rainier and Seattle’s waterfront. The picture was taken on Nov. 8 by Sigma Sreedharan.
From King5’s website : Sreedharan knew the proper equipment to use because she has photographed the Seattle Great Wheel in motion many times. To capture the image, Sreedharan used a 4- to 5-second shutter speed, ISO 50 and a f/13 f-stop on a Sony A7R Mirrorless camera. She says she then made few edits to brighten the shadows and enhance details in the darker areas in Adobe Photoshop.
If one does not pay attention to the time at this time of year, the darkness sneaks up and .. the day is gone! So when 4 pm came I knew I had to go for a walk immediately if I wanted to catch a few rays of sunlight. The sun sets at 4.30 pm already, and the days are still getting shorter.
The sun is about to set over Seattle’s Volunteer Park .. with the Asian Art museum soaking up a last few rays of sunlight.
Our Saturday night movie was ‘Maleficent*’. Borrowing a description of the movie from Wikipedia : it is a 2014 American dark fantasy film .. starring Angelina Jolie as the eponymous Disney villainess character, the film is a live-action re-imagining of Walt Disney’s 1959 animated film Sleeping Beauty.
And here is an illustration by Piet Grobler from my Afrikaans language ‘Die Mooiste Sprokies van Grimm’. Sleeping Beauty goes by ‘Doringrosie’ (little ‘Briar-Rose’) in the original translation of the fairy tale.
We liked it, and Angelina Jolie makes for a powerful presence in the movie. It got mixed reviews from critics, but did very well at the box office.
*Should this be a new word? Meaning neither malevolent (with intentions of evil) nor magnificent – or both at the same time?
.. after 10 years and 317 million miles. Check out this set of incredible images, published in today’s on-line issue of the New York Times. Keep scrolling down ! Here is the link.
I left San Francisco a little earlier than my regular Thursday time .. or should I say I tried : our flight was delayed by about an hour.
Then we seemed to take the longest time I could remember ever, to get onto the plane. A long line of us lounged in the jet way for an interminable time. My fellow travelers actually remarked about it as well. What is going on in there? As Miranda Priestly (character from The Devil Wears Prada, played by Meryl Streep) would say : By all means move at a glacial pace, you know how that thrills me.
Here’s a 747 from British Airways right next to the gate I flew out of this afternoon, at San Francisco airport, just getting pushed back. It flies to London’s Heathrow airport (of course), all across the continental USA and the Atlantic.
Bloomberg Businessweek’s cover this week. It feels as if the vortex of time is sucking us into the future at an ever-accelerating pace.
I sat with our project manager on Wednesday, adding in tasks and milestones that stretched into January and February. We are at that the time of the current year that those 2-0-1-5 digits look unreal. They make one look back and ask : where did 2014 go? We had all better jump at it if we need to do anything big and bold .. before it’s gone !
Bloomberg Businessweek projects that the US economy will grow at about 3% – not bad – and that Fed chair Janet Yellen will finally raise the federal funds rate from the zero it has been sitting on ever since 2008. Europe and Japan will continue to struggle. China will grow at 7% : a high rate but still a slow-down from recent years.
San Francisco has Sister City relationships with 18 partner cities. A Sister City relationship is a broad-based, officially approved, long-term partnership between two communities in two countries. A Sister City relationship becomes official with a signing ceremony of the top-elected officials of the two local jurisdictions. Sister City partnerships have the potential to carry out the widest possible diversity of activities of any international program, including every type of municipal, business, professional, educational and cultural exchange or project. Is 18 a lot of Sister Cities to have? Maybe so, but I see Seattle boasts 21 sister cities.
Here are just emblems from the International Terminal at San Francisco airport for Cork, Ireland and for Paris, France.
Cork’s flower is the common foxglove. I have a very special memory of Cork : when our cruise ship left there last summer, there was a four-man band on the pier with a trumpeter bidding us farewell with an Irish song that I could not name .. but I loved it anyway; it was very touching.
And how about Paris – the most beautiful city in the world? The Madonna Lily is one of the true lilies. And it reminds me of my mom’s name : Lilene.
[From Wikipedia] Dense tule fog obscures the road surface in Bakersfield, California.Our flight out to San Francisco was delayed Monday morning due to fog in the Bay Area. I’m sure it’s not going to be the last time! I see from reading up about it that the weather and sea conditions for fog are actually favored in the summer, though. Another type of fog, called tule fog, is a ground fog settling in the Central Valley. This fog sometimes reaches the Bay Area as well, and it is possible for San Francisco to have both kinds of fog!
