Here is the little clapboard
that was on the pavement tonight just outside my neighborhood pub called the Canterbury Ale House. Well, yes. Booze and food does make for fun, but could be too much of a good thing as well, right ?
Monday/ Google, now Alphabet
As one analyst put it : Google grabbed itself by the lapels of it colorful jacket, and turned it inside out, with the announcement that Google is turning into a holding company called ‘Alphabet’. Google still has search, ads, YouTube, Android and maps, but then there are the other companies called Fiber, Calico, Nest, Life Sciences, Venture, Capital and Google X. (Google X includes driverless cars and drones).
Sunday
We made it out to the tennis
court as well as the swimming pool on Sunday, and checked out the sporting goods store on the way back.
Check out the blow-up shark ‘floatie’ that was on display. (Better be careful and not sneak up and surprise unwitting swimmers with that thing in the sea. You will frighten the living daylights out of them : not good !).
Saturday/ Tide Park Beach
We spent some time today at Tide Park beach – part of the larger Solana Beach area to the north of the San Diego metro area. I even dipped my toes into the California surfer culture by going out on a standing-up paddle board for a bit, with some coaching from my brother. The surfing area by the beach is called ‘Table Tops’ because of a reef right there. Absolute beginners such as me were wise to steer completely clear of the surfers, of course.
Friday/ to San Diego
I traveled to San Diego on Friday afternoon for a weekend visit to my brother and his family. We went to dinner in the Little Italy neighborhood in San Diego downtown. Afterwards we strolled around the waterfront on North San Diego Bay.
Thursday/ the long road to Nov 8, 2016 starts
The first of the Presidential debates started tonight here in the USA with the 17 – seventeen! – candidates for the Republican party squaring off in two groups. I had the TV on and listened with half an ear. Republicans have a very different world view from mine! And was there anything really new? Not really. Cut taxes, repeal Obamacare, make war with the Middle East. Maybe I’m being a little unfair .. there were brief exchanges on a number of other topics too. Jeb Bush defended the Common Core standards for schools that he is a proponent for. John Kasich had to ‘defend’ his expansion of Medicaid in his home state of Ohio. Mr. Trump had to defend the four bankruptcies his businesses had gone through, and awful comments he had made in the past about women from his Twitter account.
Wednesday/ the ‘known quantity’ and ‘bandwidth’
I had to assist with a 
demonstration to an important prospective client via a WebEx* conference call on Wednesday. ‘We are so happy that you can do this .. you are a known quantity‘, said a colleague, one of the organizers – which made me chuckle.
The other non-human phrase that people sometimes use at work is : do you have any bandwidth to do this? Well yes, I will find some time to do it.. I am not a radio station or a robot that broadcasts with bandwidth !
*WebEx displays your own computer screen over the internet at a remote location.
Tuesday/ do n-o-t block the box
I am lucky .. I don’t have to drive in the city of Seattle in rush hour. (I take the bus to my office downtown). This picture with mark-ups of the traffic violations was posted on the Seattle section for ‘reddit’, an online bulletin board system, by an irate bicyclist.
Monday/ visitors
It was just getting dark tonight at 8.45 pm when I noticed something on my fence outside. Hey! that’s not a cat ! I thought, and then there were three and soon a whole family of four raccoons. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen the little bandits out and about, which is good, I suppose. I am sure they smell the food scraps that we now put in our yard waste bins here in Seattle for recycling into compost by the public utility company. It may be time to lock up the lid of my yard waste bin. If a raccoon gets trapped in there it’s going to scare the heebie jeebies out of the garbage collector .. or out of me!
Sunday/ Carkeek Park
I drove out to Carkeek* Park on the northern outskirts of the Seattle metropolitan area this Sunday afternoon to enjoy some of the sunny weather. The Park is big .. 216 acres, and offers hiking trails and playgrounds in addition to the strip of pebbles and rough along Puget Sound. I waited for a train to come by, and my patience was rewarded : a Burlington North-Santa Fe oil train came along. I counted about 110 cars on the train!
*named after an English building contractor who came to Seattle in 1875.
Saturday/ cat Instagram
This cartoon is from John Atkinson’s ‘Wrong Hands’ cartoon blog, here. For my readers that may not know what the heck Instagram is, and what the cartoon pokes fun at, let me help. Instagram is an online mobile photo-sharing service. Its users (you need to set up an Instagram account first) take pictures and share them on Facebook and Twitter. People take all kinds of silly pictures with their phones, and many times of the food or dessert that they are about to eat : a totally 21st century social media phenomenon. So here we have a smart and dexterous kitty cat called Max, using his mobile phone and an Instagram account to post pictures of his food everyday. Go Max! How about a mouse?
Friday/ it’s Seafair Weekend
