Month: June 2015

It turned out to be a very eventful week here in the USA.  Says CNN : ‘After a momentous week, same-sex couples can now marry in all 50 states, the Confederate flag’s historic hold on the political institutions of the Deep South is fraying by the hour and Obamacare, after defying another attempt to dismantle it, is now reaffirmed as the law of the land’.   In another win for the President (he had to fight his own party), the Trans-Pacific Partnership was approved by the Senate by the absolute minimum of votes that were needed (60) on Wednesday.  This is a 12-nation trade deal years in the making, that would link 40% of the world’s economy — including the United States, Japan, Australia, Canada and Mexico.

 

 

There is a lot of discussion in the media about the legitimacy of public displays of the Confederate Flag in the wake of the terrible shooting last week, and menacing pictures that the gunman posted of himself on holding a Confederate flag.   Well, says the Washington Post :  ‘As long as we’re on the subject of flags that should and should not be flown in states, let’s take a moment to talk about state flags’ .. and then it proceeds to just mercilessly poke fun at the state flags of the USA, here.

I don’t water the patch of lawn in front of my house in summer, and so it dries out and goes brown .. but the hydrangea and slim rose bush are still there to bring a little color.  Actually : a scarlet red so brilliant that my phone camera sensor seems barely able to handle it.

One on the backyard fence, and its mate in the tree : as far as I can tell, these were woodpeckers called northern flickers.

[From Wikipedia]  The northern flicker is native to most of North America, parts of Central America, Cuba, and the Cayman Islands. It is one of the few woodpecker species that migrate. They eat fruits, berries, seeds and nuts, but their primary food is insects.Their tongues can dart out 2 inches beyond the end of the bill to snare prey.

Happy Father’s Day to all the dads!   You rock!  I am posting a picture in memory of my dad that was taken some ten years ago in 2005, at a wine estate close to Stellenbosch in South Africa.

So .. another week in the USA, another Republican presidential candidate (Donald Trump).   And another massacre, the chilling hate crime of a 21 year-old white kid methodically shooting 9 black people dead, each with multiple gunshot wounds, in Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.  This after sitting with them in a Bible study for an hour.   ‘We are peering into the abyss’ one more time, and ‘sorry : no jokes today’ said comedian Jon Stewart on his Daily Show.  Just check out the first few minutes of what he said at the Daily Show.  Then there’s Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz at a town hall meeting in Red Oak, Iowa on Friday : ‘You know the great thing about the state of Iowa is, I’m pretty sure you all define gun control the same way we do in Texas — hitting what you aim at’.

What’s UAT? Well, it stands for User Acceptance Testing in our work management implementation project.  The business users are invited to walk through the quality tested product that they are about to be given to work with.   At this point it is too late to make wholesale changes to the data, to the screen designs, and to the functions in general.  Still, we did find some flaws in the design of our solution and we worked long hours to fix them.

Hmm.  Doughnuts!  (Just a cute picture I found on-line).

Herman Zapf, the king of letter font design, recently passed away at 96, reports the New York Times.   He was born in Germany at the end of World War I and grew up in the turbulent times that followed that; planned to become an electrical engineer. Circumstances dictated otherwise, though.  He became interested in calligraphy, and was said to be able to write letters 1 mm in size without using a magnifying glass (I’m sure one would need a very sharp pencil for that).   After he became involved in type face (font) design he designed types for various stages of printing technology, including hot metal composition, phototypesetting (also called “cold type”), and finally digital typography for use in desktop publishing. His two most famous typefaces, Palatino and Optima, were designed in 1948 and 1952, respectively.

Let’s go! my two colleagues and I said to each other at 1.30 pm today.  We packed up or stuff, bundled into the rental car and headed for San Francisco airport.

‘These are big samoosas’ I said, after the Indian food our project manager had ordered, arrived at the office.   (Samoosas are potato-stuffed pastries). Yes, it must be a Punjabi recipe .. the Punjabis love their food, said my colleague.  (He’s from a neighboring province in India.   So I had to look up where Punjab is on the map, and here it is.