Twenty-three years ago was the Good Friday Nisqually Earthquake. At 10:54am, I was sitting with my boss, Gene Pope, in his Amazon.com office near S. Weller and 5th Ave S in Seattle, near the International District. At first, it sounded like a freight train rumbling from the distance and then, the shaking started. The lights were suspended on cables from the ceiling and I remember watching them swing back and forth, swinging wider as the shaking continued. Someone was standing nearby in an area of cubbys and I yelled something like "get under the furniture". I do not recall if he moved or not. After an eternity or two, the shaking stopped and we started to assess what we had. The Seattle bus tunnel was closed for a couple of hours while the engineers checked it for damage. After it opened, I took a bus home and continued work from there.
There used to be an "earthquake rose" but the original seems to have been pulled from the internet. You can read about it here --
After weeks of rain, a day of snow, and overnight frosts, I grabbed a partly sunny day to unwind my limbs and refresh the e-bike. I just puddled around the neighborhood for 6.2 miles, up and down and around. It was a bit on the cold side, 47F, but I was able to wrap up. The main "save" was the pair of gloves that I wore. My fingers get cold after the frostbite session on that China trip.
Journalists at Business Insider are claiming that the hardware division of Amazon is on track to lose $10 Billion (with a B) in 2022 because of Alexa. The story has been picked up by other news sources and is being repeated as factual. Let us look closer at the claims.
The Alexa division is part of the "Worldwide Digital" group along with Amazon Prime video, and Business Insider says that division lost $3 billion in just the first quarter of 2022, with "the vast majority" of the losses blamed on Alexa. That is apparently double the losses of any other division, and the report says the hardware team is on pace to lose $10 billion this year.
Engineers are paid a lot of money and they get a lot of benefits, so engineers are expensive. Engineers at high-tech Internet companies are paid even better than average (e.g., Facebook and Google engineers are better paid than AMD and Intel engineers). To understand the situation, we need to make some assumptions.
First, although the article blames "the vast majority" of the losses on Alexa, let us just assume all the losses are due to Alexa and stick with the $10B. Further, let us assume that Alexa makes no money and that $10B represents the entire cost of the Alexa organization. Other articles claim that hardware products are sold "at cost", so we assign zero to the cost of consumer products sold (the cost will equal the income, therefore having no impact on our estimates). As a generous guess, let us assume that the annual cost of an engineer is $500000 (half a million bucks), including benefits and overhead (building rent, computer equipment, heat, health benefits, stock grants, and so on). This is high, but it is an average across engineers and it is based on industry knowledge.
If we take the claimed loss of $10B and divide by the $500K, we get 20000 engineers. I am pretty confident that Amazon does not have 20K engineers working in the hardware division. Elsewhere in the article, it is claimed that Amazon as a whole is eliminating 10K jobs (e.g., CNBC report) out of 1 million or more employees. But remember that most of those 1 million jobs are at the entry level in the warehouses (fulfillment centers) and are about $15/hour or about $30K annualized. Converting that to a "loaded salary" is still only about $60K per year, so it would take almost 170K employees to achieve a $10B savings in lay-offs.
So if the number of laid-off employees does not match the headline, it must be the amount of the losses that is wrong. And I submit the losses are exaggerated. Significantly exaggerated.
Because we are talking about sad things like lay-offs, I have attached a picture of a cat as a palate cleanser.
Winterizing has been the name of the game for the last few weeks. This comes from three factors.
Due to benign neglect, I have let some shrubs get overgrown over the years. The resulting blooms have been gorgeous, but we now have a lot of shrubs that are too large for their location. Several have been blocking windows while others are encroaching over the lawn and some are just too large and tangled to be healthy.
Then we had a windstorm on Friday or Saturday night. This storm created yet more lawn and garden waste than the maintenance pruning. We have a lot of large trees, and the wind came from a direction that pruned the upper parts of the trees, dumping the branches and needles on our house and lawn.
Finally, the decidious trees are dropping their leaves. The pine needles are coming down, too, to make room for new growth on the evergreens.
Any one of these could generate a lot of organic waste that we put in the lawn-and-garden bin for pickup. However, all of them together overwhelm the 96-gallon capacity of the weekly bin, so I get out the chipper-shredder and make mulch.
The chipper-shredder is an old one and I do not know how much longer I will have it. I bought it from a catalog company when we lived in Chicago. That would have been in the 1980s. I loaned it to a friend for use in the autumn and he kept it for the winter. Unfortunately, he was not aware of the maintenance requirement to drain the gas tank (or treat the gas), and the chipper would not start after he returned it. He moved away shortly thereafter, so the chipper followed us to Massachusetts and then to Washington. I am not much of a mechanic, so I did not really know how to fix this. The chipper weighs a lot, maybe 75-90 pounds, and it is large, so I could not figure out how to get it to a repair shop. And so it sat, moved dutifully with us as we bounced around the country.
A few years ago, I got bold. I bought some cleaner sprays (e.g., carb cleaner) and started poking at it. I could get it to run by spraying carb cleaner down the throat of the carburator, so that suggested to me that the problem was rooted in the stale and evaporated fuel rather that some outright mechanical failure. I carefully disassembled the engine, not really knowing what I was doing. I sprayed everything I could find with the carburator cleaner and I sprayed all the moving parts with WD-40, then I reassembled it as carefully as I could. In particular, there was some oddly shaped bit of plastic that I carefully placed back. I am just guessing here, but I think that was the fuel pump. Anyway, I got it all back together without any "extra" parts, so I put in fresh fuel and tried to start it up.
It started.
I was amazed. I ran it for a bit so ensure this was not some start-only magic, and it has been working reliably ever since. I am careful to run out the fuel in the autumn, and it keeps chugging away. The only other maintenance is to sharpen the blades and change the oil. The chipper manufacturer is no longer in business, but the engine is Briggs & Stratton, so I can probably get parts when that becomes necessary. I hope. In the meantime, I keep running it so that I can try to keep up with the organic waste that I am generating.
Although we are celebratinig the return of the rainy season and clear air, the recent past has something to teach us.
Smoke is in our future.
Since 2000, the four smokiest summers have been in the last six years. Prior to 2017, Zero was the typical number of unhealthy summer days. Keep those N95 masks handy.
According to KIRO-7, a Seattle TV station (emphasis added), Seattle has the worst air quality in the world at this time. This source did not quote numbers, but other sources quote ratings at 300 and above. From IQAir, the Seattle Eastside is generally above 300 (hazardous), as illustrated after the quote from KIRO-7. Our neighborhood is reporting 296 or 366, depending on the sampling station one selects. The air has been distinctly amber or brown all day. To be honest, I have been to Delhi and Beijing when the air quality was worse, but this is bad today.
Heavy smoke from wildfires continues to reduce air quality in Seattle and Western Washington, and an air quality alert has been extended for a second time.
The poor air quality landed Seattle the top spot for the worst air quality in the world, according to IQAir’s air quality and pollution city ranking, as of 6:45 p.m. on Wednesday.
After starting the day in the top 5, Seattle fluctuated up and down the top 15 before taking the top spot in the afternoon.
The cities that ranked below Seattle were Kolkata, India, at #5; Chengdu, China, at #4; Delhi, India, at #3; and Lahore, Pakistan, at #2.
While we were traveling in September and early October, we read reports of continuing smoke in metro Seattle coming from the forest fires east of here. One featured in the news was around Route 2 and the town of Skykomish. We have been back for a week, and the smoke continues. I posted a couple days ago about the intensity of the smoke, but it was clearing in the days since. Today, the smoke has returned. In the morning hours, there is a distinct haze and color cast in the air, visibility has dropped dramatically from the norm, and there is a scent of woodsmoke in the air.Photo taken soon after sunrise.
Sneezing and a bit of watery eyes are my classic symptoms for allergy responses. For the last 1-2 weeks, I have had intermittent episodes of sneezind and watery eyes. I just finished moving some of the felled trees from the backyard to the wood rack behind the garage, and I am sneezing. About two weeks ago, we had a massive pollen release, probably from the western red cedar trees with contributions from others. I say massive because there was a coating of yellow on everything. The black asphalt of the driveway became brownish. The black enamel of the BBQ became brownish and took on a crust after a cook. Cars were covered in yellow dust. It was bad, but I did not react. Well, maybe a little, but nothing serious. After moving the firewood, I am stuffed up and sneezing. It is not as bad as some of the November episodes in Chicago and Boston, but it is worse than normal in Seattle.On a more positive note, I saw two hummingbirds at the feeder today and they were each comfortable in the presence of the other. Normally, two hummingbirds would be ballet-fighting over the feeder and only one would remain, however these two were clearly traveling together. The second part of the surprise is that the hummingbird population took a drop in February or March down to one-a-week or so. The population is now rising again. It is still low - about one a day - but that is well above the one-a-week rate that I was adapting to. Nice to have them back.
Quickly lose weight! I just lost about seven pounds. It may be temporary but it sure was fast. My secret? Well, I shall tell you.
COVID seems to be winding down. I emphasize seems because the hospitalization numbers are down, I have my full vaxx and booster, and the weather is getting nicer. After two years of caution and lock-in, it feels like it should be OK to get out and circulate a little among selected (healthy) groups. So I did. We have a group, a delegation, visiting Seattle from France. Although 2020 was the 45th anniversary of the twinning of Seattle (USA) and Nantes (FR), COVID postponed the plans for an exchange of delegate groups. In early 2022, all the signs were shaping up and they culminated in a group of 40-50 visitors from Nantes arriving in Seattle. The group represented maritime, aviation, elected/municipal, and cultural interests. From this, a series of meetings and explorations were planned throughout the week to explore opportunities. During the times of roaring COVID, we had arranged cultural exchanges such as art shows and a collaborative beer, #8000Kilometers with Lantern Brewing, and some face-time allowed us to seek other common interests and issues.
As a cultural and social activity, the local Seattle-Nantes Sister City Association hosted a potluck dinner that featured local and American foods. This brought people together for an evening of socializing. We were brave: we went without masks indoors. I left the event very tired and went to bed somewhat late.
It was not a pleasant night. I woke in the middle of the night with classic symptoms of the flu. A low-grade fever, general pains, nausea, dry heaves. I was sorta-kinda OK until I went into the kitchen for some water. The lingering smell of warmed pizza (a midnight snack for someone else) hit me like a bat and I went straight for the toilet to empty my stomach. I went back to bed and repeated this dry/wet pattern a couple more times. I was pretty empty, dehydrated, groggy, and listless. I belabor all this because I do not think it was COVID - no breathing problems at all - just classic influenza symptoms coming down hard. I basically napped the next day and only kept down about four ounces of water throughout the day. The second night was unpleasant but far better than the first. I slept better, even after napping much of the day, and did not need to get up.
During this time, I skipped a pub crawl in the Ballard area one evening and a mayoral reception in Seattle the next. Sacrifices were made.
I woke up the next morning feeling fine. A bit dehydrated throughout the day, but alert and feeling fine.
So with this as context, I dropped seven pounds in 48 hours. I do not recommend the method, but I must admit it is effective. I shall do my best to make the advances stick and even multiply them, but that is only a silver lining from a very dark cloud.
Yesterday was a big day for Nantes Park in West Seattle, WA. While a part of the City of Seattle, West Seattle is a neighborhood that carries a distinct identity and history. Today, it is a bit isolated from downtown Seattle by the repairs being done to the West Seattle Bridge, but West Seattle is adjacent to the original settlement of Seattle, now known as Alki Point. (I am a little muddled on the details, but the history is there.) But back to our story.
In conjunction with the local neighborhood group and the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation, the Seattle-Nantes Sister City Association (SNSCA) is in the midst of a restoration project for Nantes Park. In addition to a general refurbishment of the grounds, SNSCA is installing a new walkway in the park that is ADA compliant, an art project for the sinuous knee-wall, and an art project for the butterfly friendly garden.
The wall project is to install a set of ceramic tiles featuring art from students in Seattle WA and Nantes, France. The tiles will add color to the park as well as a bit of French culture by incorporating quotes from French artists.
The garden project is a set of whimsical heads on mythical creatures.
My descriptions are lacking - the art additions are designed to make the park more welcoming to kids.
As a fund-raiser, the SNSCA and the Seattle Sister Cities Association have published a cookbook, The International Table, available directly from SNSCA and at bookstores throughout metropolitan Seattle. The cookbook features recipes selected to represent favorite foods of the varied sister cities of Seattle yet remain approachable by the American cook.
After the sunny days of recent times, I expected another sunny day today, but no such luck. After the rain passage this morning, I got out for a little clean-up in the yard. In particular, I scraped rust and flaking paint from the trellises, sanded them, and applied a rust converter. They are actually in pretty good shape, so it was not a lot of work. I will let the rust converter dry overnight and then apply another anti-rust spray before I finally apply some finish paint.
The photo has nothing to do with the yardwork or the rust work, but it presents a sense of the spring-like weather we have had in the last few days.
Yesterday was the last day for which sunset is before 6pm until late October. The Vernal Equinox arrives in two weeks. After much snow and rain, the weather has started to warm a bit into the upper 40s and touching 50F. Therefore, the grass has decided to grow again and it is necessary to start to mow again. With a break in the rains and a few sunny days, I charged up the batteries overnight to be ready for today. I pulled out the new mower, an EGO battery-powered self-propelled mulching mower; there is probably an acronym for that, but EGO BPSPMM does not roll off the tongue and I shall not use it. I was confident that I was prepared and ready to mow. How hard can this be?
I put on my safety shoes, a pair of old hiking boots now retired. I pulled the mower handle to full length and locked it in place. I rotated the handle to the middle position to be comfortable for my height. I slotted in the battery with a solid push, punched the ON/OFF button, pulled the safety bail, and pushed the go-forward palm-buttons. The mower lit up and moved forward. Unfortunately, the mower was strangely quiet and there did not seem to be any mowing action taking place. The grass was pushed over but did not appear trimmed behind me.
I probably violated a dozen safety warnings when I put the mower up on a pair of sawhorses so that I could see what was going on underneath. The oddly quiet bit that I had noticed earlier was confirmed by inspection: the blades were not rotating. I started with some simple diagnostics: battery fully seated (the mower propelled itself but maybe another contact was not supplying power for the blades), reseat the battery, switches fully depressed, headlights work, mower handle fully extended and locked in place. No joy, so I came into the house to check some YouTube videos.
The first two videos both concluded that a safety switch in the handle extension/lock device was the problem and the solution was to bypass the switch. I was reluctant to bypass a safety device, so I watched a third video. This guy started going down the same path, dismantling various housings to inspect the wiring and switches beneath each. When he got to the main housing where my hands go (as the operator), he took apart and demonstrated how the main power switch works. This was the aha! moment. I had taken the ON/OFF switch as the usual push-on-push-off momentary toggle switch. Not so! There is a mechanical interlock involved with the starting bail, so one pushes the ON/OFF switch and holds it while pulling on the starting bail. I had released the ON/OFF switch, so the mechanical interlock did not engage when I pulled back the bail.
User error.
Once I held the ON/OFF switch will engaging the bail, everything worked fine. I mowed the three tranches of the lawn with no problems. I have not yet turned the outside water back on, so the hose cleaning will have to wait until the next mowing party. After mowing the front yard, the battery has only descended by one bar (from 5-full to 4-partial).
Two notes on the grass. The grass seed that I applied a month ago did little. I speculate that it has been too cold to sprout, therefore it went to feed the birds. Furthermore, any seed that may have remained was probably washed away by the rains. The other note is that the moss is doing well. Major swathes of the bright green lawn are moss rather than grass, so I have to get out the dethatcher for a workout. Given that I am also struggling with moss on the asphalt of the driveway and the cement of the walkways, this is no surprise. This has been a really good year for moss.
Trapped for days in a ground-hugging fog, we sought escape on Monday, 24 January 2022. The weather report had gotten monotonous: day after day of heavy fog warnings in "lowland areas" covered the entire Puget Sound area. Fog filled the valleys of metropolitan Seattle all day and the Weather Service extended the warnings each day for yet another day. We had some days of pretty steady rain before that, so we were getting stir-crazy. Another case of COVID cabin fever struck. The fog went up to about 3000 feet and there was rumored to be sun above, so we knew where we had to go - to the mountains. But not just any "mountains". Stevens Pass is only about 3000 feet, barely above the fog, so we decided to go for Mount Rainier.
We usually head for the Henry Jackson Visitor Center at the Paradise area in Mount Rainier National Park (MRNP). We have been there many times over the years, usualy a couple times each year. It is easy access, has plenty of parking (if you arrive early enough), and the Paradise area is open year-round. We visit the Sunrise area during the summer and shoulder seasons, but it is a bit farther and, well, it closes in the winter so it is not open until June or so? The route to Paradise takes us through Puyallup, Elbe, Longmire, and up the part road to Paradise. Our travel was uneventful. We left the house about 9am (against an 8:30am target departure) and arrived with plenty of room to be found. Of course, the 24th of January was a Monday, so we were riding the benefits of a retired life. On the weekend, the crowds are sure to be much larger.
We grabbed our snowshoes, poles, and packs, and headed for the trail to Camp Muir. Normally, there are some broad stairs and asphalt trails to welcome visitors, but all that was buried under snow. We rather followed the asphalt trails but they are hard to find under the snow - and irrelevant. However, muscle memory in the legs from all those summer visits lead one to familiar routes. A few people were out with hiking boots but we were glad to have snowshoes. Very simply, we did not have to look where we were walking. Postholing was not a concern and we did not have to choose compacted routes; the area of the snowshoes spreads our weight. With the claws and heals on the snowshoes, we could walk a straight line that took us straight up a slope or allowed us to wander without fear of sliding sideways. The younger set may not need poles, but the older crew finds them helpful to pull or restrain on slopes and very handy for balance. We walked to a point a bit above the Dancefloor, closer to the Nisqually canyon, appreciated the views, and then headed down by the Dancefloor.
The views were grand. We could see the whole area above the fog in the valleys. Mt. Adams and Mt. St. Helens stood proud on the horizon to the south, the Tatoosh Range clearly visible, and, of course, Tahoma herself to the north. There was the odd cloud or contrail across the sky, but bright blue burned all around and above. The temperatures were astounding - hot. We did not measure the temperature, but a fellow hiker told us it was in the upper-60F range. He said 67F, and while I am reluctant to believe that exact number, I did have to stop twice to remove layers of insulation. I ended up wearing a wicking t-shirt and a "fishing" shirt. It did get chilly in the shade, but we spent most of the time above the tree-line, so the sun warmed us virtually the entire time. It was quite comfortable when walking, but I did put on my puffy sweater when we stopped. Most of the people around us were also hiking in various ways (mostly snowshoes but several boots), and one guy even had a sled that he was pulling. I guess he was going to spend the night at Camp Muir. And there were a handful of skiers. The overall hike was 2.5 miles (round-trip) in 2:00 hours, and the vertical rise was 870 feet. Paradise is right around 5000 feet altitude.
I grabbed some photos, but I used this outing as a training ground for GoPro video. In the past, I have done timelapse and even Time Warp to some degree of success, but with this trip I wanted to do some post-processing to produce a more structured video. I did skip the bit about preparing a story - my "story" was to be a snowshoe hike on Mount Rainier - so I planned for a series of clips. To this end, I chose Video > Cinematic at 4K, 24fps, SuperView, and auto-steady (I think GoPro calls it hypersteady or similar). I used handheld with no special adaptations (no external stabilizer, just the in-camera features). On the route up, I started with shorter clips, a minute or so each and mostly panoramas, and on the return down, I took longer clips while in motion. I ended up with about 20 minutes of video that I cut down to 14 minutes in DaVinci Resolve 17. My first edit ran over the YouTube limit of 15 minutes, so my second version cut that down to almost exactly 14 minutes and I added some titles. I did nothing with the audio and I only used fades on the title sections - no fancy crossfades.
(Note - although I can adjust the placement of the photos, Blogger insists on centering the video.)
The Seattle Art Museum (SAM) opened a new sculpture garden early this year. It's on the north side of Seattle on a hill overlooking Puget Sound. It has a number of prominent sculptures, including this Calderstabile. According to Wikipedia, Calder invented the mobile and the stabile. Who knew?
The tree in the foreground is not actually a tree, but another sculpture. I did a little research and found it is called Split, by Roxy Paine. This is an interesting piece because it sneaks up on you - in the winter, it looks like just another leafless tree. But take a closer look and the truth is revealed.
SAM has a virtual tour of the garden here. This photograph was taken on the opening day of the garden January 13, 2007.
It has been a gradual change, but it has recently become clear that Seattle and the Puget Sound are warmer than they have been historically. As a result, our sailing habits have changed. As the polar bears have moved north, we have been able to shed much of the equipment that burdened us in the past. No longer do we require the tooth-resistant chain mail that makes swimming so difficult and is so awfully hard to maintain shiny in the salty air. Our tans develop better and a number of the local tanning salons have had to close up shop. The rumor is that Starbucks will stop selling hot coffee drinks to focus on iced rum drinks with little umbrellas. And I'll finally get to grow real tomatoes in my garden.
The news is reporting that we are to have an earthquake this coming week. The Globe and Mail headline says "B.C. put on alert for huge quake"; as British Columbia is but a few short miles north of here and we can see Vancouver Island on a clear day (from the right vantage point), I think we'll be in on the party should one arrive.
Update: Hey, look what happened 307 years ago, on 26 Jan 1700: an earthquake... of magnitude 9.
