Vacation Restrictions - 27 November 2022

This recollection dates to many years ago, about 1986 or so.  I started work for United Airlines (at the time, later to become Covia and now named something else that escapes me).  UAL had a lot of rules that felt odd in an IT position, but they derived from the union rules that governed most of the employees (pilots, flight attendants, and ground-based staff).  The vacation rules were of particular note.

1. Each employee earned X days per month worked.  In the end, a new employee earned ten days (two weeks) per year, but they accumulated.  since I started in June, I was accumulating a week of vacation in that year.  

2. The vacation accumulated in year Y could be used in year Y+1.  As I was earning vacation in 1986, I could use it in 1987.  

As a result, in the first eighteen months I worked for UAL, I had one week of vacation to use.  After that, it settled into the two-week norm, but that first year and a half was tough.

Jouralists say Amazon Alexa to lose $10 Billion in 2022 - 23 November 2022

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 report at Ars Technica says:

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.

The ABC trifecta of Art, Blockchain, and Crypto - 17 November 2022

Music is not often associated with technology, but this Spotify track offers brilliant treatment of the blockchain and crypto circus that has gripped techbros for the last couple years.

Crypto $oy or Crypto Boy.

I am not sure how to insert the "bitcoin currency" symbol that the artist uses, so I had to insert a dollar sign.  salem ilese has created a nice ballad for your favorite crypto enthusiast.  To be complete, I further acknowledge the songwriting skills of Alma Goodman, Henry Tucker, Marc Sibley, Nathan Cunningham, and salem ilese.

ETA: put the year 2022 in the Title.

The balance on Twitter is shifting, 17 November 2022

Famously, Elon Musk of SpaceX and Tesla fame has purchased Twitter.  As part of his plan to remake the corporation, he announced a plan to lay-off 3/4ths of the staff.  Not a typo, that is 75% of the people to be fired. Oh, that is bad, said public perception.  In a thoughtful moment, Elon backed off and laid off "only" half.  Not a typo, that is 50% were fired within about three (3) weeks.  I am not sure how he expected to keep the company running after that, but Twitter has not fallen over.

Once all the fuss about the lay-offs died down, Elon imposed a sudden work-from-office requirement:  40 hours per week in the office, minimum.  Although I have concerns about the long-term success of unfettered WFH (work-from-home), that was the Twitter policy and the suddeness of Elon's dictate was extreme.  A target date and time for transition plans would have been reasonable (assuming the target date was into 2023).  

Not content, Elon announced a further 5% trim of staff, another lay-off in which the managers were required to identify a further 5% of the staff as low performers.  Yeah, always a popular move.

Finally, Elon send out an email message that required staff to commit to unpaid overtime, a loyalty oath, and (I suspect) consent to absurd delivery schedules.  Failure to commit was essentially volunteering to get laid off.

As a consequence of any layoff, there are collateral resignations.  The targeted population to be laid off may be the low performers and the low revenue groups (a common assertion), but the untargeted resignations are usually the very people who can get another job quickly.  Those would include your top performers.  The remainder are a mix of the true believers, the ones who are "stuck" (e.g., because of health care), and the inertial.  This is not always the employee base that you would want to retain.

In effect, Elon has now laid off 3/4ths of the Twitter staff and achieved his original intent, except for the "retain top talent" objective.

In compensation, I offer you a photograph of a sleeping cat. 

When appliances fail - 15 November 2022

Appliances should last a really long time, but they never do.  They are simple devices, usually made from simple materials, but they seem designed to fail long before their time.  Take the typical American water heater.  It is basically a tank of pressurized water with a gas or electric heater in the body of the tank.  There is a thermostat to control the temperature of the water, and the thermostat controls the heating unit.  In my case, the thermostat controls a gas valve.  Unlike a gas furnace, the pilot light is lit all the time and the "waste" heat from the pilot light goes into the water in the tank.  When the temperature falls below the set-point of the thermostat, the gas valve is actuated and the pilot light ignites the burner.  When the water gets sufficiently hot, the gas valve is closed and the burner goes out.  Insulation keeps the hot water hot while the burner is off. 

No pump in, no pump out, nothing active but the gas valve.  Unfortunately, there is a bit of aging due to the thermal expansion and contraction of the hot water, and more due to the various minerals in the water.  There is simply not much to fail, so why does a water heater last only about a decade?  

Our last water heater was installed in spring of 2005, so it lasted about 17-1/2 years.  It did not fail dramatically, but it was failing, so I replaced it.  I was living on "borrowed time" and I decided to replace it in a controlled manner rather than waiting for a dramatic failure at an inconvenient time.

Manufacturers should design the water heaters to be more robust.  The cost of the water heater would go up, but if a minor increment in cost doubled the expected life of a water, it would be a win for the consumer.  On the other hand, the current system rewards mediocre designs (manufacturers sell more water heaters) and the installation (plumbing) business installs more water heaters.  The consumer does not get the "best product", they get the product that generates the greatest profits for the manufacturers and installers.

The other problem with appliances is that Nothing Is Standardized.  It is just a water heater.  There should be some standard connections at standard locations and the units should come in standard sizes.  Then the installer would just disconnect the old unit, connect in the new unit, and be done.  However, the installer had to spend hours adjusting the installation process so that the water heater would fit into the space.  If you look closely, there are three (3) foam disks under the water heater; one is needed to insulate the heater from the cement floor (saves energy), but this install as three because the water heater was too low.  The gas connection is weird (the new water heater is the same diameter as the old water heater, but it just did not fit).  And the safety valve had to be soldered into exhaust plumbing with a custom fit.  This is really stupid.  If the connecterization were the same on all water heaters, it would save hours of labor at install time.  We faced a similar problem with the furnaces - they all seem to be custom installations.  And do not get me started about kitchen standards.  

The good news is that we have hot water for the next decade or so.

Checking in - 7 November 2022

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.

  

Visitors in the side yard, 30 October 2022 (15 October 2022)

 Bobcats, I think.

There are three, perhaps a small family unit on the prowl.  

Original image: 15 October 2002 in the middle of the afternoon.

ETA: formatting.

In the balance on Twitter, 30 October 2022

Elon Musk completed his takeover of Twitter on Thursday, 27 October 2022.  There has been a lot of speculation about what this means, especially for free speech and civility.  So far, Musk has repeatedly said that there are no changes as of yet, and he has appointed a committee to review current policies and recommend changes.  Musk declares himself to be a "free-speech absolutist" which most people seem to believe is a statement that the Nazis and nut-cases will be allowed free reign.  I have been trying to withhold judgement to see where Musk takes Twitter.  I am not optimistic, but neither am I at the panic-and-run stage.  

Then, today, this report surfaced.  It seems that Musk replied to a tweet by Hillary Clinton about the attack on Paul Pelosi and cited an article in a newspaper declaring that Pelosi is gay and the attacker is a prostitute, the attack was about a lovers dispute, and that Pelosi was in his underwear.  The FOX station that reported the underwear has since withdrawn their report, and the newspaper turns out to be a Qanon-aligned craphole of a news site.  Musk defended the tweet with weaselwords about "it seems", but he eventually deleted the tweet after the condemnations grew.  This is not sufficient.  Musk is an adult and should know better than to spew unsubstantiated drivel to his millions of (Twitter) followers.  

The point of this note is two-fold.  First, Musk needs to have an adult nearby at all times to supervise him (that is advice based on prudence; I am not proposing any sort of law).  Musk's failure to heed this idea will contribute to his $42 Billion collapse, and that will be penalty enough.  Second, I am concerned that Twitter will indeed become a cesspool of drivel.  This suggests that I will not be using Twitter a year from now.

Halloween is approaching, so I have attached a photo of a neighbor's decorations.  Happy Halloween!

When in Nantes, 28 October 2022 (9 September 2022)

Distractions kept me from posting photos from our recent travels.  I shall take steps to remedy this oversight.

In September, 2022, we traveled to France and Greece for long planned and long postponed vacations.  After repeated delays and changes, the travel followed a three-part structure.  The first part was a week of vacation in France near Bordeau and Perigord, a week of being in the "delegation" in Nantes, and a week of sailing in Greece.  

On our first night in Nantes, we had dinner that featured the local tradition of crepes made of buckwheat, dining al fresco.  We stayed in an unusual hotel - Micr'Home - and took in art throughout the town.  The walking was good and helped us fight the insidious tendrils of jetlag.

The destinations of the first week required that we pick up a rental car at the Nantes airport.  We traveled with our son, A, to Les Epesses, home of the famed Puy du Fou historical theme park.  Puy du Fou is an interesting place.  On the one hand, it is a bit schmaltzy (campy) for Americans, but it is extremely well done and a lot of fun.  Various bits of history have passed by or near a chateau near Les Epesses, and these historical facts are turned into spectacles.  For example, there is evidence that Romans were nearby and so there is a colloseum with a spectacular show that involves chariot races, wild animals, and gladiators.  There is evidence that Vikings raided in the area, so there is a spectacular show that involves a Viking longship and burning barns.  Laperouse, a famous explorer, is featured in an exhibit about his explorations because he was born in the nearby town. 

I seem to be having trouble with the blogging tool, so I will stop (albeit abruptly) and continue in the next post.

It took me a couple minutes, 28 October 2022

Reading bumperstickers is an old hobby of mine.  I have been reading them for years.  I do not know why as most are pretty boring.  "My child is the honor student of the week", or someone's favorite politician, or "Wall Drugs".  So when I run across an interesting one, it is a secret pleasure.

In the parking lot of a nearby grocery store, an unusual bumpersticker was found.  It took me a few minutes to work it out, so I will delay the reveal to give you, dear reader, a chance to read the secret message.

Another odd hobby of mine is to read license plates.  Well, not merely read them, but interpret them.  Today, personalized license plates are common and "reading" a plate is a common game.  However, at one point, license plates were not personalized and they all seemed to use a single format:  AAA NNN, or three letters and three numbers.  I suspect this simple rule was the result of sample bias, but it held true for many years in my experience.  I used to interpret the AAA letters as computer instructions.  "BRA 565" became 'BRAnch", "BNE 354" became "Branch if Not Equal", "ADC 757" became "ADd with Carry", "LDA 324" became "LoaD Accumulator", and so.  Not all three-letter groups had actual instructions that correspond to anything I had seen or used, so part of the game was to make up instructions that fit.  A famous example would have been "HCF 523" for "Halt and Catch Fire".  A silly little game that kept me alert on many long highway trips.

In my first reading of the curious bumpersticker, I thought about convenient substitutions that might resolve into something, and that thought is partially right.  I finally realized the entire expression does not resolve into one thing, rather there are independent pieces that resolve into separate things that, in turn, combine into the meaning.  The key was to realize that there is nothing one can do to reduce the square root of minus one except i.  Yes, one could stick in Euler's formula (e^(i*pi)+1=0), but that is more complex rather than simpler.  So we have, potentially, three tokens and the middle one is "i".  (As an engineer, I might try to put in a j rather than an i, but let us put that aside.)  That leaves the E/c^2 and the PV/nR.

Well, the first E that comes to mind is Einstein's - E=mc^2.  This immediately reduces to mc^2/c^2, or m.  This give us "mi" plus a third token.

By inspection, it is clear the third token is a play on the ideal gas law: PV=nRT.  If you take the ideal gas law and rearrange it to put the P, V, n, and R terms on one side, we are left with T.

Our solution is: miT, normally written MIT, and that is consistent with the playful spirit of the puzzle.  Do you have an alternative solution?

Jibe 1 - sloppy use of cases, and an educated person would use formulae that have uppercase M and I.

Jibe 2 - a graduate of a proper engineering university would know that j is the correct terminology for imaginary numbers and this was clearly created by a mathematician rather than an engineer.

Smoke 5, 23 October 2022

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.

Smoke 4, 19 October 2022

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.

Portland, Oregon came in at #6. 

Smoke 3 - 18 October 2022

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.

Smoke 2 - 15 October 2022

 How bad is the air quality, I hear you ask.  Well, this bad.

Smoke - 15 October 2022

We have returned from travels to France, Greece, and Canada, only to find that the fire season continues and air quality is getting bad.  When we returned yesterday from Canada, the air was hazy but did not smell.  Today, the air is much hazier, smoky looking, and there is a clear scent of burnt wood in the air.  An odd thing we noticed that that there were air quality alerts for metropolitan Seattle but no such alerts for metropolitan Vancouver (BC) - yet the air quality seemed about the same.  I conclude that Canadian authorities have lax requirements, either for air quality or for reporting of air quality.

We flew to France via Amsterdam.  I masked the entire trip as I was spending time in a small aluminum tube with a couple hundred strangers.  It only takes one or two hoseheads to make an entire airplane sick (I debated using a different phrase, a more sympathetic tag, but I cannot imagine why an intelligent person knowingly ill or feeling ill with COVID symptoms would intentionally travel on an airplane, but I digress).  We staved off some jet lag by wandering around Nantes (FR) and settled on a small crepe restaurant for dinner.   The next day or so, we picked up a car at the airport and headed out for some tourism.  There were three prongs to our travels: Puy du Fou, Cognac, and cave paintings.  I will give particulars later; for now, it was a great leg of the trip.

For the second leg, we were in Nantes and environs as members of the "delegation" from the Seattle-Nantes Sister City Association (SNSCA).  Originally scheduled for 2020, the trip was to celebrate the 40th anniversity of the twinning of Seattle and Nantes.  COVID changed the world, so the 40th became the 41st and then the 42nd anniversary.  With any luck, the 45th anniversary will be celebrated in 2025.

For the third leg, we flew to Greece to go sailing.  We met up with six friends to sail a 48-foot catamaran among the Saronic islands, including Ydra (Hydra) and Poros.

Shortly after returning home, we went to the cabin in Canada to do the annual burn.  This was to be for the Canadian Thanksgiving, a long weekend (3-day) in October that is the traditional weekend when the holiday is celebrated and the cabins are closed down for the winter.  The winter rains have usually settled in by now, making it safe to burn the accumulated prunings and tree cuttings down on the beach.  This year, we are in a continuing drought and the days remain clear and warm.  The burn ban remains in place, so we hope to return in mid-November to burn.  We could wait until Spring for the burn, but that gives the brush piles a lot of time to build up thick growths of mold and mildew that will give my sinus passages a rough ride.  We have burned in the Spring in the past, and it was no fun.

Now back at home and looking forward to the rains and the end of the fire season.

Charles III seems an ill-advised choice for a name - 8 September 2022

With the passing of Elizabeth II R, her son Charles is being called the King.  However, official reports are not naming him as "King Charles III" yet.  I suggest this is wise.  Charles I came to a bad end, and Charles II was mired in controversy.  The controversy may look peculiar from today's perspective, but it was wild enough at the time to eject Charles II and to bring on William and Mary in a Parliamentary coup.  (As I understand, this is the origin of the "divine Right" moving to a "divine and Parliamentary Right".)  Adopting the title of Charles III would recall some bad times and questionable royalty.  Much better that Charles (prince) adopt another name with better associations. Of course, others get to decide this and a rebellious colonist has but little to say in the matter.  To distract us all from this weighty decision, here is a picture of a cat.

Roll, do not brush - 14 August 2022

Having applied fiberglass to the bottom of the kayak, it was time to apply epoxy to fill the weave, creating a smooth surface for final finishing with varnish (to protect the epoxy from UV destruction).  For the fiberglass, I used a scraper to apply a thin coat of epoxy.  For the first fill coat, I used a foam roller to apply the epoxy, and it went quite smoothly.  I was happy with the uniformity of the resulting coat.  I was concerned about the amount of wasted epoxy left in the foam roller when I was done with the application, so I decided to use a chip brush to apply the second filler coat.  Although the brushed coat seemed to use less epoxy and it left a smooth coat, it also had two problematic consequences.  First, the inexpensive chip brushes tend to shed bristles; this is no surprise, but I did have to stay alert to remove the bristles so they did not set in the epoxy to become permanent features of the kayak.  The second problem is that the brush left a thick layer that had a tendency to slump and drip on the more vertical surfaces of the kayak.  This will require quite a bit of sanding to make fair.  I plan to return to the roller for future applications of expoy filler and the coats of varnish.  I will use the brushes for areas that are not amenable to rolling, such as the areas around the coaming.

I also learned why being generous can sometimes leave one in a bit of a pickle.  During the construction class, the instructor suggested that people share epoxy bottles so as to reduce the number of epoxy stations that were needed.  I volunteered to let my adjacent colleague draw from my bottles.  The kayak kit comes with a gallon of epoxy, and that sounded nearly infinite to me.  Well, I ran out today, and I am not yet done.  I ordered a half-gallon kit, but it will take time to ship from the East coast, so my construction is temporarily stalled.  I guess I can go back and sand down some of those drips.

Assembling a RAD Power RADmission bicycle from late May 2022 - 8 August 2022

RAD Power bicycles is an e-bike company in Seattle.  I finally broke down and got my first e-bike, the RADmission 1.  The big arguments in the e-bike world revolve around mid-drive and hub-drive.  This bike is typical in that it is hub-drive, therefore the motor is in the rear wheel, but it is atypical in that it is a single-gear bike.  No derailleur, no speeds.  The bike has a power-assist option from 0-5, where zero is no e-assist and 5 is full power.  The power-assist works to amplify your pedaling; when you stop pedaling, the motor stops assisting and you coast.  There is also a twist throttle that provides variable assist independent of pedaling.  I bought the upgrade to the control system that displays the wattage that the motor is putting out.  The motor peaks at 500 Watts; other bikes from RAD Power are in the 750W range.  The bikes comes with 2-inch wide tires and disk brakes, so it is comfortable on many trails, including gravel.  The power assist stops assisting above 20 miles per hour, so it is a Class 2 bike in the U.S. because it has a throttle.  The bike was pretty easy to assemble when I followed the printed instructions.  Many or all of the tools are provided, but I often used my own tools because they are of better quality and easier to use.

I am still learning how to ride it well, but here is what I have learned so far.

I use the electronic assist in three ways.  I keep the assist level around 2 and that works well for me in almost any mostly level situation.  Power assist ranges around 100W.  When I hit a hill, I use the throttle to help, and that applies anything up to 500W to get me up the hill.  For steeper hills, I have to stand and pedal to get up.  Finally, I also use the trhottle to accelerate from a stop.  Nominally, this is not needed; the automatic power assist should kick in to help when I start pedaling, but I find that traffic (cars) are often impatient and the throttle-boost gets me going fast enough to stay out of their way or to cross the road (e.g., when riding on a trail that crosses a road).  When hill climbing, I will occasionally boost the power-assist level to 3, but I back it down to 2 for normal riding.  This gives me a pretty good range - I have yet to find the bottom of the battery.

This time-lapse video should have been posted here on 31 May 2022.

U.S. Savings Bonds - 8 August 2022

Going through some old files, I found a cache of U.S. Savings Bonds that were issued in late 1979 into the early 1980s.  Savings Bonds were once a "thing" but are now rather obscure.  They were denominated in smaller amounts ($25-$50-$100) and often sold through monthly payroll deductions.  They are bonds backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government, so the purhaser does not need to worry about defaults or corporate bankruptcy.  As a consequence, the interest rates are not great, but neither are they as terrible as, say, a checking account at a commercial bank.  They have a defined date of maturity (10 years or so) and keep earning interest after that date - although the interest rate may drop post-maturity.  Some bonds are bought at face value and some are bought at a discount (e.g., half of the face value).  Today, Savings Bonds seem to have moved to an elecrtonic version, but these are old-fashioned paper bonds.

These bonds are old and long past maturity.  They would have matured before 2000, so the actual value of each bond today is far beyond the face value.  I checked the internet and found a page that describes how to redeem the bonds.  

Go to a bank.

Yep, there are a bunch of rules about paperwork that must be signed in the presence of a witness or a notary public.  

Many banks will decline Savings Bonds.

We visited three (3) banks before finding one that would redeem Savings Bonds.  One had certain designated offices that would redeem Bonds, but not the one we were standing in.  Another simply did not handle Bonds.  The third one would.

The banks require an account at the bank to redeem the Bonds.

We do not have an account at a local bank.  Gave it up years ago to consolidate our finances into a high-service brokerage account.  We have been doing all banking electronically for over a decade, but now we need a local account.

And there you have it.  To redeem your U.S. Savings Bonds, you need to have a local bank account and process the paperwork in the presence of a notary public or a designed bank official.

I am now opening an account at a local bank so that I can redeem my ancient Savings Bonds.

Picture of a rabbit because, well, why not?  Photo courtesy of Kathy Perko-Porter.

Frontier is the Fastest Supercomputer on the Planet - 1 June 2022

Announced on Monday, 30 May 2022, the Frontier computer is the fastest computer on the planet, driven by AMD EPYC CPUs and AMD Instinct GPUs.  I was a manager on the research projects that led to this success.  The research ideas were turned into reality by a large team of dedicated engineers across a variety of disciplines.  The AMD part of the story began in about 2014.

The AMD Research "FastForward" project on supercomputing started in about 2014 when the fastest computer in the world was 33.86 Petaflop/second (0.034 Exaflops/sec).  That machine was the Tianhe-2, a supercomputer developed by China’s National University of Defense Technology.  The Top500 list tracks the fastest computers, and in 2014, it looked like this.  In the research project, our challenge was to invent a 1 Exaflop/sec (1000 Petaflops/sec) machine that used 20 Megawatts of power; at the time, it was predicted that such a machine would require nearly 100 MW if built using then-current technology.  Further, it required so many chips that reliability calculations gave dismal predictions: the machine might not stay up long enough between failures to deliver the useful results.  It took years of research from 2014 - plus the blood and sweat of hundreds of engineers across many disciplines - but the Cray branch of HPE delivered Frontier at 1.1 Exaflops/sec using 21 MW of power.  News report here and here from The Next Platform.

AMD EPYC CPUs and AMD Instinct GPUs (with AI/ML extensions) form the heart of the Oak Ridge Frontier machine.  Once the system is tuned, it is expected to deliver 1.5 Exaflops/sec on the Hi-perf Linpack (HPL) benchmark.    

When the FastForward (FF) project started, AMD had a declining number of systems on the Top500 list and I doubt any of them had AMD GPUs.  The list was dominated by Intel (CPUs), IBM (CPUs), and Nvidia (GPUs).  The Tianhe-2 (China) and Fugaku (Japan) were unusual.  There were a lot of people, many within AMD, who thought AMD Research was wasting its time on supercomputers and high-performance computing.  The AMD FF project received some outside funding from the US Government's Exascale Computing Project (ECP) that allowed us (AMD Research) a bit of independence to pursue the HPC (high-performance computing) research.  The external funding even helped AMD Research survive and grow during times when the rest of AMD was shrinking and suffering.  FastForward was followed by DesignForward, FF2, DF2, and finally PathForward (PF) funding from the ECP.  This money did not cover the costs of the research, but it provided a reliable core of funding around which we could build a stable series of projects.  

Innovation was rampant in the FF work and continued into successive projects.  The AMD Research group varied in size (it grew), but at one point, it represented about 1% of the AMD engineering population.  At the peak, we produced about 40% of the AMD patents. Corporate-wide.  The average Research member was 40x as productive as the average development engineer when comparing patents. With an increased emphasis on patents, the productivity of the rest of the corporation has risen and the Research group produces about 25% of the AMD patents.

There was a strong body of publications coming from AMD Research.  The 50-odd researchers produced more peer-reviewed papers for major conferences than companies like Intel, Apple, Microsoft, and Google that had research staffs that were literally 10x the size.  To be fair, this was not because AMD Research was smarter, but because AMD had a liberal publication policy.  This publication policy changed dramatically in about 2018-2019.  A publication went out (not from Research!) that revealed AMD confidential information, and so the valves were closed for a while.  After internal debate, the valves were slightly reopened, but never to the same level of disclosure that had previously been allowed.  Certain topics were not eligible for publication because the very topics were sensitive, and this caused significant internal friction.  But such are the requirements of corporate research as distinguished from academic research.  The AMD Research publication remains strong but is not as voluminous as the historical level.

The next machine is to be El Capitan at Lawrence Livermore National Labs, and it is projected to deliver over 2 Exaflops with the next generation of AMD CPU and GPU silicon.