OMW to Port Townsend

Mom has taken a serious turn downhill and I'm needed at home ASAP.  On the KLM nonstop tomorrow, will be in Port Townsend 2-4 weeks.

Vantastic

Robin Van Persie was on fire at Stamford Bridge as he scored 3 of Arsenal's 5 goals while the Gunners drubbed Chelsea on their own ground. First time Chelsea has given up 5 goals at Stamford Bridge since '89.

CAR2GO

New electric car-sharing program in Amsterdam with electric Smart cars.  13 euros an hour, 40 euros a day ... free parking in the city.

No that isn't the parking lot! Just a promotion in Dam Square this week.

Japan's next big export: tsunami junk

Interesting news from the New Zealand Herald

Up to 20 million tonnes of tsunami debris floating from Japan could arrive on Hawaii's shores by early 2013, before reaching the West Coast of the United States, according to estimates by University of Hawaii scientists.

A Russian training ship spotted the junk including a refrigerator, a television set and other appliances in an area of the Pacific Ocean where the scientists from the university's International Pacific Research Center predicted it would be.
The biggest proof that the debris is from the Japanese tsunami is a fishing boat that's been raced to the Fukushima Prefecture, the area hardest hit by the March 11 disaster.

Jan Hafner, a scientific computer programmer, told The Associated Press that researchers' projections show the debris would reach the coasts of Oregon, Washington, Alaska and Canada around 2014.

They estimate the debris field is spread out across an area that's roughly 3,200 kilometers long and 1,600 kilometers wide located between Japan and Midway Atoll, where pieces could wash up in January.

West Seattle, Elliot Bay, Port of Seattle

View of the bay and my former neighborhood of West Seattle across the bay, from my hotel room on Saturday night before returning to Europe:

Billions and Billions

As The Guardian reports, the U.N. now believes over 7 billion human beings are on this rock, and we're on our way to 9 billion before 2050.  Barely 60 years ago, there were less than 3 billion people here.

Better start saving some canned goods.

Views From Mom's House

Typical winter weather in Port Townsend ... grey morning, blue skies by afternoon.

Delta Sucks

And Delta at Sea-Tac sucks twice as hard ... combine the low-bid cheap ass check-in equipment of Delta with the massive, inefficient job security program that is TSA at Sea-Tac, and you get one of the most embarrassingly Third World experiences at a major airport in the world.

Check in online? Oh, for international you have to check in again. Oh, but the passport reader on our machines can't read your passport, it has a wrinkle.

Cairo is a better airport experience than Sea-Tac ... that's just how bad we've gotten.

Update:  < 5 minutes to get through passport control at Schiphol, < 5 minutes to wait for my luggage ... got to the train platform at Track 1/2 just in time for the 8:46 Intercity and was home in < 1 hour of the plane touching down.  I'm not at Sea-Tac any more.

Pike Place Market

Out for some shopping today at the Market:

"Let's get ready to crummmmmmmble!"

So glad I could come back to the U.S. and see news coverage of the Republican's "I know you are but what am I?" extravaganza.

Not.

Downtown

Beautiful crisp fall weather in Seattle this week, couldn't be better.

Close Call

A new analysis of historical observation data concludes that the Earth avoided an extinction event on the scale of 3,000 Tunguska events in 1883 when a train of comet fragments narrowly missed our planet.

That would have been ... bad.

Back in Seattle

Sunny Saturday weather greeted me on my arrival, and a great time was had by all as 64,000 turned out at the soccer game Saturday night to see local favorite Kasey Keller's last regular season game as Seattle's keeper.  The comeback 2-1 win wasn't too bad either!

Coming Home

I leave Amsterdam at 10 am local time Saturday and arrive in Seattle at noon local time after 10 hours on the plane (oh boy, my favorite ... not).

Saturday night, I have tickets with my former season ticket partners Bob & Roy to see Kasey Keller's last home game for the Sounders in MLS ... so I'm going home to see soccer!  Sellout crowd of 60,000+ expected,

Video from a couple years ago in our seats, which I'll be in Saturday night:

Oslo Gardermoen Airport

Is this the IKEA airport or what? Excellent airport seafood for lunch, however.

Carrier Landing

Was in the middle of talking to the nice lady sitting next to me while we were landing when we hit the runway with a WHAM! Hardest landing in years, pilot actually came on the intercom and apologized. In the U.S. I always assume that's a retired Navy pilot but here ..... just missed it, I guess!

The nice lady is director of equestrian events at the London Olympics, Dutch horse breeder. Interesting conversation.

Oslo Airport Train

Great little bullet train Flytoget runs from the airport to Lillestrom, where I worked this week, then on to Oslo Central and 5 more stops afterwards.  It really flies, top speed 130 mph, as the video from my return to the airport this morning hopefully shows.

It's the kind of system that puts Seattle's brand new and embarrassingly lame Link system to shame.

Lillestrom, Norway

Haven't really done any tourist-y things on this trip, the usual airport-to-hotel, hotel-to-office work routine.

But the weather has been crisp, clear and beautiful.  Very friendly group to work with, nice hosts.  Last night we went out for the global IT feeding ritual:  pizza and beer.

Tutu & Bono

Shouldn't they be at a soccer match watching Kaka?

Probably Just SkyNet Testing Its Limits

Interesting article in Wired about a key logger virus persistently infecting the computers in Nevada controlling American military drones.  I guess the risk of drones using credit card information is pretty low, but still!  Possibly of greater concern is the idea that our drones are actually providing insurgents with television entertainment:

Many Reapers and Predators don’t encrypt the video they transmit to American troops on the ground. In the summer of 2009, U.S. forces discovered “days and days and hours and hours” of the drone footage on the laptops of Iraqi insurgents. A $26 piece of software allowed the militants to capture the video.

Oh ... great.  Better than HBO!

Here comes the travel ...

Summer is slow for my work, but fall is .... BUSY!

After some emails last week, my calendar is now booked into early December.  This week I actually get to stay in the Netherlands, and then in the following weeks it's Norway, America, Belgium, England, Belgium, Greece, and England.

Based on last year, that means some side-trips to France and Dubai are just out there waiting for me but not scheduled yet.  Think I need to buy some new luggage when home in Seattle!

On Singel Canal

My only question is whether they are pillaging whenever they get where they're going:

The Universe Is Just So Cool

The universe repels itself .... maybe it needs therapy.

Three astronomers won the Nobel prize on Tuesday for discovering that the universe is apparently being blown apart by a mysterious force that cosmologists now call dark energy. They are Saul Perlmutter of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., Brian P. Schmidt of the Australian National University in Weston Creek, Australia, and Adam G. Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

They were the leaders of two competing teams of astronomers who were trying to use the exploding stars known as Type 1a supernovae as cosmic lighthouses to measure the expansion of the universe. They were hoping to measure how fast the universe, which has been expanding since its fiery birth in the Big Bang 14 billion years ago, was slowing down, and thus to find out if its ultimate fate was to fall back together in what is called a Big Crunch or not. Instead, they reported in 1998, it was inexplicably speeding up, a conclusion that nobody would have accepted if not for the fact that both groups wound up with the same answer.

At the time, “We were a little scared,” Dr. Schmidt said. Subsequent cosmological measurements have confirmed that roughly 70 percent of the universe by mass or energy consists of this antigravitational dark energy.

Shark Sanctuary

According to the BBC, the Marshall Islands have created the world's largest shark sanctuary, an area the size of Mexico where trade in shark products and fishing for sharks is prohibited, and certain fishing gear that increases the risk of sharks being killed will be banned.

"In passing this [shark protection] bill, there is no greater statement we can make about the importance of sharks to our culture, environment and economy," said Senator Tony deBrum, who co-sponsored the bill through the Marshallese parliament.

"Ours may be a small island nation, but our waters are now the biggest place sharks are protected."

Where'd this great weather come from??

At home, we'd call this Indian Summer (unless that's not PC any more).  Beautiful weather this week, and a great time to sit on a terrace in the park and enjoy a cold beer and a book:

Vondelpark, sunbathers at the lake

Terrace at Netherlands Film Institute, inside Vondelpark

View from my table on the rail of the terrace

The terrace and Film Institute's beautiful building