Thursday, December 27, 2007

Johnny Chung Lee Creates "Minority Report" Effect with Wii Remote

So this is pretty neat.



Since I work at a company that makes input devices, this does make me wonder if we'd better think about trying to hire this guy...

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/projects/wii/

Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Further proof of job openings for Copy Editors in Taiwan

This motorcycle has a license plate that few in the US would feel comfortable displaying




Don't we usually try to AVOID passengers that are ticking???





See what happens when you just do a word-for-word translation?




I know you are, but what am I?





My parents read this, so I'll exclude the comment I originally had in mind...

Friday, August 31, 2007

Come on!

It's hard enough to fight the stereotype of the stupid, fat, ugly American. It's nice to see that Miss Teen South Caroline decided to join the battle...

...she just chose the wrong side...



Seriously, WTF is she saying?

Monday, August 27, 2007

Songs from the 90s

Actually, this is more wacky stuff spotted here in Taiwan, but I've managed to observe a theme on this one, so here goes:

  • Found this one in one of the local stores that carries pet goods.
















  • You can...
    ...in the morning, you can...


    ...in the night, you can...


    ...when you want to...


    ...









  • I was kind of thinking about the theme from "The Love Boat", but somehow cheezy 70s disco music rings more true...


    I'm not sure what they are implying here, but I do know that there's know way I'm drinking this...

Are You Ready For Prayer Time?

Many (if not most) companies in Taiwan will engage in a semi-monthly "bai bai" ceremony, wherein they sacrifice food, incense and money (actually just paper) to their ancestors to bring fortune and luck. I have yet to really figure out the exact significance of this rite (and admittedly, I haven't really tried), but I think that the ancestor worship is some sort of a cross between Taoism and Confucianist beliefs.



Our office typically does not show many signs of having these sorts of religious/spiritual beliefs, so it was interesting when I noticed my coworkers preparing for this particular holiday, the Mid-Autumn Festival. I consider it a privelege to have been able to witness one of these ceremonies first-hand outside of the usual temple environs.

Friday, August 24, 2007

Talented Street Performer

Check this guy out:



Very impressive style and technique.

He reminds me of Stanley Jordan.

Thursday, August 23, 2007

Mexican Food in Taiwan

Bean-o-rama's recent post on Mexican food has inspired me to put on this ol' blog with regards to Mexican food in Taiwan.

I'm not sure how to start this, so let's start with a silly scenario.

Let's say that you come to Taiwan and decide that rather than partaking of any of the local cuisines (spanning all of Asia with admirable verisimilitude), you instead opt for getting some Mexican food to avoid the dysentery. You might be curious about how they interpret a burrito. You might be wondering how a culture that only peripherally socializes with cheese would go about making an enchilada plate. You might just hate Asian food.

Regardless of your reasons, I am here today to tell you that you should not under any circumstances follow this urge to try Mexican food here in Taiwan. I am sure there are exceptions to this rule (i.e. you have a friend that makes it at home), but I have yet to actually encounter any. Here are some examples of experiences that I have had:

  • There is a very nice restaurant that also doubles as a jazz club here in Taipei called Brown Sugar. It is very snazzy, the jazz is actually pretty darn good, and the drink menu is downright spectacular. The food menu is also pretty interesting, and they somehow manage to do a great job on their Western fare. In spite of all of these things that they have going for them, their version of Nachos (which costs about US$7~8) was a basket of Nacho Cheese Doritos served with a little bowl filled with crappy picante sauce. Seriously.

  • I can't recall the place where I had this, but at one point I ended up seeing somebody order a taco that consisted of a fried shell, corn, mayonnaise, and what appeared to be Campbell's Chunky Beef Stew. Not a single shred of lettuce, tomato, pineapple, or salsa in sight...

  • This isn't really an example of issues with Mexican cuisine, but I also once received a Mojito that consisted of nothing but rum, peppermint schnapps and ice cubes.

There are other examples, but suffice it to say that I have completely given up. Now and then, I might run across a Churro that's probably safe, but I'm even a bit scared to try those out.

I used to complain a bit about the fact that there was no good Mexican food in central Texas - only Tex-Mex. Now that I've had Tai-Mex, I have learned that there are far worse things in this world than black beans served with my fajitas.

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Talk About an Understatement

A China Airlines flight exploded on the tarmac today, with no injuries or fatalities. Here is the article from Yahoo! News.

While this in and of itself is not particularly exceptional, the statement from the President of China Airlines (a Taiwanese company) was just a little bit unsettling:

"We are prepared to do its best to get to the bottom of this incident," China Airlines president Zhao Guoshi told reporters at a press conference at Naha airport late Monday. "I apologize for the trouble we have caused our passengers."

For those of you that have wondered why I am so adamant about not flying China Airlines for my various Asian business trips, hopefully the stats towards the bottom of the above article will shed some light on my position...

Monday, August 20, 2007

Greece 2007

Monday
Arrived in Athens at 4pm, took the Metro from the train over to our hotel (Evangelismos), walked 3 blocks over and checked into the Athens Hilton (thank you Hilton Honors Points!), where we had a direct view of the Parthenon from our balcony.

After freshening up, we headed up via funicular to the restaurant with the coolest view in Athens, perched atop Lycabettus hill. The restaurant’s food was pretty good (this is where we first discovered Greek wine – their whites are lovely!), but the view was outstanding! Take a thin sweater if you go in the evening (better view then) because it does get drafty.


Tuesday
Woke up early and started walking eastward towards the Acropolis. We just wandered without paying too much attention to the map, so we ended up in a couple cool neighborhoods (Syntagma, Kolonaki, etc.) that had charming tabernas (restaurants) and coffee shops and wine bars.

We eventually figured out that we were going SW, which was cool because we ended up right next to the Temple of Olympian Zeus, which is a major attraction. It’s a little worse for wear, but you can still imagine what it must have looked like thousands of years ago. TIP: Buy the all-inclusive entrance ticket, which is good for a week, and will get you into all the major attractions.

We ended up walking in to the Plaka pedestrian area, which is cool for souvenir shopping (at tourist prices, of course) and eating and we decided to have lunch here (gyro…mmmmm). With our bellies full and our fluids replenished, we made our way to the Acropolis.

Plan to spend about 3-4 hours wandering around here if you’re a culture/history buff. Also do your best to get here earlier in the day than we did, since it gets pretty full with tourists over the course of the day, and it gets pretty hot around mid-day. Also, bring good walking shoes as you’ll do quite a bit of climbing up steep walkways to get up to the top of the hill.

We started out at the Temple of Dionysus, wandered through it all up to the Parthenon proper, and then came back down through Ancient Agora, stopping for pictures at the Temple of Hephaestus. TIP: Don’t wander alone through the trees in the Areopagus area – we did and accidentally interrupted a pot deal…cannabis baggie exposed, replete in all its glory.

Afterward, we were all cultured out, so we made a half-hearted attempt at walking through the Roman Agora before giving up and heading off to dinner in Monastiraki. We ended our day wandering back through the shops in Plaka before heading over to the Metro station and going home around 11pm.



Wednesday

We woke up fairly late (and dehydrated), so we headed straight for the National Archeological Museum and had breakfast around there.

Sadly, we only had about 2-3 hours there since we’re both museum buffs and there was SOOOOOOO much to see. If you’re into lots of artifacts from the ancient world, and enjoy reading the placards, then I suggest planning a full day here…otherwise, it is possible to rush through in 2~3 hours, although I would not recommend it. High points here were…well…legion. Seriously, you NEED to go here.

We unfortunately ran out of time, and had to run back to our hotel to get our bags so that we could take the Metro over to the Piraeus pier to grab our boat. We upgraded to business class (cuz I felt like it, darn it) and enjoyed the 5 hour ride out to Santorini. You can get there a lot quicker by plane, but I’ve always wanted to take a boat through the Aegean, so we went for it. The boat left on time, but somehow arrived a couple hours late. Also, the Aegean is named after the waves propensity to jump like goats, so that should give you an idea of what to expect of the ride. We arrived at the pier in Fira (AKA Thira), where our pre-arranged ride for the cave hotel was waiting for us.

Not sure if you’ve ever been to Santorini before, but the cave hotels are basically hotels that are built into the sides of the cliffs overlooking the relatively inactive volcano crater (caldera). The views are spectacular, and the sunsets will stay with you forever.

They’re a little on the pricey side, but I think they’re totally worth it. Our hotel was the Regina Mare, which was pretty decent and had great service. I wouldn’t expect more than 3.5 stars at any of these caldera hotels, but they nearly get by on charm alone.

We ended up going with Imerovigli, which is half way between the two major towns on the island (Fira and Oia). We chose it because it is fairly close to both, but not nearly as touristy and much quieter – you can actually hear the waves at night as opposed to the various boatloads (literally) of people coming and going from the major cities.

If you’re looking for nightlife, then you might want to stay at Fira. If you’re looking for more rustic charm and more restaurants, stay at Oia. If you’re looking for peace and beauty, stay at Imerovigli.

For dinner, we headed over to a local restaurant (take that with a grain of salt) that was pretty close to the hotel. The food was great and the local Santorini wine was fantastic.



Thursday

We just basically wandered around Fira and enjoyed the general ambience of the place. We enjoyed various meals at various places (can’t recall them off the top of my head) and then went home and called it a night.


Friday

We decided to rent a car and head out to explore the beaches. Renting the car was a good move since the bus and taxi systems are unreliable and sporadic at best (apparently pretty typical for Greece). Looking for the beaches…well…let’s put it this way. If you’re expecting broad sandy beaches with warm waves of blue water washing over you, at least you’ll be happy that it’s blue. Santorini was formed through volcanic activity, and its original round shape was devastated a long, long time ago, resulting in its current crescent + point shape today.

This resulted in the formation of spectacular landscapes and beautiful cliffs, coastlines, and beaches. The bad news is that the beaches are all made of stone. The Black Beach has scorching hot black stones. The Red Beach requires navigation across the cliffs of insanity, and the White Beach requires an off-roading experience to reach. The waters are all crystal clear since there is no sand to be seen anywhere. The waters are also very, very cold for some inexplicable reason.
I got a kick out of the drive and the adventure of getting around. It was cool passing through the vineyards full of lazy grapevines (they sprawl on the ground, vines akimbo vs. having posts to follow) – try to make some time for a winery if time permits. We also accidentally ended up driving up an insane mountain towards a place called Ancient Thira – the roads are 1 to 1.5 lanes wide, which makes it extra fun when you’re trying to get around the vans containing tourists. I’d advise against going here unless you like literally living on the edge.

After spending the day in search of and ultimately hanging out at a beach, we headed home to watch an amazing sunset from our terrace, freshen up, drop off the rental car, and then we headed up to Oia for dinner at what is purported to be the best restaurant on the island. This was GLORIOUS – words cannot describe how good this was. It was pretty darn expensive, but it was also our last night in Greece, so we just went for it. You also NEED to go here if you visit. Afterward, we staggered back home (after waiting 45 minutes for a taxi to show up) and finished packing before we crashed for the night.


Saturday
Woke up at around 4:30am and had a tiny little bit of breakfast on our terrace (we were too full to eat it all, but the hotel had packed us a nice breakfast the night before and left it in our room). We cleared out of the hotel and headed to the airport and managed to catch the sunrise over the east coast. Our flight took off at 6:30am, and thus ended a great (albeit far too short) vacation in Greece.

Typhoon Sepat Hits Taiwan

Melanie was treated to her very first typhoon (also known as hurricane or cyclone) last weekend when Sepat slammed Taiwan with 100+ MPH winds and rain. This is the third such typhoon to hit Taiwan in the last month, but thankfully Taiwan is well equipped to handle these sorts of events, as you can see in this article on Yahoo.


I went downstairs to the front of our building and managed to capture a short video showing the winds and rain hammering our neighborhood. Note that this was during a relatively quiet time during the storm...




The picture above is taken in front of my office on the following Monday - as you can see, aside from the fallen palm, there really wasn't a whole lot of damage.

Thankfully, the storm only lingered for about a day. We had plenty of warning so we rented a bunch of videos, stocked up our pantry with water and instant noodles, and settled down for a weekend at home. In the end, we didn't even lose power, so it was hardly very exciting at all. The worst we experienced was that the windows creaked a bit as they withstood the tempest, and a little bit of water leaked into the ceiling of our little terrace. All in all, considering the recent news of the conditions in India, we got off extremely easy.

Monday, July 30, 2007

Great Drawing

I just thought this was pretty cool:

http://www.emagi.co.uk/2006/08/12/bush-vampire/

Friday, July 27, 2007

English Lessons for Markus

Melanie and I were having dinner with her family in Großaspach, Germany. Her youngest cousin is relatively close to our age group, and he is a blast to hang around, so we were spending most of our time talking to him. At this point, my German language skills are decent - since his English skills are also decent, the conversation kind of drifted between German and English.

At one point, he was asking us to teach him English phrases, so we gave him a few useful ones (that I can't remember). I am not sure what triggered it, but I was suddenly taken with the desire to teach him an interesting phrase by first writing it down on a little notepad and having him read the text. The video below is young Markus doing his best to read it:






Puerile - maybe. Hilarious - absolutely!

Thursday, July 05, 2007

In China today

Just wanted to point out how surreal it is here. I was in Beijing yesterday and am visiting our Shanghai office through Saturday. I wish I could more adequately describe the overall impression it leaves on me (this is roughly my tenth visit), but words escape me. I understand nearly everything that's being said around me, and I generally understand the culture, but the overall gestalt of the place is just beyond words.

I'll try to think up some anecdotes to capture this, but I simply felt the need to at least put something down that captures my utter sense of bafflement...it might take a while since I can't even do a Google search to grab a picture that's even remotely related to China...

Tuesday, June 26, 2007

2007 Dragon Boat Races

I had a chance to check out the Taipei 2007 Dragon Boat Races down at the river this year. Per Wikipedia, the tradition can be summarized as follows:

The exact origins of Duan Wu originated in ancient China. One traditional view holds that the festival memorializes the Chinese poet Qu Yuan (c. 340 BC-278 BC) of the Warring States Period. He committed suicide by drowning himself in a river because he was disgusted by the corruption of the Chu government. The local people, knowing him to be a good man, decided to throw food into the river to feed the fish so they would not eat Qu Yuan's body.

Naturally, this holiday is not celebrated in modern day China - no doubt the Communist regime had no desire to venerate a day of opposing the government, and summarily did away with the holiday all together.

Taiwan, on the other hand, along with various other countries with ethnic Chinese residents, has a great time with this one in spite of/to spite the mainland. There were attendees and racers from all over the world, including South Africa, the Philippines, the US, etc. Lots of expats also turned out to watch the races despite the 35C (95F) weather.

To be honest, the races weren't nearly as dramatic as I had expected them to be - even the final race was a little anticlimactic. Still, the crowds were friends, the racers and their friends/family were definitely pumped, and the atmosphere was highly enjoyable, so it was worth braving the heat.

I'm going to try something new for this particular post. I brought my camcorder with me for this trip and I figured I'd use the software that came with it to try putting together a little video to capture the day. It's my first attempt, and frankly the software did most of the work, but let me know what you think.

Sunday, June 24, 2007

Monday, May 14, 2007

This one...not so much

I just heard today that there is a company selling a product that claims to counteract entropy. Why just rehydrate and replace all those lost electrolytes when you can instead just ingest a few drops of this libation and "create order out of chaos"?

This is either condescension in its purest form or brilliant marketing.

I really, really need to get one of these

The article at the other end of this link describes a 3D "printer".

I can't even begin to count the number of times where something like this would have come in incredibly handy! Not just for work, but the various broken battery casings and lost bits and pieces that currently force me to do a crappy hack job.

The moment that somebody finds a cheap and effective way to make these devices for the home consumer market, then they will truly take over the world. If nothing else, it will give duct tape a run for its money...

Friday, May 11, 2007

Are Wii Having Fun Yet?

Alright, so the title is a little cheesy, but what can I say...I'm hooked...


I have heard about the Wii for quite a while now, and by all appearances it is a hit. In particular, the Wii Sports games are the hottest item, specifically the tennis game. I have wanted to try it out for as long as I've known about it, but this has been difficult thus far because (1) Wii is not yet available for sale in Taiwan and (2) when it is eventually released, it will probably be the Japanese version.


At present, the only way to get the Wii is through local importers that buy them in Japan and bring them over for sale in Taiwan. Many of my colleagues have been chomping at the bit for Wii, and thus given the recent delays and shortages, they finally decided to take the plunge and just buy one of these imported models.


It was thus that a Wii appeared in our conference room just after lunch today, along with an extra controller and the Wii Sports game pack. When I found out what was going on, I was suddenly struck with both fear and excitement. I was excited to be able to finally try this sucker out, and afraid that I would like it as much as I thought I might.


Turns out that I was not disappointed on either count...


After about 30 minutes of playing both the tennis game and the boxing game, I consider myself a believer. My arms are tired, and my back is tight, yet I keep finding myself glancing back towards the conference room of temptation. I have boatloads of work to do, and yet I still catch my mind drifting back towards getting another crack at the tennis game.


This will sound like crazy talk and thinly veiled justification, but I really think that this will actually help the workplace be more production. All of the boys in the office are naturally hooked as well, but we are all showing self restraint in playing during work hours (thus far). Folks have only gone back to play for a few minutes at a time during their breaks as kind of a reward for cranking through the tasks that they had on their plate. I for one have found myself more focused and efficient because I am motivated to get done so that I can go back and play without too much guilt. Plus, it's a fun group activity, it really (REALLY) is pretty good exercise, and it brings an element of fun into the office that raises morale.


I just hope it does not cause any incidents with folks slacking when they should not be, which I really doubt will be a problem. I'm guessing this will pretty much have the same effect that the foozball table at our headquarters had on the office - good fun during breaks, but generally not an issue.

Tuesday, May 08, 2007

Would you have done things any differently?

This story really stokes the imagination:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070507/od_nm/britain_spree_odd_dc_1

The gist of it is that a man was diagnosed with terminal cancer about 2 years ago and told he only had a year to live, so he went on a spending spree and lived like there was no tomorrow...

...Then he was told that he was misdiagnosed, and that there would in fact be a tomorrow. The tumor turned out to just be a swelling on his pancreas...

I am not sure if I would have done things any differently had I been in his situation...it's certainly interesting to noodle on.

Wednesday, May 02, 2007

It's dishwasher safe

They had me at Safe-T-Floss...

Thursday, April 19, 2007

Pirates of the North China Seas

Holee crap!!!

From Slashdot:

"Whilst Microsoft was bragging about the sales number of their latest OS Windows Vista, few would actually know that they have only managed to sell 244 copies in the whole of China in the first 2 weeks. You heard that right, and that's the number quoted from the headquarters of the Windows Vista chief (90% national volume) distributor in Beijing."

I would have been shocked if they had claimed 2440 copies...this is just ridiculous!

I guess I really shouldn't be surprised since it is possible to buy US$1 DVDs of movies pretty much anywhere in China...

...the day after it comes out in the US...

...often weeks before it even reaches the Chinese movie theaters...

I've actually watched a couple during long business trips to China (cheaper than Blockbuster), and the main difference is that the quality just gets better as the bootlegs improve. Eventually, the DVD starts to near DVD quality until the day that it gets released on DVD, at which point it's pretty much over.

Enterprising capitalists never fail to impress!

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Will Ferrell is a genius

A friend of mine just sent me the link below:

http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1754070

I find it very refreshing to see somebody this famous doing something this low-budget and hilarious.

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Let's welcome another Walker to the world!!!

The world just got a little brighter last week when it welcomed young master Owen Nicholas Walker to the world. He was born on 4/10/2007, weighing 8 pounds and measuring in at 20.1 inches long!



You can find more pictures here.

Congratulations to Jared and Leah for yet another job well done! We wish all of the Walkers (including little but big Alton) all the best on their newest addition!!!

Sunday, April 08, 2007

This just gives me the willies


The following headline caught my eye:

Japan drafts their own version of robot ethics

I don't know about everybody else, but seeing this sort of news just makes me nervous. It might have to do with the fact that we're quickly gaining on the so-called "not-too-distant future", and such laws are now seeming like an awfully good idea.

I wonder how long it will be before our new robot overlords start to pass their own laws on human ethics.

Saturday, April 07, 2007

Wulai Hiking Trip


Melanie and I went to Wulai this past weekend and spent a few hours wandering around the area. Wulai is a very neat place - nestled up in the mountains to the west of Taipei. There are some gorgeous rivers running through the valleys, and what makes them particularly interesting is that there are natural hot springs coming out of the ground into the river.

Getting there is also relatively convenient: we took the subway to Taipei Main Station, transferred to the line taking us south to XinDian, and then took a 20-30 minute bus ride up to the actual destination - roughly 90 minutes total.

If you are ever visiting us out here, then I would suggest forcing us to get out of bed early and hitting the road for Wulai no later than 10am - just to make sure you have enough time to explore. There is a lot to see, and you probably want to be able to take your time seeing it. It is also a lot of fun to switch between soaking in the tide-pools (man-made, but fairly natural) and hopping into the river proper (clean and relatively warm).

Here on the left, you can see that several families actually make a day out of bringing their beach gear and just having a blast. We were there on a slightly rainy day (as you probably surmised from our attire), and there was still a decent turnout despite the weather. What's neat about it is that the village has also started to capitalize on its touristic value by installing more parking, lots of restaurants, coffeeshops, etc. Also, since you are way up in the mountains close to the river sources, the water really is quite clean. It might smell a bit funky, but that's just because the hot springs are typically either of the calcium-carbonate or sulfur varieties - the latter being the stinky one.


In this picture on the left, you can see one of the places where the spring water is coming out in the middle of the river and moving downstream. This picture was taken just a few hundred meters north of the shore area shown up above. The rain caused the image to come out slightly grainy, but hopefully you can see enough to get a good idea for what this looks like. One of the cooler things about this is the fact that even on a day as relatively warm as the day that we visited, you could still see the steam rising from the surface of the water around the spring. The water is really extremely hot in certain areas - right near some of the sources, people even bring cooking utensils and food to boil in the water.
I'm not sure if there are supposed to be any medicinal qualities associated with this manner of food preparation (probably), but there were certainly a few families engaged in this wacky form of outdoor cooking.

From there, we headed up the path (roughly 1km walk) towards the trolley. There is a little train that will take you up the path if you aren't up for the walk, but Melanie and I decided (perhaps somewhat foolishly) to make the trek on foot. The walk was quite pleasant, but it is all uphill, so it will probably be a little bit trickier than you might imagine - particularly when it starts raining a little harder :)

One of the high points (somewhat literally) of this area is the waterfall, which is reportedly 80m tall. The two pictures shown here do not really communicate the scale of it, but it really is quite impressive. There is a little commercial village up at the top of the trail, directly across from the waterfall, where you can get a great view while purchasing your "authentic" Taiwanese & aboriginal goods. There are also (once again) more places to purchase food and drink, so we decided to have a nice dinner here before heading back down again. There is also a tram that will take you up to the falls proper, but we decided to pass on this since it was getting late, and it was a bit too dark and foggy by then for us to expect a much better view.

Overall, it was a very fun trip. If you're ever out this way, we just might take you...if you're nice to us...