1-Year Lockdown

Slacker

Yes, I'm really behind in getting pictures up. I'm working on it, I promise. Even though the photo albums are not complete, I'm going ahead and publishing them.

Let me go ahead with the other good news: Adam and Heather are expecting a baby girl. Let's hope that spurs him to get alpione.com back up.

Congrats to Doug and Sam

So things have been crazy and all with planning the wedding, but that is no reason not to get over to dougblack.net and see the pictures of Hayden. I didn’t post anything at first because he said pictures were forthcoming. Instead, he waited weeks then backdated his blog.

 

So I'll do the same with this post.

Fear and Loathing in Taipei

What a depressing weekend.

It has been cold and raining for the last week straight. It’s not cold as in Siberia cold, but the kind of wet miserable weather that makes you stay inside. I’d much rather it be snowing. To top it off, it is a holiday weekend and I am sick with a cold.

I was supposed to play golf today. There is a golf “tournament” planned for pretty much every U.S. holiday. I don’t think it went on, but I was staying in bed anyway. I work up briefly around 10:00 and went back to sleep until 1:00 or so – and I was in bed by 9PM last night.

But thankfully I don’t have to go anywhere. I have two best cooking appliances for the single man after the microwave: The Foreman grill and a rice cooker. The rice cooker, like my washing machine, is all in Chinese. However, I don’t need to read any of it. Just add one scoop of rice, fill with water to the line, and press the red button. Thirty minutes later it beeps to tell me it is done. Cook chicken on Foreman grill. Fry leftovers the next day. The Foreman grill is a requirement for high-rise living, where firing up a charcoal grill on a 10^th floor balcony is frowned upon as blatant disregard for fire code. And the taste is far better than anything I’d get from the microwave.

Anyway I wake up this afternoon and start drinking coffee and reading the news online when I see in the NYT that Thompson killed himself. That was kind of freaky since I just finished catching up on my ESPN.com Page 2 reading before I went to bed. I ended up reading his Shotgun Golf story after I got though the Bill Simmons Intern Contest applications (FWIW, the first four are the best. If I could vote, one of the first two would get the job). I guess if you were to look for the warning signs they were all there for the past 30 years.

Quick Response

It has been brought to my attention that:
1. I haven’t been posting enough.
2. I’ve taken three pictures since October.

I’ve decided to address the first issue by posting more of what happens daily and my rambling on whatever I feel like writing about. This isn’t as easy as it sounds. My blog is not anonymous. With the magic of Google, everything is found and taken out of context.

While I’m not worried about getting dooced (link requires registration or use bugmenot.com – I use the Firefox extension), I’m more concerned about the possibility of starting a minor international incident.

Some of you may recall my run in with Zejlo fans, which made its way onto Bosnian message boards. Basically, they found my Metric Football photo album but not the accompanying blog entry. Result: I had insulted Zeljo fans by calling them rednecks. You can find the original post here and the photo album here.

So, the result is I can’t put anything in my blog that might upset anyone or portray any of my coworkers in a bad light. That significantly cuts down on blogable material. However, I am now officially tenured, which means I’d really have to write some bad stuff to get fired.

Pictures are a different story. I’ll have to take my camera out more. I still have no pictures of any of the night markets up.

Cross-post

This is my comment on Stacy’s blog entry concerning Japanese TV. By the time I got done writing it I couldn’t only use it as a comment.

Man, I’m missing out. Taiwanese TV can’t touch that. The best I can do is the evening news.

Just so you understand, the evening news is like Cops meets The Enquirer. We held an election results party because a reporter “reported” that he heard we were having one. Local officials were offended that they were not invited to the fake party, so one had to be thrown together. And every police bust has a camera crew, which brings me to the juicy part…

Apparently, Taipei has these gay sex party/drug busts that make the news. I’m guessing here, because it’s all in Mandarin. Remember when you were a kid and couldn’t read, and you made up stories based on the pictures/photos? That is me now. Except, I have heard it mentioned/rumored, and instead of one photo I have a 3 minute montage of eight Chinese men in briefs, ketamine (that part was clear), and condom wrappers.

So when they bust these people, they won’t show their faces on the camera. They will blur the faces for as long as it takes them to find a scooter helmet to put on their head. But they will show their ID card on camera, because somehow that is OK. All this I get from the TV in front of the treadmill at the gym, because I don’t yet have my TV hooked up in the apartment.

Nock-Ten

Typhoon Nock-Ten was a non-event as far as I’m concerned. They city shut down for most of Monday while it blew over. That meant that Tuesday I had twice the work. Not that I didn’t go to work Monday – I still don’t have my stuff yet. What am I going to do at home in my temporary apartment? As David Byrne sings, “ain’t got no speakers, ain’t got no headphones, ain’t got no records to play.” I don’t have a TV yet either…

Not that I don’t try and listen to music off my laptop, but something about that fine laptop speaker sound doesn’t so it for me. So I went to work, partly because I was bored and partly because I’m not on the phone tree yet so I didn’t know the office was closed. I still would have had to show up, because someone has to cable Washington and tell them the office is closed. It seems a phone call or email won’t suffice. So I get to the office, and there are seven or eight people there waiting for their visa appointments. I tell them it’s not going to happen today, and no, I don’t know when they should come back. Once I explained I know nothing about visas, they went away.

We did get another earthquake on Saturday night. I was at the Shannon having a beer when the whole room just did this little hop. They say it was a four. I thought it was too quick to count. Stacy has been getting them good in Japan, apparently high sixes. I’m putting a link to her site, because unlike me, she actually updates her blog regularly and somehow finds time for pictures. I know I claim I’ll improve on this once I get my own DSL and stop mooching off my neighbors and their unsecured access points (and intermittently at that – I have to sit in this one chair in my living room and angle my laptop 45 degrees to get a signal), but the fact is I’ve only taken three pictures in the month I’ve been here. I went to grab the camera at work Monday to get typhoon pics, but I missed the good windy part. Besides, you get enough of that on TV at home. It wasn’t any worse than when the tropical storms came through Atlanta while I was home.

Nock-Ten

Typhoon Nock-Ten was a non-event as far as I’m concerned. They city shut down for most of Monday while it blew over. That meant that Tuesday I had twice the work. Not that I didn’t go to work Monday – I still don’t have my stuff yet. What am I going to do at home in my temporary apartment? As David Byrne sings, “ain’t got no speakers, ain’t got no headphones, ain’t got no records to play.” I don’t have a TV yet either…

Not that I don’t try and listen to music off my laptop, but something about that fine laptop speaker sound doesn’t so it for me. So I went to work, partly because I was bored and partly because I’m not on the phone tree yet so I didn’t know the office was closed. I still would have had to show up, because someone has to cable Washington and tell them the office is closed. It seems a phone call or email won’t suffice. So I get to the office, and there are seven or eight people there waiting for their visa appointments. I tell them it’s not going to happen today, and no, I don’t know when they should come back. Once I explained I know nothing about visas, they went away.

We did get another earthquake on Saturday night. I was at the Shannon having a beer when the whole room just did this little hop. They say it was a four. I thought it was too quick to count. Stacy has been getting them good in Japan, apparently high sixes. I’m putting a link to her site, because unlike me, she actually updates her blog regularly and somehow finds time for pictures. I know I claim I’ll improve on this once I get my own DSL and stop mooching off my neighbors and their unsecured access points (and intermittently at that), but the fact is I’ve only taken three pictures in the month I’ve been here. I went to grab the camera at work Monday to get typhoon pics, but I missed the good windy part. Besides, you get enough of that on TV at home. It wasn’t any worse than when the tropical storms came through Atlanta while I was home.