What's been on my mind lately? Read on...
Though I don't always appreciate the short-notice travel (yes, back in Taiwan again, this time with 5 days heads-up), I do a pretty good job taking advantage of wherever it is I end up. Take, for example, this weekend.
(It should be noted that in Taipei, it really helps that I have a good friend from college, Abe, who never fails to show me a great time or introduce me to awesome people. Everyone should be so lucky.)
After a long work week, I was happy to sleep in Saturday and then catch up with folks back home. Mornings here are afternoons in Seattle and evenings in Boston, prime time for Skyping and such.(More photos here.)I headed out around 11 AM on the MRT (super-convenient subway, about a 10 minute walk from the hotel) to the National Palace Museum.
It's a very impressive collection of artifacts, art and writing from Taiwanese history, some dating as far back as the bronze age. Like any good museum, you could dive deep into any particular section and spend hours and hours there, but it's not so big that you can't get through most of it in a couple hours.
I hopped the subway back towards the city, hoping to check out what I'd read was the fabric/fashion district (Yong-le Market). I was told after the fact, there's not that much of that kind of thing left in Taipei, and whatever remains was totally overshadowed by Dihua New Year's Market.
Chinese New Year is just a few days away, and I guess this street market appears every year before the holiday so people can shop for goodies and gifts. The place was wall-to-wall people like I'd never seen before, but all surprisingly good natured and not too pushy. All the vendors are hawking their wares, but again, not too obnoxiously. To give you a sense of the craziness:
I ended up buying some candy and a few odds and ends from very friendly folks, and had some very nice conversations in broken Chinese. Oh, and the scallion pancake with egg totally hit the spot.
I was happy to head back to the hotel for a spell after the madhouse of the market, and after a little rest I hopped in a cab to Abe's place, about 10 minutes from the hotel. We hung out for a bit, had a drink, and made some plans to meet up with a couple of his friends for Korean food.
I've gotten a lot of mileage from the food blog Hungry in Taipei, and Saturday was no exception. Min Dong was a great spot with excellent food, and they were able to accomodate 7 of us on a Saturday night no problem (reservations, even at little restaurants where you would never have to call ahead in the States, are a must in Taipei).
It's a trip hanging out with Abe, who's really thrived in a lot of ways in Taipei (he learned the language in college, and moved here just afterward). His social circle is huge, and I've never gone with him to a place where someone didn't recognize him.
But Abe wasn't the only one recognized on Saturday, as we had a bona fide celebrity in our party. Not only were people coming up to her all night (seriously - there were muliple babies that were forced into her arms for photographs), but the owner of the restaurant eventually noticed and joined us for a while after we'd eaten. Along with his visit came a whole lot of beer, and then more food started arriving (could we possibly have looked hungry?).
After second dinner and uncountable beers (uncountable largely because the bottles are big but the glasses are tiny), we finally rolled out with tons of leftovers and quite a good buzz going.
A few of us went back to Abe's and watched an Aziz Ansari Comedy Central special. Highly recommended; he is a very funny dude. I guess I got back to my hotel around 1:30 AM.
The next morning turned out to be pretty gray and rainy, which made short work of Abe & my plans for a nice bike ride in the mountains. After a brief telephone conference at 9 AM, we both went back to sleep for a while, and eventually met up for a coffee and a hike up Elephant Mountain.
As you can see from the photo/map, it's really right in the city, but feels pretty far removed (much more so than say, Central Park). It felt good to get some exercise, see some wildlife and a bit of a different landscape for a while, and get some quality hangout time with Abe, too.
It took the hour long walk up the mountain for us not to feel full from dinner the night before, so naturally we splurged on lunch at the Marco Polo Restaurant (38th floor) at the Far Eastern Hotel
Two and a half hours and four or five courses later, we were again almost uncomfortably full, but it was totally worth it.
Abe had borrowed his roommate's scooter, and so I asked him to drop me off at the Flower and Jade Markets, where I wandered for the better part of an hour. At the Jade Market, I either have impeccable taste or the vendors are trying to shaft me - whenever I see something I like (something that is actually attractive and well-made), it's hundreds or sometimes a thousand dollars (US). Even factoring in bargaining, it's way more than I want to spend, and the stuff that's affordable doesn't look worth it, even for cheap.
Empty-handed but satisfied, I walked (again happy for the exercise) the 4 km back to the hotel, sent some emails, and watched Premier League football 'til I fell asleep.
It's been quite the week of computer- and domain related changes.
For starters, I switched dsz123.net's email over to use Google Apps. Email sent to my dsz123.net address is now handled by Google's server, and actually forwarded to my Gmail account. This seems to be the most flexible setup; I can read my mail from anywhere and send replies from any account I want, but everything is still linked to my calendar and my Google reader feed. Though the solution feels rather Google-intensive, I do have fallback solutions should I want to extricate myself from the not-so-evil-empire, and it's much more convenient in the meantime than anything else.
As it happens, my email move also coincided with a transition in web-hosting. Former host Cedant was bought out by Aplus, and they finally switched me over to the new servers this past weekend. Unfortunately, a whole bunch of emails seem to have been misplaced during the transfer. They're looking for them, but I'm not super-optimistic, and it doesn't leave me with a particularly good feeling about my new hosting company.
Lastly, Blogger just announced that they're discontinuing FTP publishing for blogs. Apparently, I'm in the minority (0.5% of their active blogs) that actually use this feature, and I'll have to figure out a new solution to publishing here. Finally time to switch over to WordPress? Probably so...
Amidst many things, including yet another short-notice trip to Asia, I am going to try making some changes in the next few days to how email & DNS are handled for dsz123.net.
I have a Gmail account that I like because of many of the features it provides (better web interface, large amount of storage online, etc.), but I like having a unique domain name in my email address, and I would prefer having just one email address and just one place to check it. I think there's a solution in there involving MX records, Google Apps (formerly Google Apps for Domains), and some judicious forwarding (thanks, Drew for the tips). I'll post my solution if it actually works.
So if you notice something isn't working quite right, feel free to drop me a line, or just hang on for a day or two and try again.
I am in Taipei, and thinking hard about why, exactly, I'm here.
It's 2010. I can pick up a phone and talk to someone on the other side of the world with crystal clear sound. I can do it for zero or almost zero cost. I can share my computer screen with them, or use a webcam (hell, even one I designed) so we can see each other while we talk.
I'm trying to convince myself that in spite of technological options and conveniences, sometimes the best way to communicate really is face-to-face. Today went a long way towards proving that true. I don't actually think we could have accomplished in a week remotely what we did in just one day here, and we have four more days of just as intense work. Though it's somewhat overwhelming in nature, the prospect of trying to accomplish this work from 6,000 miles and 8 timezones away is even more daunting.
I am in Taipei, but for the first 12 hours of my visit, I heard almost no Chinese being spoken. We were met at the airport and taken by car service into the city. I woke up in a room in a hotel that could have been anywhere in the world. I went to breakfast with my coworkers at the cafe in the lobby where we were greeted in English, were served perfectly reasonable coffee, and could have had waffles, scrambled eggs, bacon, croissants, or smoked salmon. We got picked up by another driver and whisked off to our supplier's office, where we were again greeted in English and served coffee. We got on wifi, logged in to our email, and looked at presentations and spreadsheets all morning long.
I opted not to join my coworkers at the restaurant in the hotel for dinner. Instead I checked out dinner spots on the Internet and walked the 20 minutes to a surprisingly good pizza joint. Along the way, I found, among other things, this awesome coffee paraphenalia store (I don't think they even sold coffee, just equipment), got some exercise, and feel much better about the whole trip.
I'm in Taipei, but I'm totally going to make the best of it.
After a week-long trip to the East Coast, I'm happily (if only briefly) home in Seattle.
From Boston, where I spent some time with family & friends, I flew down to Maryland for a second shot at New Year's with Drew and friends. Last year, I spent my 3 days in Lexington Park shuffling between the bathroom and bed, sick as a dog; hardly a lively time. This year, it was a great celebration filled with food and words, along with fantastic people.
On the food front, we did a ton of cooking. For New Year's Eve, we made venison carpaccio, bacon-wrapped dates, artichoke dip, poached pears over blue cheese on toast, garlic shrimp, stuffed mushrooms, oysters, homemade deep-fried paneer with curry and chutneys, beer-braised venison ribs, and homegrown-lemon mousse napoleons for dessert. And there was more on other days: homemade pizza, cheesy eggs, and more bacon than you can shake a stick at. Phew!
The astute among you might notice that the lemon mousse is actually a repeat from New Years 2007/2008, including the homegrown fruit from Maine, courtesy of Sarah. A little investigating revealed that her mom's lemon trees are actually Persian limes. The ones we used were definitely yellow, but, as this page explains, limes get yellow when fully ripe. In spite of the duplicitous fruit, everyone enjoyed dessert.
In the word games category, we filled not one but two spots on my all-time top hardest/most-complicated/most-awesome word game list.
First, we played a giant game of anagrams (similar to Banagrams) with a huge container of remainder Scrabble tiles off eBay, and imposed the extra rule that the crossword-like entity you built up needed to have crossword symmetry. I think that's pretty much all a few of us did the day before New Year's.
The second feat we accomplished was completing a crossword puzzle via charades. Each clue was painstakingly acted out (those guessing had to get the whole clue right, word for word) and eventually the grid filled out. This one took about 6 or 8 hours, all told, but spread over a whole day and night. I think we finished around 3:30 AM, when a few of us turned in. The rest apparently stayed up playing secret games (?) 'til all hours.
All in all, a very enjoyable time.
