Lunar New Year == food

Oof...it's the Lunar New Year today, and already I can barely fit in my jeans. Why? I had hotpot with a few friends on Tuesday in Redwood City. Then, on New Year's Eve we had lots of yummy food at home (including desserts, mmm). Today at work, the chefs put together a kickass New Year's banquet, complete with roast pig, roast duck, and dim sum. Tonight, it's a dumpling party in Sunnyvale, and more desserts. I've heard that in Taiwan, people just eat and eat all week, since they're on vacation anyway...and people ask me why I think going to Taiwan is all about food.

bleah again

This has been somewhat of a Bad Day (tm).

I can think of plenty of things on which I can blame the badness, but I think it's just one of those days. I'm hoping my afternoon yoga class will fix me.

we won! but I miss Aaron Sorkin

We won our basketball championship! In an ugly defensive battle, we came out on top, 19-11. That's our lowest offensive output yet, but I guess all that matters is that we won. After the game, they gave us some puke colored t-shirts, and we went out to celebrate at Left at Albuquerque's.

Later on at home, I watched an episode of the West Wing in which the President gives a State of the Union address. Apparently it's required that someone in the line of succession not be in the Capitol during the speech, in case something really bad happens. I wonder when that became a rule. I doubt it's in the Constitution.

Speaking of the West Wing...unlike some people, I didn't immediately notice when Aaron Sorkin left the show. Last week, watching "The Stormy Present" (current season) and "Noel" (season 2) back to back, I noticed. (As an aside, I love Tivo to death!) The earlier episodes seem to flow better, have more fitting/moving endings, and involve more creative dialogue. I was especially irked that Charlie spent the entire last episode telling President Bartlet that Leo was on the phone. Dule Hill deserves better.

SARS screening and playoff basketball

When I was in Taipei, I was amazed at the amount of temperature screening being done. The first day, we went to buy movie tickets, and they took our temperature using a little gizmo that they aimed at your head. When we actually went into the movie theatre, they had a big screen that displayed the amount of heat coming from everyone's bodies; people who were over the acceptable limit would presumably show up in red or some warning color. The nest day, we went to a hotel, and the parking attendant opened the door of our minivan, and used another little gadget to shoot infrared light at everyone's foreheads, and took our temperatures that way. After a couple of days, I stopped thinking about it. We had our temperatures taken at malls, restaurants, and entering the subway. I guess it takes that kind of vigilance to prevent another outbreak; looks like there are several cases in southern China already.

On another note, we've made it to the championships of our basketball league! Tonight we play the #4 seeded team; they knocked off the #1 seed last week. I'm glad they did, because we'd lost to the #1 seed twice, and we've beaten the #4 seed twice. We'll have to be careful keep our heads in the game, and not get overconfident or otherwise off-kilter. Speaking of which, maybe I should eat something.

New Zealand photos

Here are the promised New Zealand scenery photos. These were taken by James.









The first picture was taken from Queenstown. We stayed 3 days there, and we could see most of the view from our condo. The second picture was taken on the road between Te Anau and Milford Sound, the third on the road near Glenorchy, and the last one at Lake Tekapo.

New Zealand, plus fantasy football wrapup

I'm back in Taipei, after having spent 10 days in New Zealand. What amazingly gorgeous scenery! There are no words...

It was pretty cool taking great pictures based on no photographic skill whatsoever; everything is so lovely that any random snapshot comes out looking good. I'll post a couple when I get a chance.

Having seen the first two Lord of the Rings movies, I guess I'd had an inkling of what we would see, but I'd figured everything was CG enhanced. I'm still pretty impressed with Peter Jackson and the LOTR crew, but it certainly didn't look like they would've had to do much to get those beautiful panoramic landscape shots. Speaking of LOTR, I got to see Return of the King on our last full day in Auckland. How cool is that?

Sitting on the plane today, I was trying to decide what the trip highlights were. My conclusions:
- the drive to Glenorchy (and the hike we did there), definitely the most scenic day of the whole trip
- the entire sheep farm trip: the ride over on the TSS Earnslaw, getting to feed all the animals, and the very yummy afternoon tea (especially the cheese and onion scones) in the lovely garden
- jet boating on the Shotover River
- whale watching at Kaikoura (5 whales!)
- getting to drive from Christchurch to Picton, and again from Taupo to Auckland
I bet I'll look at my pictures and come up with more, but those were the ones that were foremost in my mind.

On a completely different note, I'm the champion of our fantasy football league! Woo-hoo! I'm counting that as a birthday present, and a most excellent one. My team MVPs were Holmes, Lewis, Holt, McNair, and my free agent pickup of the year, Domanick Davis. I'm tempted to retire from fantasy football altogether, on this high note.

military powers

Someone asked me the other day if I thought the United States' armed forces could take on the rest of the world, if necessary. For some reason, I was pretty convinced we could, except then the nations with nuclear weapons would probably use them, and we would all be screwed.

Today I went looking for numbers to justify my belief. I found this site which has numbers on military spending and scores for military power, quality, etc. The only countries that come even close to the US are, in order: China, Israel, India, and maybe Russia. China has 1/3 the power score of the US, 1/3 the quality score, and 1/10 the budget, but they have more active units and a bigger population.

forced relaxation

I've decided that the best way to relax is to go to a place where you are literally unable to do any work.

Over Thanksgiving weekend I was at my parents' house. They do have high-speed Internet there, but all three of the computers of decent speed and stability were monopolized by people playing FF XI. I couldn't pay any bills, I couldn't compulsively check e-mail, and I couldn't write holiday cards or wash dishes or do laundry, so my cousins and I basically sat around all weekend. We watched some DVDs, chatted about random topics, reread old books, lounged around being backseat gamers ("What do you mean, it's not your job to heal your party??"), ate lots of yummy food...pretty much the standard definition of doing nothing. It was great fun.

old and ignorant, and creaky too

I've been having some issues with my right hip during yoga. It doesn't hurt when I'm just walking around, or even during basketball, but whenever I do a hard stretch like a right side split I'll notice. I was afraid I had a stress fracture or something, because the last time I had persistent pain it turned out I had a stress fracture in my left foot (although that healed by itself). Anyway, my doctor thinks I have early arthritis in my hip. Ugh. She thinks all that gymnastics as a kid might have contributed, because gym inflicts a lot of trauma on your joints (well duh). Now they tell me. I guess the 4-year-old me wouldn't have known what arthritis was anyway.

duh...what?

Every once in awhile I'm reminded of how some things are just way over my head.

I was doing an interview the other day, and asked the candidate to describe her current project. The first couple sentences out of her mouth involved something about "P4 structures" and "perfect graphs." I must have sounded sufficiently confused, because she spent a good five minutes explaining (pretty well, considering my ignorance) what she was talking about.

Speakeasy rocks

Wow, look what just landed in my inbox...

Speakeasy is kicking off its customer upgrade program, affectionately called Turbo Shot: Upgrading your need for speed! As part of our network and service upgrades, we're increasing your circuit's speed at absolutely NO COST to you.

Your upgrade will occur during the month of February, 2004, and we'll notify you via email 7 days in advance of your scheduled upgrade.

We will upgrade your service from 608/128 to 1.5/384 - all the same great services complemented by an increased speed for the same base monthly fee you pay now!

I've had Speakeasy DSL ($49.95/month) for six months now. My favorite features:
- no port blocking and/or server restrictions
- policies that explicitly allow wireless and other internal networks
- static IP, woohoo!
- support for non-Windows operating systems
- customer service people who understand traceroute results and tell me to run ifconfig

Me like. Why anyone would voluntarily continue to use Comcast for high-speed internet is beyond me, especially at $56.95/month ($42.95 if you subscribe to their crappy cable TV).

halloween 2003

It's Halloween! It's funny that you're allowed to celebrate Halloween as a kid, and then there's this gap of about 5 years where people look at you funny if you dress up, and then when you're an "adult" you're allowed to dress up again.

Some of the best costumes I saw today at our party:
- Lumbergh, the boss from Office Space
- the "Can you hear me now?" guy
- Owen Pochman uniform complete with knife through head
- a couple bloody Siegfried and Roys (that one is a little mean)
- Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (somehow it's better when Snow White is a 6ft+ man)
- a "multi-threaded bug" (yes we are geeks here)
- a Powerpuff girl costume

This year we're not going to a Halloween party, but we are going to play poker at a friend's and eat, I mean give out, candy. Mmm...

in search of a women's basketball league

With the demise of the Oracle Women's Basketball League, a bunch of us started scouring the Valley for a place to play. Because the San Carlos Women's League started way back in August, the closest program we could find was the Campbell Community Center Women's League, a solid 20 minutes south of Mountain View...and well worth the drive. The league consists of three levels: Novice, Lower Intermediate, and Upper Intermediate. Each level consists of 6 teams of about 9 players each, and each team plays every other team twice during the season. It's really very well organized, and apparently it's been around for 4-5 years now.

Anyway, we joined a Novice team, and started out the season barely beating a good team, and then somehow completely fell apart in our second game. We were disorganized, sloppy, out-of-sync, we were low on energy, and started bickering right before the half. Somehow we managed to mount a comeback, and we only lost by about 10 pts (yes, that did require a significant comeback). During practice on Sunday we ran zone defense drills, passing drills, layup drills, and did some scrimmaging, but more importantly we talked about who would play what position, who our starters would be, how people would sub in and out, and how people would give and receive criticism.

Today, we came out with high energy, getting off to an 13-2 start, and pretty much dominated the entire game. I myself took two shots early on, made one and barely missed one. I think I did a fairly good job of seeing the court and making good passes during the rest of the game; sometimes it's hard for me to know if I should be looking for more shots or just concentrating on creating opportunities for everyone else. Anyway, it was a good game all around, but we'll have to be careful not to rest on our laurels.

Some of the things that we need to work on:
- I need to do a better job of seeing the left side of the offense. Apparently our guards were getting free down low and I wasn't seeing them.
- We need to work on our post defense. Because we got burned baseline so many times last game, our outside low defenders were playing extremely conservatively, and we gave up too many perimeter shots. In general, we need to communicate more on defense.
- We need to work on our fast breaks. We have one of the fastest teams in the league, and we should take advantage.
- Some of our rebounders need to work on securing the ball or passing it back out quickly after grabbing the rebound.
- A few people need to learn not to shoot when they are too far from the basket and/or well defended.
- I need to get in shape! I was yelling for a sub midway through the first half...not good.
- We need to use our center more...she's tall, quick, has great fundamentals, and is a good shooting threat. I should work on finding a way to pass to her, to draw the defense up high.

In any case, it was a very satisfying game, and I'm looking forward to next week.

New York, New York

I'm visiting my sister in New York City in two weeks.

I love the Bay Area best of all the places I've lived, but from time to time, I do miss the craziness of NYC. I was only there for one summer, it was a totally different life, and I'm pretty sure I would have been exhausted at the age of 30 if I had stayed, but sometimes I wish I could go back for another three months or so. It's just not the same when you visit.

Things I miss:
- subways, subways, everywhere (and stations that are open all the time)
- walking around Battery Park amongst the suits during lunch (although I didn't enjoy the wearing part)
- corporate car service (thank you Goldman Sachs)
- hanging out after work at McSorley's, a Irish pub/dive serving exactly two types of beer, "light" and "dark"
- Broadway shows, off-Broadway shows, and way way off-Broadway shows
- concerts at Jones Beach
- outdoor showings of old movies in Bryant Park
- Central Park: rollerblading, chilling on the grass, just looking at it from someone's apartment on the Upper East Side
- never getting ID-ed (and I was a young-looking 21, that year)
- being out and about at 4am and seeing streets full of people
- chancing on a random street festival, staying for awhile, and having a blast
- authentic Russian food, Jewish food, Italian food, Irish food, Chinese food...
- lots of lovely old bookstores and trendy new coffeehouses to sit and read in

Now I'm all nostalgic.

credit cards

Wow, what a giant pain it is to close a credit card account.

I called up Fleet today to close out my Platinum Cash Dividend card. It used to be a tiered rebate card with up to 2% cash back a year, but starting in September it became a flat 1% card. The customer rep redirected me to a "closing specialist" whose job it was to convince me not to close my account. I spent a good ten minutes turning down all of her reasons for not closing my card, many of which involved lowering the APR %, which would have done me no good, since I don't carry a balance. Finally she closed out the account, and I requested written confirmation that the account was closed at my request, since I'd heard that was a good thing to do.

I'll be using my tiered 1.5% Amex Platinum Cash Rebate card as my primary credit card from now on, with my flat 1% Motley Fool Platinum Visa card as a backup, and my AAA Visa card at the pump (5% cash back on gas). I prefer the Fool card to the Chase PerfectCard (aka Freedom), even though the Chase credits your rebate to your card monthly instead of paying out annually. I find the Fool card more consumer-friendly, since it offers a 25-day grace period, all the normal platinum services, and no additional fee for overseas purchases. Plus, the Chase card charges you a fee if you don't use it at least 10 times a year, and I don't want to have to worry about being charged. Anyway, if you like rewards cards, Credit Card Goodies has a pretty active forum where people post information about all the different cards.

TMQ and MMQB

When you say you love your job, how much do you really love it?

From SI's Peter King:
Peyton Manning missed football so much during his bye week that he played touch football Sunday morning in his backyard, then went inside to watch all the pregame shows followed by the actual games, and then fell asleep with the Madden 2004 controls in his hands.

The quote is courtesy of Peter King's Monday Morning Quarterback, so it may or may not be true. I love MMQB, but I also love(d) Gregg Easterbrook's Tuesday Morning Quarterback. Unfortunately, Easterbrook made an anti-Semitic comment on his New Republic blog last week, resulting in ESPN dumping his column. I understand that Easterbrook's comment was hurtful and offensive and wrong, and I'm not defending him and I don't vilify ESPN (although it's worth mentioning that Easterbrook's comment criticized Michael Eisner, whose Disney owns ESPN), but I am sad that a column that I found witty and insightful and well-written is gone.

SJ Ballet?

I'm going to the ballet tonight. Nope, not the San Francisco ballet, the San Jose ballet. Yeah, I didn't know they had a ballet company either.

Not to be a snob, but I'm generally skeptical about SJ's performing arts. They just can't compare to the SF companies, especially for the ballet, symphony, and opera. The touring performance of Rent was pretty good, I guess. Plus, I think I get an extra kick out of watching the SF ballet because I indirectly know Yuan-Yuan Tan.

Anyway, I decided to give SJ a chance tonight because (A) a group of my co-workers are going, (B) it's only $10 for us, and (C) they're performing Appalachian Spring, which I've never seen. I'm trying to keep an open mind.

bleah

I've been writing a lot recently, probably because I'm finishing up the beta release of my project, which means I have lots of things to do that I've been putting off because they're tedious or otherwise annoying. There's nothing like procrastinating from one task to make you accomplish something else.

I was talking to someone the other day how it seems like days go by faster now. When I was a kid, my parents used to say that, but I never really got it. I think it has something to do with not having school (vacations do a good job of breaking up the year) but it also has to do with having more abstract goals. When you're trying to get a degree, your milestones are exams and problem sets and semesters. When you're trying to just do good, interesting work at your job, you don't notice days and weeks slipping away.

On a slightly related note, sometimes I worry that I'm losing touch with people that I used to know and hang out with. I feel like I must be doing something wrong; I used to see these guys every day, and we'd eat dinner and chill and crack stupid jokes and go out for movies and talk about politics and religion and art and music and gadgets and human nature. Now, I see them maybe ten times a year, and a lot of times its in these big party-type group settings where you don't really get to talk about anything interesting anyway, since you don't know anything about each other's lives. Maybe some people can have good conversations at a party or at a bar, but I manage it best at 4am in the morning while taking a break from finishing some life/time-sucking project. I don't have many of those moments anymore...maybe I really should think about going back to school. Having felt this rush of horror just now while saying (typing?) that, I'll go ahead and take it back.

So what am I doing wrong? It's not like I'm lazy and sit at home all day surfing the web and watching TV. I play league sports. I'm taking Chinese class. I vacation in interesting and beautiful foreign countries. I go shopping with my girl friends. I hole up on Sunday watching football with the guys. I go to poker night, and movie night, and whatever other nights those crazy young'uns come up with every week. I sometimes think if I moved to San Francisco I'd have more of the life I want to live, but I'm pretty sure that's not true, either. And, the thing is, it's not as if I'm unhappy. I do lots of fun things, I hang out with cool people, I have a nice place, and an interesting job, and great co-workers...I guess I just have a vague inkling of missed opportunity. In the back of my head, I'm wondering: are these supposed to be the best years of my life? Am I missing out on something?

back to my favorite topic

Wow, I haven't written a post about Taiwan in months...how unlike me.

I was reading an article this morning with a pretty good explanation of Taiwan's political situation.

As an aside, the article also includes an explanation of Taiwan's history by former President Lee, that clearly articulates a point that I often have trouble making; that China does not have any reasonable claim to sovereignty over Taiwan:

Lee pointed out that Chiang's regime was originally asked by the United States in 1945 to go to Taiwan to set up a temporary administration, since the US itself was somewhat overstretched at the time. There were no implications of sovereignty attached, no more than there are to the United Kingdom's current responsibility for Basra in Iraq. The whole question of who was to own what was to be sorted out at the peace treaty to be negotiated after the end of the war.

Chiang's regime then made a land grab - based on the gentlemen's agreement - claiming to have recovered China's "lost" territory, and returning to Taiwan as the sovereign power, which, of course, it wasn't.

In 1952 the final claims of the war were settled in the San Francisco Peace Treaty. By this time there were two rival Chinese regimes, Mao's in Beijing and Chiang's in what it is becoming fashionable in Taipei to call "occupied Taiwan". In the treaty Japan finally renounced the sovereignty over Taiwan it had gained in 1895 and that sovereignty was given to - nobody, a situation that remains to this day.

Anyway, back to the main point...

The author uses the premise that any act of aggression by China will push Taiwan's voters further towards independence-minded candidates, and hypothesizes that the recent inflammatory statements by President Chen and ex-President Lee are designed to provoke Beijing into initiating such acts. It is possible that some of Taiwan's politicians may use China's highly reactionary nature to advance their agendas, but politicians aren't the only ones annoying Communist China. Last month, 150,000+ marched in Taipei to advocate that Taiwan (currently the "Republic of China") officially rename itself as Taiwan. Although it's a possibility, it isn't highly likely that all of those citizens were involved in a ploy to advance the DPP party agenda. I think it's just becoming clear to an increasing number of Taiwanese that they have to stop cowering in China's shadow, so that they can get the international recognition that they deserve.

those crazy Californians

So, today is the recall election. I can't even explain my feeling of disgust over this whole spectacle.

I know that as a good citizen I should vote, but looking at the candidates, I can't imagine ever telling someone that I voted for one of them. I'm really hoping that there will be someone in the 2004 presidential election that won't disgust me. Hear that, candidates? All you have to do, to get my vote, is not disgust me...and I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels this way.