Personal Dork Assistant

First Day On The Job (whatever it may be)

Got up early enough to hitch a ride with uncle to the office. It's a 30-minute ride from home to an anonymous building in the anonymously bustling streets just outside Taipei City. The outside isn't all that imposing, but inside is nicely decorated. There was a spare cube (sure, they're made of low-slung, blonde wood instead of high-walled particle board, but they're still cubes) upstairs with the IT and accounting folks. I was next to Mr. Ho, the local geek, (you could tell, with the stacks of Oracle and LInux manuals three-deep on his desk) and he got me up and running in no time on the PowerBook once I figured out that he was telling me that I needed to enter some HTTP proxy settings. Had a little chat with the IT manager about the Oracle ERP installation, and collected a bunch of business cards from relevant people (thank God, otherwise I'd never be able to remember their names), but other than that it's a matter of hurry up and wait. Supposedly there's a batch of new recruits coming in, and I can sit in on the indoctrination sessions, but that schedule is yet to be determined. Uncle dropped off some industry news for reading material, but other than that it was just killing time until the bento boxes came. 50 bucks for a box with rice, cabbage, chives, soy-marinated tofu skin, a pan-fried piece of fish, a couple pieces of char-siu pork, julienned pork strips stir-fried with preserved pickle, and a partridge in a pear tree (actually it's half a 滷蛋). They threw in a bottle of Yakult-style yogurt drink, extra white rice for those so inclined, and for good measure. Can't beat Chinese cheap eats when it comes to fill factor.

Gaffe of the Day: Mr. Ho asked for my Chinese name to set up the email account and I blanked on the last character. That was damn embarrassing.

Hung around until 5:30pm, although there wasn't much for me to do after I got the PowerBook's Airport MAC address added to the wireless station's allow list. I'm getting CC'ed on all the US-Taiwan intranet emails, which right now seems like a blur of product codes and shipping invoices. The trip home wasn't terribly difficult, once I figured out which side of the street is the right direction to catch the bus. Three bus stops to the subway station, and then one transfer at Taipei Main Station to the Blue Line heading home. It's good that I get on at the next-to-last station on the line, so there's plenty of good seats available even during rush hour. On the other hand, it's not so good that the trip took almost an hour. Probably won't be moving any closer, either, as we just closed on a third-floor apartment in the same building. We move into the rank of capitalist oppressors, as we bought the unit on auction from the bank, who's in the process of evicting the folks currently living there. Apparently they'd inherited the apartment and the mortgage, but they fell behind on the mortgage and after four years of wrangling the bank finally decided to foreclose. Might be a while before we can move in.