Personal Dork Assistant

Found myself at a

Found myself at a bit of a loss in the grocery store after sitting on my ass for a month at home. Haven't had to deal with the calculus of daily subsistence for a while. Picked up garlic, ginger, and green onions as a matter of course. Grabbed a Mach3 razor and shaving gel because I left them at home, and because they were on sale at the store. A box of Contadina pasta since I still have a jar of pesto somewhere. Trader Joes has the cheapest eggs and dairy, plus a bottle of cheap (but surprisingly drinkable) red wine, and a jar of capers for the heck of it. Unlike Jamie Oliver (join the JO Club?), I do not consider anchovies to be a staple of the cupboard, although I thought about picking up a tin. There's plenty of food in the freezer thanks to mom, but reheated leftovers get blah in a hurry. Sigh.

Yes I know I should be thankful to have food at all, blah blah blah...

Insert Your Own Joke Here

Winner of the Miss America (Lifestyle and Fitness in) Swimsuit Competition: Jennifer Adcock (Miss Mississippi)

So I'm back in San

So I'm back in San Diego after being away for a month and a half. Yep, the plants died. Although the fern might pull through after a good watering. Still need to get some groceries and other household sundries that I should've grabbed from home but I always forget, and I didn't get this week's Sunday paper so there are no coupons to double. Maybe what I really should do is stop worrying about the nickel-dime stuff.

Vargas - De La Hoya

Vargas - De La Hoya was some fight. Seems like it's been a while since there's been a Vegas prizefight that's been worth the trouble. Scary to think that De La Hoya is the old man now. The man's still got a scary left hook, though.

I'm not much of a

I'm not much of a video gamer, but this has me excited in blasphemous ways. Of course, it won't come out for another year or two, which should actually give me enough time to finish Brood War one of these days.

Oddities on the way to Costco

• Seeing a Prius at the gas pump.
• Beating an honest-to-goodness BMW M5 off the stop light to the lane merge. Admittedly the beamer wasn't trying, but still.

Somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, near the International Date Line, so it could be the 15th or the 16th, and God knows what time it really is

Impressions

• Back hair on Sumo wrestlers is really unattractive.
• No matter how bland and boring the music is, at least Asian MTV still plays music videos.
• My eyes and throat definitely notices the air quality after a stroll down the busy streets.
• Other than the air, I like high density urban living Asian style, where you have American boutiques, Japanese department stores, and Taiwanese street food side-by-side.
• Hanami (hanami:hamachi :: toro:maguro) is amazing.
• Business Class (plus iPod and Etys) meets the minimum requirements for a civilized trans-Pacific flight. Thanks mom.
• You know you live in a fashionable neighborhood when the Starbucks density exceeds the McDonalds density.
• To stop future terrorists, only plastic butter knifes will be used on the flight. Yet one more reason to avoid the beef course.
• Asian rap is weak.
• I almost got a hernia carrying the HK Cosmo in my bag. It's HUGE.
• One of these days I'll figure out why I opened three bank accounts in Hong Kong with my expired Taiwan passport, which you're not suppose to be able to do but the bank manager assured us is okay as long as I renew my Taiwan passport ASAP.
• The next trick: get a new Taiwan passport without getting drafted into the army in the process.

Every time I saw a lao-wai, I wanted to go up to him/her and ask, "What are you doing here, you poor bastard?" I would've hated Taipei if I didn't have family here and didn't speak/read the language. Without a guide and with a language barrier, Taipei becomes a dirty, crowded warren of impenetrable streets and alleys. You start sweating as soon as you step outside, but being blasted by indoor AC isn't much better. The street food is scary and the restaurant menus are vast and incomprehensible (heck, they seem that way to me regardless of language). And it's hard to meet the "nice" girls if someone doesn't introduce you, although a nice girl wouldn't date foreigners by definition.

The Taipei MRT totally rocks. It's clean, fast, and efficient. Heck, it's almost anti-Taiwan. Helps that there's a line running directly along our road and that there's a station 1.5 blocks away (plus another right outside my old elementary school). The HK Metro is pretty nice, too, and it's very much like the (newer lines of the) London Underground, complete with "Mind the Gap" signs. I suppose Hong Kong is what Taipei can aspire to be, except skyscrapers and earthquakes don't mix. Taipei is stuck amongst that second-tier of Asian cities, not as strict as Singapore (but not as clean), not as corrupt as Kuala Lumpur (but not as tourist-worthy), not as hip as Shanghai (but no totalitarian government either), etc.

Visited Aunt Dai's old house in the countryside near HsinChu. First did some shopping at the nearby market and meekly trailed behind mom and auntie as they blew through the myriad stalls in the outdoor market, picking out the specialty of each vendor from the half-dozen stalls all selling the same thing. The produce was picked this morning and the chickens still have their heads on. It made for a great home-cooked meal at the house with more of auntie's relatives. Stopped by at a roadside stand of somebody someone knows and visited his tomato greenhouse, the baby strawberry plants ready to be planted, and had some green tea fresh from the roaster.

It was actually quite a busy day. Went out later that night and met up with the Lit girl from UCSD near National Taiwan University. I thought it went well. It was interesting to see all the parents taking their little kids to visit the best university in Taiwan. It was nice to spend time with a woman who's actually less than twice my age.

All in all, Taiwan felt like home. Unforunately, being at home means that I spent too much time watching TV and surfing the net. Good thing I brought the Airport Base Station with me since I had to tear up the fancy phone system to get a real analog line for the modem and it was a little out of the way.

Anime on I saw on TV

• Fushigi Yugi
• His and Her Circumstances
• Pokemon, Digimon, Yu Gi Oh! (I consider them to be the same thing)
• You're Under Arrest 2
• Rouroni Kenshin
• Slam Dunk
• Initial D
• Cardcaptor Sakura
• Tenchi Muyo
• Some cutesy show on Cartoon Network that would never ever see the light of day in America so it doesn't have an English name (玩偶遊戲 is the Chinese name, FWIW)

Not the latest and greatest, but a pretty respectable list. Liked some of the wacky Japanese soaps and game shows, too.

22:30, Somewhere over the South China Sea

I'm not a fan of group tours, but mom found a 3-day, 2-night package with plane, hotel, and a short guided tour that left us with a day to ourselves for the price of the plane tickets alone. There were only about ten of us in the group. Nobody I particularly cared about (except Mom, of course), but mom can strike up a conversation with anyone.

We arrived at Hong Kong in the afternoon, and the tour guide immediately took us for a ride around town. The new highrises gleamed, the old apartment blocks didn't. Went to , with vastly overpriced real estate for folks who don't worry about prices. Our tour guide was quite the populist. As we passed by the fancy places, he liked to talk about the inequalities in this libertarian paradise.

Took a ride on the Star Ferry from Hong Kong Island to Kowloon. The terminal and the ferry were filled with Filipina maids. With a billion desperately poor Chinese people next door, they still import labor. Perhaps the different faces make the differences in status a little easier to justify. Aunt Dai is losing her Filipina maid since her work visa is expiring after three years, and just when she's getting properly trained, too. The prices for mass produced goods have been equalized by the global market, so it's almost pointless to go shopping for this stuff. Only the price of labor can still be arbitraged. Mom had the right idea, picking up some nice Chinese zodiac jewelry from a shop on the tour. The salesladies were like white on rice as soon as they figured out that she had money to spend, and we spent our time with one of the pit boss ladies instead of the pretty drones. At least the tour guide was honest about the kickback they were getting.

I would never go to these sort of place, but the tour included a trip to Hong Kong Ocean Park, and they had pandas. It's sad that I've spent all that time in San Diego and not bothered to go to the zoo and see their pandas, but the Ocean Park had a good environment for them and one of them was actually lively enough for some good photo ops. The rest of the park was kitschy, and not a fashionable kitschy, either. Went up to Victoria's Peak, but the harbor was just hazy enough to make the view not spectacular. It was the first day I really spent outside, and the heat and humidity was oppressive. Went around Mong Kok's warren of electronics and sports shops without anything striking my fancy, for reasons stated above. Searched for mom's favorite dried goods store and found it just in time to avoid a huge but brief downpour. The dried lizards and snakes didn't look to tasty, but the dozen varieties of dried scallops, shitakes, abalones, shark fins, shrimps, and on and on were impressive and very Chinese. Too bad I didn't have my camera. The dried abalone should make for some tasty soup.

There are really three Hong Kongs. There's the British Hong Kong, which is a bare veneer, really, but it's visible in the double-decker busses, driving on the other side of the road, and the street names of old Hong Kong (Nathan Road, Queensway, The Admiralty). Of course, there's the Cantonese Hong Kong, it's the dominant language and cuisine, and it reflects the British face through the Cantonese translations of the English names. Now there's the Mandarin Hong Kong, with People's Liberation Army Headquarters on the shores of the harbor and the hordes of Chinese tourists from the Mainland. We're not as bumpkin as the mainland tourists, but we don't speak Cantonese, so there's always a moment confusion when we speak with a local. Found that I had better luck with the hotel folks when I spoke English. Whatever works. Now combine wrong-side driving with Asian traffic and maybe I should just be glad to get away alive.

Taiwan, Part 1

Well, the whole typhoon deal ended up being a whole lot of nothing as it swung north and only skirted northern Taiwan. Everyone's happy since work and school were cancelled and it ends up being a three-day weekend. Of course, this only happened because everyone was way overprepared after last year's disastrous flooding. Next time when people relax is when the typhoon will lay down the beatings.

The old warren of narrow streets and dumpy apartment buildings in our area have been replaced with gleaming highrises (in an earthquake area?) and foreign-branded boutiques. The Starbucks density is almost at Manhattan levels (there's one on the corner across the street), but what really surprised me was the sight of a Coffee Bean shop. The Coffee Bean near Caltech was why I started drinking coffee in the first place, and I thought that it was a SoCal-only mini-chain. Did not expect to see it on the corner of two busy Taipei throughfares. I might have to drop by for a Vanilla Sunrise sometime.

Mostly been following mom, 戴阿姨 , and their friends/family around to restaurants. I ain't going to lose any weight on this trip. Went to the high school where dad used to teach. 戴阿姨's brother used to be dad's colleague and is the principal of the school now. He dug up old yearbooks with pictures of dad, which was a cool yet strange thing to see. Went out to a nice restaurant beforehand. I know it's terribly exploitative and environmentally unfriendly, but the shark's fin soup was really good, if you're into the whole shark cartilege thing. And it was a single large fin in the bubbling hot broth, not the thin, stringy stuff one typically gets.

Grandfather is basically gone, when you talk about higher faculties. The only thing he can do by himself is scoop the mashed up rice and things into his mouth at dinner and chew reflexively, the basest survival instinct in action, and even then he's not very effective at it. Thank goodness for the full-time nurse. Grandmother is still mentally sharp, although the hand tremors have got worse over the years. The neuro dude (one of Aunt Dai's nephews) says that it's probably not Parkinsons, since the hands are still steady at rest, and language faculties are still good. Mostly likely it's Essential Tremors Syndrome, which happens to be a dominant hereditary trait in varying degrees (since multiple genes are involved). That ought to be be good news for Sam's surgery career.

Haven't really been out on the town because of the typhoon rains and my unfamiliarity with the city, so I spend too much time watching TV. Hooray for satellite TV, which has transformed modern Asian culture. The Asian ESPN channel gets most of the ESPN games, so I watched the A's winning streak, the Niners' opener, and the Giants' showdown with the D'backs all live (helps that I don't have to go to work in the morning). Since the channel is run in conjunction with StarTV (aka SkyTV = Murdoch empire), it gets Premier League and Champions League games, too, and the exposure has made Asia a big contributor to the earnings of the clubs. Also watched Team USA get their asses handed to them in bball. Nothing wrong with losing once, but losing two in a row confirms that the NBA pros didn't give a shit.

Apparently Korean soap operas are getting real big now, and China makes the best historical dramas since they have all the original historical sites, not to mention cheap extras for the big battles. The movies are American or HK, and grandmother likes to watch the NHK variety shows with your favorite Japanese oldies. Of course, there's more anime than you can beat with a stick, including genres that don't get to the U.S. like the sports and the historical stuff. The different languages and dialects make subtitles a necessity on everything, and from watching movies on HBO it's obvious that the translation is more art than exact science. The MTVs have the subtitles as an integral part of the video, fading in and sliding out in tune. I've been curious about how good the Japanese translations are, and I have a feeling that it's not as accurate as the illiterate yet accuracy-obsessed U.S. otaku would like to believe. There's a cognitive dissonance for Japanese->Chinese translation as the names are rendered in Kanji and pronounced as the Chinese words that they are, while in English the names are transliterated from the Japanese pronounciation. So the Americans get the right pronounciation, but the Chinese gets across the meaning, e.g. 美 = girl's name. Been watching 男女蹺蹺板, a.k.a. His and Her Circumstances (oh, the titles is an area where different translations diverge greatly, as the title-writers have to make it meaningful yet catchy). The shoujo stuff is like crack, a cheap emotional high, and it makes me glad I didn't have to go to high school in Japan. His and Hers is being released in the States on DVD right about now. I'll probably pick up the box set.

At least they haven't tried to fix me up with anybody. Yet.

September 3rd (or is it the 4th?): Somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, south of Vladivostok, 5 hours to Taiwan

I'm cutting it a little close with this trip to Taiwan. However, the ticket is $200 cheaper if I waited until September, and another $100 less if I waited until after the long weekend, so here I am. Another perk is that mom (and her travel agent) helped to bump me up to an aisle seat in EVA's Deluxe Class, which is more like Economy Plus, or Business Minus, depending on your view about water in glasses. The extra seat pitch is a godsend, the difference between claustrophobia and working room.

The plane is new enough, with the video screen in the seatbacks, so I can obsessively watch the kilometers tick away. Have to whip out the Powerbook and write this as the iPod needs a mid-air recharge. Found it interesting that EVA does its annnouncements first in Taiwanese, then Mandarin. Gives me enough time to notice that something's going on so I can pause the music. I'm usually okay with political correctness and I recognize that stereotypes can be bad, but I don't really mind that they insist on hiring thin, attractive females for flight attendants.

The meal was a little bit of a leap-of-faith. The salad had honest-to-goodness shrimps in it. They were tiny, but they weren't overcooked and they actually tasted kinda shrimpy. Decided to go with the beef for the main course, which is usually dicey anyway, but Hungarian goulash on a Chinese airline? It wasn't as awful as it could've been. Reminded me of the good old days of elementary school cafeteria food.

The airline isn't perfect, as I had to check in my wheelie. 7 kg (15 lbs) limit is ridiculous. The overhead bins are echoingly empty, since most people are checking in massive suitcases. Eva made its name in the freight biz, and its passengers are hauling cargo of their own, with presents for family, etc. Nobody's packing light here. People are packing cup-o-noodles for a midnight snack, and the smell is grossing me out. All the kids on the flight would be bothersome, except for the miracle that is the Etymotic ER-4.

It's all about killing time on these flights. Actually, it's more like a slow, torturous strangling rather than a clean kill. Just got through Fast Food Nation, which doesn't make me feel any better about that beef goulash. Hey, at least In-N-Out is still okay. What I really want to do is to get some sleep, but that would just make the jetlag worse. Not that I can sleep on a plane.

Going out the door to

Going out the door to fly back to Taiwan for the first time in about 17 years. Apparently I'll be flying into an incoming typhoon. Should be exciting.

I don't feel out-geeked very

I don't feel out-geeked very often. There was the time at the SCA event, the astrophysics conference, and the good old days when I spent too much time in the UGCS lab. Then there was Thursday night when I went to the Baseball Prospectus pizza feed in Concord. These folks sit around and wonder what Rule 5 draftees have panned out over the years (stumped the room on that one). Heck, we actually know how the Rule 5 draft works, which is a feat in and of itself. The East Bay crowd was mostly A's fans, so the mood was jovial, but it was the night before the strike deadline, so everyone was interested in Gary Huckabay's take on the negotiations, especially when he opened the Q&A with "I just talked to Donald Fehr on the way over..."

It was interesting to get the inside scoop on various organizations and players, if only to confirm the suspicions of the incompetence of most baseball management. Of course, Billy Beane is The Man, even if T. Long's play in center field is almost an inside joke among the crowd. There was actually a guy there who doesn't drink the OPS Kool-Aid, who made for a nice foil to the mutual-admiration society.

Interesting tidbits:

• Mark Bellhorn is a jerk
• John Mabry kills right-handed, fly-ball pitchers. Hello Juan Acevedo.
• Young players with old player skills (high walks, high strikeouts, high home run to doubles ratios, i.e. no speed) tend to collapse for some reason. Danger, Troy Glaus
• There's a good chance they'll let Tejada walk after next season. Especially if he suddenly gets older when he renews his visa.
• No, the A's didn't trade Jeremy G. for Mabry because of baseball stats. Too much booze on a team flight back from New York.

Too bad we couldn't spend more time asking questions about real baseball instead of the labor stuff. Highway 4 was the road to Concord, and it was one of the few times when I actually felt the need to slow down on a California freeway. It's still a narrow state freeway winding through the hills of northern Contra Costa county with no street lamps, and with the recent growth in the area, it's becoming a commute corridor, connecting to 80 and 680. Hitting the highway after a long commute makes it a tough home stretch, and I'm not surprised that it's one of the more deadly highways in the Bay Area.