Personal Dork Assistant

Turning the Corner

Here are the news, just in time to support the President's favorite campaign catchphrase.

• Older Investors Jittery as Markets Dissappoint

  But even with her long-term outlook, she has found the market's recent performance unsettling. And so this month, Ms. Pitts sold all of her shares [about 500] for $6,000, less than a quarter of the $25,000 that they were once worth. She now plans to give the money to her son, who is building an extra room on his house for the kids.

  So much for the American Dream. Even had she sold at the top of the bubble it would've only been scraps off the capitalist table. The hope is the most pathetic thing about it.

• Which way for small-town America hard hit by recession?

  "I made a really good living, and I liked my job, and what is so bad is that we have come out with nothing after all those years no pension, no insurance, no nothing," she says. "The day it closed, our insurance was gone, our pension was gone. It was devastating."

  Sorry folks, manufacturing in America is deaddeaddead.

• Outsourcing is Good For You

  "She's got an interesting argument: outsourcing means cheaper IT products, meaning businesses will buy more, meaning more products to make & manage = net gain of IT jobs in the US. Ummm, did you follow that?"

  Sorry, no. By the way, high-tech jobs in America are deaddeaddead, too. Especially as I'm starting to see how the sausage is made. Around 70% of Dells products are ODM'ed. So much for "high-level design" jobs staying in the US. Let's not even get started about software.

And finally, because anecdotal evidence sucks.

• Census: Poverty rose by million

  The number of Americans in poverty rose by 1.3 million to 35.9 million, or one in eight people. The number of Americans without health insurance rose by 1.4 million to 45 million, or 15.6% of the population. Both sets of figures rose for the third-straight year.

  The income of the median U.S. household was virtually flat at $43,318 after a two-year decline.

  The uninsured figure is probably more significant than the actual poverty figures. After all, if you're uninsured, you're only one small illness away from poverty anyway. That's much more indicative of the population struggling economically to hold on to the bottom rung of the middle class. And what do you do if you're uninsured when you get sick? If you're in LA, nothing.

Not-Valentine's Day

Nothing's better for business than holidays, and it's amazing how many commercial opportunities one can create when you combine Western and Eastern traditions. Of course, the department stores pimp out Valentine's Day, since browbeating from wives and girlfriends is the only way to get guys to hang out in the ladies sections (i.e. 90% of the store). However, there's another day for lovers, namely 7/7 on the Chinese calendar. Because it's a lunar-calendar holiday, nobody would ever know when it actually is except for all the ads blaring the date in your face. Never been much for this sort of thing, but considering that I missed the GF's birthday (7/29, now properly entered into iCal for perpetuity), a token of some sort was warranted. Ended up just being a card, but I did get a nice card, for what that's worth. Thought about writing it in Chinese, but gave up on that in a hurry, when I realized that "Dear" is a lot easier to write than "親愛".

It's been a while since we've actually gone out, and the day happened to be a good opportunity, even though neither of us was keen on dealing with crowds of lovey-dovey couples. Saw one such couple walking hand-in-hand between platforms at the Taipei Main Station subway stop. The guy was proudly wearing his Kobe Bryant #8 t-shirt. I guess his girl doesn't keep up with the American celebrity news. Went to see a movie at the Spot, which was running films appropriate for the occasion. I don't know how they found a Chinese translator for a Danish film. I suspect they translated from the English, but there wasn't English subtitles so the Chinese had to do. The movie wasn't heavy on dialog anyway, and the plot was plodding, but the movie is all about cinematography anyway, all handheld artfully grainy shots of Copenhagen. Watched it more as a photo exhibit with a soundtrack, which is an interesting way to see a movie, in small doses.

Incoming!

Sure it's only a medium typhoon, but it can't be good when the eye is going to pass almost directly overhead.

Buying Random Shit

Picked up Rita Calypso's latest not because I loved it at the listening station, although I did check to make sure that it's not totally unlistenable. Main reason I bought it was for the title. When we had the House Meeting to pick the theme for the year's OPI, it was a small tradition for someone to suggest Apocalypso. You know, with steel drums, post-industrial construction, not to mention the end of the world and all that. Heck, I always voted for it. Anyway, it's a perfectly pleasant piece of music, so what the hell. Funny how the Chinese title is "西班牙旅行三部曲番外篇" which has nothing to do with anything, aside from the fact that the CD came from a Spanish label.

I can hardly live on one CD alone. Thankfully, with the introduction of Apple Lossless Encoding, and the Friday sales at Fry's, I picked up a 250GB hard disk and stuffed it with almost my entire CD collection in bit-perfect form. The hard disk was easier to stuff into the luggage than my CDs, but it's not much good unless I had a computer to go with the HD. Spent a couple of weekends wandering Taipei's computer-marts, dragging the GF behind me (yeah I'm a real sweetheart), but it was a real pain to pick out good deals from the horde of indistinguishable storefronts. Plus the crowd and requisite haggling didn't really put me in a buying mood. Then came the Taipei Computer Applications Show at the convention center, and I couldn't resist walking over with my still-virgin Taiwan credit card. The show was brutally crowded on a Saturday, mostly filled with lusers out to gawk at the latest displays. The floor was dominated by the big boys like the various Taiwan motherboard makers, Japanese electronics giants, and comsumer electronics chains, all out for a piece of the action. Fought off the proles for the knick-knacks, but a couple of CD wallets was about the best I could do. Wasn't really interested in the packaged systems, so I hung around the fringes looking for cool random peripherals and DIY parts-sellers. Found the BioStar distributor booth on the edge of the hall in a standard small booth. What really caught my eye was their small-form-factor Athlon64 system, for the price of regular Pentium 4 and Athlon XP systems. Of course, by the time I read the fine print I noticed that they'd cut so many corners that by the time I upgraded the parts to resonable levels it would command the premium that one would expect from a cutting-edge system. Nevertheless, they did get my attention, so I talked to them, and talked myself into picking up the NForce2-based AthlonXP barebones iDEQ instead. Now I've committed to a system, I could start gathering the rest of the necessary peripherals. Couldn't do much more shopping while lugging a steel box (even if it's relatively small by PC standards), so I didn't do much more than buy a DVD-CDRW combo drive before lugging the stuff home. The optical drive was a Lite-On, which I was embarrassed to be bringing home, considering their original business. Still, I was missing plenty of necessary parts, like, um... a CPU. So it was off to the rat-maze that was Nova after having lunch with the GF and her family. It was painfully tedious to go through each and every vendor and wade through pages of fine-print to compare prices on an OEM Barton-core AthlonXP 2500+ CPU and a 512MB stick of DDR400 memory. Of course, after all that, I ended up buying everything from the very first shop right by the entrance, plus a Logitech wireless keyboard/mouse set, and a USB wireless adapter to get it online. All in all, it came out to just a bit more than NTD 18,000 to put together a pretty solid mid-range system, and the prices were just a smidge less than US prices. It also just happened to be almost exactly equal to my July salary (for a bit less than half month's work). Oh well.

The system didn't seem like much of a bargain at first, though. Stayed up to put the pieces together even though I had to get up early for work the next day. For some stupid reason (i.e. it works for Macs!) I thought I could just throw my old Windows XP installation onto a totally new hardware setup and have it work. Of course, it hard crashed before the Windows bootscreen even comes up. Thankfully David had brought his original XP install CD with him from the States. Managed to get Windows installed the next day, after bluffing my way through Microsoft phone monkeys to get it activated. I skimped by not buying a video card, hoping to get by on the built-in GeForce MX400 graphics of the nForce chipset. However, I was getting crud pixels on the screen even at startup, and the machine would crash as soon as I tried to do anything remotely graphics related. It was dying under both Windows and Knoppix, so I was thinking I was fucked hardware-wise, and dreading the prospect of trying to get my money back from random Taiwanese shops. Thankfully, the helpful iDEQ forum at SFFTech noticed the release of a new BIOS from BioStar. Managed to keep Windows stable just long enough to flash the BIOS, and all was finally well. Even got the graphics card to do a pixel-perfect 1280x768 resolution for the plasma TV that I was using as the monitor, once I installed the latest Nvidia drivers. It survived the PC test gauntlet (memtest86, prime95, and 3dMark2001), and I could finally enjoy surfing from the couch, and having my entire CD collection available again. Still have to reinstall the Chinese input methods somehow, since XP thinks it's installed by won't let me actually use it, but maybe I'll let SP2 hit before I fuck with my installation.

Good thing I enjoy tinkering with this stuff for fun. Would hate to have to do it for a living, not that you could make a living as a tech monkey these days. If nothing else, I was reminded why I paid the big bucks for hardware that works. I brought my mini-grinder and the remainder of the BlueBottle coffee from home. I even bought a French press, before discovering the Melitta drip filter that had been gathering dust in the upper reaches of the cabinetry for ages. The Melitta is convenient enough for me to make a cup of coffee on the run on work days, so I finished off the coffee beans faster than I expected. Mom had mentioned that the coffee place down the street seems to sell fresh-roasted beans, so I went by after work to check it out. The bean roastery and warehouse was actually down the alley around the corner from the retail coffee shop. The big roasting machine was reassuringly up-front, and there were bags of green beans as well as packed roasted beans for sale. Got talked into the membership plan, where if I prepay $1800 I can get the coffee at 50% off, which makes it only a little cheaper than good old Peets. So in exchange for paying a fair price I have to get locked in to their store. Oh well, at least the location is convenient, and the product is decent. Now if only half&half existed in Taiwan.

Happy Hours

The manager for Taiwan sales was retiring at the "suggestion" of the uncle. Guy's getting a nice pension (unlike some people), so it's not as if he's being thrown out on the street. Nevertheless, for the sake of saving face there's a big retirement dinner with everyone strongly "suggested" to attend. Heck, it's not as if we had better things to do on a Friday night. There's a nice new restaurant in the big shopping building next door to the office that provided a convenient location, and people could walk over after work. The food was stunningly mediocre, but the company was buying the booze and uncle must've cut a deal with his dealer, as there were multiple cases of Ballantine to lubricate the social gears, albeit the 12-year variety rather than the 21-year whiskeys in his personal stash. People skipped the shot glasses and went straight to the wine goblets and promptly went about the business of getting hammered. David and I avoided the head table and sat with the Foreign Sales people that we've been working with. As the new kids we were obligated to drink many, many cups, or so we were told. Joanna was leaving KB, so she got the business as well. Poured the entire bottle of whisky into a jug full of ice cubes, which made it dilute and easy-drinking, but there was still a whole damn bottle's worth of liquor in there. Actually, make that two bottles, over the course of the night. And we were pikers compared to the other tables, especially the table next to us, where some of the more senior ladies were sitting. It's slightly surprising how many senior female managers KB has, and in important departments, too. They're all hideously competent, of course, and drinking people under the table is one of their areas of competency. A few of the guys went by to toast their bosses, got stuck because they were too polite to leave, and had to take their shots like men. The poor receptionist girl probably thought sitting with the nice aunties would be better than sitting with all the random icky guys. By the end of the night she was so drunk that she passed out on the sidewalk. One of the ladies had to accompany her home in the taxi. It was a little awkward explaining to her folks how their little girl got falling-down drunk on company time.

Meanwhile, the rest of us were heading out to the 西門 branch of Holiday KTV. There was a closer one, but it was already fully booked, which you'd expect on a Friday night. I was pretty hammered, well past the buzz stage and almost into the puke zone. On the other hand, David was going, and so were a couple of the managers, which meant that it had the uncle's tacit approval. It was probably the right thing to do socially anyway. Plus I've never been to a good old Asian karaoke place before. So I hopped in the cab and off we went. They called in some other people who used to work at KB, and we had a dozen people packed into the soundproof room. And before the night was done we managed to go through four more bottles of whisky (cleaned them out of the Macallan, so had to finish up with some good old Johnny Walker). Thankfully I had some free time to watch some MTV before I started work, so I recognized at least a few songs that I could sing along to, not that Asian pop songs are all that complicated musically anyway. I think the polite thing to do would've been to drink until I threw up and passed out, which was what happened to a couple of the junior guys, but I guess if I have to demand special treatment, not having to puke isn't that much to ask. Yeah, yeah, in Asian societies it's more important to fit in, etc. Fuck that.

Caught a cab home with David and Jack about 2:30am, leaving the rest of the crowd to start in on the fifth bottle of Johnny. By then I wasn't even drunk, just a little headachy and dehydrated from the alcohol. Shoulda drank more? At least I didn't have to go to work the next day, unlike some of the party people. Yikes.

Road Rules

Sometimes Taiwan seems like it can't get anything done without having it turn to shit. On the other hand, sometimes it's kinda amazing how fast things can happen around here. Headed in to work on Monday and hopped on the bus to KB at the MRT stop. Noticed that they'd repaved the entire route over the weekend. Compared to the Republic of Berkeley, where they're finally repaving the crumbling Arlington Blvd., but it'll take them about three months instead of three days. Plus the Taiwan road is a pretty major thoroughfare and busy even on weekends. Unfortunately, they didn't get around to paining the lane markers for a few more days, so during that time the traffic was even more chaotic than normal. At least they had the decency to paint the crosswalk stripes right away, so the peds could have a fighting chance at crossing the street unscathed.