The network guys have blocked most web sites, and ssh traffic from our desktop net. I've had to use a random farm node in the data center to sneak through their little blockade. Why the incomplete blockage from just our subnet I wonder? Our new CIO asking to keep us productive as a "trial"?

Pong is now using https for all the important stuff and still allows anyone into the public site (which houses just my avatars for various discussion boards, etc). That's pretty cool. I've also got NTP working, although I'm not sure why it didn't work before. Our web dude here was impressed that a manager could do anything, and did warn that I would see a little performance hit on the server with all of the encryption. Hasn't hurt so far, but the limited upload speed of the cable modem is still probably the bottleneck. Now I want to get even more crazy and have a second server going that I NFS mount all of the web content off of (serving it off pong). I have to find another small and quiet box I can run linux on, having one of those 2u dual proc noisy beasts isn't going to cut it.

I just heard that one of our network guys quit. He's having one of my guys sell off his bike and car and his house is on the market too. Something was up. That's kinda a bummer, he's a good networking dude.

Now I've setup a caching name server for the house as well. I really should have done all this a long time ago but I guess thing worked well enough as they were without all the tricks. The real test will be changing the config on the woman's box to use the squid cache, the named cache, etc. The replay I think I'll just leave alone, that poor thing has enough trouble without me trying to be fancy.

Next I should set up the wireless to use something better than WEP.

We saw the new "Underworld 2" movie last night. Oy. The lame action/shoot-em-up movies are getting old. More story and characters, less random shooting of monsters. Guess that's what it was billed as though so I can't complain too much. The vampire theme did give the woman an excuse to wear her new rubber skirt, gotta love that. :) The previews showed 3 movies based on video games, and 1 based on a comic book. Hollywood out of ideas again?

A picture of the new rug in the "library". The woman's old sofa with the black sheet on it is pretty tacky but we wanted to simulate what it would look like if/when we move my sofa down there.

Apparently the super bowl is today. I wonder if that means there won't be any rednecks at the range today? If it wasn't cold and cloudy it might be a good day to go. I might just work on my taxes though. The woman is not happy with my tax guy so we may switch back to hers, or to a new one. Looking at my investment accounts I've got about 100 or so stock transactions for the year. I'm sure if I really had to I could get turbo-tax and figure it out. Might be a good use of time and money to do that and then turn the turbo-tax files over to the pros and just have them check them for errors and stuff. Might cut down on their processing time if everything was neat and tidy. Hmm..... I feel a Fry's run coming on. I'll try not to buy a mini-mac to run it on. :)

The super bowl is next weekend. Oh. My information was bad, or more likely I wasn't paying attention.

So no copy of turbo-tax yet, I spent a bunch of time gathering info and looking through papers and didn't make it to Fry's. We did make it to our anniversary dinner. Our first date was 2 years ago Monday so we went to the same brew pub today that we went on our first date at. Hayward is still a pit.

I setup a secondary web server on pong and got SSL to work. Cool. I'll probably swap the whole private web server over to https tomorrow and just leave my web board sig files and image hosting stuff on the regular http server.

Fending off jet lag has been a chore. I got home Wednesday, stayed away all day and then slept for 13 or so hours. Obviously I was a little late to work. Last night I went to bed at 10pm and slept until 1am, then was up until 3am and finally got back to sleep. I was very tired at the gym but I'm hoping that I'm back on schedule now and can sleep through the night.

In our every more Nazi environment here they've started blocking some web sites. Apparently they get some list of porn sites from somewhere and block all those. OK, but now www.bmwsporttouring.com is on the porn list. How did my favorite motorcycle site get blacklisted? Well anyway I finally got off my butt and read the ssh man page and setup a tunnel from a box here to the squid proxy on pong at home. Now I can browse whatever and not be subject to the porn blocker. It's not even that slow going home and back again. I should setup https for pong like I was poking around with last week but I think that will take an apache upgrade. I have all my doc files very separate so it should be non-destructive.

Hmm... what else. The Taiwan/HK pics are up on the main page. Not very exciting, but something to look at. No plans for the weekend, it's going to be cold and possibly raining so I won't be washing the bike. The woman wants to go over some tax planning stuff, I want to get a lemon scone at Starbucks on Sunday morning, and I really need to vacuum the house. She's generated a ton of carpet fuzz I need to clean up. What does that woman do when I'm not around? I was thinking of trying to con Rod into driving to Vegas and having the woman and I tag along, but he's pretty burnt out from being on call this week (lots of off hours issues) so I doubt he'll be up for that.

Talk about the slow boat to China, I was on one today. After the 7am con call I went back to the hotel and had breakfast and then took the subway to the ferry terminal and headed out to Cheung Chau, a small island about 7 miles off the coast (aren't all islands off the coast of something?) of HK. There are two ferries, the "slow" and the "fast". The slow costs about $1.35 USD and takes an hour to get there and the fast costs 2x as much and goes 2x as fast. I took the slow one on the way out (to be with the locals as the guide book advises) and the fast on the way back. The slow boat is 3rd world ghetto, the fast had leather seats, flat screen TVs and was really quiet. I like the slow one better, actually, it felt more like an adventure. On the island I wandered around, looked at the beach and went to the Pak Tai temple. I played tourist and bought some incense sticks to light there and they have you do that and then hit a bell 3 times and a drum 3 times. From what I can tell it's supposed to bring happiness and health to your family. OK then. They offered to take my picture while I did this stuff which I took advantage of. Seems odd for 18th century priests to be up on how to work digital cameras. Ruins the image a bit.

Back in HK I stopped at while I can only think of as a Whole Foods market equivalent. Even the color scheme was the same and it was filled with tasty stuff and HK yuppies. I had some sort of chicken and rice. The cashier spoke pretty good English as did the woman who ran into me with her stupid SUV baby stroller. Almost like home, except that they spoke English. :)

I'm done at the office now, I've fixed all the hardware I can, positioned the fans best I can (the AC dude's mods were not that helpful) and am ready to head out. I'll pack tonight and be ready to head to the airport in the morning. Very exciting for me, I really want to be home.

Nice thing about the Asia offices, they both have a supply of ramen in the break room. Sure, I'm stuck with "Hakata Tonkotsu Flavor" but at least it's food. I missed breakfast this morning in my rush to get a workout in and get to the office.

The small portion of Mongolian BBQ mutton that I had for lunch wasn't enough so I had to grab a cheeseburger on the way back from the appliance store. The HVAC guy couldn't figure out a better way to run the duct work so I'm going to stick some fans in the room to move the air in the right places until he does.

I've been writing snippets of perl code, updated a ton of internal wiki pages, written a transition doc for an upcoming server migration we're doing, and generally been getting a ton of stuff done. It's amazing what you can do when no one is bugging you every 5 seconds.

I've also been staring at a picture of a supposedly "real" version of the fake watch I got. I can't see any differences. I know the hologram on the back is different, but so far that's all I can see. A used version that's real goes for about 100x what I paid. Cool. :)

Now that I look longer, the crown on mine is maybe 1mm longer and I don't think it's just the angle the picture is at. The colors may be off a touch as well (real is deeper shades by a tiny, tiny amount) or it could just be the photo. I wanted to find one exactly like my dad's real one, but his is all gold and tacky and the gold fakes never look real (the gold color is all wrong).

One of the channels on the TV is the 24 hour fashion channel. Every time I've seen it, it's just runway footage from all sorts of fashion shows. Gods fashion looks like crap. Must be a big deal here though for them to dedicate 1 of the 15 channels to it.

Neal Stephenson must have used 7-11s in Asia as his inspiration for the "lucky dragon" markets. They're so amazingly bright and shiny and out of place in these little traditional looking streets. Candy bars are expensive, but dried cuttlefish is cheap!

Today I worked for a bit in the morning and then went for a walk. I took the subway into the central district and then went up to SoHo and toward the peak using this crazy long escalator. To accommodate all the people going to work in the morning they built this long stairway and escalator set that allows you to go from the top of the hill with all it's high density down into the city. Pretty cool. At every junction there are tons of shops and restaurants, stores, etc. I ended up stopping off at a pizza place for lunch. It was quite good.

I also walked the botanical gardens (where I had lunch) and wandered down to the harbor to check on the ferry system. I'm going to one of the outlying islands tomorrow or Tuesday, depending on work and the weather.

Well, I did it. I'm very proud of myself. I navigated the subway, found a watch vendor and negotiated for another Rolex and a Breitling. I had my "emergency Chinese" book with me, but it didn't have about half the words I needed. The dude called another dude and handed me the phone. That got us past the "I want to buy both" problem. The rest of the haggling was done via a calculator. I'm sure I way over paid, I only got him down 40% from his asking price. Still, a $30 USD Rolex isn't bad. :) This one is a lot fancier than my other one, but it's still not too tacky. Joe, the local IT guy, told me that the government is cracking down on the fakes and that they won't let you see the "warehouse" anymore. It sure made things a lot slower.

On the work side, I got a ton of stuff done today. I've got all 40 systems mounted, powered and running for the most part. Two were not configured correctly, and one had a bad power cord (that's pretty rare). The room has the air conditioning capacity, but it's not balanced right so the temp is up to 31 C by the intakes for the HPs. It needs to get back down to 27 C. The AC guys will be there on Monday to figure it out. I could ghetto it up with some cardboard and get it down a few degrees but that's just a hack.

I'm watching some crappy movie on HBO and it looks like it's heavily edited. A sex scene just ended randomly in the middle.

This iPass stuff Ernie hooked me up with is slick. I just fired it up, told it I'm in the Taipei airport and poof, I'm on the net with no charges (well, I'm sure the company pays for it somehow). It's even pretty fast, it's easy to type on pong even though I'm half way around the world (OK, maybe just 1/3 of the way). There are no power outlets in the waiting area though, everything is hard wired into the wall. Guess I'll only be able to play for a little while before I lose power.

When I got to the airport, this woman at the CX counter comes up to me while I'm looking at the flight board and asks if I'm going to Hong Kong. Now why would they expect to be looking for a random American white dude to be going to Hong Kong? I would think they would ask if I was going to the US. Strange, maybe the hotel called them? Also at the airport I tried to buy some mints in the gift shop. It didn't work, I couldn't convey the concept of mints and I couldn't recognize any packaging. I ended up with cough drops. At least they're better than my breath. :)

My passport is stamped "entry to ROC". I wonder if that means I'm officially in China now and not in Taiwan? How does that work? Am I violating Chinese law by using strong encryption on this ssl connection?

Connecting to pong's web server the username/password goes in clear text, and I just sent it over an insecure wireless network in China. Doh! I should try to figure out https I suppose.

Why are there so many condom machines in the airport too. Or at least they look like they're selling condoms, I can't really tell. They had some really cool posters by security showing what looked like a Walther PPK and a field stripped PPK. I have no idea what they were talking about. You could assume it was saying "no guns on the plane" but then what's the 2nd part all about? No guns unless you field strip it and put the parts in your carry on bag? I didn't want to take a picture of the sign, I've already been burned trying to take pictures like that. I did get a shot of the sign that says "drug trafficking in the ROC is punishable by death" one thought because it was in this hallway between immigration and security and no one saw. Or at least I don't think anyone saw.

Made it to Hong Kong with no problems. I slept on the flight so I missed the snack. Don't know what it was, but now I'm hungry. I'll have a power bar and then go to sleep.

This hotel is WAY fancier than the JW Marriott I stayed in last time. The room is small (without Charles to get us upgraded for free that's to be expected), maybe 1/5 the size of the room in Taiwan and 1/4 the size of the JW room. It's nice though, and the lobby and common areas are fancier. Also, there were at least 3 hot chicks walking around the lobby when I checked in. Maybe I just wasn't up late enough last time to see any of the night life.

I'm sitting in the Uli data center, using some unsecured wireless network I managed to find. I'm running ssh over a VPN session secured with my RSA widget. I think I'm safe. I'm also sorta alone I just noticed. Hmm... where did everyone go?

Long day today, but I think we've got done what we've come to do. The Uli guys are going to copy the data on the filer I managed to figure out how to setup, and if there isn't room they can use the linux box I built with the 1.4TB of disks in it. Glad I started playing with the RHCE stuff, I'm using those RAID building skills a lot it seems.

Last night we went watch shopping and found nothing. They wanted $300 USD for junk that I was paying $24 for in Hong Kong. I'm hoping I have better luck on Saturday. I contacted the eBay dude that had the BMW F1 watches (fake) out of HK and he won't sell local, he only sells on eBay. That's kinda a bummer, but I'm going to try to find one local anyway. I've got a picture printed out so I can show it around.

For lunch today we went out to one of the local restaurants and had some form of native Chinese food.

The internet link from Uli is way faster than the hotel so I can actually work. Nice.

Taipei is nice so far, clean but with a touch of traffic. Lunch was tasty, but the pea and corn pizza they brought in to "make us feel at home" didn't exactly do that. The trip to the BMW motorcycle dealer made me feel more at home. :) I liked the bento box style lunch, some sort of beef and rice and odd veggies and really good soup. There was a bonus "nugget" in the box that some of us thought was chicken, some thought fish. I wouldn't be surprised if it was a mix of both.

The local guy here (from nvidia) says he knows people who can get me watches if I want them. Grade A fakes (vs. the grade B/C I'll find in the market in HK) for $1000 TWD (or so). The market in HK is called "the ladies market", which isn't a cool name. The shady market here is called "the night market". Much cooler.

The environment at Uli is really screwed up (config wise) so there are several weeks worth of work to be done here. I'll leave a lot of instructions with the guys here (they seem competent) and we'll see what they manage to do. My netapp is clearing customs and will be to the NVDA office around 5pm, I'll cab over there and see. I have a sheet of paper with the Uli office address on it so I can show it to cab drivers, but don't have one for our office. Hmm.... have to take a local with me.

I got my phone working, it's a different code to dial out from here.

Oh, and I saw The Dukes of Hazzard on the plane. It sucked ass. I also saw I, Robot on the plane. At least the chick was cute.

Made it to Taipei, settling into a room that's larger than my bedroom at home, trying to figure out how much they're charging me for using the net. My phone doesn't dial out, so it looks like I'm stuck with email only for the trip until I get to Hong Kong. The crackberry works, that's probably the most important thing anyway.

Back at work, I finally remembered the funny (?) thing I was forgetting. I recorded a few episodes of the A Team off TV land to bug the woman with. We watched both of them, and they were painful to sit through, but the amusing thing is that they both featured the same section of road, gas station and diner. The exact same "ham & eggs diner" was both in Bad Rock, CA and in Las Vegas. That diner gets around, and how they drove from "bad rock" from Vegas and back again in the same chase scene is pretty amazing. We've also watched 2 episodes of Knight Rider. It's not aged well. :)

It's raining a lot here, so no walking to Starbucks this morning for scones. We just made breakfast here again, but there was a distinct lack of frosting on anything like you get with the scones.

Last night I had to run over to a warehouse in Fremont to pickup a Netapp filer (a small one) that we need to ship over to Taiwan. I'm hoping it gets there by at least Thursday so that I've got it to start the data migration from Uli before Friday. I don't want to have to stay in Taiwan over the weekend, I'll be the only one left if I'm not finished. I don't like that idea.

Today I've got to go into work and finish up some last minute things before I'm gone. Mostly paperwork and other administrative junk. I need to do laundry and pack and whatnot as well this weekend, and Sunday we have to go up to meet with the flower chick for the wedding. I don't even want to think about flowers.

The honeymoon planning is coming along and we're staying well within budget. That's cool, we won't have to cut any activities for a lack of money, just for a lack of time. The woman wants to go everywhere and see everything, and I'm trying to minimize the number of days we spend just driving from place to place.

Oh, and finally those pictures: the bush thingy falling off the wall, the woman finishing sanding and staining the new nightstands, the 0.24" 3-shot group with the .308 (42gr of Varget powder) and the new official pong, complete with a real case this time.

Lestat continues to get ripped apart by the reviewers. Seems it's not so good in the eyes of the critics.

What a crazy week. My flight plans have changed. I'll be flying from SFO to NGO then connect to TPE (Taiwan). Then from Taiwan on Friday I'll fly to HKG (Hong Kong) where I'll work on some stuff we're shipping there and then come back to SFO the following Wednesday. That's 10 days "on the road", that's a lot. At least I'm not in India! I'm not sure my time in Taiwan will turn out very well. The bean counters don't want to hire us translators, and the IT guys at Uli don't speak English. Could be a lot of hand waving and finger pointing for a few days.

There is probably something else important I'm forgetting to put in here, but I can't think of it off hand. Maybe it will come to me later. I know I've got a few pictures to download yet, maybe they'll remind me of something.

They (the CIO, CFO and our new VP) rescheduled our 10am meeting in which they were going to tell us some secret stuff about something or another. Guess whatever the news is will have to be a secret a bit longer.

Changed the oil in the Montero and it looks like the source of the oil leak is in the rear of the engine. It's running down the sides and top of the transmission and falling to the ground near the back. That's not good, but maybe it's why the oil consumption is going up, it's leaking some and it's falling on the ground as I drive? Time will tell.

Went to the range today, man what a waste of ammo and gas. Kevin and Don from work came to shoot as well and they got to see me do HORRIBLE. I didn't even keep the target, everything on there sucked and was invalid for ammo testing. Even the good ammo from last time wouldn't shoot for crap, so obviously it was me. It was a touch cold and windy up there, but not that cold and windy. I'm going to load more of the good load and just work on getting my skills consistent at this point.

Yesterday we went up to SF and saw Lestat, the musical. It's "world premier" is today apparently. The singing vampires weren't too bad, and the woman loved it which is all that counts. Some weirdos on BART, lots of homeless crazy people downtown too. We went into some sort of gray market jewelery/watch market and I was looking at (probably stolen) watches while the woman was looking at necklaces. Some Asian woman was giving her the hard sell on a neckless, and after we left Kristen said she didn't want to spend $25 on it. I told her that the woman was asking $2500. I can't hear so well but I can read price tags.

The other news for the new year is that channel 104.9 (the one I listened to most of the time) has changed to an all Spanish format. Another blow to the white man, we're down to 1 radio station. 105.3 now says "the only music alternative" and it's true, it's the last station to not be oldies, Spanish, elevator or inspired by Jesus.

I've been on the phone now for almost 5 hours trying to solve a problem with some of the software guys. Turns out, one of their perforce trigger scripts was relying on environment variable in root's environment to run (instead of setting the stuff in the script) so when we "cleaned up" old cruft it broke their scripts. On top of it, their debug stuff was reporting the wrong errors. Doh. No lunch for me today.

If only all days were this quiet at work! We finished up our small bit of maintenance and now I can go home after only 2 hours of work. Nice.

I'm going to swing by my parents place. I've been unable to reach them on the phone for 3 days now. Dad's cell just goes to voice mail after a while and the cabin phone rings and rings (which means they're not there as they turn off the power strip the TV and answering machine are on when they leave). They're either dead, or dad dropped his cell phone somewhere. Mom's phone goes right to voice mail too but she never has that thing on.

Dennis should win the prize for journaling, he's got entries back to '98. So much for my vi solution being best, his seems fancier than that.

My parents aren't dead, they're just at the cabin. They never heard the phone they said, probably because they've been moving hay bails for two days trying to stop the erosion problem on their land. Oh.

Don mentioned that an external firewire hard drive is faster than the laptop disk in the mini mac. Maybe that holds true for my laptop too? I've hooked up an external firewire disk and put the swap file on that disk, we'll see if it helps any.

OK, the laptop isn't swapping all that much, or at least enough to make it worth having that extra drive on there. Instead I've focused on making the web crap faster. I setup a squid cache on pong, turned off the disk cache on the laptop and changed "fasterfox" to not do so many parallel requests. I think it's 8 request parallel queries were upsetting a lot of web sites that only allow 2 connections at a time.

Don was mocking my "editing html with vi" style of journal writing, but I pointed out that my journal relies on pretty much nothing. No specific web server, no DB, no blog app, no funky markup language, nothing. I should be able to burn this junk to CDs and as long as .jpg is still an valid image format and browsers can read HTML 1.0 I'll be OK. Even if browsers don't work, they're still just text files that can be manually read or converted into whatever. Text lasts. My organization still sucks, but I at least made some archive pages and shortened things up today for 2006. I've also moved some pics around and reorganized the html directory so that when (if!) I ever get around to backing up the site on CD/DVD instead of just another hard drive that it's easier to break up into pieces. I'm taking less photos, but the directory sizes are going way up. I started with a 1 megapixel camera and now I'm at what, 4? I saw a 4 megapixel canon pocket camera with a 4x optic zoom for $200. As soon as they figure out how to stuff a 6x optic zoom in a small camera not made by Sony I may have to upgrade.

Last night was one of the first I actually stayed up until midnight. Don came up and the 3 of us went to a comedy club. As predicted, the headliner act was pretty weak but the middle B-grade comic was funny as hell. I'm not sure why that always happens. It was still a good night, we went out for Korean BBQ before the show which I always enjoy (forgot to ask Don what he thought of it). Today now is just doing some light work (going to be hell to pay tomorrow, there are some serious things busted and with no one around to fix anything they've just sorta got worse) and playing with the web site.

It's crazy windy outside, the shrubs against the house actually got pulled off of the wall. So much for hanging ivy. I wonder how they'll fix that?