We've had like 23 days or rain this month, or maybe it was 25. Whatever, it's apparently a tie of the 1904 record and we still have a day to go I think. That's a lot of rain. It's like living in Seattle, only without the affordable housing or abundance of hot chicks at hip downtown social spots. I do think it's helped teach our latest batch of FOBs how to drive in the rain though so it's not all bad. We'll see how bad traffic really is tonight when I have to drive to Redwood City for that interview. Driving sucks.

My parents are starting to hound me about my birthday, what we're doing, what I want, yada yada. I was going to buy a new razor the other day, but the woman told me to wait... so my parents are getting me a new razor. At least the gift will be something I can actually use. Kristen ordered me something, but it won't be here until May or some such. I'm hoping we'll go to Chevy's for dinner at some point. I realize that's not very fancy but I've not had Chevy's salsa in 6 months or something (or at least it seems like that). Last year (or the year before) the woman got me take-out chips and salsa which was a nice birthday present.

Oh come on man, what's wrong with this PC now? It's moving so slow I can out-type gmail and quicken is entering data so slowly it can't even play the little cash register sound file at full speed. The woman said I should just get a new PC and join the 90s already and that my system is "the size of a mainframe". It's only a 4u rack mount case, sheesh.

Back at home obviously trying to catch up on all the crapola that happened over the last few weeks. I lost yesterday to the funeral so today is it for stuff. I've got my taxes signed and checks written and ready to go, paid bills, entered stuff into quicken (v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y) and cleaned up the huge pile of crap the woman set out. Who knew I got so much mail that had to be shredded?

I didn't take that many photos this trip, mostly just work stuff (power, rack layout, etc). I did take one shot when I got back that was kinda cool. I know Vareck is the real world traveler and all, but I did have to use 5 foreign currencies on this trip... Euros in Germany (layover), Yen in Japan (layover), Baht in Bangkok (layover), New Taiwan Dollars in Taiwan and Rupees in India:

Two more photos showing the differences in technology on the trip. First, the way, way, way too complicated public toilets in the Nagoya airport, vs. the dude with the gas powered DDT fogger attempting to control the mosquitoes in the Bangalore airport. Yea, I'm sure I'll get cancer from the toilet seat....

Friday when I got home I ended up driving back up to SF to have lunch with Kristen and as it turns out to drive her home. Her last patient canceled so I hung out in the Starbucks down the street while she finished with her 3pm and then we went home together. It took us about 2 hours to get home from the city in the car vs. the hour and 10 minutes it takes her walking, taking BART and driving the last 10 miles. Ouch.

Hmm.... I checked the oil in the Montero, and 825 miles after the oil change and it's still not showing any signs of usage. The last change I made the same observation. Maybe I'm WAY overfilling it at each change? It says 6 quarts with the filter which I do every time. Maybe it's really 5.5 quarts or something and they're just rounding up? It doesn't show high on the stick after the change and the initial run-in, so where does the oil go (or come from)? I change it warm, maybe it ends up keeping a lot up in the valve covers for a long time when it's warm and it only shows up when I let it drain down after checking it cold?

Oh come on man, what's wrong with this PC now? It's moving so slow I can out-type gmail and quicken is entering data so slowly it can't even play the little cash register sound file at full speed. The woman said I should just get a new PC and join the 90s already and that my system is "the size of a mainframe". It's only a 4u rack mount case, sheesh.

I should have gone for a ride today instead of farting around with crap in the house. I went for a quick ride just to get gas and it was amazing out. So much better than the rain and gray of the last few weeks. I BBQed burgers and we ate outside before going for a walk to 7-11 for dessert. Very relaxing.

We finished up the details on the wedding invites, I think she's going to order them next week. They're not that expensive either, and I like the all-in-one folding style thing she found. I'm sure her mother will have something to say (I think she's on the phone now, I hear some sort of yelling from up stairs). Oy.

Something else I forgot to mention. It turns out that my mom was never big into the Catholic church, it was dad who made me to to Catholic school. Apparently mom had a brother (who died as a baby). The church would not baptize him before he died because her parents were behind in their "tithing payments". Until they were paid in full they couldn't get the kid baptized. When he died unbaptized (which in theory means he doesn't go to heaven) they told the church to screw off and gave up on religion after that. If the church was more interested in back payments and unable to perform is "holy" duties, they must not really care. Interesting stuff comes out at funerals.

We at at the fancy Italian place in the hotel last night. It was over priced, the service was bad and the food was only fair at best. Last night at "the people's restaurant" was 100x better. You must be in the know to get into the people's restaurant. You go down these steps into the basement and there are two large (metal?) double doors there but no handles, no bell, no nothing and they don't open when you walk up to them. To enter you have to put your hand into this hole in a little statue off to the side which trips the doors. Inside they carry the hidden door theme along with secret doors to get into the bathroom. Kinda cool. Food was, well, awesome, but I don't know what sort of cuisine it really was. Asia inspired of course but lots of French influence in there as well. (Apparently watching Iron Chef every night at dinner has made me some sort of expert). I had frog legs, stir fried veggies and sea scallops. Griffith had some kimchee and beef, and some other stuff I can't remember. I had an adult beverage called a "water bottle", and I couldn't read what the ingredients were but it turned out to be a huge glass cylinder about 12" tall filled with ice and some strange blue liquid. Neither of us could place the smell, but it was very sweet. I drank the whole thing and was buzzing, but not all that bad so it must have been a lot of sugar water and only mild amounts of vodka (maybe?).

This is my last day at work here, tomorrow early morning I'm on a flight to Japan and then on to SFO. I'll be glad to be back, even if I have to go to that funeral on Saturday.

I had frog legs at dinner last night. Super tasty!

The network guys sure make it hard. They won't let us directly connect back to Santa Clara, so I was first using the iPass stuff to connect to the McDonald's across the street (they and KFC are major wireless providers in the city) so I could VPN back to SC. Now I can connect to SC from inside but not ssh to pong. So I did a double hop ssh from here to SC to home. Lame, but it works.

Making good progress on the install now, could be done by tomorrow if all goes well.

The Far Eastern has by far the best gym out of any hotel I've stayed in outside of the USA. It's 5x the size of the one at the Oberoi, has almost real weight equipment and free weights plus enough room to use the stuff. It's still 10% the size of the Golds at home (or maybe smaller, Golds is huge) but it will work. This morning's workout was weird because every joint in my body was popping. Calcium buildup? Or just a lack of real exercise last week? I'm hoping for choice 2.

I'm sure I've said it before, but every 7-11 in Asia so reminds me of those "Lucky Dragon Markets" in Neal Stephenson's novels. They are so garishly bright and have so much colored plastic stuff in them and the worst music playing. So very out of place compared to everything around them.

I got a map and walked to Taipei 101 which is (I think) the tallest building in the country. I didn't go in, just took a picture. I couldn't really tell what it was, but I know there is a restaurant or bar at the top as Seth and Vince went there. I'll see if Griffith wants to go later in the week; I didn't want to end up going twice. On the walk back I found a bookstore (couldn't read much, obviously, and the fancy picture motorcycle magazines were $1300 TWD or $40 USD), and stopped at a Starbucks for a beverage and to read for a bit. I still have the rest of the day and I can't figure out what to do with myself. I hate free time away from home. Too bad there isn't a pool to lie next to. Well, there is, but it's 65 and cloudy out. Humph. The only English language movie at the theater down the street is "Underworld 2", which oddly I've already seen.

iPass to the rescue! I've got a few hours more of being stuck here, I need to find some food. They wouldn't exchange my rupees for baht, I had to bust out the US dollars. Everyone may hate us, but they'll take our money.

Made it to Taipei finally. Thai airlines is sorta ghetto, but they didn't show Aeon Flux as the movie. Too bad I slept through 99% of it. I caught just enough to know what it was, and assess that it was pretty bad. Hot chicks though, that's gotta be worth something.

I think my body thinks it's lunch time. I've been traveling for 12 or so hours since I left "last night" and only had a light meal of rice and some meat. I slept through the meal on the first flight, but I sorta had to in order to keep resetting by body clock. If I can stay up to a normal time tonight, I might have jet lag beat for a while. Griffith isn't here until Monday, so I have all day tomorrow to myself to do, uh, something. I gotta email the locals and see if they can take me somewhere.

Typing with latency takes some skill. Apparently putty doesn't buffer worth a crap, I lose a lot of keystrokes. I'm not that bad of a typist normally.

I had lunch with Keith and his wife, a guy from SC who has been stationed here for the last 6 months. They were excited to work over here for a while, to see what's it's really like. Now they're ready to go home, but are really worried about getting back into the swing of the US lifestyle. I understand, it's a lot less stressful over here.

I'm so glad I brought my ears with me. I had dinner with Manju last night and I wouldn't have heard anything without them. I can hardly here him in the quiet office, much less a noisy restaurant.

7 more hours before I head off to Bangkok. Hope the iPass thing works in their airport, it's a long layover.

Ah, Bangalore again. I must say that attacking it with a fresh attitude makes all the difference. Basically, it's easy being rich anywhere so why not just enjoy it? I also got a kick out of the fact that the airport has a gravel floor around the baggage carousel. At least they didn't lose my luggage this time. Oh, and it turns out the first half of my flight was on United, then I switch to Lufthansa in Frankfurt. The "Economy Plus" crap on United I figured was just a sticker on the seats and a marketing gimmick turned out to be real. They really do have 5" more space between the seats. That doesn't sound like much, until the guy in front of me on the Lufthansa flight put his seat back and it hit me in the face. I'm not that big of a guy, I should fit. I had to put my seat back just to have any sort of face room at all. Luckily the flight wasn't crowded and I had an empty next to me.

My room at the Oberoi is larger than last time, I have a separate closet and a TV in the (larger) bathroom. They're charging us $419/night now, maybe that's why. Breakfast was awesome: bacon and eggs, BBQ beans, watermelon hearts, bread, cheese, some strange cereal, orange juice and coffee. Sounds like a lot but the portions were tiny. I'll take variety over quantity every time. BBQ beans for breakfast though? Must be for the Americans.

They're spoiling me at the office though. Some droid brought me a paper, coffee and some sort of biscuits. I've also got a hard walled guest office. I'm like royalty or something.

Keith (British dude who has been here 6 months) told me that when your luggage goes through the xray, if they (customs) sees something they want to try to tax you on they put a chalk mark on the bag. If you brush the mark off, they won't stop you when you go through. Very high tech. One of the engineers brought some test equipment in and when they wanted to charge him US $200 he asked for a receipt (to charge it back to NVDA). They changed their minds and said they would only charge US $100, but he couldn't have a receipt. Tricky those corrupt customs dudes.

Running everything through the ssh tunnel from the laptop back to home is a bit slow, but I don't want anything getting intercepted. It will also let me get around the Chinese government firewalls when I'm in Taipei.

6:45pm and I'm still awake. That's pretty good. I'm guessing the serious jet lag will kick in tomorrow afternoon sometime.

I've forgotten how to do almost everything, so I had to look up our internal docs on setting up a bunch of the stuff we shipped over here. The docs sucked, so I updated a lot of them. It's amazing, I seem to be the only one on the team who will actually update a shitty doc. It's not hard, they're just wiki pages. I really need to thump some heads on this.

One of the dumbass outsourcing dudes crashed his crappy Mustang into the building today. I saw it getting towed away but didn't know what happened. Apparently he saw too many Dukes of Hazzard reruns and tried to do some fancy parking maneuver. He hit the curb and hit the building 3' off the ground. I thought people were making that up (about the height of the impact) but you can see it on the outer wall. If he had been 1 space over he would have come in the window and run over one of the windows admins. The security guys at least took his badge, let's hope the just fire him and don't get all excited and start putting speed bumps in the parking lot now.

Snow in the bay area. Nothing like other places, but even a dusting on Mission Peak is impressive. We almost thought about hiking up there, but everyone and their dog was headed that way to check it out so we took a pass. I guess we've seen snow before. :) Mom says there was 5" at the cabin again. That makes almost 2' for them in the last few weeks. I wonder how much is on the ground still? Guess that 4-matic Mercedes is coming in handy now.

Saturday night after a day of errands we went to visit my parents who were both home in the trailer this weekend. Mom spends her weeks at the cabin and dad stays here and then they either say in the trailer or the cabin on the weekends. The driving is going to kill them. I took the puke jerky over and we tried it. It's pretty gross; we ended up tossing it. I don't think it was spoiled or anything, I think that's just how it tastes.

Today I had been invited to go shoot an IDPA match, but it was raining again and Erik said he would rather just go to the range and work on his rifle shooting before his big boar hunt in a few weeks. I went and played with some loads over the chronograph. Interesting science, and by loading up some ammo that was the same other than the primers I think I've proved once and for all which primers are the best.

I've got to get my junk cleaned up and put away and start packing for the trip. I leave on Tuesday and haven't done any packing yet (other than my books, I'm taking at least 4 books this time, I don't like being under pressure not to read because I'm afraid I'll run out of books).

Wow, the hail was really coming down a few minutes ago. Griffith actually went and moved his car into the parking garage he was worried it would get damaged. The Montero was safe in the garage already (I drove today as I have to bring the shop vac home to clean the fireplace). We're almost done with the maintenance stuff so I can get home before 9pm and watch the season finale of Battlestar. Very exciting.

Oh, and today I got a spot bonus for work on the Taiwan project. I've given spot bonuses to my guys, but never received one. They actually paid the taxes on the bonus too, so the $1500 will actually be $1500. That little extra cash will just about pay my tax prep bill. Wee.

Almost 8:20pm and I'm still at work getting stuff done. Amazing. Maybe it's the fact that they announced the re org today that I'm still here, or the fact that I pissed in the Cheerios of the network dude and the security dude? Whatever, I finished my Thursday night Bangalore call and now I can go home and not think about work for like 8 hours or so.

I switched to gmail today. Holy crap is it light years ahead of yahoo. Even the spam ad stuff isn't that bad. I should listen to Kenny more often.

Oh, and the loaner bike with the better transmission than mine? No way. Now that I've ridden my bike again I realize it was just different, not better. Crap, it's raining again. Am I suddenly living in Seattle without the benefit of affordable housing?

It's amazing the solutions you'll come up with when you let the security guy and the networking guy design hardware and software solutions. They claim I "know nothing about how things work" yet they come up with wonderful one-off hacked up stupid shit that takes constant babysitting... and then they want me to run it. Yea, I know enough to stay far away from their problems. That much I know.

I've got the bike in for it's 30k service and to have that front shock installed. Should have a much better handling machine when it's all done. For a loaner they gave me a beat-to-crap 1150GS with 82k miles on it... but man does it run! It's got the same shocks on it that I'm having installed and the service manager says it's an awesome bike. I didn't believe him until I got it on the road. It's gearbox seems better than mine, and the brakes haul it to a stop with authority. I'm guessing it's really just because it's lighter than mine with basically the same brakes so it just feels better. The off-road focused suspension really helps soak up the crappy roads around here. It's so much nicer to not have to worry about the pot holes and all the creases in the pavement.

I just looked over the Oscar coverage, and I haven't seen any of the movies other than the best documentary (the penguin movie) and hadn't heard of most of them. I think that's pretty cool, actually. Not sure why.

The wireless just took another mystery dump. Completely shut off, kept rebooting etc. I was watching on the laptop; at first I thought maybe my wireless card in the laptop was going out, but Kristen's desktop stopped being able to see our router or the other 7 or so that are usually around. ALL the routers in range stopped responding. No idea what that was about. I turned off the "extended range" option while I was fooling around. The signal still reaches upstairs, but maybe I'm not running the radio so hard now and it might last longer.

Sitting here in the garage I just noticed that there is water in one of the Montero's headlights. That can't be good.

Oh my dog that was painful. 6 total hours of registry crap. We only registered for 12 things at C&B, and two of those were jars of salsa. Yea, don't leave me alone with the scanner for too long. Mostly it was a sofa we both finally agreed upon, some strange candle thing for the wall over the fireplace and a pot holder/hanger thing that doesn't go in the middle of the kitchen but off to the side. I liked the sofa a lot, so that wasn't bad. No one will really buy any of that big ticket stuff, we just want to get the discount after the wedding when we buy it for ourselves.

Next was Macy's and that was 4 of the 6 hours. Ugh. I did get to pick out better BBQ tongs than the woman would have picked. She keeps picking the flexi metal ones, which look cool but ultimately suck ass because they flex and stuff falls out. I want the fixed metal ones with a hinge, they don't drop stuff. One fun thing was that she wanted some 10" square brown plate and they only had a 7" square brown one on display. Rather than ask them for the number to scan I took a 7" and a 10" in a different color, figured out the pattern they used to generate the part number and then guessed at what the 10" brown one would be. Got it on the first try, the little scanner thingy knew exactly what it was. Score one for the CS major. Take that CS251! No wait, that's probably the assembly language class. Well, whatever the sequences and series class was, take that!

Excel has so many things built into it. I was fiddling with all of my chronograph data and it's got standard deviations and averages and whatnot as built in functions. I got a pivot table demo on Friday, that was pretty impressive.

We watched the pilot of Stargate SG-1 tonight. I thought it was OK, Kristen said she didn't really like the characters all that much, no one was worth rooting for and they were all pretty flat. Eric at work says not to worry too much if you don't love it right away, it takes them a bit to hit their stride. I just don't know if they should be making MacGyver jokes on the show. If the TV show MacGyver exists in the universe SG-1 takes place in, who was the actor if Anderson wasn't an actor, but really in the Air Force? Maybe I'm just thinking too hard.

I was going to eat my "beef jerky" from Hong Kong, but got sorta sickly from the leftover soup we had for dinner. I wasn't sure why the people on the bag looked like they were puking, but it doesn't bode well:

Friday I found out I was a victim of credit card fraud; some dude stole my REI card number and tried to buy some stuff at a travel agency in Paris. At least they have class? Anyway, the card is dead now and they're sending me a new one and something to sign to say that wasn't me making the charges.

Today I ran errands, emailed documents to the lawyer for the pre-nup, the accountant for taxes and got a .22 cleaning rod at Reeds (my existing one is some POS from the 50s or 60s) and a box of ear plugs. I found a 3 year old gift certificate in the safe and used that.

My parents came over and we went for sushi. Mom's not a sushi fan, but since her trip to Korea she's getting braver and will at least eat other non-raw foods at a sushi restaurant now.

Tomorrow we're supposed to go register for a bunch of crap at Crate & Barrel or some such nonsense.

A good day so far. The range up on skyline was closed so I went to one in south San Jose. They're cheaper, less annoying and they have a 200 yard range that's open to the public once a month and allows 50 BMG. Cool.

I setup the chronograph today and tried it out; it works well. I'm not sure what to do with all of the load data I've got now, but it's going to let me start trying some "real science" in this whole loading game. Before I was just sorta playing around trying to find something that worked. Now I can really start tweaking and see what different components do. I'll finally know if bench rest primers are better than the regular ones. Some shots from the range:

While I was on my way to the range, dad called and wanted to know if I wanted to do lunch. Turns out he was about 5 miles behind me on 101, so I just pulled over and got gas and we met up to eat. Unfortunately the only thing we could find on the exit was a Taco Bell, so now I'll have as much gas as the Montero. :) He pointed out that the Montero was smoking pretty bad. Not white-trash bad yet but he said he could tell every time I was on the gas as it started smoking more. Oy. How long before it won't pass the visual smog check? I may have a year left at most (I think I had to do the test-only dyno check last year).

I got a call back from the other lawyer I called Tuesday. The first guy was saying the pre-nup would cost about $3k, this guy says it's about half that if we're not doing anything too crazy.