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I’m not sure what kind of drugs you’d need to be on to ask me to sign your shirt when Jeff Ament and Stone Gossard are standing by (along with Mark Arm and the rest of Green River), but this guy was insistent enough that I went ahead and signed his shirt.
Since moving out of Seattle and buying a house on Bainbridge Island in April, I’m finding that the types of gadgets in my life have taken a dramatic shift from consumer electronics to the home improvement variety. While we rented a house for the past three years, I did very minimal handyman type stuff because I never felt particularly motivated to invest time and energy into improving someone else’s property. Now I’m constantly on the lookout for the right tools for minor home improvements. My friend Tim Carter’s site, Ask The Builder, has become a regular destination for me.
I’m also cooking more than I ever did when we lived in Seattle, which is a good thing. Growing up, I always loved helping in the kitchen both at home and at my grandparent’s house, where my grandma would tease me about being unsure if my left-handed mashed potatoes could possibly be good to eat. The bowl was generally empty by the end of the meal.
Before moving from Des Moines (the IA one, not the WA one) to Seattle, I remember having converstations with my friend Harry from Sausage Software about both of us finding the kitchen to be a great place to releive stress. Sometime after leaving Iowa, I forgot that I really love being in the kitchen. Or maybe I just got lazy because I’m married to an amazing chef and Seattle has some of the best restaurants in the country. Regardless, it’s great to be spending time in the kitchen again.
This summer I’m encouraging Wyatt to cook too, finding some fun summer recipes that keep him entertained while he’s on a break from school. He shows great enthusiasm for almost anything we try. Knowing there’s food coming at the end of the process is certainly a great motivator.
I also finally convinced Robin, my wife the chef, to work with me on starting a new food-themed site, which further provides me with an excuse to keep cooking more frequently. The result is a work in the work in progress, Daily Munch, which combines some of her great recipes with many of the simpler things I’m making at home with her much needed assistance from her chef skills when I don’t get things quite right. There are also some great contributions from Seattle food blogger Keren Brown, aka the Frantic Foodie. Ultimately I’d like to get a few more people writing about food, so that the site updates more frequently. There will be video in the future as well. In the meantim, I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished so far.
I got burned out on floor installations after finishing the hardwood throughout most of the house and opted to hire someone to install the the remaining bathroom floor. The installers were going to tack on an extra charge to remove the toilet in the bathroom and expect me to hire a plumber to put it back. This seemed a little silly considering how easy removing and installing a toilet is in general. To remove the toilet, you basically just need to make sure the water to the toilet is shut off, you get all the water out of the toilet bowl and toilet basin, and you carefully remove the toilet from the floor by removing the floor bolts and breaking the caulking seal around the bottom of the toilet.
Installing the toilet is just as easy - you scrape the remains of the old wax ring from the flange on the floor and from the horn on the bottom of the toilet. Seat a new wax ring on the toilet, then carefully place the toilet over the floor bolts and tighten back in place. Connect the water, check for leaks and you’re back in business.
Here’s a video showing you all the steps of both removal and replacement:
At the same time, I decided to also swap out the flapper valve on our other toilet because the old one frequently required jiggling the handle to make it stop running. My friend Tim Carter of Ask the Builder has a great video on this if you don’t already know how to do it:
While the night markets in Taiwan a packed with food providing instant gratification, the morning market in Danshui is for people who prepare their own food. The closest thing I’ve ever seen to this in the US is the Pike Place Market in Seattle, but even that doesn’t come close to providing the kinds of meat and it certainly lacks live animals. You have to be an early riser to catch the Danshui morning market, which requires a ride on the MRT subway system to the end of the line. Once you’re there, you can browse fish mongers, see pigs being butchered, buy a live chicken to take home for dinner, or simply stock up on vegetables.
While you’re in Danshui, there’s also a boardwalk along the mouth of the Danshui river and the Danshui Fisherman’s Wharf, which is a tourist site aimed more at local Taiwanese looking to escape the city than traveler’s like me. Small passenger ferries provide transport from the boardwalk in Danshui out to the Wharf, which is highly recommended over walking. Even seeing someone washing their pig on the side of the road didn’t quite make up for the length of the walk. Danshui also has a Maritime Museum which covers a great deal of the history of ships in the port town including an aboriginal canoe on display.
You can also take the ferry across the river to Bali, which has another boardwalk area and the Shihsanheng Museum of Archeology.
Hauxi night market is a stark contrast to the Shilin night market frequented by both locals and vistors to Taipei. Where Shilin feels alive with interesting sites, smells, and people, Hauxi feels like it’s clinging to a past Taipei would largely like to put behind it. Hauxi night market is the one famous for cutting snakes open and serving cocktails mixed with alcohol and snake guts. I saw snakes in cages, but I didn’t see anyone stepping up to try the snake. In fact, while we were in the section of the market with live animals, I hardly saw anyone. There’s no pictures of the snake purveyors here because they don’t want you to take them (presumably because what they are doing is frowned upon). I did try to get a couple of photos on the sly, but the camera I brought was too slow and blurred the images. I did get a picture of a pile of beheaded turtles, which I think are more for some sort of folk remedy than anything a tourist would find exciting. Fish and crustaceans were in great supply in the Hauxi night market, which explains the number of photos focused on fish.
I was on hand for the AMD announcement of their Turion X2 Ultra mobile processor and the 7 Series chipset for mobile computers and I couldn’t help feeling like this was the turning point for Windows Vista performance. In my own experiences with Vista, the key limiting factor for everything important to me — video editing, high definition video playback, and even day-to-day visual user experience — is graphics processing. My Dell D620 routinely crashes thanks to the Nvidia graphics card inside. My desktop Vista installation was a graphics slug until I upgraded to a GPU with 512MB of dedicated video RAM. AMD’s annoucement of the 7 Series chipset, should help make sure that doesn’t happen to anyone smart enough to buy a computer with the 7 Series chipset inside.
AMD’s announcement is all about video (okay, there was some other stuff, but I ignored most of it). The chipset is designed from the ground up to be able to handle HD video playback. No more jerky framed HD video playback. No more praying your video editor won’t crash while you’re trying to edit those AVCHD movies (unless of course the software is buggy). This is a huge leap forward because most people are buying laptops these days. And most of those laptops are using some kind of integrated graphics processing rather than a dedicated GPU. The integrated graphics processors, while technically being “Vista capable” are not up to the task of running the “glass” interface of Vista, let alone playing back HD, and editing is completely out of the question.
Upping the game even further, if you buy a new laptop with the 7 Series chipset and a dedicated ATI video card inside, you can take advantage of some bridging technology that makes use of both graphics processors where appropriate. It’s smart enough to optimize for using the dedicated card when you’re plugged in and the chipset GPU when you’re not, helping improve battery life (according to AMD by up to 90 minutes, which I’ll believe when I see). All-in-all this is a huge win specifically for Windows Vista, because it finally means getting a laptop with Vista on it won’t make it a complete dog for video tasks we are all coming to expect.
Thankfully this doesn’t seem to be limited to those giant desktop replacement laptops either. ASUS already has a laptop in the market (not in the US yet, unfortunately) with a mere 12-inch screen, HDMI out, and the 7 series chipset handling HD like a champ. If I can get my hands on one, the ASUS will be my replacement for the frustrations I’ve had with the Dell D620 over the past 18 months. If you’re in the market for a new laptop and care about HD video as part of your purchase process, look for the AMD Turion X2 logo, you won’t be disappointed. And if recently bought a PC with integrated graphics, you can solve most video frustrations by spending an extra $150 and getting a dedicated video card.
I needed to escape the confines of the swanky Grand Formosa Regent last night, so I jumped in a cab and headed for the Shilin Night Market. This was similar to night markets I visited in Beijing, offering many foods that go beyond my ability to recognize. In the covered market stalls serve oyster omelets, giant fried chicken patties, squid on a stick, noodles, hot pot, and tons of stuff I couldn’t recognize. There’s also an arcade and shopping for trinkets under the cover of the large market building. It’s what Pike Place Market in Seattle might look like if there were no health inspectors. Nearby the streets turn into an outdoor bazaar, where vendors setup in the middle of the street and shops line both sides. Plenty of photos of food here:
One of the things AMD invited Nate and I to attend while we’re in Taipei was the Info Tech 100 presentation where Pat Moorhead did a keynote speech. We went in not knowing just how prestigious this event was and as a result, we were grossly under-dressed (nothing like playing the ugly American). It never occurred to me that I needed to know how to read the characters for vice president, food and basic communication seem like better survival skills. I guess I was slightly better off than the guy I saw desperately trying to get some sort of poop off his shoe in the bathroom prior to the event.
The event kicked off with an introduction and award presentation by Vincent Siew, Vice President of Taiwan, complete with ear piece wearing security detail. I’m pretty sure if it had been the US Secret Service, we’d have been booted from the room. Awards were presented for the top 10 of the Info Tech 100 and then also for the companies that made it on both the Taiwan list and the Business Week Info Tech 100. The CEOs of ASUS and HTC were both on hand to receive awards, along with a long list of other highly successful Taiwan tech companies.
After a brief intermission and the departure of the Vice President of Taiwan, Pat Moorhead kicked off the four keynote presentations offering a succinct look at AMD’s broad vision of the future (or what I will refer to in a future post as how AMD is saving Windows Vista).
The day closed with a keynote from Jonney Shih of ASUS.
I’m a firm believer that having cell phone service on the local network while traveling is a must. I’ve been spared countless communication breakdowns in a cab simply by calling my destination and letting them speak to the cab driver. Making this possible in Taiwan proved to be a challenge because I couldn’t easily find a SIM card vendor. Based on past experience traveling in China, places like 7-Eleven are an excellent source for getting a cell phone service. You pay for a card that comes with some minutes and unless you call outside the country, you’ve likely got more minutes than you’ll ever need. In China, everyone who sells SIM cards knows them as ‘SIM card’, I never encountered a Chinese word used instead. In Taiwan, SIM card seems to be a common phrase as well, I just couldn’t find anyone willing to sell me one. Even the Nokia store at New York New York near Taipei 101(the world’s tallest building), didn’t sell SIM cards. The 7-Eleven downstairs (the 5th such place I tried) finally offered to sell me a SIM card in addition to providing some clarity about why no one helped me previously - the red tape is silly.
Think of the pre-paid virtually disposable cell phone we can buy at Target stores in the U.S. when I say SIM card. They sit equally on the communication food chain. The SIM card pops into an existing phone, but they serve the same purpose in their respective marketplaces. In the U.S., I can buy a disposable phone with cash and nothing else. In Taiwan, a SIM card purchase requires two forms of picture identification, a form that has enough English to fill in the blanks coupled with enough Chinese that you’re not sure what you’re agreeing to. If I’d been under 20, I’d need my attorney present. The SIM card packaging clearly states that I’m buying something with no monthly fee and no bill, but still several interesting hoops to jump through. Not sure if this is the norm in most countries that sell SIM cards, but this is certainly my first experience with inconvenient communication.
Shortly after landing at 5:40 am local time, two hours after the worst one hour of turbulence I’ve ever experienced, we were safely on the ground in search of an ATM. The money changer at the airport helpfully pointed Nate and I in the right direction. A few minutes later I stopped back at the money changers with 3 crisp 1000 TWD notes (approximately $100 US) and a request to break on of them. After a quick count of ten 100’s in a money sorting tray I stepped away from the counter only to be called back again. The money changer was trying to convince me I’d given him a 500 TWD note and that he’d given me too much money. A nice way to make $500 if you can pull it off. Unfortunately for him I wasn’t that jet-lagged, yet. Later in the morning I was extremely thankful when the cab driver graciously returned my phone after it fell from my pocket on the way to the hotel.
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