Updates

It’s been a bit hectic, so here’s some updates.

Maggie’s shop got broken into in the middle of the night last Saturday night/Sunday morning. They popped open the two back doors. They had crappy deadbolts where the bolt was only about 3cm long and the rest of the mechanism was just a slender rod. Suckers popped right out. She has security through Tokai so the alarm went off and guards responded fairly quickly, but the burglars were gone by then. They didn’t manage to get anything for their trouble though. The security company also called Maggie and then she dragged me out of bed at 2am to go over to check things out. The security guard was covering the back door when we arrived but hadn’t gone in and hadn’t called the cops. Maggie insisted the cops be called before going inside. A second security guard showed up and decided he was brave enough to go in to check things out. A bit later the cops showed up to take a report. In case you are wondering, it’s about impossible to get a door replaced on a Sunday.

The new shop is going well. We need to work on a more efficient work schedule, but this is also the slow season for Subway in Taiwan. Also need to work on some store marketing because the old owners didn’t do anything in that area. However the store paperwork system the old owner designed is some hot stuff and makes the weekly reports a breeze. Need to implement that in the new store. I promised to keep everything the same for one month so just planning now what to do. We also decided to close for three days for Chinese New Years and work a reduced schedule for one week.

Today I found out that one of my favorite authors, Robert Anton Wilson died on Thursday morning in California. If you recall from a previous post asking for financial help, this was not unexpected. Thanks to everyone who donated a few months back, he was able to stay at home and get good medical care through the end.

I also host the Official Robert Anton Wilson Website on my computer, so one hint I got that something had happened was seeing my poor little SDSL line pegged to the limit with 99% of the hits for that one host. I temporarily redirected the main page to his blog on Blogspot, but it turns out that he uses some of his site’s images on his blog, so that didn’t really help any.

I was able to temporarily move the host to a free trial account I had through 1and1.com but that only has a 5gb/month traffic limit which would only last at best 12 hours with the traffic it was getting. I was thinking of upgrading the account there, but they don’t have the best reputation for reliability. Later I found a good deal on a hosting account through hostgator.com and setup on there. They seem to get good reviews, and have good rates. Also they have a promo to take $9.94 off the first month when using promo code ‘whreviews’ and since the account that I was looking at was $9.95 per month that means the first month is 1 cent with no obligation. If they work out OK I’ll probably move most of my stuff there after I shut down tcp.com at the end of next month.

New Year’s Eve Dinner

Tonight we had Suwa Hanzo (諏訪漢宙), head chef from Tokyo’s Harajuku Street Chinese restaurant Dongpo (東坡) flown into Taipei. He brought along several select cuts of Japanese raised Kobe Beef to prepare for us. To start off the dinner we cracked open a bottle of vintage Grand Vin de Château Latour Pauillac 1992. Dinner also included Caesar Salad, Steamed Crab, Steamed Broccoli, Creamed Ham and Corn Soup, French Bread with imported French Butter, finishing off with a dessert of Cheese Cake with Wax Apple accompanied by premium Alishan Tea. In about an hour we will ring in the new year with a couple of chilled bottles of Champagne R. Renaudin Réserve Brut.

(The above is all completely true and only somewhat exaggerated. Hanzo is my sister-in-law’s boyfriend and came to Taipei for New Year’s. His Chinese restaurant, while renowned for it’s ultra-spicy Mapo Doufu is only a two-person operation. He did indeed fly in today with Kobe Beef to prepare for us though. The bottle of Château Latour has been knocking around our house for at least seven years and nobody exactly remembers where it came from. However, that also means it had gone through a few hot Taiwan summers, so it probably wasn’t as good as it could have been.)

Earthquakes

It’s been a busy night down in southern Taiwan. We had a 7.1 quake followed by a 7.0 quake, both of which were quite noticeable way up here in northern Taiwan 300 miles away. They’ve since had a 5.2, another 5.2, and a 5.4 down there, all of which were too small up here. At one point Japan issued a Tsunami Alert for the Philippines but fortunately that turned out to be a false alarm. Currently there is at least one collapsed building and several fires reported.

This brings my magnitude 7+ tally to four.

Announcing Jimmy’s Subway Qingcheng Store

Jimmy’s Sandwich Company Limited announces that it will take over management of Subway Qingcheng Store starting Wednesday, December 27, 2006. The Qingcheng Store is located at 1F #12 Qingcheng Street. Qingcheng street is conveniently located near the intersection of Fuxing North Road and Nanjing East Road Section 3, behind the Nanjing East Road MRT Station and Brother Hotel.

Subway Qingcheng Store Map

Christmas Eve Dinner

For some bizarre, in Taiwan not only are Turkey dinners sold for Thanksgiving, but also for Christmas as well. In my book though, Christmas dinner is not complete without a Christmas Ham. I don’t think Turkeys should get to hog two holidays. After some investigation, I was able to find that Florida Bakery offered a take-away ham dinner which we used for today’s Christmas Eve dinner. The dinner included:

– large pineapple roasted ham
– two cups of honey mustard
– yams
– large pumpkin pie
– two packs of tortillas
– one pack of tortilla chips
– two bottles of fresh salsa

We also bought a gingerbread house from Florida Bakery and I made mashed potatoes. Maggie also bought some roast goose.

I’m stuffed.

IKEA MAGASIN Hack

One problem with laptop computers is that they aren’t really designed to be used as ‘laptops’. At best you’re going to end up with your leg getting a bit warm, at worst you will overheat your CPU and sterilize yourself. My current laptop computer has a Pentium M chip, and I run Speedswitch XP to make sure it throttles down the speed when not under load, so it actually runs fairly cool.

However, it has one design feature which is a bit annoying. The vent for the CPU fan is on the bottom of the computer. It’s also over towards the right hand side on the bottom, which means that if you actually use it on your lap, you are almost guaranteed to block the vent, risking overheating the CPU.

I’ve looked at several of those ‘lap saver’ devices which have come out in the past couple of years, but never found one that I liked. They come in sizes that don’t match my computer. They come with all kinds of extra crud like USB hubs and extra fans (again venting out the bottom… duh) that I don’t want and jack up the cost. And more often than not they look stupid. Really, all I need is some flat board to put the computer on so that there’s room for the air coming out of the vent to circulate.

For a while I was using one of Emily’s over sized children’s picture books, but it wasn’t quite the right size either, and probably wouldn’t stand up to extended use. Still, it did work OK. I took the measurements of my laptop and committed them to memory and then left a little note in my subconscious to be on the lookout for hard flat things that size.

A few weeks later I was in IKEA and my subconscious finally screamed out “Look! Over there! Flat hard things that size!” just as we were passing by the cutting board section. Sure enough, there were two cutting board styles that were almost exactly the right size. The first was a plastic one at TW$49 each (US$1.50), but it was a bit too thin and bendy. The second choice was a set of two wood cutting boards for TW$99 total (US$3.00). The bigger of the two in the set was just the right size, and sturdy enough as well. So into the shopping bag it went.

Let’s look at what was found:

MAGASIN cutting board set

A set of two cutting boards.

Laptop and cutting board size comparison

The big one is about the same size as my laptop.

Laptop and cutting board size comparison

And now with the laptop on top of the cutting board. The cutting board is slightly wider than the laptop but the depth is almost the same.

Click: Full set of pictures