Stuff

Boy, the malls sure are crowded during the holiday. When we went to Taipei 101 there were lots of people wearing tour group buttons. I guess for some people, making a trip up to Taipei for the holidays is a big deal. Anyways, I’m somewhat phobic about big crowds, so going out at times like this can be kinda stressful.

Here are some notable activities of the last couple of weeks:

Food:

Ikki (Corner of Dunhua North Road and Minsheng East Road)

When we first arrived I had a lot of misgivings. The entrance was a stairway leading down to a fountain and a bridge going over the water to a large black door. Outside was a hostess waiting to take our names and lead us to our tables. Inside the hallways are painted black with red lights glowing from the floors. Individual dining rooms were found behind sliding doors off the main corridor. In other words, it looked really, really nice. But my experience here is that the more flash there is, the less substance there is behind it.

I was pleasantly surprised however to find that the food was quite good as well. Ikki is a Japanese restaurant, and offers a choice of set meals with various options you can choose from. Every dish I had was top notch, and the sashimi selection was quite fresh and good quality fish. Especially interesting were tempura shrimp which were battered in what appeared to be some kind of dry noodle.

Diamond Tony’s (Taipei 101 Mall; also in Tianmu)

I’d noticed this Italian restaurant a few times while visiting Taipei 101 Mall, but had never had a chance to go in. The food and service here turned out to be top notch. The food is authentic Italian. I started out with Prosciutto e Melone, one of my favorite antipasti. It’s basically parma ham with cantaloupe, but the two flavors go together surprisingly well. Then had a Caesar Salad which was spiced up a bit with the addition of some smoked cheese. For the main course I had veal with ham and cheese which was also quite good.

Movies:

霍元甲 (English Title: Fearless)

This is Jet Li’s latest movie, and also rumored to be his final martial arts movie. If you’re a fan of this genre it’s worth seeing, but it’s only OK, not great. The story line involves Jet Li’s character Huo Yuan-Jia (霍元甲) who followed his dream to become the top martial artist in his town, suffered a crisis, was redeemed by the support of a blind country girl and then went on to compete to be the top martial artist in China. There’s a decent story in here, but it seemed to be a mishmash of fairly standard story lines. The fight scenes were pretty good, so edpark will probably enjoy it. The showing we saw was not subtitled in English, so I got a real workout trying to follow along. This one is not yet scheduled for US release.

Memoirs of a Geisha

I hadn’t know what to expect going into this one. I’d heard mixed reviews of it going in and never read the book. All in all, I quite enjoyed this one. The story was fascinating, both tragic and at the same time inspiring. Though it was well over 2 hours long, it did not seem long to me at all, unlike my experience with King Kong which seemed to be a tedious 10 hours long. There seems to have been a lot of controversy about many of the leading roles being played by Chinese instead of Japanese. I did not think this detracted from the story at all though. Anyways, I highly recommend seeing this one. This movie was done mostly in English and was subtitled in Chinese. The few parts that were in Japanese were simple enough for me to understand though.

狗年旺旺!

Today is the first day of the lunar new year. This year is the year of the dog.

Last night we had a big new year’s dinner with lots of different foods, such as chicken soup, soba noodles, sashimi, sushi rolls, mushroom noodles, asparagus and cream cheese wrapped with smoked salmon, etc. For wine we had a 2001 Ridge Dusi Ranch Zinfandel, Moet Chandon Rose Champagne, and then at midnight R. Renaudin Champagne.

There’s been a fairly steady drizzle outside, so it’s been one of the quietest new years I’ve had here when it comes to firecrackers. That’s good for me! On a dry year we’ll have firecrackers going off until well after 1am, and then again starting around 5am. Yikes.

I’ve been playing around a lot with my OpenWRT router. I’ve got it set up to build a VPN to my network in Santa Clara, and ntpclient and cron are setup to sync the clock. The router I got is the Asus WL-500G Deluxe. It comes with 802.11g wireless, 5-port switch, 2 USB2 ports, 4MB of flash, 32MB of RAM, and a 200mhz CPU. It also has two serial ports built-in though there aren’t external connectors, so you would have to install those yourself. The USB ports can be used for a variety of purposes such as disk/flash, webcam, etc. This model is one of the best equipped routers that supports OpenWRT currently. Looks like it goes for around US$100 in the US, though I got mine for US$83 in Taiwan.

One of the interesting things about these routers is that there’s really nothing special about the ‘WAN’ port on them. All the ports are on the same internal switch and then VLANs are built so that the WAN port is on one VLAN and the LAN ports are on another VLAN. For example, on my router it has a 6 port switch built in. One port is for the wireless, one port for the WAN VLAN and four ports for the LAN VLAN. The default is that the LAN and wireless ports are bridged together. But the interesting thing with OpenWRT is that you can setup the VLANs however you want to segregate different nets, use a different port for WAN, or in the case of using it as an AP or a wireless bridge, you can make the WAN port a regular LAN port.

Anyways, it’s a fun toy to play around with.

Tonsillitis Part 2

I’d been taking the medicine the doctor gave me last time and things had been looking up. By the time the medicine ran out I only had a little bit of a runny nose left. Unfortunately this morning when I woke up the sore throat was back again. I went back to the doctor this afternoon. Though it was the same clinic it was a different doctor since they each take every other day. Doctor said the tonsillitis was back again. He was going to send me off with only 4 days worth of medicine even though it’s almost chinese new year and they won’t be open again until next Thursday, so I talked him into 6 days instead. Hopefully that’ll be enough to put the smack down on this bug.

In other news, I signed a franchise agreement with Subway this week and we’re about to finalize a new ten year lease on the shop. Then there’s gonna be remodeling and training and ordering of equipment to do.

I’ve also been playing a bit with OpenWRT. Some of the current broadband routers and wireless access points are actually very stripped down computers running Linux. Some folks have managed to implement a common OS that works on several of these models. The one I have has 4mb of flash as ‘disk’ and 32mb of RAM, which seems minuscule in this day and age, but it’s enough to have a fairly useful OS on it with about 2mb of ‘disk’ free. I loaded up openvpn on it, and that with its other required packages still leaves about 1mb left free. It’s complete enough that I’m thinking I’ll start using it as an Internet router instead of using a Solaris box. It’s got just enough power and flexibility to do what I want, and a lot simpler to manage.

Which RSS Reader do you use?

Please add a comment telling me which RSS Reader you use to read LJ. Also please tell me if the reader can handle authentication for friends-only posts sanely. (If you just read posts on the web site then you can skip this.)

The URL change for RSS feeds has broken RSS Bandit. There’s a few other quirks in this client that I’m not completely happy with, so I’m startig to look around at others, and usually starting with what other people are happy with is a good approach.

Thanks!