Back in Taiwan

Saturday morning went out to IHOP for breakfast and it was PACKED but the wait for one person wasn’t too bad. After that went to the bank to get some US$, and then went to Mervyn’s to get a new rain jacket and PJs. I had a nice rain jacket I bought in Milan, but it was one of the kind that the waterproofing is not machine washable, so it got ruined… So found a pretty nice one that claims to be machine washable. Back home, finished up taking care of mail stuff and got pretty much everything organized and ready to go.

Took Rick and Anna out to dinner at Sushi Oh Sushi, a pretty good Japanese restaurant on El Camino at Bowers. It was Rick’s birthday on Sunday, so I treated them.

Back home again, got things packed, took a shower and changed to fresh clothes and headed to the airport just past 9pm. In SFO, EVA had a separate Deluxe checkin line, and there wasn’t any line for security, so that went pretty quick, but the EVA lounge in SFO doesn’t allow Diner’s Club access, so I’ll have to wait till I get frequent flyer status to get in there. Still the wait went pretty quick. I was able to sleep in small doses most of the flight. Getting in in the morning, I wasn’t nearly so tired as getting in in the evening. Still, it wasn’t long after I got home that I sacked out. Got up in the afternoon for a while and then was out again by dinner time and managed to sleep until nearly 5am. Now the question is how long I can stay awake today.

Last day

Had a nice dinner with my Taiwanese cousins last night. We went out for Chinese food and it was one of those places where I was the only white guy there. Pretty good. My mother-in-law’s brother is visiting them for a couple of months and seems to be having a good time. He was interested about my shop opening and wants me to show him how to make things since he’s a good cook.

This morning the weather had cooled down considerably. Friday broke a few records for high temps in March in the Bay Area. San Jose got up to 32 C. We’re a bit closer to the bay, so probably a degree or two cooler than that. That’s pretty high for around here even for a summer day, but especially for March.

Finishing up some last minute things and getting ready to pack for tonight’s flight.

Am I hot or not?

It’s been pretty warm up here in Santa Clara, a bit unusual for March, but pretty nice. Last night we left a bunch of windows open to cool things off at night. Unfortunately we forgot one thing. In the middle of the night, the heater suddenly kicked in. See, the thermostat is on the first floor, and it had cooled off enough down there to get the heater to come on, but upstairs it was still pretty warm because heat rises and all that, so the heater coming on just made things a lot worse. Oops.

Today was leftover Thai food for lunch, and tonight I go over to see some of my Taiwanese cousins. Then just one more day til I go back home.

Rich Shoe, Poor Shoe

rosminah invited me over for lunch today. She made chicken salad sandwich with balsamic blood oranges. Mmm, mmm.

Later I went out shopping for some shoes. I wanted a leather upper or a boot type of thing. I wanted black, but had to give up on that because couldn’t find much. At Big 5 I found some cheap clearance shoes that were in my size and OK, but they were only $9, so hey, it’s a $9 shoe.

Finally at Santa Barbara Outfitters I found a decent boot I liked, the Montrail Torre GTX:

They are pretty expensive, but they look like they are built like tanks.

CutePDF Writer

CutePDF Writer is a neat little program for Windows computers to let you make free PDF files for web publication or distribution. It requires you to install GhostScript in addition. It will install itself as a printer called “CutePDF Writer”. When you want to make a PDF of any document, simply load the document into your editor/viewer/browser, hit “print” and choose the “CutePDF Writer” printer. A save box will then popup and you can select the filename and location to save too. In addition, my tests show it produces smaller file sizes than Acrobat does!

Santa Barbara

I was planning on finishing up a few things on Saturday morning and then head to Santa Barbara, but a few things turned into more things and then it was already early afternoon and I was still not ready, so had to push SB off until Sunday. That was compounded by Taiwan having a series of strong quakes, so had to console my wife over that.

One of the new toys that arrived while I was at school was my new iPod. When the iPod first came out, I thought it was nice, but a little too big. When the iPod mini came out, I thought it was just the right size, but 4gb for $249 was too much for too little capacity. So when Apple rolled out the new iPod mini 6gb for $249 and lowered the 4gb model to $199, it was finally just right. I ordered a blue iPod mini 6gb during the brief time I was in Taipei between Kyoto and US. All in all I’m quite impressed with it.

I also got an iTrip mini for it, a small FM transmitter that fits on top so you can play your iPod over a car stereo. Reviews of it have been pretty evenly split between “blows goats” and “totally awesome.” So I’m going to buck the trend and say that it is merely adequate. The main problem is that the instructions tell you to find a free channel, and better yet, one with free channels to either side of it. Problem is, if you live anywhere reasonably populated, it’s pretty damn difficult to find a free channel at all, much less one that has free channels to either side. In Silicon Valley, there’s only a couple of free channels at all. Plus on the ride down to SB, I had to retune twice as my free channel was suddenly in use a couple of hours down the road. That said, it does work reasonably well, though it is somewhat annoying to be fiddling with channels every so often. If you live somewhere more remote, it’ll probably work just great.

So anyways, Sunday morning I was pretty much ready, but wanted to make one hardware change on neko.tcp.com. I got that all done OK, but then after moving things back around on the computer rack, I knocked the master power switch on the remote power management box, and all the computers went down at once. Everything rebooted cleanly a few minutes later, so not too bad, but tcp.com had an uptime of 1 year and 1 month, so it was kinda disappointing to interrupt that uptime.

Finally I was able to make it onto the road and down to Santa Barbara where I’ll be until Wednesday morning.

Done with classes

Thursday and Friday were warm enough to even dispense with my heavy winter jacket I had brought.

Thursday again was classroom in the morning and lab in the afternoon. I was feeling a bit more confident so was trying out more things in the lab session, despite a couple of equipment problems. I was quite pleased being able to make some pretty good stuff despite being a lot more inexperienced than some of the others in the class. Over in nearby Salina, Steve Fossett made history after finishing his solo non-stop around the world flight.

Friday morning we finished up are classroom work and had our final exam, which I got 97.5% on. Yay. Now I have a fancy certificate and everything. Class ended just before noon and I headed back to KCIA for my flight home. My DENSFO flight was delayed almost 90 minutes because of a hydraulic leak, but we only ended up getting in a bit more than an hour late. Still, that meant getting back home just past 9:30pm, so pretty long day.