Category: 沒有類 / Uncategorized

The wallpaper and wall art for my shop was scheduled for delivery tonight, so I went to my shop a bit early to check how the work was coming and wait for the delivery guy. The front of the shop has a roll down metal security door in the front that is opened and closed by a key fob remote control. I walked up to the shop and pressed the up button… and nothing happened.

Well, that wasn’t good. I tried calling the contractor but he wasn’t answering. I called my wife to see if she had the foreman’s phone number, but she didn’t know. After waiting around a bit and not being able to reach the contractor, I decided to try the back door, which involved going down to the next lane and walking down the narrow alleyway in the back of the shop, with not much light to guide me. The shop behind me has a motion detector light though, so by the time I made it down there, it went on and I had plenty of light.

Unfortunately, though I had a key for the door, it was also bolted on the inside, so even after unlocking it, I couldn’t open it. I went back around to the front where my wife was just arriving to see what was up. She tried the remote a few times herself to make sure I wasn’t just being an idiot, and sure enough it still didn’t open.

After still not being able to reach the contractor, we called up the landlord. She also has a remote for the door, so on the off chance that my remote had suddenly busted between yesterday and today, we wanted to try hers. She lives just down the block so while Maggie called her up, I walked down to get the other key. I met up with the landlord about halfway and she wanted to come see for herself the problem.

We tried her remote and still had no luck. So at this point we were really confused as to how the door could be closed and inoperable at the same time. It had to be working when the workers left for the day. At this point the contractor called me back. He thought maybe the workers had shutoff a breaker out by the electric meter, but after looking for a switch we couldn’t find any. He wasn’t able to reach his foreman, so he said he would come by.

While we were waiting, the delivery guy came with the wallpaper and wall art. Not having any place to put it, we just had him pile it in front of the shop. Then the contractor showed up, and he tried both my remote and the landlord’s remote to make sure we weren’t being idiots and sure enough, it still didn’t work. He also looked for a switch outside and couldn’t find anything.

The only thing he could think of was maybe the remote control box got disconnected and the workers used the manual controls inside to lower the gate when leaving for the day. The foreman was out sick today, so the contractor wasn’t sure exactly what happened.

The landlord was still around, so she let us store the boxes upstairs in the empty second floor apartment. The contractor promised he’d come back tomorrow morning to figure out how to get into the shop. For now, it’s an unsolved mystery how the door came to be unopenable.

The newest hitch is for the walkway sign. In front of shops in Taiwan there’s usually a covered walkway in front under the building. Most shops will have a sign across the outside front of the shop, and another vertical one extending out from the front on the building, but these aren’t visible to someone walking by on the walkway, so there’s also a sign put up in the walkway so that the passersby can see it. The trouble is that the shop to my left has their sign up on the right side, and the shop on the right has there sign on the left side, so I don’t have any place to put up a sign.

At first the barber shop guy said he’d be OK with moving his sign, but now he’s changed his mind about it. Most of the shops have their signs on the opposite side from his, but he still is reluctant to move it. And there’s still a few other shops that have their signs like his. Enough shops don’t have any walkway signs which allows them to get away with such a random system. The vertical signs out front on the other hand are all on the same side for the whole block, and the opposite side from where the barber shop has his walkway sign.

In other news, I have registered jimmys.tw for the company web site, and I’ve come up with a revised recruitment poster:

The remodeling guys keep having to take them down as they redo the walkway area, so I keep having to make new ones, and this time reworked things a bit. The sign guy is gonna make a recruitment banner that’ll be done next week that’ll get more visibility. Also once the outer signs go up there should be more visibility as well.

I have a business license now, but need to get the address split to get the correct kind of license.

The sequel to Snakes on a Plane?

emilylick.com has also had its pictures updated from 2005-12-30 through present. Enjoy.

(Ok, so this makes two pictures of the day.)

Before 1

Before 2

Demolition Day

Putting up walls 1

Putting up walls 2

Construction is going well. US equipment order is in. Signs are about to go up. Getting a “coming soon/now hiring” banner done to increase visibility.

New hangup is with the business license. Because the entire building is all one address, they don’t want to give a restaurant license that would also cover the upper floors. The accountant is working on finding a workaround which may involve partitioning the building into two separate addresses. There’s a possibility that it may delay the opening.

On Monday we had a pretty big rain storm and after Emily came home I noticed there was water dripping down onto the sofa from one of the light fixtures. I pulled the fixture out of the ceiling and found the dripping was coming from one of the air conditioning pipes. Fortunately it was not coming from the piping itself, but the insulation wrapped around it. The insulation had a small nick in it and the water was dripping out from there.

Our AC is the “split type” where there’s a small inside fan unit, and then the main compressor is located outside on the side of the building. I followed the piping out where it ran up to a compressor on the 6th floor of the building. On the 6th floor, I leaned out the window and saw that the insulation on the piping had been eaten off. And by eaten off, I mean literally. It looked like some rodent had decided the foam insulation made a good dinner.

So, we called in an AC repair guy to look at it yesterday and this afternoon he and his buddy came to do the repairs. He took the windows out, tied a rope to the ceiling support and jumped out the window onto the top of the awning over the greenhouse window that runs along the front of the fifth floor. He added a new foam covering on top of the bundle of pipes, taped it all up and caulked up the ends for good measure.

All I know is, I sure as hell wouldn’t go hanging around outside a 6th floor window even if you paid me, but this guy did.

On Sunday I took Emily to play at Tom Dragon in the Neihu RT-Mart while Maggie did some shopping there and at Costco next door. Emily had a lot of fun there, mostly playing the the ball room part.

It’s really warming up here now, so Emily had trouble sleeping until the AC was turned on in her room. Today it’s raining a bit so it’s a bit cooler than yesterday. It seems like we hardly had winter this year.

Yesterday I learned that the owner of Alleycats Pizza opened up a full Italian restaurant called The Italian Job with some partners. So tonight we headed down to Lishui Street to check it out. Their kitchen was a bit slow, but the food was good and the design of the restaurant is quite nice. Then Maggie nipped downstairs to Alleycats to get some pizzas to go while Emily and I headed to the book/toy store nearby. Then we spent some time over in the park on Yongkang Street and bought some Fried Fish Soup (you may have noticed I like this one) at a Tainan food restaurant. Then we went to pick up our pizzas and went home. It’s nice to have so many good choices in the Yongkang/Lishui Streets area, but now there are TOO MANY. We hardly ever go to the original Ding Tai Feng anymore, and we skipped the vietnamese place and Ice Monster today too. Now we’ll have to actually decide where to eat when we go down there.

Tomorrow my mother-in-law is going to Japan for a visit and next week my nephew Jason (he changed his English name to Oliver but I still call him Jason) is going to be visiting from Hong Kong.

Demolition started this morning, stripping out the old walls, front window, ceiling and scraping down the floors inside and front walkway.

Meanwhile R.L. helped me repair a sick computer back in Santa Clara. One of the 1gb ECC memory modules went bad.

Emily and I saw a neat looking lizard in the park.

Since the Valerie Plame story has been a frequent topic of this blog, I thought I should say something about this week’s news. Libby now says that not only was the classified information he leaked authorized by Cheney, he now says that Bush authorized the leak as well. He goes on to say that it was fine to do this because he talked to White House counsel who advised him that the president can defacto declassify material by authorizing its release. This seems to be the Kissinger defense, from when Kissinger reportedly quipped that he didn’t leak, he declassified.

So Libby’s defense now seems to rest on the argument that there was no crime in leaking the information. Never mind that everyone in the White House has apparently been lying about who leaked the story, if this argument is true. And never mind that Libby lied about it under oath. I just hope that the voters have the sense to toss out any politician who still defends these liars and/or criminals this fall.