Month: December 2006

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

Store #2 Update

The lease signing was supposed to be last Thursday morning, but for a variety of reasons on behalf of the disorganized landlord it didn’t happen. We were hoping to reschedule for today, but that didn’t happen either. It looks like we should still be able to make the transfer date of 12/27, but we’ll probably have a lot of things to do last minute to compensate. The old owner wants to close before year-end so he doesn’t need to worry about another set of taxes next year, while I’m not as worried if it slips a few days more or not. 12/27 was chosen because it seemed quite easy to meet when we decided the date in early December. Also as the Subway accounting week runs Wednesday-Tuesday we wanted to start on a Wednesday so neither of us would have an extra partial-week.

Actual Work

Things have been a bit busy lately preparing for the takeover of the new store. By Thursday the last of the contracts should be signed and then I’ll feel free to let you know which store I’m buying. The transfer is currently scheduled for me to take over the store starting on 12/27.

Today was a bit of an adventure in my current store. Due to a building fire nearby, electricity was turned off for the store this morning until shortly after noon. Being able to get back under way at noon would have saved most of the lunch hour, but the outage had interrupted our bread baking, so we didn’t have bread at lunch time. Salad only. 🙁

This was somewhat compensated for by what happened in the afternoon. At 3pm over a dozen people walked in the door. They were all English teachers from the nearby Hess school who were in training today and came over for their break. However, we only had one person on duty at that time which was nowhere near enough. Fortunately I was there and so there was the rare occurrence of seeing me with cap and apron on and making sandwiches. Between the two of us we managed to get through everyone before their half hour break was over.