Other Catching Up

So what else has been going on…

Maggie went to Korea for a week for a beauty equipment class. Emily and I got to hang out a bunch. Maggie brought back a giant box of Choco Pie back (picture coming).

There’s a new chain of Japanese Curry Rice restaurants started up by Japan’s House Foods called CoCo Ichibanya. They have 7 levels of spiciness and a whole bunch of toppings! One is near Taipei Main Station and the other near Nanjing East Road Station. I love the Japanese Curry Rice, and I have found memories of House Food’s socal Curry House chain.

After going to the Nanjing one a couple of weeks ago I popped over to Asiaworld Center to get a gelato and ran into Maoman from Forumosa.com who was having lunch with his wife. It turned out he had been meaning to talk to me that day anyways. To make a long story short, I was invited to be a moderator of the Legal forums on Forumosa. So far I’ve managed not to let the power go to my head.

Last week after getting my gigabit switch replaced (see previous entry), I ran into miltownkid back at my Subway™ restaurant. He’d actually sent me email before hand, but since I’d been out I hadn’t seen it. Good thing I decided to drop by the store. He was there to meet one of my regular customers, Elliott, who I hadn’t yet introduced myself to, one of the Hess crowd. Elliott also has the same laptop as I do.

After Elliott left, miltownkid and I talked for a while and then I showed him around the restaurant a bit, then went back to my house to let him borrow some books. He seems to have gotten really excited by one of them and posted a big old blog entry about it.

Subway news: We had our tax withholding on the royalties changed from 20% to 10%, then they decided they didn’t do all the right paperwork so they switched back to the 20% rate with the extra kicker that those of us who did what we were told had to go revise the payments and paperwork with the tax office. Fun. We also had two boxes of wheat bread which didn’t rise last week. Apparently a problem with that lot. Also after getting the equipment in I was told they needed more money for the shipping costs which I wired over. Now they are ready to close down my equipment account and the money’s still there. I ask what’s up with that and turns out the shipping was in the original quote after all, so they shouldn’t have asked me for more. So yay I get money back, but boo US$22 in fees blown. Otherwise things going fairly well. The end of the July/August tax period is coming so there’ll be a bunch of invoice sorting at the end of the week.

Next week is APNIC22 in Gaoxiong. The spam session is Tuesday so I’ll be going down Monday night and returning Tuesday night. I got together today with Arthur Shay, one of the advisors on spam issues in Taiwan to get the latest scoop so I can give an update (we couldn’t find anyone local to do a Taiwan update other than me so far). He’s going to put me in touch with some other people so hopefully I can talk to them too. The conference is actually covering registration and room this time. Usually I only get registration covered as a speaker. (And in case you haven’t been paying attention to this blog, Gaoxiong trip means Liuhe Night Market Fried Fish Soup!)

Then at the end of the week my Dad will come for a visit to see Emily (and I assume the rest of us too). This time he’s decided to actually stay with us in the new guest room we remodeled last winter.