Ring in the New Year

This year's New Year's Eve was low-key and private. It was too cold to be outdoors anyway. I went to AC's place in Taipei, made dinner, and we watched Disney's High School Musical 2. As the clock neared midnight, we went upstairs to the rooftop above the 15th floor to watch the Taipei 101 fireworks. With 101 towering all buildings and AC's apartment the highest in its surrounding area we had an unobstructed view of Taipei 101, which is about 20 minutes away. Being further away from the action, we also got great view of not only the 101 display, but also fireworks going off around Taipei City. So, at one time, we could see 6 or 7 lighting displays. And an elevator ride put us right back in the warmth of AC's home.

I hope everyone else had a great countdown too...! HAPPY NEW YEAR!

[Photo taken by EW who was closer to the 101 action. A little blurry though.]

HAPPY NEW YEAR 2008!

Wow, would you believe I haven't posted anything here for more than I month? It's been a busy time, and I guess there just hasn't been too much to post.

I hope everyone's had a great holiday season, and I'm sure you're all dreading going back to work. Fortunately, I don't share those feelings, because we don't take breaks here during the Christmas/New Year's holidays. Ok, not true. We had Jan 1 off.

My New Years was spent having a late hot pot, going to Taipei's City Hall to see the fireworks (watching the Taipei 101 fireworks, that is), and playing MJ until past 4am.

Since I couldn't be with everyone back home (nor everyone here in Taipei) to bring in the new year, let's do the countdown together right here, right now.

10... 9... 8... 7... 6... 5... 4... 3... 2... 1... HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!!!

[kiss kiss kiss] [drink drink drink]

Fantasizing...

I joined a Fantasy Basketball league this year. Yahoo! Basketball

For those who don't know what that is, you can consider it a statistical game. A league consists of 15 managers (like me), and on a set draft date before the current season starts, we create our rosters by drafting NBA players. In our league, we have 10 positions and 3 spots on the bench. Our teams are evaluated based on nine statistical categories: field goal %, free throw %, 3-pointers made, points, rebounds, assists, steals, blocks, and turnovers. So as the season progresses, the averages or sums (depending on the given category) is accumulated based on how players play in real life. This makes your team susceptible to injuries, inconsistent play, etc. And of course, we can make trades with other teams in our league, pick up players from the free agency, and all that good stuff.

So what does this all amount to? A lot of wasted time.

Since figuring out how to play the game (because there's a very, very slight learning curve), I've been staring at stats and reading news like crazy. Most of these guys, other than the superstars, I'd never even heard of. But now I'm hooked. It's a very day-to-day thing. I started off around 8th place out of 15 teams in my league. Then it's been a roller coaster ride 8th -> 5th -> 6th -> 4th -> 8th -> 12th -> 14th. After all this time I've spent looking at player statistics, reading news and expert advice, I'm in 14th place out of 15. Just horrible.

One big reason is that I've got no bona fide superstars. I have some good players, but they're not going to consistently put in double-double. I don't have people who can regularly drop 30 points on a night. And that really hurts. It hurts me inside.

All in good fun, right? Only when it doesn't mess up your mood. But it's a long season, and like mutual funds, we're in for the long run. Let's go, team MadMen!

Krosa

Typhoons come often in Taiwan, and most of the time, they only cause havoc on the Eastern coast of the island (winds and flooding). While we will once in a while get a typhoon holiday, many people will just go to the movies or shopping because the weather on the day off usually ends up being not-so-bad. In short, typhoons are rarely anything spectacular - especially in Hsinchu.

Come Typhoon Krosa. Krosa hit Taiwan on Friday evening and most of Saturday. Finally a typhoon worth talking about. In my three years here, I have yet to see a typhoon this strong, and it was fun. AC and I already planned to see a movie, and despite the strong winds and rain, we decided it'd be fun to go out anyway. Just because I had never done it. We got soaked, yes. Me in particular. My umbrella got inverted a few times, but survived because of its sturdy and flexible design. I saw a lot of trashed broken umbrellas - you get what you pay for. Anyway, when we came out of the MRT (subway) nearest the movie theatres, we started out walking towards the theatres about 10 minutes away. But we turned around after 3 minutes because of the high winds and heavy rain - and we started to suspect the theatres wouldn't be open. Sure enough, a quick phone call confirmed that they were cancelling all their afternoon shows.

So, Krosa was a fun and scary experience. Countless trees uprooted, bikes and scooters toppled over, flipped umbrellas, and even wooden panels dropping from tall heights. It was something more comparable to the mayhem you see on TV when a hurricane hits the Southeastern US States, but without the palm trees. In fact, we were in a taxi, and one girl crazy enough to be out scootering was blown in front of our car forcing the driver to break rapidly. Fortunately no one got hurt.

However, unfortunately Krosa came with bad timing. We got no typhoon holiday out of it, and it ruined a perfectly good weekend. But at least I got to experience the wrath of nature.

Dodge This!

Been off blogging lately because I've been too busy. Well, my readers have been too busy too, giving birth to babies and what not. But in the meantime, I've still been coming up with blog topics.

This past Wednesday, we had a company dodgeball tournament.

In Taiwan, dodgeball is a common game on schoolgrounds much like it was for me in Canada, but with a different set of rules.

The rules I knew as a kid were something like this:
- The game started with either a number of balls laying along a center line which both teams race to gather after a 1-2-3 Go! or with each team starting with the same number of balls
- If you get hit, you go into a zone behind your enemy's territory and can throw the ball from there
- If you catch a ball before it hits the ground, then one of your "dead" can come back in to play

The common rules in Taiwan are more like this:
- Each team starts with members in the "in play" area, and is surrounded on 3 sides by members of the opposite team
- There is only one ball in play
- If someone in the surrounding area knocks out a player, s/he can go into the "in play" area for his/her team
- Catching a ball doesn't result in your team member coming back from the dead

So, in the small area of a basketball half-court, we squeezed in two teams of 20, and whipped around a yoga exercise ball.

Made from thick rubber, a yoga ball is pretty heavy - and guarantees injury. I threw out a few people, but on one throw (which managed to kill an opponent) my arm came at a strange angle and resulted in a minor dislocation of my shoulder. Well, it was more of a subluxation - a partial dislocation. So now I have two bad shoulders, and I'm getting treatment from my physiotherapist now. Sigh.

But that injury was far from being the worst of the night. One coworker took the ball in the face, shattering his glasses. I wasn't playing in that game, so I didn't see the hit; but I saw that there was blood running down his face, with glass shards caught in and around his eye. So, he was taken to the hospital. Over the next couple of days, I heard he had surgery on his eye. Apparently the pressure from the hit might have busted up his eye a little, and now he can't work for a month, as they pay attention to the recovery to see if everything went smoothly.

Were You? iWoz.

Last Tuesday, Steve Wozniak was in town. As part of his iWoz book tour, "Woz" made two stops in Taiwan - one in Taipei on Monday, and one in Hsinchu on Tuesday.

In case you've never heard of Steve Wozniak, perhaps you're more acquainted with his partner in crime and co-founder of Apple, Steve Jobs. In all honesty, I hadn't heard of Woz until recently when I read the Jobs autobiography called "iCon: The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business". But fair enough, I decided to go have a listen to his book promotion since I got my hands on a free ticket through a coworker. In some circles, he's an engineering legend, having almost single-handedly inventing the personal computer.

Woz was one of two guest speakers - the other being Taiwanese Mr. Chang, founder of Trend Micro, best know for its popular anti-virus software PC-Cillan. For the Taiwanese, Mr. Chang is probably a better known name than Woz.

A third character that evening was a Taiwanese female moderator who in my opinion had no reason being there.


The 2 hour event roughly went like so:

• Woz spoke at a podium about his life experience, his childhood, his love for building computers, etc. Probably very close to what he recalls in his book.
  
• Then they switched gears, and had all 3 people (Woz, Chang, and the moderator) on stage, with Woz and Chang answering questions thrown out by the moderator.
  
• The moderator was awful. Trying to segway between answers and her next question, she would constantly throw in irrelevant comments, make terrible jokes (or at least I think they were attempts at humour), and she had a hard time
  controlling an overly-verbose Wozniak.
  
• Woz is a well-spoken man, but as I mentioned above, he sometimes has a hard time keeping it shut. He just wants to tell story after story.
  
• At some points, it felt like Woz and Chang were telling stories to show what they'd accomplished in the past to one-up the other.
  
• Finally, they took some questions from the audience - including one from me asking what Woz's current role at Apple is. Well, this is before I realized he wasn't at Apple anyway. Ok, officially he is. He has a very low salary, and basically just chats with Steve Jobs and acts as a consultant. The salary is just to make him an official employee - as the longest-standing member at Apple.
  
• Overall, I didn't take much out of the event. I didn't learn much, and none of what was said was very enlightening. But I guess sometimes you just go to these things just because it's cool to meet someone famous and have your picture taken with them.
  

After the event ended, a table was set-up on stage where Woz would sign books.

With a copy of iWoz I bought the day before, I stood in line to get my book signed. Some guy brought his iBook to have it signed on the cover. I had brought my digital camera, but without a battery. So, after I got my book signed and shook Woz's hand, I stood in line with my ex-coworker CY, who had brought his camera. As I got to the front of the line for the second time, I told CY to get behind the table to pose with Woz. I took his picture, and then we traded places and had my picture taken. Then CY and I went to McDonald's and to chat a little. About 10 minutes after sitting down, CY says "Eh? Where's my book?" Turns out, with all the photo-taking, we/he completely forgot to take his book. By the time we got back to the scene of the crime, everyone was gone. Fortunately, CY had already read the book - and he wasn't too devastated about losing the signed copy.

But that's how the evening went. I met him, shook his hand, and got his picture.


* While keeping with the Apple them, both books, iCon and iWoz, start with the 'i' prefix. But in my opinion, both titles are horrible. "iCon", which talks about Jobs being an icon, can also be read as "I con", describing how he's screwed over a lot of people in his career. "iWoz" on the other hand seems to indicate Steve Wozniak as a thing of the past, "I was". I feel like both books could have been better named.

EarthShake

We just had an earthquake. Not yet updated on the Taiwan Central Weather Bureau.

Around 1:53am, Taiwan time, Sept 7th.

2:05am Updated: Now it's up.

2007-09-07 01:51:00 6.6 058 24.20N 122.43E, i.e. 87.3 km ENE of Hualien City

Click here to see a map of where it hit. The epicenter is the red star. I live in the 3rd county from the top along the West coast - so I felt a 3.