Not New, but Improved

Finally I've made a few changes to my blog layout, and it now uses Page Elements. And finally, I've added titles to my postings as well. I'm not sure if I'd go back and add titles to my past posts, but I may just do that on one windy typhoon day if I run out of things to do.

Another late night, and it's time for bed.

Quote: National Post

Vancouver Police Chief Jamie Graham raised the spectre Friday of a retaliatory attack in the wake of the Fortune Happiness Restaurant shooting, in which two people were killed and six others injured.

Graham called the restaurant attack "cowardly."

Here's something I never understood. In the news, whenever someone commits a crime such as a kidnapping or murder, they call that person or the act "cowardly". How is that "cowardly"? I think it takes a lot of guts to go into a restaurant full of people and shoot up the place. What do people expect the assailants to do to make it less cowardly? Call their targets out for a dual?

We are taught to observe the rules of the road. So, what do you do when the rules of the road are broken or redefined by rogue operators of rogue vehicles? You take the law into your own hand. I don't write tickets or give warnings. I just do my best to give such people a hard time in the 3 seconds we encounter each other on the road. Call me a vehicular vigilante.

Scenario 1: On smaller single-laned streets (one in each direction), drivers like to give themselves room from parked cars by driving in the middle of the street, half-and-halfing it over the solid yellow dividing line. If there are on-coming scooters, they expect the scooters will steer clear of them.
Scenario 2: Scooterers often use the opposite-direction lane overtake cars, such as those stopped at a red light, to get to the front of the line.
Scenario 3: When a red light turns green, cars and scooters waiting to make a left turn will often try to beat the incoming traffic. Scooters have a better chance of doing so because they accelerate faster.

My solution to Scenario 1 and 2 are the same. When I see someone ahead of me cross into my lane from the opposite direction, I ride closer to the middle line. Playing chicken usually establishes my territory and forces them back into their own lane.

For Scenario 3, if I'm at a red light and I see people at the other side of the intersection getting ready to make a left turn, I usually peel out of the stop position as soon as the light goes green. This gets me to the middle of the intersection before they get a chance to squeeze in a turn. If someone insists on turning, I let'em have it with my left thumb on the horn.

I have no problem making good use of my scooter horn either. It's there for a reason. Besides, mechanical and electric devices have shorter lifespans if they're underused.

Finally, the cut I had at the side of my mouth is healing. There are few minor cuts worse than having a cut right at the edge of the mouth; because every time I open my mouth again to eat, brush my teeth, or yawn, it splits open again. Not very fun.

I had a canker sore on my frenum (the web under the tongue) not too long ago. That's not much fun either.

So, ummm... my advice to you all would be to avoid getting cuts at the side of your mouth, and don't get canker sores on your frenum.

Last night, in the 1+km scooter home in the rain, I saw the results of 2 car accidents.

One I couldn't really tell what happened. Two cars were stopped in the middle of an intersection parallel to each other - but I saw no apparent damage. The police were there doing there post-accident checks.

The other accident looked like it involved just one car. Again, I couldn't really tell from the aftermath what happened. This car was also in an intersection, with its front right wheel and half the axle torn off and sitting about 5 meters away.

Geez. What are these people doing?

On Sunday, my sister and I went with a group to Taipei's Yang Ming Mountain (陽明山) for a day of rock climbing. We probably started climbing around 10am and wrapped up after 6pm. I gotta say, it felt really good to be out there. The weather was mostly pretty good, with a brief bit of rain. Plenty of grinding, sweating, and fun company. But most of all, it was just nice to be out away from the pollution spending the day where mosquitoes have good appetites.

The first picture kind of shows our climbing set-up. The second photo is of my sister. She did the climbing there, but I'm credited with taking what I thought was a pretty good photo.

On Saturday, I attended a Science Creativity competition held by my company's Education Foundation. It's an annual competition with a cash prize/scholarship of 100,000 NTD to the winning team of four highschool students. The challenge was to create an automated structure with 4 stages, show two displays of Physics and two displays of Chemistry. So students, in the area provided, would create systems of moving parts, pullies, cascading dominos, ingredient mixing, burning things, etc using as much creativity as possible - subsequently judged on their efforts. But I was actually pretty disappointed with the results. Team after team had failing experiments, with links between each Physics/Chemistry stage that would break instead of falling through to continue the action to the next stage. I felt like these teams didn't think their experiments through, and didn't prepare and practice enough to be successful.

Nevertheless, it reminded me a lot of going to the Technolymics back in highschool. Those were fun times. Hopefully these kids learned a few things along the way too.

I took this picture a couple weeks ago. It caught my eye last summer when I was scootering around my neighbourhood on a weekend around noon. Only around lunch does the shadow of the overhanging electrical wires cast down upon the splattering of bird poop on the street below. Fun, huh.

Oh, What a Night!

Last night, I went to a company Innoluxin Zhunan (竹南), about 15 minutes by car (by highway) or 40 minutes by scooter (regular roads), for foosball. Zhunan is one area I'm not familiar with (having only been there once almost 3 years ago), though I happened to have lunch across the street from Innolux just at lunch yesterday-- a little coinkidink.

Since it's illegal for scooters to take the highway (for safety's sake), my path was as you see to the right here. This is what you'd do: take 寶山路 (Bao Shan Road) straight towards downtown. Then turn left onto 食品 (Shi Pin Road), follow the curve right, go up and down a bridge, double-back along a lane next to the bridge and turn right onto 中華路 (Zhong Hua Road). Then take Zhong Hua road, a big street, all the way until the destination. About 18+ km in total.

And yet, while that all seemed simple enough, that's not how it turned out. The second map is the route I actually took. Working off 5 hours of sleep, I forgot about the bridge, and somehow turned left at the intersection before it. But I didn't notice anything wrong, even as the road I was on twisted and turned (unlike Zhong Shan Road should have). I started to question myself as I felt I was heading into the mountains, but since I didn't stray from the main road of what I thought was Zhong Hua Road, I kept going. Until... I ran out of road. All I had were motorways and highways. I went one way, then felt it was wrong, and went the other way. In the end, I decided to follow the road signs that said 竹南 Zhunan... which took me onto Taiwan's largest highway. Happily it got me where I wanted to go, and made for a fun story. My detour only took an extra 10 mins for a total of 50.

This morning, I woke up to the sound of my radio alarm at 8am. Got changed, and went to the swimming pool. After a quick rinse, I did a few stretches, and looked up at the clock hanging from a post at one end of the pool. 7:21am. Exsqueezeme? In Adrian Monk style: Here's what happened. Last night as I was setting my alarm, I accidentally pressed the wrong buttons, thereby changing the hour of my alarm clock one hour earlier. The result was me finishing my 1000m and getting to the office by 8am.

Tonight, we need to be out of the office by 7pm because there will be a carpet cleaning and disinfecting (happens a couple times a year). So I'll probably go bowling and maybe have some MJ at my coworker's place.

It's 3:20am. I can't sleep. Let me ramble about what's going...

I was making Vietnamese drip coffee at work today. Drank it around 7pm or 8pm. I never thought I had ever been affected by the effects of caffeine. But here I am, at 3:32am sitting on the corner of my bed typing a blog.

So, what's up with me? Work's been busy lately. Working on a Sales Kit for when we start driving the Asia Sales Force sometime this month.

Been swimming about twice a week in the mornings, just before work. Not swimming all that long, my last swim being 800m. Increasing 100m each time. I was planning on swimming again tomorrow, but seeing as I can't sleep, I can't swim. I'm going to be a complete wreck in the morning.

Been also busy with taking rockclimbing lessons with my sister. We just finished our 5th and final lesson for this introductory course, and we've got a outdoor trip this Sunday to do some climbing at Ya Ming Shan in Taipei. Lots of fun. I'm going to have to take a break after we finish that. My fingers need a rest, and my so does my injured left shoulder. No workouts at the gym the last few weeks. Don't want to worsen my shoulder's condition.

After work tomorrow, I'll be scootering to another company to play some foosball. Just signed up for another tournament for 9/1. A smaller one. Gotta play more and practice.

I hate not being able to sleep. Mainly because at 2am or 3am, I get really hungry, and it's far too late to eat.

Ok, 3:31am now. Time to try sleeping again. Night.