Category: taiwan

Sometimes I go here… those times get their own category.

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facing northeast

How may I be helping you?
Busy morning and still no internet at home. Time to press “go” on the blog.

Turns out my router is just fine, my ISP is having some issues with their “circuits,” and I’ll be out of an internet connection for an undetermined amount of time. That sucks for me, because the internet is my brainless-entertainment. I mean, for most people, it’s television. They come home, plop down, and watch TV all night before going to bed. Maybe not really paying attention, maybe doing other things while “watching,” but the TV is the prime occupier of their free time. For me, it’s the computer. I’d rather sit in front of the computer, surfing the net, listening to music, tinkering with this and that, making webpages, etc. The computer is my TV.

This has been the source of some friction between Sharaun and I before. She feels like I spend the “whole evening” on the computer, which I counter with something like, “I feel like you spend ‘the whole night’ on the TV.” This does not computer to her, because the TV is just “what you do.” I’ll admit, it’s more mainstream. I bet the vast majority of people come home from work, turn on the TV, and have it going in the background until they go to bed. Kids of the TV generation then see this as “what you do” in that post-work, post-school, evening time. It was the same way with my family, we had our “shows” that we watched. Cosby on Thursdays, Murder She Wrote on whatever day Murder She Wrote came on, McGuyver, Family Ties, etc. Problem is, in her mind, there is a fundamental difference between wasting time in front of a television and wasting time in front of a computer. One is “OK,” a socially-acceptable waste of time, while the other, for some reason, is not.

To me, they’re both wasting time. To her, watching TV together is “spending time” together. But, if I’m sitting on the couch with the laptop while we watch TV together, somehow it doesn’t count. I don’t really understand it. In order for our evening to qualify as “spending time together,” we apparently both have to choose to waste it in the same way. I’m even in the same room, the sole difference is that I’m staring at a laptop monitor and she’s staring at a television. It’s funny, if I’m reading a book – that’s cool, if I’m doing dishes in the kitchen, that’s cool too; it’s only the computer that somehow magically negates the “spending time together” thing. I predict this as a problem for more people as the brainless-pastime paradigm slowly shifts.

I talked to Tracy on the phone today, a buddy of mine is in Taiwan staying at the hotel where she tends bar. He was at the bar, and had her call me up. She still can’t speak English that well, but it was funny to talk to her. She said she’s happy that I’m coming out there again soon, and this time she might let me take her out to dinner. I mean, really, y’all be knowin’ she’s not a real “girlfriend,” or else I wouldn’t be calling her that on the internets – but she is fun to hang out with when I’m in town. Hopefully, I’ll be able to talk to her a lil’ more this next time – providing I pass my Mandarin class and don’t get fired.

Kind of related, last night I called tech support for my ISP, since the connection was down and I wanted to inquire about a possible outage. The guy I got routed to was in India (I’m not pigeon-holing here, he told me), and our conversation was hilarious. First off, without sounding too boastful, I’ll set the stage by saying I could run rings around this guy’s tech expertise. Not that what he knows won’t enable him to solve 99% of the type of customer issues he probably runs into, just that to me it was pretty much useless. Anyway, I told him my connection was dropping packets, particularly large ones. Small packets were making it through with a higher percentage, while the loss increased with packet size.

The first thing homeboy asked me was “where, exactly, are you located?” I responded with my city and state. “Mmm-hmmm, OK,” says he, “Where, exactly though, are you located, sir?” “Uhh…,” I repeat my city and state again, asking if that’s the information he wants. I go further and give him the nearest “big” city, just in case he’s squinting at a wall-map of a country halfway around the world trying to find my tiny suburb. “Mmmm-hmm, excellent sir. But, in terms of location sir, where, exactly is that located?” Wow… what?! My mind races: what does this guy want? I respond with my zip code, and wonder if I should next resort to longitude and latitude or degrees, minutes, and seconds. “Oh, and currently I’m sitting in my computer room in a large grey chair, facing northeast.” Hilarious. It goes without saying, I humored the guy for about 10min and then hung up on him when I got to feeling too bad. Yeah, I do people like that.

Dave out.

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the groovy barn

Indeed he was, my friend.
So, despite some minor hiccups, everything seems to have come over fine. Migrating from a Windows machine to a Linux machine can have its little quirks, like the fact that Linux is case-sensitive and any instances where you’ve ignored file case on your Windows-site code are now broken links on a Linux host. But, with the help of some automated link-checking and human spot-checking, I think I’ve got most things right. Not that you care, but, look, I nearly made a paragraph talking about it. That’s wordcount baby, and wordcount means quality. Right?

A buddy of mine is in Taiwan right now, staying at the “company approved” hotel where my Taiwan girlfriend works as a bartender, so I told him he should pay her a visit and tell her “Dave says hi.” Apparently he did, and she gave him some free fries for “being my friend.” So, if my sheer awesomeness wasn’t enough incentive for you to become my friend – I now come with free french fries. I’m headed back in early December, and I can almost taste the bloody marys and cigars. Oh, and the fish eyes… can’t forget the fish eyes.

I remembered another story I wanted to write down, so here I go. We’re in 8th grade, and one of our passions is just “walking around” town. We’d walk everywhere, loitering first here, then there. One of our old town’s most stickout features was a big tall cement plant that sat along the railroad tracks just off the highway. It had several cool buildings, and a lot of neat-looking machinery and hardware. There were huge conveyer belts running from the ground to towers in the sky, big warehouses, and one really tall “silo” looking thing. Now, I don’t know much about cement or mining or whatever, but pretty much every “materials” plant I’ve seen looked pretty similar. The railroad tracks ran right through the place, presumably for easy loading. Anyway, we were always intrigued by the silo in the distance – and one day decided to walk to it.

When we got there, we ducked under a gate and headed onto the grounds. It was a weekend, so the place was dead. We’d soon find out, however, that it being dead had nothing to do with it being the weekend. We walked to what was the main building, and found some huge roll-up loading doors wide open. Letting ourselves in, we found the place to be completely abandoned. Freshly abandoned though, it would seem, hastily or without care, it seemed, too. Desks still had pens and paper on them, there were calendars on the wall with semi-recent (within a month) dates from the past marked on them, and although there were light-bulbs in the sockets, there was no power. This was no cubicle-farm, it was a huge empty warehouse with a couple “offices” tucked in the back. We explored the warehouse, then set off to explore the remainder of the place.

We climbed to the top of the conveyer belt towers, explored some deep “tunnels” that went underground (with mine-shaft-looking handcart tracks running down them), and just generally poked around the whole place. Finally, satisfied it was truly abandoned, and with a few hours of uninterrupted trespassing bolstering our confidence – we did what any good teenage boys would do: we trashed the place. I remember throwing bricks through windows, tossing rocks at fluorescent lights, and even going to all the trouble to uproot a whole toilet from the men’s room, then sharing the task of precariously hauling the heavy thing up with us as we climbed the thin ladder to the top of the conveyer tower – all so we could toss it from the top and watch it explode in a hail of porcelain ten stories below us. It was awesome. Eventually, we got bored breaking things and decided to explore the silo.

The silo was much taller than the conveyer, at least twice as tall and maybe half that again. As we walked over to it (it was on the other side of the tracks), we noticed that there was a whole other building hiding behind it. Before we hit the silo, we decided to explore our new find. The small building was just an empty warehouse, with a truck-ramp on one side for loading or something. It was a strange split-level thing, one quarter of the floor being about seven feet taller than the remaining three-quarters, and there was a small ladder leading up/down between these levels. What was even better – we were obviously not the first to have discovered the place. The walls were covered with paint, sprayed on, brushed on, all graffiti. This was a party place, this was a hangout. I remember seeing “If you don’t eat your meat, you can’t have any pudding” crudely emblazoned across one will, as well as the requisite Kilroys, peace-signs, and expletives. One wall was a mural of sorts, with the words “groovy barn” in the center. So that’s what we called it: the groovy barn.

There was a pile of charred wood and ashes in a blackened corner of the building, and beer cans/bottles littered the floor – we instantly loved the place. At the base of the mural wall were several cans of paint, they called to us like sirens. Before we knew it we were using our hands to add our own decorations to the walls and floors. We smeared lines from Doors songs, traced our outlines in a human mandala one the floor, with the words “I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together” written in a circle around us. Then we finished up the cans by throwing paint all over the place. We had a blast, but it was clearly time for the final frontier – the silo.

The silo part of the silo was jutting out of a smaller building below. We entered the smaller building and poked around a bit, finding some more graffiti sacks upon sacks of sand or something. The place didn’t look like it had been in a state of disuse for too long. Finally, we found what we were looking for. Still inside, we climbed a small ladder up to a kind of “hayloft” place. The hayloft had a door to the outside, which let you onto a small platform on the outer base of the silo; a tiny, rickety-looking ladder stretched up the side of the silo to the sky. We were scared, but we decided to do it.

I remember being scared out of my mind. There was nothing to hold onto but the ladder, nothing to break your fall if you slipped, and it was high. The rungs weren’t very wide, and the welds to the silo were rusty-looking. Being scared made it even more fun, and after a couple starts, retreats, and some group chest-pounding, we made the final push to the top. At the top, it was awesome. The view was incredible, and you had a feeling of conquest, over fear, over the silo, over anyone who’d be too afraid to do the same – it was the things teenage boys dream of (well, the non-sex things, at least). We did all the “look how high I am!” things you normally do, spit, peed, threw rocks, etc. Finally, we got scared down when a man in a truck pulled up, even though he didn’t spot us we decided it was time to split.

We went back to Rinker (yeah, that’s what the place was called) quite a few times, although mainly just to climb the silo again with new people. I remember one time even taking “the girls” (Kyle and I had significant others at the time) and coaxing them to the top. Eventually, when just the guys and I were visiting, a police cruiser rolled up on us and gave us the standard bit about trespassing and whatnot. After the police thing, we didn’t go back much. I think the last time I went, it was with the same crew I’d first been with – we made one last climb to the top and, in an act of retribution, left my by-then ex-girlfriends name and number with the standard “for a good time call” message in thick permanent marker. While up there, we discovered that were weren’t alone: a huge nest of bees had made their home in the eaves of the silo. Freaked, and having accomplished the slander we set out to do, we headed down and never returned.

I accept your challenge.

I’ve often wondered if our painted messages still exist in the groovy barn, or if Robin’s name and number still make promises of a “good time” atop the silo. Last Christmas I forced Sharaun to take a drive out there and snap some pictures of the place – but I was too chicken to squeeze through the gates and check. Maybe this year… owell. Oh, and this story reminded me of the crane story – I’ll try and get that one out too.

Dave out.

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tommy of concierge

Many a night started off right sitting here.
I know, I’ve been listening to this album for nigh on a month straight now – but I still crave it on the drive to work in the morning. Even with new and excellent distractions like the Mono and Dungen albums, I find myself still coming back to it, over and over. I like it so much I gotsta get it to you, so here ’tis – fresh and steaming, the 2nd cut off the Arcade Fire album Funeral. Enjoy. In addition, I dunno what language this guy is singin’ in, but the album is just indomitably rad? but don’t take my word for it, listen to this and be convinced. The intro paragraph is over, but here’s more music from Dungen and Arcade Fire.

Remember the last time I was in Taiwan? Yeah, I do too. Anyway, I was there for two whole weeks that last time. That’s the kind of stint where a brother starts feelin’ right comfortable near the end. I mean, the hotel is where I’ve gone home to for two weeks every night, so the hotel gets to feeling quite a bit like a surrogate home. And the hotel work puts us up in while in Taipei is nothing but class, class all the way I tell you. I mean, I’ve written about the princely way guests are treated, the plush accommodations, and awesome staff – because they really do cater to your every whim. I love staying there, I love heading to the bar each night for a bloody mary or two, if it wasn’t for the fact that I’m half way ’round the world from my real life – I might not mind staying at that hotel forever. Anyway, this is going somewhere, I promise.

Last time I was there, I had accumulated some twenty-odd nights of patronage at the hotel this year, and they give you little perks based on the amount of time you stay within a year. I had gotten little manicure kits, free massages and spa treatments, free laundry services, free food, candies on my pillow, all sorts of awesome little goodies. And, having really connected with the bar staff and spent a couple nights going out and karaoking with them, I was more than satisfied with my two-week stay. On my day of departure, the hotel left a feedback form in my room. Having had such an enjoyable stay, I felt obligated to let them know. So, before I went to bed that night I sat down and filled out this little form.

I mentioned how much I enjoyed the stay, and in the write-in portion made sure to compliment the entire staff of Henry’s Bar – giving special nods to Tracy and a friendly waiter who always mixed my bloody mary’s extra well. I also mentioned that the wireless access point that served Henry’s Bar seemed to be flaky. Other than that, I left that little form on my pillow – a glowing review of a well-enjoyed fortnight. And that was that, I had all but forgotten about that little form. Until yesterday, that is.

Yesterday I went to check my “mailbox” at work (really just a big hanging-file cabinet with a folder for me, and everyone else, in it). Lo and behold, a letter from the hotel! Get a load of this (click for a larger version):

Your opinion counts.

Oh man, that is classic. First off, it tells me that this hotel most likely responds to each and every piece of feedback they receive – which is just another example of how rad the place is. Second, on the whole it’s just crackin’ me up. They make it sound like the spotty wireless in the bar ruined my otherwise spotless trip to Eden, like I was gonna be doing serious work in a smoky bar half-torn on bloody marys. I only wanted an internet connection to surf around and maybe read Fark or something. And I love how they acknowledge my comments about the bar staff and waiter in particular, just awesome. If I was a VIP at twenty-some nights, I’m gonna be a freakin’ rock star the next time I go. What a great letter, I love that hotel.

Did you guys read this? Do people not read? Or don’t care that this was why we voted for war? Sorry, I almost managed a whole entry. This blog has inline media, and as a rule that means I don’t type as much. For more reading, check out this site – pretty interesting stuff.

G’night, Dave out.

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wayne presents

Moses brought them down from a mountain.
Sometimes water sounds and tastes infinitely better to me than soda, like right now – I’m drinking water and it “tastes” great. Intro paragraph over.

Tonight I mowed my sickly lawn with tender-loving care. I edged her, used the blower to clean her of stray cut grass, fertilizered her, weed-controlled her, and all around pampered her. But that’s not what’s important about this story – the important part is the soundtrack I chose for the task. A few days ago I downloaded an album by a group called The Horns of Happiness, simply because I liked their name (alliteration does a whole heck of a lot for me for some reason). Occasionally I’ll do this, grab an album on name alone, and usually it’s a bust. Like they say, you can’t judge a book by it’s cover (as illustrated beautifully by the turds contained within the kickass album covers of Molly Hatchet). Anyway, the album was perfect for our oddly Fall-like weather this week. Some strange hodge-podge of disjointed tunes, sometimes reminding me of anything from the Microphones to Neutral Milk Hotel to Sufjan. Anyway, it’s quickly climbing the charts in my head, gunning for number one with some animal drive? yeah. The music was good, and the lawn’s already showing signs of improvement. Whew! What a relief.

Speaking of our unseasonably Fallish weather of late, bending my mind more and more to thoughts of Halloween. If I haven’t said it before, I freakin’ love Halloween. Ever since I was a kid and my brother and I used a pair of my dad’s old slacks and one of his old flannels to make a mask-covered basketball-headed dummy which we then ritualistically covered in 99? fake blood from Kmart and hung from the basketball goal above the garage. I will repeat, Halloween is awesome. This year will be our second annual Halloween party, and I swear I’m fated to finish the backyard the day before or something. I just want it done y’all, I just want it done.

Man, sometimes I get super sick of people sending e-mails around without checking them out online first for accuracy. I have a family member who is very religious, and therefore very republican and very pro-Bush. Being so republican means that this person is also vehemently anti-democrat and anti-Kerry. What bugs me is how these anti-Kerry pro-Bush mails seem to circulate like wildfire among these “churchy” e-mail “clubs.” Like a right-wing party line, these retired-couples-cum-internet-surfers dutifully forward any piece of tearjerking, awe-inspiring, mushy God-crap that lands in their inbox along down the line to the next person who needs a “virtual hug” from the Lord. Now, I know I’m on the edge of offending people here – and I don’t mean to. You’re more than welcome to need a virtual hug from the Lord, heck maybe even I do, but that’s not my point.

It’s the political mails that really get me – mostly because these donation-plate-stuffing senior citizens just blindly believe whatever trash washes up on their AOL accounts’ shores and proceed to propagate said nonsense to those of us who actually bother to “fact check” the cyber-missives. Without so much as a thought on the accuracy of whatever the internet rumour-mill churned out last, they jot their insightful comments on top of the long line of those before them and proceed to add another column of carats to the left margin of an already unreadable body of mis-tabbed and oddly-spaced text. “I think this is disgusting, shame on us if we elect these men,” reads a comment in the 15th attachment I had to open on the way to the original e-mail which is still another 10 nested “envelopes” down.

And hey, I’m not even that guy who says anything negative about the dems or Kerry is necessarily wrong. Maybe, somewhere out there, there’s a mail about Kerry/Edwards that’s fact-based and worth distributing. But most of this stuff is ridiculous. Where does it say in the Bible that you’re duty-bound to God to forward this rubbish? Thou shalt be staunch republican, may thou never neglect thy duty to forward any e-mail which let’s thy distribution list know thy as such. I mean, you think Edwards flips people off as he runs? Think Kerry’s wife really runs overseas sweatshops? Or maybe that he’s voted to kill every defense weapons bill since ’88? They’re all crap folks, all crap.

To be fair, there’s no shortage of the same going around about Bush – and the tree-huggers can be just as bad about forwarding mails painting him as the grandest fool of an evil-dictator ever to grace the earth? so I suppose it goes both ways.

And to all my relatives, if you’re reading this, I love you dearly.

Time to go check e-mail and get ready for bed. Oh yeah, here’s a picture I drew last week in Taiwan while a co-worker was doing his portion of our presentation. It was the 8th or 9th time we’d given the same presentation to customers, and I guess I was just getting bored. Enjoy.

G’nite all, Dave out.

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you wouldn’t want it to get too cluttered

Man, that's longer than Tracy.
Ugh man, I’ve got that ten-hour plane-flight funk going on. You know, that thin sheen of been-up-too-long sweat and grease all over my body. Coupled with the stretched, frazzled feeling you get from bring travel-worn – I’m ready to sleep in my own bed. I got bumped from business class on the long leg of the flight, so I’m in the next best place – the exit aisle with no seats in front of me, on the aisle seat. I actually think this would be fine were the arm rests just a tad freakin’ wider so as to accompany my ate-too-much Taiwanese food hips. I mean, my wallet is pressed so tight against the armrest that it’s holding the seat-recline button in perma-depress – which is really pissing me off. The only problem with sleeping in this seat is that I tend to naturally lean out into the aisle to keep from laying my head on the shoulder of the attractive young Japanese woman sitting painfully close to my hip pocket in the seat next to me. I think they are stewardesses, I hope they don’t mind the snoring.

Got home to find the lawn in a shambles. See, we had some decorative concrete curbing (mow-strip) installed one Friday while I was gone, and apparently the install crew got the sprinkler treatment during their job (at least this is what I imagined happened). To fix this problem, they decided to simply turn off the main water (they had no choice really, not being able to access the controls in the garage or anything). Anyway, Sharaun didn’t notice the sprinklers weren’t coming on until the lawn told her by turning a nice I’m-dead brown. Not her fault, how’s she supposed to know. She ended up calling me at a customer in Taiwan, where I proceeded to work through an extremely frustrating 20min debug process in which we attempted to figure out why the sprinklers weren’t working. Eventually, and without even getting divorced, we figured it out and got them up and running again.

But you know me, I take a lot of pride in the yard. I mean, I’ve worked dang hard to keep it looking OK. And now with the appearance of the dreaded crabgrass the week before I left, the large spotty-brown thing I once took so much pride in is just a neighborhood eyesore. I know it sounds trivial, but you don’t know how much it frustrated me to be greeted by that sad sight upon pulling up to my beloved house after a two-week stint overseas. Anyway, I hit it double-hard today with a nice dose of crabgrass killer and some kinda turf-builder, and it’s been getting enough water – so perhaps the majority will grow back. I mean, I guess when it comes down to it, who cares right? But man, that seriously bummed me out.

This weekend was sufficiently laid-back: hung with friends, cleaned the house, worked a tad in the yard. The thing is, I’m really gonna be slammed this week at work. I have several commitments which I placed “on hold” when I was traveling, and they will be coming back to judge me this week. I’ve got to make good on some promises, and one involves getting a big project done by tomorrow evening. It’ll be tough, but I think I can swing it – even if I have to work late. What’s worse is, I have to take Friday and Monday off because we’re climbing Mt. Whitney this weekend. Don’t even get me started on how woefully unprepared I am for that. I should’ve been running every day for months, instead I’ve been stuffing myself with Chinese food and Bloody Marys – just hoping my weary legs can carry my clinically obese ass up that mountain. We’ll find out I suppose.

I promised you guys the scans of the Taipei Hooters menu that I boosted one night whilst at dinner. It’s funny for a couple reasons, both of which I think are obvious. Firstly, these girls have no hooters. I mean, c’mon y’alls, we all know the “hooters” in Hooters isn’t really talking about owls like the logo may lead you to believe. They mean boobs! No, I’m for real, that restaurant Hooters is all about boobs. Anyway, we took to calling the place “Hoot” because the “ers” was actually pulled around the back of the shirt being that there was nothing in front for it to stretch across. Secondly, at Hooters in Taiwan you can order all sorts of seafood. Shock! Seafood at an eatery in Taiwan?! These people live and breath fish man. Pat even complained one morning because his bacon at breakfast tasted of fish – and that’s what I mean, everything there is seafood. Oh, it may not be seafood overtly – like fish or prawns or whatever. But you can almost bet that it was made or cooked with seafood or some seafood “essence.” I’m being unrealistic for the sake of comedy of course, but really? they love some seafood. And yes, I know it’s an island. Anyway, without further ado – the Taipei Hoot menu:


Janet was our waitress, and mighty attractive if I may say. You could land a plane on her chest, but she was cute nonetheless. Note that you can order “Chips and Salsar” or the “Fried Fishman Platter.” You can keep the fishman thanks, I’m not feeling terribly cannibalistic today – but salsar, now that sounds new and exciting.
Here’s the flipside, where you can feast on such delicacies as “Curly Squid” and “Pork Knuckle.” Man, when did Hoot go all gourmet? To be fair though, the “Fried Mushroom” only costs lantern-house-menorah-sailboat, pretty good if you ask me.

I think it would be cool to sell a shirt that had nothing on the front but the words “Where I stand.” Then on the back there would be a short list of items and two columns, “Yes” and “No,” with a box for each column after each line-item in the list. Before I get to the list, lemme say that the purpose of this shirt is controversy. You take the few most-debated political and social issues today and list them out – then sell all the yes/no permutations. I imagine a list something like the following:

  Yes No
There is a God.  
Capital punishment is just.  
Keep abortion legal.  
Affirmative Action is rad.  
Gay people will burn.  
Three AK47s? No problem.  
Welfare works!  

Anyway, you wouldn’t want it to get too cluttered, so I think that list would be enough to enrage enough people. Then you wear it around see, and people know right away where you’re at. Maybe I should make these shirts. I mean, there’d need to be 128 of them to get every possible combo – then you could keep stats like which permutation (combination?, I forget my statistics) was most popular and stuff. It could be a whole website, people could even vote on the next issue to be added to the short-list. Hmm? Oh yeah, and for any of you entrepreneurial bastards out there – I’m pretty sure that’s my intellectual property now that I wrote it down, so don’t even think about it.

And I’m out, g’night.

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do i have to do this again?

Shea-shea!!
Tokyo. Again. And again I’m just passing through, still haven’t been able to see Japan. This past week, I was originally booked for Japan, but plans changed and I stayed in Taiwan instead. Anyway, that’s all old news now, history. I’m on my way home, finally, after what seemed like a month-long two weeks. Really, I got to the point where I welcomed the hotel bed as my own each evening. A spotty week for writing, or maybe I should say posting – because I actually wrote quite a bit. A couple paragraphs from Tuesday, some crazy outlines for an intended Wednesday entry, and last night’s famous unfinished Thursday-night-in-the-bar entry. Anyway, I’m gonna make the verb-tense workable and go ahead and publish most of it riiiight about? now.

[Written Tuesday afternoon in some hotel conference room, after giving my initial presentation to about 150 Chinese dudes.]

Damn. Nothing can humble me like giving what I feel to be a bad presentation. I mean, I just got off the stage and I think I stunk it up royal. I blanked on a couple of really easy questions and just didn’t have confidence in my knowledge of the material. Man I wanted to run out of that room. What’s worse: I’ve got a totally different one to give in another hour, one I’m equally undereducated on. Ugh, right now my only solace is thinking that I can head back to the hotel in shame and take a nap if I want. I’m sure from the audience it didn’t look that bad, but knowing that I was just reading from the material with no knowledge to back me up sure made me feel crappy. What a terrible feeling, and embarrassing too. I’m ready to leave Taiwan again.

It’s funny how a bad experience like that can make me want to crawl into a cave and hibernate (read: lock myself in the hotel room with the “do not disturb” light on and lounge around in my boxers). It’s my laziness kicking in I guess. To make matters worse, I had an 11pm conference call last night and didn’t get to bed until 1am, only to wake up in four hours for another call at 5am, then it was straight from that call to here. Now I’m dangerously tired and trying to stay awake for my next class. Funny thing is, whenever I do come off a less-than-stellar speaking engagement, I always question why I like doing it at all. I mean, not putting myself up there means never having to be embarrassed. Talk about a quitter attitude huh? But, I know I’ll do it again, because I like to – and I like it most when things go well and I come off feeling like a champ. I suppose every one has a “stinker” once in a while, presentation or not. (Note from the future: The next presentation and the Q&A sessions that followed in the days after went superb, more than making up for the self-loathing my initial bomb instilled in me.)

Another editors note: Wanna see my “free writing” notes for that last paragraph? Oh, what? You do? OK, here it is: funy, performp poorly and start questioning how much i like it. lazy, from youth, etc. Wow, exciting huh? I mean, it’s these sneak-peeks into the behind-the-scenes workings of the blog that just set me apart from other writers. At least, to me I mean.

[Written late Thursday night from a corner table in Henry’s Bar at the Sherwood Taipei, three or four bloody marys into a night getting tight on spiked ‘mater juice.]

Sitting here in a dark corner, cigar smoke and Mandarin fill the air. I’m looking out across the dim room to the bar – where the bartender is making me a new bloody mary to replace the one I just finished. Her name is Tracy, but in Chinese it’s something longer and is drawn with a lot of little sticks and boxes that look like lanterns and houses and tic-tac-toe games. I know because she wrote it down for me on one of the paper coasters she brings the drinks on. She’s trying to teach me more Chinese before I leave, but the bar is busy and she can only come talk ever once in a while. So far I can recognize about twenty characters, and understand a few words in every sentence. Next time I come, she says, she promises to speak better English if I promise to speak better Chinese. Deal.

Anthony and Pat were here, but went out to the night market to see the people drink snake’s blood. In all my time in Taipei, I’ve never had the urge to go to snake alley. It sounds interesting as all get-out, but the locals look down on the place as dirty and giving them a bad name. Last night I went to karaoke with two girls that work at this bar. Tracy actually changed her night off to go, all the bar staff knows it and they give me funny looks and talk about me in Chinese (I can recognize my name, “Da-Way,” in Mandarin). A buddy of mine from the states who speaks Mandarin and is also friendly with the bar staff hooked up the outage, and they came and grabbed me from my second-favorite bar down the street and whisked me away to karaoke. Everyone knows I have a crush on Tracy so it was all a big joke. We ended up having a blast. The Taiwan beer and milk-tea flowed freely and my head didn’t hit the pillow until 3am.

So tonight I’m practicing my words again on the drink coasters: fire, human, door, time, ask, month, temple, big, sun, house, one, two, three, four, understanding, ten, and love. Later I’ll end up hanging at the bar until they close at 1pm, drinking more bloody marys and finally winding things down with some milk-tea-made-with-love. Time to hit the hay, and what do you know it’s 4am again somehow. Taipei was fun this time, a bad presentation, a good presentation, two nights of karaoke, and a handful of nights where one more hour out would’ve meant seeing a sunrise.

I’m done, I’m outta here. Until next week when writing once again begins on US soil, Dave out.

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damn you soda popinski

Duck and move! Duck and move!.
Monday in Taiwan and it was time for a “shift-change.” Most of the crew from last week took off and a new crew came in this weekend. Anthony’s here, and we already did some tromping around the city, some good eatin’, and some cocktailin’ at the hotel bar.

Honestly, and not to brag or anything but, I’ve been living like a king this past week. Nay, not of my own doing – these country just treats you like one. They open doors, pour drinks, wish you good evenering and good afternoorn, it’s totally awesome. The other night I was lounging on a plush couch with my legs spread wide in a I’m-all-man pose, drinking champagne while house beats rumbled from the ceiling and waitresses called me “boss.” I handed out business cards at 3am to other “industry” types in some crazy dance club. In some ways I love it here, but I am pretty ready to go home.

The other day I went to the local computer market (a two story “mall” that’s bursting at the seams with computer and electronics equipment), and bought a better controller for the anticipated Zelda64 marathon that will be my flight home. It’s smaller, more accurate, and the force-feedback works. It should make Zelda’n much more better, and more force-feedbacky. I haven’t had much time to play it lately though, as we’ve been busy running around the city visiting this customer and that customer. We did, however, get together in the hotel bar the other night, all with our laptops, and have a marathon NES session. We played Tyson’s Punch Out! for like four hours, just sitting in a corner drinking beer and trying to beat Soda Popinksi. It was awesome, once the crew saw me playing some old NES they all wanted them. Nerds to the bone man, how embarrassing.

Anyway, today is kind of a “free day” where we had some time to come into the office and work instead of being carted around the city by some maniacal van driver. Pat got in early this morning so I’m actually writing now as I watch him present his material to some customers. For me, tomorrow is the big presentation day – thinking about 200 people per class and I’m doing two pretty much back to back. I’ve been working on my material and trying to bone up for questions. Hoping it all goes well. Then we do the crazy two-customer-a-day days on Wednesday and Thursday, and get Friday off before we fly out Saturday morning. I can already tell it’s gonna go faaaast.

So, you know, usually when I go to Taiwan I write all about the crazy junk I eat. Well, I think I must’ve gotten used to what was once “crazy,” because the urge to write about food hasn’t struck me this time. I mean sure, I have eaten some interesting stuff on this trip, standard fare really: octopus, fish eyes, shark fin, coagulated pork blood, etc. We didn’t, however, order the “fried intestinal tract” or “stir fried chicken testicles.” No crap man, they eat everything over here! Oh, and we went to Hooters! Hooters in Taiwan y’allz? yeah, uh-huh. We took to calling it “Hoot” since the “ers” part was actually on the back of the shirt – these women may be hot but they ain’t fillin’ out no Hooters tee. Not only that, but Hooters Taiwan don’t be compromisin’ y’all – sure they have wings, but they also have all manner of cooked undersea-life goodness. I actually stole a menu that had some pictures of the waitresses, including ours, I’ll post it tomorrow if I can remember.

Well, that’s it for me. Huh? Still hard-up for some more quality reading? Check out Ben’s site then, he’s been updating more regularly and even posting little web-narratives punctuated by pictures which are teetering dangerously close to the edge of blogdom. The kayak and Advantage stories are good, so quit being such a pussy and check ’em out already.

OK, I gotta run? Pat just got in today and wants me to show him where the hookers from last week’s story work. Dave out.