Lancia club in Lucca?

For the Lancia fans. Went down to Cinque Terre for the weekend and saw this...

hunger games

if you haven't read it and need a book for the beach... Get it!

car trouble

I guess the car has to give me some kinda battery related trouble every other year. Went to take the car to the only supermarket that has some resemblance of American supermarket in size, only to find out the car won't start. The lights come on, everything electric works.

One successful jump, unsuccessful restart, and a new battery, and two days later, we are back in business. I really crossed my finger and hope that it's not the alternator. Have no idea what one of these things costs in Switzerland.

Anyway, thought about this one thing. When have to trade the car for a baby, I would hope it's a girl, because its name has to be Portia.

are we going overboard to create a false sense of security?

are all these 21-year old anti-drinking rules resulting in fewer drunks in America than in Europe?

Last nite, I went to Whole Foods to get some fruits, they wouldn't let me buy a small bottle of port because I didn't have my ID with me. Fine. Fair.

Today, I went again to pick up a a couple bottles of beer to go with my lunch. I made sure I brought my Swiss driver's license. Still no dice. I was told that my license didn't have any physical description of me. Apparently, the picture on my driver's license is not a physical description of me.

I was then told that dumb dumb Schwarzeneger signed into law that it would be acceptable to use a passport, even if it doesn't have physical descriptions either.

What the hell is going on in this country, or this state?

People seem to have forgotten the point of checking IDs. 1. make sure the holder is more than 21 years old, 2. make sure the ID is not fake and the ID matches the person holding it. So assume that my brother is using my license to get booze, and the white dude in the supermarket can't tell my brother from me since we are Asians, but the fact a CA license would say that I have brown eyes would really help him to pin point that he is indeed NOT the true owner of the picture ID?

What is even dumber is a governer would sign this crap into law, then sign a loophole into law so that a passport, even without a "physical description" could be used to purchase booze. "To encourage tourism", the manager of the store said. So, let's allow the foreigners who are on vacation in this country get booze easier than the people who actually live here...... Better yet, let's allow anyone with a passport get booze easier than someone without. What kinda shitty logic is that?

Just to state the obvious, with my Swiss driver's license, I can rent a car, check into a hotel, probably even buy a gun, but.... I can't buy a bottle of beer.

So, my plan is buy some nice paper and something to laminate it with. Make a little booklet, then I will put my picture on it with my birth date, and print "Republic of Genovia" across the front cover. Will this home made passport do the trick? Do you think the dude at the supermarket will know that I am the prince of Republic of Genovia that only exists in The Princess Diaries?

food in Taiwan

watching the travel channel. Some dude (bizarre food) is in Taiwan chowing down some stuff.

The first stop I caught was him at some place eating stinking tofu. He didn't do so well. Couldn't stomach it. Then he tried the 1000 year old eggs. Didn't do well either.

Stop II. Scheelin night market. Oyster fry with egg. He survived. Chicken butt. Survived. Then he went shrimping which was grilled immediately after. Coffin planks. I personally have never seen what the big deal is. He was of course, fine. Fried chicken uterus. I must admit I haven't tried it yet. I think it's a new thing. I guess the thought of it is a little repulsing. Duck tongue. Yamm.... Duck head. I wouldn't eat that myself. Just don't see the point. There is nothing but very thin skin on it.

Stop III. Rooster testicle soup. Ah... I think I have had it before. I wouldn't eat it myself again. Again, don't see the point. Dude liked it.

Stop IV. Taipei 101. Hardly the place I would go to get good food. It's the stuff you can get in any food court. (Note to Zimmerman dude: the soup - does have pig's blood cubes, but it's not dried.) Pigeon egg marinated in soy and black tea. I think it's 鐵蛋, no?

Stop V. Wu-lei. He ate at some 泰雅 restaurant. Again..... I am not sure that is where I would get 泰雅 food. But then again, I have no idea what 泰雅 food should really taste like. He had fried bees. Weird.

I have always wondered where you take foreign visitors. I guess the show took him to places I have never been to.

back to the states!

Woowooooo!
I am back! Haven't been back for 6 month and I am happy to be in the states again. At least I can speak the language!

Two observations/experiences.
On the way from SFO to Los Altos, I was reminded by how many cars were on the road of the Economist article that Americans on average generate at least twice as much CO2. Just on my SFO to hotel trip, I have driven more than I did in the last three months combined!

Went down to the supermarket to pick up some fruits. I also picked up a small bottle of port, but the 18 year old cashier wouldn't get me buy it just because I didn't have my ID with me. I might have a baby face, but I am 34!!!!!!

goin' to bed now.......

balut

So I ate one. I have never been soooo scared of an egg before, or any food of any other kind. I guess I have finally been able to understand other people's fear of various types of food I have ingested (bat, snake, sheep testicles, brains, intestins).

I heard they used it on Fear Factor?

little duckies

went to Paris for the weekend. Maybe more on that later. We did have some fantastic food (Thanks, Stu!). But the most "interesting" story is a continuing saga.

We went to have some Vietnamese food. On the way back to the metro, we stopped by an Asian grocery store, just to see what is available. YiChun and I both love food shopping.

We bought some Asian pears and didn't find anything that interesting, except duck eggs. There is this Taiwanese thing you do with duck eggs. You perserve them with salt water. I think every Taiwanese kid grew up eating this at some point. I have always had it hard boiled, but YiChun said her mom fries it with some minced pork.

These duck eggs were huge, compared with the normal chicken eggs. The shell also has a slightly darker color.

Back at the hotel I opened the box out of curiosity and took out the biggest one since it was kinda protruding out of the top of the box. It felt kinda funny like there was solid in there. Interesting, I thought it might have been boiled already. I figured that is ok, we can still preserve it salt water.

Last nite, back at home, YiChun looked up the recipe. Just simple salt would do. But I shook the egg again and there is really some solid stuff inside. Oh well, once or twice, you do get these eggs with slightly developed ovaries or whatever you call them. It happens.

At lunch, YiChun mentioned that she thinks the Vietnamese do eat these 60% grown chics still in the egg. Yikes. That really stirred my curiosity. So I cracked that egg open. The picture...... well, I didn't take one.

Here is a link that gives you a good idea of what is inside. http://acien.pixnet.net/blog/post/24312395

I am still regurgitating.....

getting openLDAP to compile on snow leopard

1. go get BerkeleyDB http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/berkeley-db/db/index.html. Compile it and get it working.

2. use the following when running configure
LDFLAGS=-L/usr/local/BerkeleyDB.4.8/lib CPPFLAGS=-I/usr/local/BerkeleyDB.4.8/include ./configure

follow the rest.....

the exciting media and us

since I have been sick, I decided to spend this sunday morning reading something interesting and spend my time quietly. So I am reading the DIscovery magazine while listening to Ashkenazy play Bach's Well Tempered Klavier. An article triggered me to go over to discoverymagazine.com's blog section. I read down the blog trying to find what I was looking for when I stumbled on a link to Jon Stewart's take on the whole climate gate thing. Polarizing statements from idiotic republican senators aside, Stewart, as usual, is hugely entertaining and it reminded me of two of my pretty smart friends who watch the Daily Show, well.... daily.

I then went back to Bach and the Discovery magazine. Wow, it struck me how "blend" Bach is compared to Jon Stewart. I was shocked at that reaction. No wonder so few of us listen to classical music any more, or read a magazine like Discovery or the Economist.

We want to be entertained, our senses stimulated. Bach is great art, Stewart is amazingly entertaining and definitely packs in many more punches in 5 minutes than Bach can. Short punchy entertainment is what we need now, instant success, quick rise to fame. Short articles on the web, blogs, even better, twitter, drives us toward ever shorter attention span. Where are we headed?

If time is x, attention span = y where y = 1/x as x -> infinity. Maybe this formula isn't even correct since our attention span probably shortened a lot quicker in the last century than any century before it.

In an attempt to lengthen my attention span, am heading back to the Discovery magazine and Bach now......

Perlman is like the Samantha in Sex in the city?

this morning, I woke up and put a Mozart CD in and started listening. Requiem soon became way too serious for Sunday morning. I know it would take me closer to God, but it's just not feeling like one of those Sunday mornings.

So I turned to a newly acquired Oistrakh playing various violin sonatas (disc 52 of this series).

A discussion with YiChun over skype ensued. Oistrakh's Back sonata really is cold, and less emotional than we both liked. I didn't really see the point of Reger's piece, and even less so for Ysaye. The Wieniawski was just ok and was played by with David & Igor. Kinda special since this is when Igor was still young.

Then came the Prokofiev sonata for 2 violins. Man, talk about cold. It was cold. Shortly after the music started, I had the picture of a worn out artist, pacing an empty street in the middle of winter. Cold, and just beaten by the world. When allegro started, he was telling the story of the love of his life - how his girl friend broke his heart. A 2 second smile quickly faded as he recounted the time they had spent together when he realizes that he is without a home, without success, without money, and worst of all, without his love.

I just couldn't take these three russians (David, Igor Oistrakh, and Prokofiev) drowning me more on this Sunday morning - it's cold, cloudy with no sun as is. I just had to switch to something a little more upbeat.

Mozart Requiuem too serious, Oistrakh playing Prokofiev too depressing, I turned to.........
Perlman's Greatest hits. Yeah, I know. It starts with Carmen Fantasy. Wow, I don't even want to imagine what it would sound like of Oistrakh was playing that. (Let's just leave the debate of Perlman's music for another day)

I said to YiChun: "Compared to Oistrakh, Perlman is like the Samantha in Sex in the city."

Arrau & Francois

Been listening to the collection of Arrau's last recordings (in Switzerland). Dad told me if I liked his Debussy's girl with flexen hair, I should listen to Francois.

I did and must admit that Francois plays Debussy with a very different style, a much more active one. The music is still absolutely amazing. They do have different take on the music. Not just with girl with flexen hair. I have to admit that I didn't quite recognize Francois playing Berceuse héroïque. It was just so different from Arrau. Arrau puts less "effort" into the music and yet leaves a more profound impression on me.

Interesting........

Kogan & Oistrakh playing Kachaturian is next. But I am going to wait for the weekend for that. it's just tooooo heavy for a week night.

apple mail & SMIME

Thawte announced a while back that they were cutting off the free personal cert and at least, they are replacing it with a free VeriSign class 1. I wonder if VRSN ever made that $500M acquisition worth their while. NetSol?

Anyway, I never tried to make Apple Mail send out smime mail b4 so I thought I would give it a try. I have to say, I am not really impressed how complex Apple has made it. I guess I have come to expect Apple to make things easy.

Getting the cert into keychain wasn't hard. But.....

1. Double Click on your cert and bring it up in keychain.
2. click on the little triangle next to "Trust" to expand it.
3. In "Secure Mail" select "always trust"
4. Restart Mail.

Now you should see the little check box to the right of the screen.

playing with iPhoto 09's face recognition

Interesting results.

It asks me to confirm 4 pictures of Maria B. In the 4, two of them are actually Maria, and two of them are Jorge. (I am not sure what that says about Jorge or vice versa)

It asks me to confirm 5 pictures of Janeth. OUt of the 5, two were Janeth, and two of Katya. I think the 5th was a bit blurry.

It also mistook my wife as Sandra F on one occasion.

TGIF!

This week wasn't too tough, but I found myself just feeling sooo couped up inside. I just couldn't wait to get off work. After I finished that presentation, I really felt like getting some fresh air, not the kind of "fresh air" in the bar. So I decided to so something I have never done in Switzerland (actually I don't really find myself doing it in the states, but I was driving a Honda).

I went driving around like a redneck, just for the sake of driving. And no, I didn't have a 6 pack next to me. And no, I did obay the speed limit (loosely).

Man how cool was that! Went over to Lutry, got on the highway and just let it rip. I was going 130 well before I was out of steam in 4th. It just feels soooo good. I love that car!

Now off to dinner for some tapas!

We went hiking

and winded up...
a big black cow chased us around..... because she didn't like me singing the pink panther theme.

We started filming this because she wanted a picture with the sweet looking cows. You can tell how much she loves cows - like best buddies.


Before the chase.



Of course, the cameraman had to ditch filming because of the chase.

Then after...


Then she commented on what happened.


Then we re-enacted what happened.

(we will try to subtitle this in english later)

upgrading to snow leopard

the directory service is still burning up a lot of CPU for no good reason.

The upgrade killed my openldap install so I had to install from scratch.

This meant compiling the berkely BD. LDFLAGS and CPPFLAGS are absolutely crucial to doing this on OSX. Google provided good help there.

Orchestrator is still loading up with JVM 1.6 instead of 1.5.0 even with the hack. Don't know what is going on there.

i love TV, I love the bar

been a tough few days.
After VMworld, I had to unwind n0 matter how tired I am. So I ended up at the irish bar next to the hotel.
Beer, wings.... boy, i didn't realize how much i miss it.
then back to the hotel. TV!!!!!!!
Swiss TV SUCKS dead goats!
American cable rocks......... Ｉmiss it.

eeepc update ui

first time I am running it. it just crashed on me. I think the updates are still running since the ps outputs suggest it's still alive.

There is no way my wife would know that if she is the one running the update.......

Also noticed that asus disabled the update button on firefox and only allows you (in the UI) to install newer versions of firefox through their update server. The problem is that they are WAY behind..... (FF still on 3.0.4 when it should be 3.0.13 or 3.5.2)

1st thoughts on the eeepc 1000

not sure if the hype of ssd is paying off. Maybe it's the processor and memory spec that is slowing the down.
The thing shipped with Xandros linux by default. Not bad, kinda cute. The keyboard is a bit clunky, and feels cheap, but I suppose what is what you would expect from asus.

Why do the xandros UI folks choose to model their UI after Windows? There are plenty of good examples out there. Ever heard of OS X?

Getting to a command prompt was a bit painful. ctrl+alt+t... wa then sudo konsole. I suppose it's the KDE console. Then there is no easy way to get it added to the desktop where all the apps are.

One more thing. The reason I hate touch pads...... you hit them by accident all the time. That is why I preferred the nipple on the thinkpads.

jetlegged but I need to get some sleep now......

(went to a decent japanese joint last night....... i guess i look the part. they say "hi" a lot:)