New Dog

My dad got a new dog.



Cooper is about 10 weeks old.

Busy. Sick. Tired. Busy.

So many of you have probably been wondering "where is k?" (okay, this may be few, or even one). Though I have link to my current location on the left hand column, I haven't really updated my blog in a month or so. Well, I've been busy. And sick. And sick of being busy:

• I went to Vegas in early October for too long (>24 hours) and got sick. I did get to visit the Ghost Bar, but didn't get sick there.
  
  
  
  
• Still sick, I went to Tokyo and got stuck in Narita Airport for 40 hours after they cancelled my flight. Yes, there is a DFA letter in mail to United for that one (United believes that $350 travel voucher squares us, me not so much). On the plus side, I did get well acquainted with their awesome beer machines:
  
• I cooled my heels in Australia for a week. I say cooled my heels because I was in Australia (Brisbane then Sydney) eight days for the total of 2 hours of customer meetings and 6 hours of internal meetings. Basically, one day of work for 6 days of boredom and 36 hours of travel.
  
  
• I was home for about a week and was still sick.
• I finished off the month with a quick trip to Bangkok for 48 hours.

Now, I am on vacation until early January. Maybe I will actually post something interesting between then and now.

FFF: Akasaka

Japan, japan, japan. I am disappointed. Such a great idea (it's pig! it's a burger! it's got strange toppings!) but with such a unimaginative name.

How awesome would this have been if it was called "McPig" ?

Mumbai Tourist

I had a free afternoon in India a few weeks ago and since the entire country was watching the Twenty20 Cricket World Cup or celebrating a Hindu festival, I decided to do some sightseeing with my driver Anand. I kept it short and visited:

• Gateway of India
• Kamala Nehru park
• Mahatma Ghandi's residence

Overall it was a good trip. The only real problems came as I was rushing to the airport to leave: my flight was scheduled to leave just after the Indian cricket team arrived home from winning the World Cup. The resulting traffic jam left me barely minutes to make my flight.

Video Delays

So I had promised video from India last week (and it's actual good) but I am having a hell of a time getting Revver.com to post it correctly. In the meantime, accept this picture of the sun rising over the Pacific here in Santa Cruz, California where I am attending a technical symposium:

Hopefully, I will have the video up sometime tomorrow.

Beijing

Okay, I've fixed my "firewall issues" (by fleeing the People's Republic) and I got a few minutes to put together some of the almost interesting snippets of video online. I hadn't been here since 2004 and it was amazing to see how much had changed. Behold my short trip to the Financial District of Beijing, China:


I was scheduled to fly home on Friday from China, but a business emergency has made me divert to Mumbai, India. Soooo . . . I'll probably have some video from there later this week.

c3ns0r3d

So you may have noticed that the usual stream of boring posts, strange pictures and pointless video clips has come to an abrupt halt this week. This is due to my trip to Beijing, China where I have been both surprised, and somewhat honored, to learn that my blog is censored behind the Great Firewall of China. And while I have found a hack to workaround this (I am currently sitting at a Starbucks near Tiennaman Square), it has stymied my attempts to upload videos.

So look for new updates sometime this weekend when I make it Mumbai, India.

Tiger Live

Here is the video that I threatened you with earlier this week. It chronicles my free day in Singapore two weeks ago.

Some setup, since the video audio is somewhat soft:

I went to Tiger Live thinking it was the home of Tiger Beer, one of my favorite beers in the world. Instead it turned to be a cross between a night club (they have several inside) and Disney world. If Walt Disney had taken a lot of acid in the '60s. At one point in the "experience," they actually showed hops "having sex" as a metaphor for fermentation. Unfortunately (or fortunately), they didn't let me take any video inside but I did get some video at the bar (they gave you a few free beers afterward. I think it was a reward for sitting through the "experience").

To add insult to injury, it also turns out that you can actually tour the brewery.

I also captured some video from near my hotel in Clarke Quay.

Here's the video:

And the Chickens Return

In the ongoing saga of my neighbor's "farm", it now looks like the chickens are back.


The llamas can't be too far behind. I hope.

Seoul Food

I still haven't finished editing my cinematic masterpiece on Singapore, but I did cobble together some footage from yesterday night's trip to a traditional Korean restaurant here in Seoul.


This video is embedded with Google Video, which lowers the resolution and quality a fair bit. If you want to see the higher resolution (640x480) and quality (H264 encoding) version, subscribe to the podcast in iTunes or your podcaster. I changed this over to Revver because Google Video was doing strange things with the images. You can subscribe to the iTunes feed, click here. You'll get each video as I upload them and you can sync it to your iPhone :>

I'll post my video from Singapore once I get home and I can make some sense out of it.