A long overdue update

It’s been nearly 2 months since I updated my blog. I’ve been busy with work, and I’ve been using facebook for one line updates.

I’ve got a few projects on the go that have some big potential. There’s some R&D and collaboration to be done first so I’m going to be in Australia for a while by the looks, so this week I’m renting an apartment in Adelaide for Jasmine, Violet, and myself to live in for the next 6 months. Sort of follows a loose idea I had about spending June-August in the Northern Hemisphere, and Dec-Feb in the Southern. I like summer.

3C Kid

In Taiwan they call IT stuff “3C”

My Birthday Photos

For my birthday we went on a outing to Taipei.

It was hot in the morning, Violet was feeling the heat:

We had all you can eat lunch at fancy restaurant. Cost AU$18 for the 3 of us. We got a discount because it was my birthday. Below Violet is eating some egg and fish pudding.

At the end of the meal Violet enjoyed getting her dessert which was a milk pudding:

After lunch we went to a shopping complex called Miramar. We started off walking around the shops:

Things escalated when we got to the floor with all the childrens toys with many toys within reach for children to try out. As I dragged Violet away from one thing I ended up pacifying her outbursts with something more intriguing, with each iteration getting more and more exciting for her until we ended up in a gaming arcade where she rode some rides:

After all that we went to a micro-brewery on the roof where they served freshly brewed German style black beer with no preservatives. Also on the roof is a Ferris Wheel:

We went of the Ferris Wheel. Here’s the view of Taipei from near the top:

The following collection of shots are of us riding the Ferris Wheel:
 
 

Violet got more interested in looking out once we reached the top:
 
 

 

The sun was going down, you can see it here just above the mountain:

After that we went on the Carousel:

 

Violet the Alarm Clock

This is how Violet wakes me up in the morning:

Milgram Experiment

Anyone else noticed that the conclusions of the Milgram Experiment don’t seem to apply to toddlers?

Another great Taiwan Beer

Yes I’ve heard the joke, “Q: What’s the best beer in Taiwan? A: Imported”. If you believe this then pick up some American beer (1 of the 2 brands at 7-11) and then we’ll see who’s laughing. Anywho..

I generally drink Taiwan Draft because it’s a nice clean beer to drink in hot weather. However I do like to indulge in the Barley Beer from the Taiwan micro brewery Le ble d’or http://www.lebledor.com.tw/ . It’s a bit pricier than the normal beer, I picked up 2x 1Litre bottles from CostCo for 500NT, but I’m enjoying a bottle now, and it is nice.

Violet’s camera skills

So I’ve been trying to teach Violet how to use my camera. Things haven’t been going so well. As you can see she keeps on putting her fingers over the lens:

Which then confuses her when she tries to frame the photo:

Potentially the camera is too heavy as she struggles a bit when pointing up and puts more fingers over the lens:

If she moves her fingers then they end up over the flash as well:

Here’s some of the better results, but most have fingers in them:

She took some photos in a restaurant. While she was able to frame the picture better she still put her fingers over the lens:

For this one she worked out that she could rest the camera on the edge of her high chair and thus not put her fingers over the lens:

Taiwan Gold Mine Town

Sunday was a nice sunny day in Taiwan. Here’s the view from Jasmine’s bedroom window:

So we drove to a Gold mine town on the North East coast. Here’s a couple of pictures of the town:

Here’s a picture of the coast taken from within the town, the carpark on the lower left is where I took the first picture of the town from:

The town had narrow alleyways:

and a lot of stairs:

There was also a road that wound its way through the middle of the town, and was surprisingly busy:

In the town Violet got some new shoes:

The shoes were taken apart and reassembled to fit Violet’s feet:

We took some family photos:

and then went to go home. It took a while to get back to the carpark because Violet insisted on walk down all the stairs herself.

Stopping Autorun from the USB

Just wiped my Acer Aspire One netbook and reinstalled the operating system. Took the opportunity to try out Windows 7 RC on my netbook which I’m now running.

The reason I did this is because I got a virus on my netbook from a guy at work. I loaned him my USB flash drive which he plugged into his home computer which put a virus on it, which was new and so got past both his virus detection software and my virus detection software. Anyway the main cause of the spread of this thing is the Windows autorun behaviour, and I found a way to turn this off on this website http://antivirus.about.com/od/securitytips/ht/autorun.htm

Basically you copy this text into a .reg file, and install it:

REGEDIT4
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\IniFileMapping\Autorun.inf]
@="@SYS:DoesNotExist"

My Progress In My New Fitness Regime

In March this year (2009) I embarked on a new fitness regime. My modest goals for the end of June were to be able to do 30 pushups in a row and jog from Waterfall Gully South Australia to Mt Lofty in under 40 minutes. With the pushups I started off being able to do 15, and with the jog I started off at 50 minutes. Mt Lofty run first: I BROKE 40 MINUTES! to Mt Lofty. In fact on Saturday I tried so hard that I actually broke 39 minutes – did it in 38 minutes 56 seconds. There is a standard run listed on the internet that is 40 seconds shorter than the run I do, so I would rank about 16th on this list of times http://www.train2max.com/sites/pt/t2m.nsf/xtraClimbUnid/8A0CD712876F230AE92574BB002B07C5?opendocument

Anyway I guess I need to adjust my goal as it isn’t June yet, so I’m going to aim for my best time ever of 36 minutes 30 seconds.

With the pushups I’m only up to 23, the interesting thing though is how many I can do in a day. I do pushups Monday to Friday, and this week I did 1052 pushups total, that’s an average of 210 per day. On Friday I did 229 pushups over 8.5 hours so that’s about 27 pushups per hour. When I started in March, on the first day I did 100 pushups in 8 hours, so that’s 12.5 pushups per hour.

So here’s the improvements I’ve made in 2.5 months:

Pushups in one stint, improved 53%

Average pushups per hour, improved 116%

Speed to Mt Lofty improved 28%

Average Power output to Mt Lofty improved 64%

So the big gain is in the sustained amount of exercise that I can do during the day. This has had quite a positive effect on my general well being. I find I need less sleep and have more energy to do more things in my spare time.