Hey Doc

Last night I was all ready to finish the other half of the chicken noodle soup I made the other day. I put the pot on the stove than went to the TV as I wait for it to heat up. Somehow I felt asleep on the couch for god knows how long. I woke up with a sick feeling that I knew I have stuff on the stove. Sure enough, the soup and the pot were burned to crisp. Lucky that I had the fan on so the smoke have been sucked out of the kitchen.

On a different subject, backward compatible. Taipei Rapid Transit District is replacing the automatic gates where you open with the train ticket. The older style requires the person to push the horizontal bar through after the ticket has been OKed. It can be difficult if your hands are full so people sometimes push it with their body. Everything will work just fine if no one was in such a hurry. Quite often you get people crashes the gate because the gate was not yet ready to open, so they get injured. The new gate that opens to each sides, much like a scissors so a person does not have to push it.

Let me step back for a bit. There are two types of train tickets, electronic proximity sensing passes (like a pre-pay credit card) or the old paper with mag strip type where you have to insert into the machine. Here is the problem, the new style gate does not have a slot for the paper ticket. Now we have both types of gates at each station because they have to accommodate the old ticket that are still in use. It confuses a lot of people as which gate to use. I wonder how long will they have to keep the old style gate around until the paper ticket is phased out, or will it?
Somewhere along the planning and execution, there is something missing either by design or mistake. We the lowly users are the one who suffered.

I have not felt this sick for the longest time. The daily changing cold/warm weather we had lately did me in. I felt it coming when I was walking home after the workout at the gym two days ago. The cold temperature felt through the sweaty shirt. I started to sneeze and my nose started to run that night. The next morning I woke up with a bad sore throat. I managed to go to work but the co-workers made me go home because they did not want to catch any bugs from me.
A home remedy that worked for me before was a bowl of chicken noodle soup with lots of white pepper. You can work up a sweat after eating the soup and somehow that got rid of the cold, most of the time. Followed by an 18 hours sleep made me a brand new man the next morning.

I have made my one year with the company on 11/1. I am now entitle to 7 days of vacation in a calendar year. That means, after the adjustment, I have 1 day and 2 hours of vacation until the end of 2006. We have already taken one day of vacation this year to make-up for the extra holiday we had during the "double-ten" national holiday (like the 4th of July in US). That leaves me 2 hours of vacation. I think I will use that for a sleep-in some day next week.



One of the large department stores in Taipei, SOGO, was having their big annual sales this past weekend. Their loyal customers lined up to get their free gifts also take the advantage of discounted goods. Huge crowds brought huge traffic jams that go on days and nights. I live within walking distance of this store. On days like this, I avoid taking any surface transportation through this area.



I took some pictures at an art exhibition few weeks ago. This place used to be a winery. It was abandoned for many years. Now they have fixed it up to become an art center for local artists to show their works. Check it out.