Next move, July 2011

The other day I started thinking about the fact that our current apartment is our third apartment in three years in Taiwan.  I counted how many times I've moved in my life, and the total is 22 times, which over 38 years is once every 20 months.  But that's actually misleading, because in my adult life I've moved 19 times, which over 20 years is almost once a year!  So the fact that we lived in Danshui for two years and that we have a two-year lease here means that I've really settled down.

The whole list, which admittedly is totally self-indulgent, is as follows:

My parents' apartment, Berkeley, March 1972
My parents' house, Seattle, September 1972
Highgate, London, spring 1974
South Woodford, London, spring 1981
Clark Kerr Campus, Berkeley, August 1990
Apartment, Berkeley, June 1991
Room, Berkeley, February 1992
Cité André Allix, Lyon, France, August 1992
My mom's house, Seattle, June 1993
Room, Berkeley, January 1994
Apartment, Oakland, June 1994
Apartment, Piedmont, October 1995
My dad's house, Seattle, September 1996
Lake shack, Seattle, May 1997
Pembroke College, Cambridge, UK, September 1998
Densmore Avenue, Seattle, September 1999
Woodland Park Avenue, Seattle, January 2000
Natal Road, Cambridge, UK, June 2002
Melrose Avenue, Seattle, September 2003
13th Avenue NW, Seattle, December 2003
Hongshulin, Taipei, October 2007
Danshui, Taipei, August 2008
Xindian, Taipei, June 2010

Two birds with one stone

Anja was taking a bath last night.  "I'm the world's most beautiful princess, and I can use this", she said, brandishing a toy watering can, "to fight monsters and water flowers".

Act first, ask questions later

Me:  "Anja, go to sleep; you're just delaying."
Anja:  "I'm not delaying.  What is delaying?"

I am Clark Gable

One of my colleagues just told me that my first name in Chinese, 蓋博 "Gai-buo", is the same as Clark Gable's last name in Chinese:

http://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-tw/克拉克·盖博

I wonder if the guy at the Taiwanese fair who chose my name for me knew that.

Shotgun wedding

Anja drew a picture of Mama and Baba getting married, with Anja as a baby in Mama's belly.

A story, by Anja

(Translated from Chinese by me)

My friend went to the doctor to get a shot.  But when the doctor was going to give her the shot, he closed his eyes so he cut her arm off.  The doctor said "oh, no problem" and found a new arm and fixed her arm and said "move your arm around" and she could move her arm around and so her arm was fixed.  But then she went to school and played all day long and her arm broke again.  So she went to her mom and it turned out that the doctor didn't put a bone in the new arm and that was why the arm broke.  So her mom put a bone in the arm and fixed it again and said "move your arm around" and she could move her arm around and so her arm was really fixed.  So her mom was even better than the doctor.

What music the magic happens to

I've noticed that I listen to some artists a lot more than others at work.  At some personal risk, here are the ones that I seem to keep comping back to:

• The Dandy Warhols
• Keane
• Django Reinhardt
• Saint-Saëns
• Fauré, particularly the Requiem
• Pink Floyd
• Wes Montgomery
• Rachmaninov
• Muse

Generally I like a lighter sound while I work so it's not too distracting, but when I get a bit frustrated I have to start hitting slightly harder stuff.

Where the magic happens

I took some pictures of my office at HTC.  Our group is in a single big room in one of HTC's Xindian offices, and the style is "start-up", as evidenced by the big red sofa and the gym lockers.

My desk.  Note that there is a smartphone, but no landline.

Ethan and the big red sofa

The gym lockers

My ride when I have to pick up Anja after work

Christmas every day

I was looking out at the main street outside our apartment one evening, and I was suddenly struck by how many flashing lights I could see.  Looking more carefully, I saw that there were several cars doubled-parked in the street with their hazard lights on.  Over the next few days, I noticed that there are always several cars doubled-parked, making the street look like it is permanently decorated with so many amber Christmas lights.

 Later in the evening, only four or five double-parked cars

What I do at my new job

In the time-honored tradition of avoiding creating new content by linking, here's what HTC does:

Or, alternatively:

Why mama gets mad

Anja:  "Mama, sometimes when you get mad it's not my fault, right?"

Chieni:  "Yes, that's right."

Anja:  "Sometimes when you get mad it's baba's fault, right?"

Chieni:  "Yes, that's right."

The World Cup final

I'll be setting my alarm for 2:30 AM tonight to watch the World Cup final.  I like Spain, but I'm going to root for the Dutch because they are crazy.  I do admit that I may be influenced by the Brazilian guy who gave me a lift in Florence many years ago, and claimed he could drive as badly as he wanted to because his car had Dutch plates.  Then he hit a pedestrian's hand with his side-view mirror.

The view from our house

I managed to get out on the balcony at sunset today and take some pictures of our view:

Looking towards the north

The, um, west

The south, towards Wulai and the old highway to Yilan

The tenement effect of all of the top-floor residents having built corrugated metal awnings over the building roofs to give them extra space

The Health and Safety class

Being a new HTC employee, I had to take a health and safety class.  Unfortunately, the class was not offered in English.  Even more unfortunately, the HR people decided that my Chinese was probably good enough to take the class.  Whether it actually was is debatable, as I got the gist of most of it, while missing a lot of in-domain and formal keywords like "evacuate" and "first aid".  At the end of the class was a test, and this I thought I was going to definitely be exempted from because I really can't read that level of Chinese.  But no, they had prepared an English version of the test specifically for me.  It turned that it was one of these non-tests with questions like "True or false:  it is a good idea to follow all safety regulations", so it should have been easy to pass even without having attended the class.  But the English was so bad that sometimes it was completely impossible to figure out what they were trying to say.  But at the end of the day, if I failed the test, they will tell me, and I'll tell them how bad their English is.

The class made a big deal out of being environmentally friendly and doing things like riding your bike to work and recycling.  But when I asked where I could park my bike, the course instructor didn't know, and the next time I visited the kitchen I noticed there was no recycling bin next to the trash can.

Goodbye England, hello HTC!

Last week I made my last trip to England for Toshiba.  Since I was in the office over parts of two weeks, my original idea was to go somewhere really beautiful over the weekend, like the Clarendon Way between Salisbury and Winchester, or part of the South Downs Way.  But the weather was so fabulous the entire time I was there – about 25 degrees and sunny every day – and Cambridge is such a beautiful town, that by Friday I had decided that there wasn't any need to go anywhere else.  Of course, by Friday, World Cup group play had determined that the U.S. was to play Saturday evening and England Sunday afternoon, so that also made it difficult to

I arrived back in Taipei at 11PM on Wednesday.  On Thursday morning at 9AM, I arrived at HTC's Xindian offices, conveniently located three minutes away from our new apartment by taxi.  There, I had spent an hour in the HR department when Chieni called to say that she had badly hurt her back and couldn't walk!  So I rushed back home and drove her to the hospital, where they they couldn't do anything, and so said she just needed to go home and rest.  However, when we tried to drive home, we discovered that the car wouldn't shift out of park!  So Chieni took a taxi home, and I spent two hours in the company of a grumpy tow truck driver who couldn't tow the car because it was parked in an underground parking lot with a height limit that was too low for his truck.  He eventually called a friend who showed up in a beat-up sedan that towed our car to the parking lot entrance, from where the tow truck driver was able to tow the car to a garage.  It turned out that a small $15 part in the brake system electronics had broken, thereby disabling the system that requires the driver to put his foot on the brake in order to shift into drive.  So in summary, I took my first day at HTC off as a personal day.  On Thursday, I managed a full day of work, so I'm at 50% so far.  Hopefully I can increase that percentage next week.