oh boy it is clean over here. the subway doesn't smell like urine either. according to the billboards, the taipei mrt is the most reliable in the world, 3 years running.
you can read more about it at the wiki page. all you really have to know that it is super-modern, clean, reliable, and well designed and laid out. i have to wonder if philadelphia had the same hardware, what would we do with it? can we actually have nice things and not ruin them?
so the day before, i thought i was in danshui but i was really in taichung. and i'm not so sure i was really in taichung anyway.
anyway, i checked the map and i really did go to danshui today. it was a 40 minute subway train ride down the ride line or something. we took a bus down to fisherman's wharf which was closed and empty because they don't really open during the work week. oh well. we saw some fantastic scenery though.
after that we got back into danshui's night/day market where wares were sampled and consumed. i tried this ginger tea that opened up my sinuses. we got back to the danshui train station and rode back into town.
pretty quiet day, relatively.
getting swarmed by turning mopeds while crossing. the below is taipei, a few hours past rush hour.
UPDATE: i wasn't in danshui afterall. i think i was in taichung and whereabouts.
i went running around the park this morning. i think one lap is close to a mile and i did about 5 laps i think. i'll be sure to take some video of what a taiwanese park looks like in the morning.
we went up to taichung today. it's nice and very touristy. we went to the national palace museum which was almost just as good as the nyc met. one of its most well known exhibits is the jade cabbage. the garden also had some of the biggest koy that i've ever seen. you can feed them too.
after that, we went into taichung proper to the shin kong mitsukoshi department store for lunch (fried breaded pork with cheese inside?). the weather started turning hostile then, so we caught a bus back. the bus we ended up taking however was a department store sponsored bus that would ferry people between the subway transfer station and the department store area. i also spotted my second chili's.
we ventured back out later to the cks memorial hall which was super huge. also nearby was taiwan's presidential office building, like the white house but red. we went a little bit into the night market-ish area and got dinner.
today, we started the day with a common local breakfast: coffee and bread. of which yonghe city is apparently known for.
we went down the northern coast of taiwan to see the coast on our way to the gold ecological park in jinguashi. the coast is quite magnificent and an imposing defensive predicament for any attacking force (i'm looking at you china!). a small force can execute holding actions in the mountains until reinforcements arrive, but i digress.
we also visited the night market in keelung where i ate and sampled a lot of weird food that i had no idea what it was. we also visited another night market but i don't think it was a night market because we were all up in there around noon (updated: actually, it was jioufen).
we also visited a fish market that was pretty neat. there's a row of restaurants adjacent to the fish market that has solicitors out front trying to get you to patronize their establishment. they're rather persistent in an annoying way.
i'm working on getting pictures uploaded... my upload rate is slow over the hspda connection that i have. tomorrow, we're supposed to be going to danshui.
i survived the 20+ hour flight. it helps when you break it into two halves and it becomes more manageable. i didn't have a watch on me so i lived in a realm outside of time and space for a while. fading in and out of consciousness and getting fed every x hours. that sony portable dvd player that i picked up on a whim the day before i flew out was a godsend. so far i watched the new futurama movie, and the british office seasons 1 and some of 2. anyway, i got to go up to the observatory deck in the taipei 101 building. the lower level is a shopping mall that is nearly unrivaled in the high-endedness that they are offering. and the elevator gets you 90 stories up and down within 32 seconds.
not work safe cause x gonn give it to ya.
if you've grown up in philadelphia and turned on the tv on a lazy sunday afternoon...
the slow buildup and climax of only in dreams, and the frantic wall of sound and group shouting of laika. harmonix, you can already have your way with my credit card. just make it happen.
putting this contact information down in my post so google will index it so maybe somebody will be deterred from going. you're better off going to the pagoda inn by the ritz on second street. or eulogy. or national mechanics.
4th & Chestnut
325 Chestnut Street
Philadelphia, PA 19106
Phone: 215-399-0214
Fax: 215-399-0216
i don't want to get into typing about what happened now, but service on a monday night with only a handful of patrons should never be this horrendous. how bad? like genocide-level bad. i'm surprised that THE COSI ACROSS THE STREET FROM THE RITZ AT THE BOURSE hasn't caught on fire and burned to the ground due to employee neglect. this place should be avoided like VD.
alec baldwin doing... everything.
While cleaning out his archives, Gawker's Jim Lehnhoff unearthed some video that he shot of the Arcade Fire all the way back on April 11, 2004, at the First Unitarian Church in Philadelphia. (They were third on the bill, playing behind the Unicorns and freakin' Chromeo, and in front of The Ponys.
a minor part in a movie called juno.
wait... i thought he was dead?!
yup. can't wait to get these jackasses off our streets."Shooting, stabbing, killing, whatever it is -- whatever you gotta do to survive," he said.
"Anything goes -- anything."
neon bible interactive music video.
ignore the awful music.
finished in 25:56 according to my watch. my second and third mile split can't be correct though...
yes i did run and finish the philadelphia distance run this past weekend. thirteen point one glorious miles in 1:57:23 (go here and search for bib 10150). three months of training and about three hundred total training miles. here are my mile splits that i kept on my stopwatch:
i'll post more about it later. i need to get to bed now that this phils game finally wrapped up in the 14th inning.
"Clean and simple. Its so understated that it screams in your face," raves Anthony of Anthony Heisler.
UPDATE: "willvuong.com... too much manliness for my wireless router to handle!" proclaims Anthony Heisler.
yeah, i reserved my copy at the 7-eleven down the block this morning. surreal.
click and watch the video
Taking advantage of an exploit that allowed an unidentified friend to deliver to him the Halo 3 "Epsilon" test version, former Xbox Live user "Scar" found himself on the receiving end of the Live banhammer. After six hours of Halo 3 heaven, his brief flirtation with the unreleased game came to an end. He was hit so hard, his account won't wake up until the year 10,000 AD, at which point, he'll have fallen so far behind in his achievement grabbing that he'll... well, he'll probably be dead.
The object of ping cup is to use the Wii remote to throw a ping-pong ball at a pyramid of cups.
not work safe video
tracing over a video clip to generate 3d models
play the video. it gets crazy awesome in the second half.
i wasn't planning on picking this one up but damn...
- Game Informer (100/100): "Even if you play games strictly for the difficulty that they bring, BioShock is a title that needs to be played, simply because you will never look at an FPS the same way again. Of the 15 to 20 hours of gameplay that it delivers, there isn't a second wasted. Once you finish the game, there's little chance that you'll take it out before playing it again to see the second ending."
- IGN (97/100): "To call this game simply a first-person shooter, a game that successfully fuses gameplay and narrative, is really doing it a disservice. This game is a beacon. It's one of those monumental experiences you'll never forget, and the benchmark against which games for years to come will, and indeed must, be measured."
- 1UP (100/100): "The sounds of the vending machines, the demented rants of a housewife who has long lost her sanity, the ability to craft your own ammunition, the level design based on some beloved touchstones of horror (medical experimentation, a garden of evil, the performing arts), the optional photography research, the color palette, the scratchy rendition of "Beyond the Sea," the fire and lighting and water effects...everything is in its right place."
Roman legion that was "lost" ended settling in China where their descendants still live today.. in a place called Li-Jien (which sounds in Chinese as the word "legion" and is the name by which the Chinese called Rome). Source
remember how ken griffey jr used to be so cool? i still have his rookie card somewhere....
CINCINNATI—Overcome with a mixture of distaste at the almost certain future and a wistful sense at the way things could and should have been, baseball fans across America took time to address veteran Reds superstar Ken Griffey Jr. yesterday in order to let him know that they sincerely wish that Griffey, and not Barry Bonds, was on the verge of hitting his record-breaking 756th home run.
"Don't take this the wrong way, Mr. Griffey, because the last thing we as a nation want is for you to think you've disappointed us by not breaking this record," the country's message, which was read to a quiet and humble Griffey by retired Seattle, WA–area mechanical engineer and lifelong baseball fan Robert Colgrave, began. "America knows you did everything you could, and we couldn't be more proud of you. In fact, that's the whole point—we think you're a man who is actually worthy of this record."
Top 10 Halo Pick-Up Lines
4 player halo campaign coop over xbox live or system link!!
i haven't been updating as much as i've wanted to really. and i apologize to my readers for that.
i'm going to try my first craigslist experience this week. i'm going to try to sell my ps2 and guitar hero game+controllers up on there. hopefully it'll turn out well and i won't be robbed. weeeee!!!!!
super dent dental floss, distributed by darby group companies inc of jerico, ny 11753 is the worst dental floss that i've ever used.
This is Rose & Camellia. It's set in the 19th century. You play a woman. You slap other women. That's it.
UPDATE: and the flash game itself.
looks like i'll have to pick this one up.
finished an 8 mile run tonight. i'm exhausted. i have 10 weeks to add 5 miles to this and make it faster.
I make this post as one makes a PSA. Because honestly, I think most people have no clue. People think their unopened factory sets of 1986 Topps are going to send their kids to college someday. I'm not exaggerating.
to $499. that's getting closer to the sweet spot ($400). still needs some actual games that i would be interested in that i wouldn't be able to get on the 360 though.
holy shit. this is like 3x guitar hero's awesomeness.
edit: i call bass. eddie's got lead. who's got drums and vocals?
edit2: only for ps3 and xbox360.
they might as well just give him his old job back since they're rewarding "compromising our national security and the secret men and women that protect us while we sleep and then covering it up" today.
President Bush commutes the prison term of Lewis "Scooter" Libby, former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. Libby was sentenced to 30 months after his March conviction on federal charges of perjury, obstruction of justice and lying to investigators.responses from other talking heads. my response:
this is lame. man, fuck all of you guys in dc.
geoff and melissa's wedding thriller
i carry my paypass card with me when i go running so i can pick up a sandwich and half gallon of tea from wawa afterwards without any hassles.
Jaw arthritis for hot-dog champ
Takeru 'Tsunami' said he can only open his mouth to make a gap the size of a fingertip after being diagnosed with jaw arthritis.
In an entry on his blog entitled Occupational Hazard, Kobayashi said: "My jaw refused to fight any more."
The injury occurred only a week after the slender 29-year-old started training to win his sixth straight title at the annual July 4 Nathan's Famous Hot Dog Eating contest on New York's Coney Island.
To kick off the national launch of Accelerade, Dean Karnazes will aim high. On June 21, his goal will be to break the world record for a 24-hour distance run on a treadmill (currently set at 153.76 miles) as well as to raise awareness for Athletes for a Cure, an organization dedicated to finding a cure for prostate cancer. The treadmill will be located on a platform attached to the Reuters building in Times Square.
i'm working on a facebook application written in java for mobile phones. so far, it's a pain in the ass to write non-web-applications using their facebook session api. i've been able to work around it (generated infinite session keys), but it's still hacky and confusing.
small world: ryan claims to have lived across the street from him.
i finally felt good enough to put in some sub-9 and sub-8 min/miles tonight. this is the first time in about a month where i felt like i was actually running.
A Berkeley watchdog organization that tracks military spending said it uncovered a strange U.S. military proposal to create a hormone bomb that could purportedly turn enemy soldiers into homosexuals and make them more interested in sex than fighting.
Pentagon officials on Friday confirmed to CBS 5 that military leaders had considered, and then subsquently rejected, building the so-called "Gay Bomb."
inconceivable! looks kinda lame too.
a series of 18+ videos at video.google. (link goes to forums thread.) oh boy!
i had a mobile phone in 1998. that was back when two-way pagers were new. using my phone in public drew attention because mobile phones were relatively uncommon. my carrier was omnipoint, which later became voicestream, which later become t-mobile. my plan was about $40/month for local 150 minutes per month. extra minutes were 15 cents and roaming outside of my region was about 30 cents (i remember getting absolutely raped for surcharges when i was in san francisco for business). text messaging was extra. my job at the time subsidized most of my phone bill. i had a phone from siemens, which was like the size of a folded original nintendo ds.
i was once a mac user. i had a mac performa and a powertower pro from power computing, which was a licensed mac clone. a mac clone! i even had a job where i maintained and wrote for a 20,0000 daily reader web site about mac laptops and imacs for a couple of years. i was even part of the local user group scene at one point.
now? my last three home workstations have been windows boxes. my htpc is a windows xp box. and i make fun of the guys at work that own them. what happened? a few things actually. the mac os at the time was horrible for c++ development; no protected memory or preemptive multitasking. imagine learning and working with pointers and pointer-pointers in that environment... one bad pointer and the whole system needed to be rebooted, unlike windows 98se. i don't pc game much anymore but half-life and rainbow six were enough to keep me from booting up the mac box for weeks at a time back then. and i like building my own pc from parts i bought and hand picked from the internet.
will i ever buy a mac again? i doubt it. windows xp is good enough and my next workstation will be a vista box.
in order to inspire others to post to their blogs, i will write something about myself every day this week that not many people know about. it's on.
edit: some of these "secrets" may be very stupid, obvious, and tangential. they're probably not secrets at all. but they will be posted on the internets.
well, sorta. i've been rehabbing a hamstring injury for the past two or three weeks. i think it bit me during my 24:01 5k and i haven't been able to run a pain-free 2 miles since. hopefully i'll be able to start running a bit more and test it out this week. i have to remember that these things take time to heal but i always end up rushing back too fast and too soon. :(
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