So maybe SNL is starting to be funny again. This is a great video that started this new season. Check it out.
http://tw.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_xQdynFVLg
Sunday, September 14, 2008
Saturday, September 13, 2008
Notre Dame football post
First, typhoons suck hard. The one hitting now has been DUMPING rain for the last 48 hours and it is supposed to be around until Tuesday. The wind hasn't been bad but it has been constantly raining. It even rained so hard for a bit that there was some water leaking in around my windows and air conditioner.
Ok, so the ND game. Thankfully, you can watch all the games on NBC without commercials and it takes under an hour. So these are the things I've noticed over the first two games. We have some ballers: Brian Smith (who will be in the NFL as he was all over the field), David Bruton is great, as is Mike Anello who has more heart than all of last year's team, Aldridge showed some flashes, and Tate is going to be great too. And to give credit where credit is due McGuffie from UM is going to be amazing.
In general there have been some good things. The safety play has been great as has tackling and hitting. We have caused a lot of TO's which is always good news. It was funny to see a 330 pound man running down the field. We also have a strong youth movement. But most of all, it's always great to beat UM and start the season 2-0.
However, there are are a lot of things that are concerning to me. We blitz a lot (which I absolutely love) but we don't get consistent pressure or come up with sacks. Conversely, we are lucky not to have given up any sacks as our OL still needs a lot of improvement. Overall the offense needs a lot of work, but it's still early so that will come. The d-line is still absent on too many plays--which cannot happen in a 3-4 defense.
Finally, I say we spread the field with three receiver sets. Get Tate, Floyd, and Kamara in so the defense has to cover them then pound the ball on the right side and run the occasional play-action pass.
The arrow is pointing up on this team.
Ok, so the ND game. Thankfully, you can watch all the games on NBC without commercials and it takes under an hour. So these are the things I've noticed over the first two games. We have some ballers: Brian Smith (who will be in the NFL as he was all over the field), David Bruton is great, as is Mike Anello who has more heart than all of last year's team, Aldridge showed some flashes, and Tate is going to be great too. And to give credit where credit is due McGuffie from UM is going to be amazing.
In general there have been some good things. The safety play has been great as has tackling and hitting. We have caused a lot of TO's which is always good news. It was funny to see a 330 pound man running down the field. We also have a strong youth movement. But most of all, it's always great to beat UM and start the season 2-0.
However, there are are a lot of things that are concerning to me. We blitz a lot (which I absolutely love) but we don't get consistent pressure or come up with sacks. Conversely, we are lucky not to have given up any sacks as our OL still needs a lot of improvement. Overall the offense needs a lot of work, but it's still early so that will come. The d-line is still absent on too many plays--which cannot happen in a 3-4 defense.
Finally, I say we spread the field with three receiver sets. Get Tate, Floyd, and Kamara in so the defense has to cover them then pound the ball on the right side and run the occasional play-action pass.
The arrow is pointing up on this team.
What a Week
This week was pretty busy. We had two technicians come in and I had to take care of them. That means transport arrangements, hotels, and translating between them and the workers. The good part is that I'm building a better rapport with the production team that I have to work with so that is never a bad thing, one lady even told me in that she couldn't understand what the hell the technician was saying unless I helped translate. The other good thing was that I was able to get a sweet Italian meal with the technicians on the company bill. The downside was that I still had all of my regular work to do and next week I have to order and catalogue several thousand dollars worth of spare parts.
Interesting note: the ride back from the airport with the technician was 30 min and that was the most I talked to a white person in over 2 weeks.
Right now there is a typhoon hitting the island. It has been about to hit for the last three days and now it finally is coming close. The rain seems to come hard for a 30min then fade off then come back. Tonight will be the real test to see how it looks.
The downside to the typhoon is that I was going to go to the beach in Yilan with a coworker this weekend but now that the typhoon is here that trip was cancelled. That means I'm also not sure about the mid-autumn festival bbq I was supposed to have with my language partners tomorrow. But most galling of all is that I planned to go to the bar this weekend and get hammered, but probably not a good idea with the typhoon.
I mentioned the new girl who works at the office now. I think it's kinda strange but whenever i talk to her in Chinese she laughs a ton since she claims she is not used to seeing "Chinese words come from a white face." So that is good. The bad lady news is that I made the mistake of giving my MSN to a chick I met at a bar and now whenever I get on she wants to talk.
I went to the airport this afternoon with my boss to pick up a business partner. He has all of these big plans and big ideas for me. But I stay cautious since he has a tendency to overstate things. But he trusts me and wants to give some of my work to someone else in the company so I was happy to hear that.
Interesting note: the ride back from the airport with the technician was 30 min and that was the most I talked to a white person in over 2 weeks.
Right now there is a typhoon hitting the island. It has been about to hit for the last three days and now it finally is coming close. The rain seems to come hard for a 30min then fade off then come back. Tonight will be the real test to see how it looks.
The downside to the typhoon is that I was going to go to the beach in Yilan with a coworker this weekend but now that the typhoon is here that trip was cancelled. That means I'm also not sure about the mid-autumn festival bbq I was supposed to have with my language partners tomorrow. But most galling of all is that I planned to go to the bar this weekend and get hammered, but probably not a good idea with the typhoon.
I mentioned the new girl who works at the office now. I think it's kinda strange but whenever i talk to her in Chinese she laughs a ton since she claims she is not used to seeing "Chinese words come from a white face." So that is good. The bad lady news is that I made the mistake of giving my MSN to a chick I met at a bar and now whenever I get on she wants to talk.
I went to the airport this afternoon with my boss to pick up a business partner. He has all of these big plans and big ideas for me. But I stay cautious since he has a tendency to overstate things. But he trusts me and wants to give some of my work to someone else in the company so I was happy to hear that.
Friday, September 12, 2008
3 Questions
Without fail every Taiwanese person here will ask me the following questions in some order (even the GM of my company asked me these one day). 1. What do you do on the weekend--coffee shops, sleep a lot, study, read, go to bars, be lazy, etc. 2. Do you have a Taiwanese girlfriend--no. 3. Do you think Taiwanese women are pretty/Do you like Taiwanese women--yes, but not necessarily more than any other race of female.
A fourth question that I love to be asked is if I teach English. The VAST majority of the foreigners here teach English so when I say no its a great conversation starter. Seriously, how many 23 year-olds are working in international sales, production, ordering, and in charge of machine maintenance at at Taiwanese company? That is not to say that I always like my job but I'll post on that a little bit later.
A fourth question that I love to be asked is if I teach English. The VAST majority of the foreigners here teach English so when I say no its a great conversation starter. Seriously, how many 23 year-olds are working in international sales, production, ordering, and in charge of machine maintenance at at Taiwanese company? That is not to say that I always like my job but I'll post on that a little bit later.
Monday, September 8, 2008
The Last Week
This weekend the old couple I teach English to invited me on a little trip to the famous Yang Ming Shan (Mountain). It was a pretty nice drive up there and even though it was hot the park on the mountain was pretty cool. The biggest thing for me was to get out of the city since most of my days are spent in the concrete jungle so that was a welcome break to go there. Then we drove to the ocean, again, a great place to go. We had a great lunch of clams, cuddlefish, shrimp, and fish at a cool seaside restaurant and we got to pick the stuff we wanted from bins of live seafood (some of the things there I had never need before in the second to last picture). 
The weather here is finally starting to cool off a bit and by that I mean in the evenings it’s below 30 degress C with a breeze. Of course, the middle of the day is still hotter than all hell.
This last week was a ton of work since I had a bunch of orders to take care of. On top of that two engineers are coming in and I have to make all of their arrangements with hotels, transport, and working schedule. That also meant that I had to have countless meetings to go over the details with my coworkers. Then one of the machines broke…more work. Then the boss said to accept the engineer’s request only to have the GM keep delaying the decision. The worst part was my boss was in China and would randomly give me emails to prepare stuff for customers I had never even heard of (sure I can take an order of thermal paper from a company I’ve never heard of for a contract bid I’ve never heard of). No the worst part would be emailing vendors who I knew were swamped then to have a coworker come ask me to email with a new question 5 min after I sent the original email.
The strange thing was that my boss wants me to drive to the airport to pick up one of the engineers (with his car) for some reason. No way I say, the drivers are pretty crazy, I don’t know the rules of the road, I don’t have an international drivers license. No problem he says, drive my car and the cops are nice so you won’t get in trouble or care that you work here illegally. Doesn’t seem like the best bet to me. So far I’ve put it off by saying that I was too tired to drive.
Well one engineer is here this week and it’s already been a sonofabitch. He’s a nice enough guy but now I have to order a ton of shit for him, maintain the machine, translate (for him and the workers and some huge hand-written document I was handed today), and do all of my other work too.
This weekend I went back to the Bravo bar where I had been before. I actually saw other white people my age for the first time in a long long time. It was pretty strange, since I’m used to only being around Taiwanese people now. But one dude bought me a shot so it was all good. Also at the bar I also ended up talking with a group of Taiwanese people and shocked them at I speak some Chinese. People are always a little nervous to talk to you since they think their English isn’t very good but once they hear me speak Chinese they all want to talk.
The plus side to all of this is that my Chinese is getting much better, or at least it’s coming more fluently and I have been able to pick up on more of what is said. Then again I still have a hard time with the business meetings since there are so many words I still don’t know.
The weather here is finally starting to cool off a bit and by that I mean in the evenings it’s below 30 degress C with a breeze. Of course, the middle of the day is still hotter than all hell.
This last week was a ton of work since I had a bunch of orders to take care of. On top of that two engineers are coming in and I have to make all of their arrangements with hotels, transport, and working schedule. That also meant that I had to have countless meetings to go over the details with my coworkers. Then one of the machines broke…more work. Then the boss said to accept the engineer’s request only to have the GM keep delaying the decision. The worst part was my boss was in China and would randomly give me emails to prepare stuff for customers I had never even heard of (sure I can take an order of thermal paper from a company I’ve never heard of for a contract bid I’ve never heard of). No the worst part would be emailing vendors who I knew were swamped then to have a coworker come ask me to email with a new question 5 min after I sent the original email.
The strange thing was that my boss wants me to drive to the airport to pick up one of the engineers (with his car) for some reason. No way I say, the drivers are pretty crazy, I don’t know the rules of the road, I don’t have an international drivers license. No problem he says, drive my car and the cops are nice so you won’t get in trouble or care that you work here illegally. Doesn’t seem like the best bet to me. So far I’ve put it off by saying that I was too tired to drive.
Well one engineer is here this week and it’s already been a sonofabitch. He’s a nice enough guy but now I have to order a ton of shit for him, maintain the machine, translate (for him and the workers and some huge hand-written document I was handed today), and do all of my other work too.
This weekend I went back to the Bravo bar where I had been before. I actually saw other white people my age for the first time in a long long time. It was pretty strange, since I’m used to only being around Taiwanese people now. But one dude bought me a shot so it was all good. Also at the bar I also ended up talking with a group of Taiwanese people and shocked them at I speak some Chinese. People are always a little nervous to talk to you since they think their English isn’t very good but once they hear me speak Chinese they all want to talk.
The plus side to all of this is that my Chinese is getting much better, or at least it’s coming more fluently and I have been able to pick up on more of what is said. Then again I still have a hard time with the business meetings since there are so many words I still don’t know.
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
Stuff Around the Office
Listening to Taiwanese people say my name is something that I hope will never get old. It is absolutely hilarious. I tell them my name is a lot like Bill Clinton's without the on at the end (his name in Chinese is Ke Lin-dun). So most people try and say my name and it comes out pronounced like "kuh lin." In fact, a coworker here thought my name was spelled Cliat for a long time so maybe that explains some of the problems.
Do you ever have the urge to just mess things up? I do. Or I do now, I found that I will likely not be travelling much if at all this month-this of course is what I have been looking foward to. So maybe if I screwed up all my work and made some customers drop us as suppliers I could go out and travel to get some new business.
There is also a new employee here at the office (three people have left in the last week, including the only person younger than me). The new girl is nice but is a year older than me which makes me unhappy since I don't want to be the youngest one here. I am more okay with it now since I've known her only a few hours and she's trying to set me up with her friend.
In the office, as in life, I send a ton of email. But I have a bad habbit of not CC-ing everyone on it. Here even routine things need to be CC-ed to all the people involved so I'm trying to break that habbit of mine. My boss here is REALLY into Skype. I'll admit that it's nice and I use it to talk to my parents. However, my boss has me send him texts with Skype since it is supposed to be cheaper. He even called me on it one night after work at 10PM. That means from now on I'm always on invisible.
I know I need to put up more pictures. I'll try but my main goal is to drink hard this weekend so pictures might have to wait a little bit.
Do you ever have the urge to just mess things up? I do. Or I do now, I found that I will likely not be travelling much if at all this month-this of course is what I have been looking foward to. So maybe if I screwed up all my work and made some customers drop us as suppliers I could go out and travel to get some new business.
There is also a new employee here at the office (three people have left in the last week, including the only person younger than me). The new girl is nice but is a year older than me which makes me unhappy since I don't want to be the youngest one here. I am more okay with it now since I've known her only a few hours and she's trying to set me up with her friend.
In the office, as in life, I send a ton of email. But I have a bad habbit of not CC-ing everyone on it. Here even routine things need to be CC-ed to all the people involved so I'm trying to break that habbit of mine. My boss here is REALLY into Skype. I'll admit that it's nice and I use it to talk to my parents. However, my boss has me send him texts with Skype since it is supposed to be cheaper. He even called me on it one night after work at 10PM. That means from now on I'm always on invisible.
I know I need to put up more pictures. I'll try but my main goal is to drink hard this weekend so pictures might have to wait a little bit.
Crassly Political Post
No, it's not crap. It just looks like crap, smells like crap, and has the same color and all the qualities of crap. That's what I hear coming from the RNC. Romney called the Dems the party of big brother. Anyone who has been conscious for the last 8 years would see this as double-speak. He is trying to tell you yes we Republican-led Congresses passed all sorts of measures that intrude on privacy and degrade the ability of courts to oversee those processes but that's not big brother-ish it's really the Dems who are big brother. He is telling you "No, this is not crap even though it has all the qualities and properties of crap-don't believe your eyes."
Here is a great opinion piece by one of my favorite columnists, Leonard Pitts Jr., about Sarah Palin: http://www.miamiherald.com/living/columnists/leonard-pitts/story/670090.html.
This jives perfectly with the last few days. Palin tells the media not to intrude on her family (note: I wholeheartedly agree, families should be off limits), only to have the campaign trot out her 7 year-old and then show McCain meeting the father of her daughter's kid. If you want them out of the media don't put them there in the first place. This is also the same McCain that stooped low and made off-color jokes about Chelsea Clinton being ugly when Bill Clinton was elected as president.
Also on the subject of Palin, the new line on here is she has experience, and not just any experience but "executive experience." Yeah, she has been a governor for 20 months and was a mayor of a tiny town. I'm not entirely sure how that translates into qualifications, after all, if you need executive experience to be president then where does that leave McCain (and Obama)? Moreover, Bush had 8 years of executive experience in Texas and that didn't translate to the national level very well.
The other great line on Palin is she is like the next door neighbor-I think by that they mean a normal person. Well two of my neighbors are off-the-wall strange and mildly creepy so if she's like my neighbors that's bad news since neither of them need to be VP. But the point is that she is normal and down to earth. Frankly, I want a person in the White House who not normal in that they are much smarter than I am and if they are down to earth and normal that's a bonus.
One reason I don't care for Palin: she has stated global warming is not related to human action. Thomas Friedman has a fantastic column (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/03/opinion/03friedman.html?_r=1&oref=slogin) about how McCain has avoided voting on measures that would help fund alternative fuels and Palin is just another step there. For a nature lover from Oregon there is nothing worse.
But when all else fails, Republicans can blame the media and avoid talking about the economy at all costs because if you just shift the focus then it all goes away...
Here is a great opinion piece by one of my favorite columnists, Leonard Pitts Jr., about Sarah Palin: http://www.miamiherald.com/living/columnists/leonard-pitts/story/670090.html.
This jives perfectly with the last few days. Palin tells the media not to intrude on her family (note: I wholeheartedly agree, families should be off limits), only to have the campaign trot out her 7 year-old and then show McCain meeting the father of her daughter's kid. If you want them out of the media don't put them there in the first place. This is also the same McCain that stooped low and made off-color jokes about Chelsea Clinton being ugly when Bill Clinton was elected as president.
Also on the subject of Palin, the new line on here is she has experience, and not just any experience but "executive experience." Yeah, she has been a governor for 20 months and was a mayor of a tiny town. I'm not entirely sure how that translates into qualifications, after all, if you need executive experience to be president then where does that leave McCain (and Obama)? Moreover, Bush had 8 years of executive experience in Texas and that didn't translate to the national level very well.
The other great line on Palin is she is like the next door neighbor-I think by that they mean a normal person. Well two of my neighbors are off-the-wall strange and mildly creepy so if she's like my neighbors that's bad news since neither of them need to be VP. But the point is that she is normal and down to earth. Frankly, I want a person in the White House who not normal in that they are much smarter than I am and if they are down to earth and normal that's a bonus.
One reason I don't care for Palin: she has stated global warming is not related to human action. Thomas Friedman has a fantastic column (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/03/opinion/03friedman.html?_r=1&oref=slogin) about how McCain has avoided voting on measures that would help fund alternative fuels and Palin is just another step there. For a nature lover from Oregon there is nothing worse.
But when all else fails, Republicans can blame the media and avoid talking about the economy at all costs because if you just shift the focus then it all goes away...
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