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So I’m off to Singapore again, on EVA Airways – nothing spectacular, except that I’m stuck in the middle row of seats, in the middle seat – not exactly fun. But the Deluxe class seats are extremely comfortable, so I don’t mind. EVA has a Deluxe class, for CAD$100 more return, you can get business class type seats but with economy class food. Good deal, I think – especially with the trip being 18 hours of flight-time in total – one way.

So 12 hours later after departing Vancouver, I land in Chiang Kai Shek Airport in Taiwan. I have about two hours to kill before my next flight, it is about four hours to Singapore. So I’m walking in a fairly deserted wing of the airport to my gate – and I was glancing at the flight arrival monitors (big 40 inch LCD screens, I believe), and lo and behold, there was a Microsoft Scandisk window overlaid on top of the arrival screen! It was churning away, I couldn’t read the window text because it was all in Chinese.I wish I had a digicam at that moment. No surprise that most of these systems would be run by Microsoft software.

I get to the gate – and saw a sign saying ‘WiFi’ near the public payphones. Hmm – why not try it out? So I whipped out my laptop and proceeded to just go to “www.google.com”, and it redirected me to the page for HiNet, a Taiwanese WiFi/broadband provider. The page is all in Chinese. Then I saw the “English” hyperlink and thought – I’m in luck! But not so fast. That brought me to a FAQ page that proceeded to tell me that for non-HiNet subscribers, I needed to buy a HiNet prepaid card, bla bla bla, and that card can be bought online using my credit card. But unfortunately when I went to the link it provided to buy the card, it was in Chinese yet again. Since most of the link location text was in English, I thought by hovering my mouse over a link I might gain some clues to where the link might go to from the status bar. Quite frustrating. The contact page was indecipherable also, so I couldn’t e-mail the webmaster or public relations or something.

On my return trip back, I have a 6 hour layover in Taiwan again. I really wish I could get some wi-fi love then, but I’m not hoping too hard.

A couple of months ago I was in the computer department of a national chain, let’s say it rhymes with “Mondon Drugs” (haha) to buy some computer equipment. As I was browsing, an elderly couple came in and were talking to a sales person about getting a bigger LCD monitor than what they currently have, a 17″.

I was nearby and I couldn’t help overhear the rest of their conversation. The wife was talking to the clerk: apparently her husband had trouble seeing the small text on webpages and wanted to get a bigger monitor so he could see the text. The clerk had Firefox running on a demo computer and she proceeded to show the problem her husband was having, basically he couldn’t see the text clearly because it was too small. I figured, this clerk would surely know his stuff, and tell the couple that you can increase the default text size in the browser through the options, or just “ctrl+mousewheel-up” to increase the font size.

But no – the clerk proceeded to test webpages on a 19″ monitor so the husband could “test” whether the 19″ monitor was better for his eyes. Of course the text was “larger” (a 19″ LCD has the same number of pixels as a 17″, but the pixels are larger of course). I had a dilemma – should I step in and save this couple about four hundred plus dollars and show them how to increase the default text size (and interfere with the clerk’s sale) – or let them be. I chose the latter – I figured it was not my place to interfere with someone’s bread and butter (maybe he was on commission, who knows).

Well – two weeks ago I was in a similar situation, but this time there was no sale involved.

Continue reading ‘To interfere – or not’ »

Ruskin Park, a tiny space of land right in front of my house has been taken over by a film crew. There are trucks, trailers everywhere – including a couple of ambulances and police cars. I don’t know what movie they are filming, but they’ve been here for about a week (must be major), apparently filming at the Ruskin Dam which is about a couple of minutes walk from my place.

The police cars have the lettering “Burnaby Police” on the front doors, and are baby-blue in colour. We have a municipality here in BC that is called Burnaby, but I’ve never seen any municipality’s police cars in that colour before. So far, since I have lived here – this is the third time I’ve seen filming nearby. The first was “Taken”, a sci-fi mini-series I believe (I didn’t watch it). The second was a quick film (only a couple of days) that I did not know the name of – probably a local film, and the third is this new film. Before I moved here, a scene from the X-Files was shot here, which I think was the episode “Patient X” (Season 5) where a throng of people were moving across the top of Ruskin Dam (they kept the name of the location in the script). The Ruskin Dam is sure a magnet for filming I guess.

side note: The film “Lake Placid” was filmed on the top side of the dam, Hayward Lake.

I just bought my first Mac, a 12″ iBook G4. Actually, its not for me – my wife needs a new laptop, her HP Pavilion is on the fritz, and she is swamped lately with freelance work. She has been vehemently anti-Mac before, she even had her whole department switch from all Macs (all 25 of them) to PCs when she was a Managing Editor at a major publishing house in Singapore. She wasn’t opposed to the iBook, since I got an extremely good deal from Atimi. Her “sour” experience stemmed from her first Mac experience using Mac OS 7, that was my first experience with Macs also. We both hated OS 7!

I had a chance to play with iLife, etc – and I really like iDVD. The whole suite seems extremely well done – although rendering menus/DVD image etc through iDVD is dog slow. I have tons of home video to edit and I can see myself using a Mac for this task. GarageBand is intriguing – I will need to dust off my guitar sometime.

I had already been introduced to OS 10.4 Tiger at work (I am a Windows developer in a sea of Mac developers). Mac OS has really come a long way I think. And I needed a new challenge – Cocoa programming. Next thing I knew – I bought a Mac Mini! A good starter system I think – what I am really waiting for are the Intel Powerbooks coming next year so I can dual-boot Windows (still my bread and butter)