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Don’ mess wit me cuz ahm packin’

Well, it’s 1pm and I am packing up for the day to leave the office.  I’m heading home to start packing for our big trip home.  I suppose I better water my cacti before I leave.

This is our first trip back home since we’ve moved to Hong Kong.  Our flight is at around 8am so we have to leave our apartment around 5am to make sure we get to the airport on time.  We have tons of stuff to bring back for our families since we are essentially celebrating Christmas, Easter and birthdays all at once.  Hopefully if anyone gets anything for us it will be small or money shaped so it’s easy to transport.

So the updates will probably spotty to say the least for the next two weeks.  But if I get the time I will come here and let everyone know I made it home alive and hopefully no evil terrorists or evil Homeland Security people will give us any trouble.  Like there’s any other kind of Homeland Security person….

The Singapore trip

I am back in Hong Kong after being in Singapore for 5 days/4 nights for work.  I had a ton of stuff to get done in a short amount of time.  They had a UPS that needed new batteries installed, a brand new UPS, a new server as well as a new LTO-2 tape drive and tapes.  Oh and a new Adaptec 39160 thrown in the mix as well.  The server being replaced was there Exchange e-mail as well as file and print server.  So lots to do.  Luckily things went pretty smooth except for a couple of odd problems on Monday before I ran out to catch my flight.  Overall a decent success.

Now I’m back at my desk in Hong Kong.  I came back into my office yesterday to find everything scattered around and piled in odd places and just all around a bit off.  My phone was unplugged and my paperwork was everywhere but my desk.  It seems that in the aftermath of the remodeling of our offices, the desk I had gotten had a big scratch in it.  Big deal.  But no they needed to replace it.  So it seems that they did replace it while I was gone.  So now I have a new desk with a smaller scratch in it in a different spot….  I’m not mentioning that to anyone.  One odd thing I noted while I was getting everything hooked up was when I was running the power cable for my speakers.  And that odd things was “Hey…  I didn’t have speakers before….”  So that was weird because now I seem to.

St. Louis missings

Here’s a list of few things I miss from St. Louis (or in some cases, Missouri or USA in general):

• Dairy Queen
  The closest one I have found here is in Shanghai, China and it is SO not the same
• Used CD, DVD and video game stores
  I have found one tiny store in Central (the district my office is in) but no others. This could be due to most people buy VCDs at a fraction of the price of DVDs.
• Baked goods
  Although there are plenty of bakeries here in Hong Kong, none of them make anything like back home. Most things are dry. Except the new Krispy Kreme. That tastes almost identical.
• Ted Drewe’s
  I think that this concept would be beyond their comprehension here.
• Papa John’s Pizza
  They have this in Shanghai too and it does taste basically the same. I have a picture of the Papa John’s sign in Chinese on my camera. Have to dig that up.
• Best Buy
  A four story tall giganto Best Buy opened right across the street from the office the week I was in Shanghai. I of course visited and was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of televisions. And the absolute lack of video games, CDs and DVDs. It seems that there may be some truth to ths rampant pirating in China myth you hear about. Shanghai also seems to have more Western goodness thanHong Kong for some reason….
• XL
  XL or extra large size shirts are not the same as they are at home. The scrawny south Chinese just don’t have much use for American sizing I suppose. So I will be getting undershirts when we come home.
• Driving
  Yes I miss driving. We went from having three cars between the two of us and now we have none. Not a car in the world. No we take buses, ferries, trains, etc everywhere. There’s a certain freedom in driving that just can’t be replaced easily. I didn’t realize that till I didn’t have it. We will be getting a rental when we come home. That ought to be fun.

X-Mas in April

Since we were kinda on the other side of the world at the time, Christmas had to be postponed for us.  Birthdays (mine) too.  But since we will be back in St. Louis to visit as of April 1 (no foolin’), we will celebrate Christmas, birthdays and Easter all at once and as many times as possible.  The bad thing is that we have to have gifts for others.  Not that we don’t like buying stuff for everyone, but we hate lugging it all half-way-round-the-world.

Thus the extra suitcase….

We have gone to Stanley Market twice and the Temple Street Night Market once and the twin Li Yuen street markets multiple times to look for fun gifts for the family.  We may have gone a little overboard.  If Customs stops us, we may have some ’splainin’ to do.  Probably not but that was fun to say…  type.  You know what I mean.

So we have to start packing soon.  At least the gifts.  We’ll be like frickin’ Santa Claus with bunny ears.  Sweet.

Do you believe in farmers?

Farmer Jim: I hear you don’t castrate your animals. That true?
Farmer Bill: Yup, that’s true all right.
Farmer Jim: But why?
Farmer Bill: Why? ‘Cause I believes in karma….

Seventy two days later Farmer Jim died of heat stroke. The relic of a tractor he was riding continued on through the fields carrying his bouncing body. It crashed through the old weather-worn pole fence, crushed his wife’s precious gardenias and then sputtered to a stop after crashing through the living room wall. His lifeless body slumped off the side and impaled itself through the stomach on a broken two-by-four from the wall.

Three hours later Farmer Bill left the local gas station scratching the grey covering off his weekly lottery indulgence. As he uncovered the third and winning $200,000 marker on the scratcher he realized what he had and what this would mean to him and his family. He then realized that in his amazement he had not stopped walking and saw the dumptruck moments before it ran him over in the middle of the street. Three large tires on the passenger side of the fully loaded dumptruck went on over and through his body. As the driver slammed on the brakes those tires left a trail of black rubber, blood and small gobs of flesh in their wake.

So, what do you believe in?

Real-too-real

Does anyone remember VHS tapes? Yeah, of course you do. You’d have to be like 7 years old not to remember. But what about audio cassette tapes? 8-Track tapes? Vinyl records? (Yeah everyone “remembers those” because they are ‘chic’ and ‘underground’ now)

Have you ever watched an old family reel-to-reel home movie on an old projector? Maybe even in black & white and maybe no sound. Yes? No?

And with the SuperCD, HD-DVD and BLU-RAY DVD formats out now, how long will it be till people can’t remember the olden days of CDs, single-layer DVDs and transition delays?

What’s my point?

I didn’t really have one. But I am feeling kind of old.

Delays

Going to Singapore has been delayed for a week. Hopefully no more than a week because I will not be on this side of the planet for a few weeks after that. Too many things not coming together to make this a successful trip. I’m sure Singapore is a nice (if ungodly hot) place to visit, but I’d like to get everything done in one shot.

We have a new branch office that just opened up in Mumbai, India recently. However it’s only two people so far, so there is no way I will be needed to fly there anytime soon. I’m not even sure that I would want to go to India. Other than the Taj Mahal, I really don’t think that there’s anything in the whole country I’d want to see. Except for maybe the sets of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom of course, but I doubt that was shot on location….

I still need to hire one more person. I’m really shocked that people didn’t ask me to take their resumes. Maybe people are smarter than I thought. It wouldn’t have helped if they had. I don’t think I can get another expatriate a position here. Unless of course they wanted to move themselves and take care of everything on their own. Maybe I can send that person to Mumbai….

… again, jiggety jig.

Writing titles for these posts is fun. For me, not you. It’s all about me, so get over it.

Since I have been talking about travel lately, I thought I would add these two items:

1. We will not be flying, boating, ferrying, sailing, gliding, swimming, driving(!?), rowing, or any other travel means available to anywhere in Indonesia. They say it’s not terrorist activity but multiple aircraft, airline, ferry and fire incidents in 2 and a half months is insane. More people have been recently killed in Indonesia by vehicles of one sort or another than I care to count. If you have plans to travel to Indonesia, check the World News first. It may save your life.
2. We will be heading home (St. Louis, MO) on March 31 to visit family and friends. It will be Christmas, Easter and Birthdays all rolled into one since we probably won’t be back again for another year (maybe less). We’ve got everything planned (we think) and are just getting everything finalized (we hope). (lots of parentheses)

And that’s all their is. Please go about your normal browsing.

Oh, the Places You’ll Go!

I wonder if he was really a doctor… what? Oh, we’re on?

I was thinking about what I said about visiting Singapore and then about the other places I have been so far. Places that I would never have imagined I would ever get to visit. So far, I have seen very little of these places, but I have gotten to see a few rare treats.

Here’s where I’ve been so far (in order) since I’ve moved to Hong Kong:

• Hong Kong (repeatedly, hehe)
• Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
• Seoul, South Korea
• Beijing, China
• Tokyo, Japan
• Shanghai, China

Singapore is up next and I will try and make some excuse to go to Sydney, Australia some time this year yet. We also have offices in Guangzhou, China and Manila, Philippines but GZ is very small and unsafe from what I am told and there are big warnings at the US Embassy about Americans travelling to the Philippines. May hold off on that one for a few centuries.

In other news, it’s my birthday today… yay.

Bound for Singapore

Well it looks like I will be in Singapore on March 16th.  I have to go replace an old out-of-warranty server with a new one.  Exchange, file and print…  fun stuff.  Supposedly there are about 29 people in the office so it’s going to be one hell of a busy weekend with all the workstation reconfigurations afterwards.

This will be my first trip to Singapore and I’m not really looking forward to it.  For one thing it’s hotter than hell there no matter what time of year.  The other reason is that I’ll be locked in the office all day every day and not get to see a damn thing but the airport and the office.  I understand Singapore can be a very beautiful place.  Perhaps, I will buy a postcard and treasure it’s tiny view always.  Perhaps not.  I’d prefer to be bitter.  Although I’m just hungry at the moment….