a two year anniversary

the tango community in taiwan is a very collegial group.  it's relatively small enough that everyone knows almost everyone else.  additionally, people socialize with each other outside of milongas quite a bit.  not that it doesn't happen elsewhere, but the taiwan group seems to do so a lot more than other places.

saturday was the 2 year anniversary of the tango studio. as a result, people were excited about the milonga. i got invited to one of their pre-milonga dinners by two different people. and i decided to go. it was a huge group-- more than 20. then came the milonga. everyone showed up on time. that never happens elsewhere. the floor was super crowded-- if you took away the fact that everyone was ethnically chinese, you could almost imagine yourself in buenos aires. afterwards, another large group went out for a midnight snack at the hk dim sum place right down the street. this time it was a group of 14.

i don't usually go out with large groups of people, nor do i usually socialize with the tango community, but it was nice. i think it helped that the tango group in taiwan is not quite like the group in other places. and by that i mean that they have lives outside of tango. each one of them have their own careers, interests, are not living day to day on very little (if any) income, and can hold conversation about a plethora of topics (albeit in chinese). in short, i am intellectually engaged when interacting with them.

a day of socializing

friday i met up with a friend for lunch, near ntu (national taiwan university).  we headed to a vietnamese place, and while it's still not as good as golden deli, at least we got a leaf for each of the pieces of egg rolls.  i found it funny though, because we got 6 leaves for 2 rolls that were cut into 6 pieces.  which made the ratio of leaf to roll way too much.  golden deli is 1 leaf per roll.

afterwards, my friend, who had attended ntu, gave me a tour of the campus.  there's a street thats quite wide, lined with palm trees, and almost feels like you're walking down the same street at stanford, except everything is darkened with soot.

at the end of the tour, we ended up at the most famous dessert place at ntu.  i had gone there 8 years ago, and they've upgraded their decore a lot.  i got a red bean soup with these dessert balls that was made of red bean paste, sesame, and glutenous rice on the outside, and peanut paste on the inside.  yum.  and we sat there talking for hours.  by the time we finished, it was almost time for me to go to my next engagement, friday night happy hours with some local expats.

the happy hour was fun, made some new friends, even re-connected with an old friend from arcadia. what are the chances of that?  afterwards, a few of us went to the shida night market next door and ordered a bunch of food at the frying stand.  we initially thought we couldn't finish, but we did.  and then went to another bar, cafe bastille, for more beers.  they have over 70 different belgiums.  not bad.

wanted to keep going, but had to head home.  taipei is hosting an open source developers conference this weekend.

a delicacy, home cooked

my grandfather is actually a pretty good chef, but he usually doesn't do the cooking.  every once in a while though, he does.  this is an image of one of his signature dishes, which no other place i've found does as well as he does.  offals cooked in ginger infused sesame oil and rice wine.  in the picture above are pig kidneys, rooster gonads, and i believe pig intestine lining (though i'm not exactly sure of the translation).  yum.

dunkin donuts

this is a gratuitous shot for my sister.  they're everywhere in taiwan

the talk at nchc

it went well. though because it's more of an academic institution, a lot of the audience were younger engineers, just out of college. certain assumptions i had about their level of knowledge of cloud computing was wrong, so i had to explain some basics. my host was very hospitable and we went for dinner where we discussed possible action plans. going forward, i think this was a good for networking.

another upcoming pomsets talk

this time it's at ITRI, next Monday morning at 10am in Hsinchu.    pretty exciting, because Taiwan just announced another investment of NT$17B (US$540M) into cloud computing initiatives over the next 5 years.  And I will have made contacts with 2 of the 3 (NCHC, ITRI, and III) main cloud computing centers funded by the Taiwanese government.

secret weapon

this trip down to taichung brought a secret weapon. actually, 4 of them. they're mosquito racquets. they're shaped like badminton racquets, except that they have batteries and the net is a metal mesh. so when you turn it on and swing it at a bug, the bug is electrocuted. with it, i killed a bunch of mosquitos. so i avoided bites for the first day or so. but i think they got smart, because by the end, even though i didnt see them anymore, i returned to taipei with about 4 bits, all on the last day.

the goose place

there's a place in taichung that serves amazing goose.  goose.  breasts, wings, legs, thighs, liver, gizzard.  and its amazingly good.  they started as a little stand over 30 years ago, to a small corner storefront that's been around for a few years.  in the last few months (at least since my last visit in august 2009), they've expanded again.  this time they have bought out two adjacent storefronts and the floor space above both of them.  so, essentially the size of 4 stores.  right across the street from their corner store, which now serves as their back kitchen where the geese are cooked.  once cooked, the geese are brought over to the open air kitchen in the new space, where the parts are dissected and plated.

six of us went, order a bunch of food, including half of a goose, a large plate of gizzards, and a large plate of liver, a large plate of pig blood cake (in a goose place?), 3 plates of yam leaves, and vermicelli soup for everyone.  total NT$1130 (US$36).

business idea: buying up the liver and fat from them, and making foie gras and rendered goose fat for sale.

A very busy weekend

I worked all weekend putting together my presentation to NCHC.  I could have gone with what I already had, but I wanted to do a bit more.  So I refactored the workflow that I was using so that it would run better.  I wanted to show off some new ideas I had, so I made changes to pomsets and released a new version, so that I can point people to it for download.  I wanted to give a live demo of the cloud enabled rendering, so I compiled a new Eucalyptus machine image with my modified version of Yafaray, and dependency libraries.  This took a while, because a networking issue came up.  It had to do with the fact that I was building the image off a running instance.  I've barely slept the past couple of days, but everything is ready to go. 

I thought I would have a few more hours to get everything done, but my mom wanted me to go to Taichung earlier to have dinner with the relatives.  Given that dinner is going to be at the best goose place in all of Taiwan, I couldn't refuse.

So today I'm headed down to Taichung.  I still have to buy some stuff, including a mini-DVI to VGA adapter.  This is what I get for giving the two I had to people who needed them.