Silver Case

All my crap is packed up, and I’m catching a Northwest flight to Seattle via Tokyo in five hours.

Logistically:

Phone numbers:

•  My handphone: +65 9620 2930.  I am bringing along another old handphone. When I get to the US I’ll buy a sim card for it so that I have a US phone number during the month I’m there. That way people can call me more easily.
• Ling’s handphone:  +65 9696 5369
• Matt’s handphone:  +1 206 683 9816
• Matt’s Office: +1 206 633 3400  x504

Skype:

While I’m in the US, my laptop’s skype name is ‘karavshin’ .  Ling’s skype name, back in Singapore, is ‘robin-close’

The house we’re staying at is:

2019 E. Newton St
Seattle, WA 98112

Don’t worry Shannon and Aunt Mary, I’ll twitter as soon as I land!

• Taking Luke to his first visit to the dentist. Bribing him with train. #
• Teeth cleaned. Minimal trauma! #
• Luke gets the Sodor road crew train as his reward. #
• Packing, pre-move purging, and pre-ChineseNewYear cleanup going on. #
• George Noory sucks. Pale imitation of Art Bell. Noory sounds insincere and condescending. At his worst, he goes for cheap thrills like … #
• Dinner: moyashi chashu and gyoza at osho. (pork and bean sprouts & fried dumplings) #
• Boarding the plane now. Tweet tweet! #

On Tuesday I was asked how much of my house is finished. I answered 50% and then on reflection said maybe more like 60%.  I think I grossly underestimated.  Yesterday I was at the house when all the built in cabinetry was arriving, and when the stairs and wood flooring was finished.  In fact, the house is very close to being done, perhaps 80% now.  There was an absolute mountain of cabinets in the living room, waiting to be installed into the bedrooms and kitchen.  If it weren’t for imminent Chinese New Year, the house would be finished by the end of February.
This reality, and the fact that tomorrow morning I’m leaving for a month in the USA, keeps pushing me to throw away more and more stuff from the basement storage. I’ve managed to reduce my books library by 90%.   My computer and old electronics rubbish, by 98%.   Practically the only thing I haven’t culled has been my collections of old memories and photographs.  I have trunks full of slide albums.

But having slides today is sort of like having Han Solo in ice.  I really have to want a photo to go to the trouble of re-installing my slide scanner and processing the slide. So much so that I haven’t scanned a slide in close to five years.

Thinking about this, I realized a great double-blow solution would be to use the Scan Cafe service.  I could get electronic scans of all these immobilized images. Then I’d (1) have access to them electronically, which is vastly more useful  (2) be able to throw out at least fifty pounds of crap from my house.

The Scan Cafe service comes well-recommended by Kevin Kelly Cool Tools.  I will want to do some more due diligence on their service, but I am very tempted to try this out.  If it works, maybe I’ll sponsor to have other family collections electronically thawed.  Dad has piles of carouselled slides somewhere in the attic.  They also scan photos, and I’d be thrilled to have a bigger library of photos of Pa and Nanny, for example.

• taking the boy to the beach #
• Taking family and dogs to the beach today to celebrate Ling’s birthday. #
• Birthday yakitori dinner with Ling. Could barely drink two beers; echoes of saturday still pounding me. Wednesday last day here before … #

• installing parallels and XP on my mac book pro #
• ms is such an embarassment in compariison #
• heard vista #
• involves phonecall authorization process. #
• unbelievable #

• Leftover crab. #
• Testing from my phone. #
• Spent afternoon cleaning out the dungeon and sweating a hangover. Wiped out now; going to bed. #

I’ve got more important things I should be working on, but for the hell of it I made myself an account with Twitter.  It’s basically a one or two sentence blogging engine.  You can post to it from the web (zzzzzz…), IM clients (better), and SMS text messages (best).   I do lots and lots of SMS’g (my record was the day I resigned, I had close to 180 SMSs in my inbox) so it’s trivial to add a few more during the course of a day.  I was given a +44 (UK) phone number to SMS.  I presume there is one for the US, as well, and I’ll use that when I’m over there.  My twitter page also has an RSS feed.

Five friends came over yesterday and we demolished lunch into dinner into midnight.

• Ate six 1.5kg (3.3pound) Hokkaido tarabakani (which are, essentially, Alaskan King Crabs)
• Followed with seafood risotto, grilled sole and dory, and a pile of Hokkaido hotate (scallops)
• Concluding the savories was a spinach/blue cheese/bacon/onion salad
• For dessert, started with Italian wine-and-blueberry cake (this one rose higher than the first I made)
• For after-dessert, slices of Shizuoka rock melon (imagine something like a cantaloupe, but where for each tree, they prune away all but one of the cantaloupes, so that maximum flavor/energy/development/perfection concentrates there) and strawberries from Shizuoka.

What did we (three or four of us) drink?

• Six liters of Kirin beer
• Six bottles of wine, everything from NZ Sauvignon Blancs, to French bordeaux, and someone’s Christmas gift donated to our cause — a $1,000 bottle of Saucerne dessert wine.
• And a 1.8 liter bottle of absolutely beautiful sake

You can imagine how spry I felt this morning.

Now I’m overseeing the production of gallons of crab stock from the left over shells and guts — a Virtuous Cycle.

We were quite disappointed that Shannon’s fiance, Pat, would be unable to join our vacation in Seattle. He’s a member of an organized labor cartel (imagine OPEC, but for electrical workers) that failed to protect him from his petty, vindictive employer.

Anyway, I was thinking “why be paying these idiots dues and working for an unappreciative company?” The obvious conclusion is that he should change jobs.

I was wondering if Pat might like an international assignment? I’m guessing their are some job openings in Ho Chi Minh city, for example:

My principal justification (excuse) for coming to Ho Chi Minh city was in order to have a bunch of suits tailored. Vietnam, and HCM in particular, is awash with tailors, seamstresses, and fabric.

There are (among others) two big names in tailors here: Cao Minh and Dzung (or Dung). From my research, Cao Minh is faster but more expensive. Another remark is Cao Minh is the best tourist tailor in Vietnam and Dzung is the best tailor in Vietnam. It’s an easy two hour flight to get here, so I’d rather have the best, and simply come back for second and third fitting later on, than to pay up for a possibly-inferior product at Cao Minh (heard that they sometime fuse the material, rather than sewing it. yuk)

So we hurried over first thing so that I can get another fitting in while I’m here. (tomorrow at 6pm it turns out). Two hours later I walked out with a set of reference swatches, having left orders for ten business suits, sixteen shirts, and two linen Hannibal-Lechter-in-Florence suits.

I chose very nice wools and flannels for my suits, both Italian and English weaves, suitable for the hellish equatorial tropics. All the shirts were pure cotton, some of it Egyptian. A mix of hand-sewn, two-button, and three-buttons with single and double vents for variety.

The cost of this exercise? about $2,200USD. This is dauntingly inexpensive, considering equivalent quality in Singapore costs more like $550USD for a single set of suit-and-shirt. That’s why I could go on vacation, but lots of suits, and still come out even or ahead. Ridiculous.

Anyway, you’ll hear the other shoe drop in March when I return to collect my suits.

Tailor Dzung (Dung)
221 Le Thanh Ton
District 1 Ho Chi Minh
Tel: 8296778 - 8245676
Fax: 8236808
dungtailor@hcm.vnn.vn


The shirt materials were selected from Nguyen Nhat Minh, the sister-store, adjacent to Dung.

We’re bringing along two baby-sitters (mother-in-law, brother-in-law).

Plan to shop for fabrics for projects, have some suits made, eat more Vietnamese food, and come home.  Four days should be plenty. Plus in a month I have to go back again to get those suits fine-tuned and collected anyway.

While I’m there, I have to finish the final logistics of the February Seattle trip, too.

Today my coffee roaster arrived. It cam in a massive constructed plywood box and weighed the better part of eighty pounds.

When I get to the USA in a couple weeks I’ll be taking a two-day course in how to run this machine at Diedrich in Idaho. I’m not going to toy with it before then. Apparently a common mistake during the initial “seasoning” of the machine is to catch the beans on fire and scorch the roaster. I’d prefer not to do that. So in the meantime I’ll just have to wait and fantasize.

Fuzzy picture of the coffee roaster on our coffee table

Nice industrial look with a bit of pin-striping

Machinery

Originally uploaded by heiwa4126.
This photo looks more like a glossy comic book illustration than a real photo. However it really is a photo: three photos of the same scene, taken at different exposures, to catch more range, and then somehow combined.

I don’t understand why doing this makes it look so unusual. Maybe you could blame the blending software or something like that?

Well, not really, because if you look at the larger sizes of the shot, it looks like a totally normal photograph!

I don’t know what magic is occuring.

The photo doesn’t look so fake at full size resolution

Luke assembling the protoype bomb

Originally uploaded by karavshin.
It’s Hokkaido Fair time. That means deep-frozen Hokkaido King Crab. We bought about 14kg of monster crabs from the deep Sea of Japan for a party we’re hosting next week. The Japanese guy packaged everything nicely, including a purple ton of dry ice. It was great timing - a dog day afternoon when I was free, Luke was free, and Shyan Woei was free. And momma-Ling wasn’t closely monitoring what the three kids were up to.

I’m thinking a 400 meter long invisible longwire antenna could be kind of fun, even if it only lasts temporarily.

From my roof to the jungle canopy, 400m away.

Had a nice yakitori dinner at Kazu Sumi-Yaki tonight. Walking back to my car, I passed a (for Singapore) extremely old car. Moreover, it looked like some very old American Heavy Metal. Like a Mustang or something. This would be no big deal in the USA, but in Singapore, cars over ten years old are an abject rarity.

UEF3274R Mystery Car

I tucked around behind it to figure out what the car was.

What was it ?

A Toyota Celica ST. This has to be the coolest Toyota I’ve ever, ever seen.

There was one very happy little boy who was so excited he kept moving too fast for the camera.

Megan bought him perhaps the best 3d/foldout book I’ve ever seen — a totally amazing railroad book that features trams, tunnels, all manners of trains, and a complete station.  Luke and I spent two hours this afternoon playing with it.  Once he gets familiar with it, I am looking forward to the more high-brow Children’s Book of Art. He loves to pore over pages and discuss them, and this is a perfect book for that.

In the meantime, I steal away to read my Last Meals cookbook. So far no chef has included Pork Birds in his Final Menu.

I sat in the pantry late this afternoon and browsed Nigel Slater’s Kitchen Diary. I was vaguely hungry when I started, so I ended up inspired to try two dishes.

Mixed up coarsely shredded zuchinni and some gently sweated onions (from last week’s dinner!) on low heat. Thickened with flour and egg, at the last minute tossed in a large bunch of chopped fresh dill and a bunch of crumbled feta. Pan-fried the wet patties. Was supposed to serve with chutney, but I forgot to serve it. It’s ok, they were tasty by themselves, although they were really too wet to have much more than a thin outer crust. They were in no way the hashbrown-like consistency of the cookbook photo.

Chopped into large cubes tomato and eggplant, tossed into a roasting pan with oil, coriander, salt, olive oil and heartily roasted for 45 minutes. Pulled out, tossed with basil leaves and chickpeas while I fried mortadella (instead of prosciutto) with some homemade harissa (*) sauce until the mortdella was crispy panes that I served underneath the warm salad. Also very nice.

Suprisingly filling, this lot of vegetarian food.

(*) Harissa: supposed to use some cannned stuff, but instead I made it myself using some chipotles, anchos, and guajillo chillis softened in hot water and a lot of garlic. Hot and flavorful to me, impossibly hot for Ling, impossibly weak for Matilda.

I popped by the house for the first time since Saturday. They’ve accomplished a lot, but most interesting was the installation of my ladder.

The architect did it right. The ladder is easy to get on, safe to climb, and easy to get off. I’m very happy with it.

I was very pleasantly suprised to find that the roof itself is safe, too. The edge wall comes up almost to my chest. There is no danger of flipping off the roof while running around the perimeter.

The concrete up there is pretty solid, and there is existing lightning grounding. I ought to be able to install a pretty solid antenna installation. Not sure exactly how, but I am sure there is potential. Suggestions?

It’s probably the least sketchy roof I’ve ever climbed onto, except perhaps 9V1PC’s top storey antenna farm in Jalan Kayu.

This

Salmon Eggs

plus

Chawanmushi (steamed egg custard)

equals

Extremely Happy Boy

This mixture of rice, egg custard, and salmon egg is Luke’s absolute favorite meal bar nothing else, even ice-cream. He gets visibly excited when we serve him fish eggs. Not sure what he likes so much about them, but he definitely does.

I re-installed Adium multi-client Instant Messaging client. I am not sure what services everyone is using these days, but I’m only all the ones below, so you can contact me on any of these accounts:

If there is something else you use, let me know, and I can add an account there.

This is a good idea (for me as a handphone user). Amazon is always forgotten from the ranks of the super-creative companies, like Apple and Google.

NowNow is a service that mobile users can use to find answers to any question via mobile email. When you post a question to NowNow via email (ask@nownow.com), our NowNow workers will surf the web to find the answer for you. NowNow workers are users who are being paid to search the web on your behalf. NowNow bypasses the need for mobile users to go to the web to find answers to questions as NowNow will send you an email with up to 3 answers to each question you ask. We have not finalized our pricing for each question, however, we expect each question will cost less than $0.25. During this beta-test period all questions asked will be FREE.

I requested to be given an invite when more are available, but if anyone has one right now, I’d love to get one.

Watched the first episode of The Wire’s last season today.  As is typical, the first episode got off pretty slow as they set up the story for development.   I am sure it will gain momentum.  Unfortunately, I’m watching it as it unfolds, week-by-week, rather than after-the-fact, all-at-once. Consequently I have to wait week-by-week, rather than watching all the episodes in one massive The Wire gorging.

Marlo is the arch bad-guy of the series. Apparently Avon is making a return.  I love the twist of that disgraced, bald cop working for the drug dealer’s lawyer.  Was disappointed Omar hasn’t appeared yet.  The newsroom angle isn’t as bad as I feared it might be.