jiveturtle

Quarter-finals of the World Cup is starting this weekend the Germany vs. Argentina game. Should be exciting! England has made it through too to face Portugal in the quarter-finals. Come on England! Put some welly into it! Not much to report on really. The weather is getting EXTREMELY hot (with temperatures of 33 degrees C at 10am in the morning). Looks like we are going to have a sizzler of a Summer this year in Taiwan. No news of typhoon yet, but I'm sure they will be on their way soon. I think I will just stay indoors with the air conditioning on! Amelie is certainly growing up. She's able to walk, run and jump now. She still find some stair daunting, but hopefully her confidence will grow. To be honest, there isn't much stairs for her to practise. Maybe we should take her to Taipei 101 and let her climb there. She can be a handful at times, but when she sleeps, she's at her most peaceful state. I have spending a lot of time taking random pictures in and

Didn't know you was into Japanese pop music!

Here's a Top Gear clip of Evo racing against Lamborghini (This is for you Jason!)

...but not like this one. This one is pretty crazy, but extremly funny. I watched this so many times that I'm starting to get weird looks from my colleagues.

Came across this little clip which was forwarded from my friend Steve. I can't believe this guy! His Cantonese is almost as good as mine, but with the added bonus that he can sing pretty good! Turn on your sound, put on your headphones!

I got sent a link in which my friend Klaus had spoken to the Taipei Times about the recent performance of Germany in the World Cup. It turns out he used to play against Klinsman! I personally think Germany are going to win it again. Even though I would like England to make it, I just think Germany has a better chance. But still, come on you lions! Klaus will be holding a wedding dinner in a couple of weeks to celebrate his marriage Taiwanese style. Luckily, we've been to invited and I can't wait to see meet his wife Karen and see Klaus get drunk. As usual, I will be taking the camera, so will post some pictures on here and on my homepage .

What a way to end the weekend, being soaked top-to-bottom in heavy rain! It came very suddenly and we just wanted to get home, so we took the chance and ran all the way home in the rain. It was refreshing actually, I have had a lot on my mind recently and the being soaked certainly gave the brain a bit of a reboot. But then I realised Taiwan rain is quite acidic, not a good thing. Anyhow, I have updated my homepage with something useful for the lunch hours. Its a random lunch selector, which basically displays a picture of a local eatery which we would go to for lunch. It has been pain in the rear-end when deciding where to go for lunch. There are so many choices in the area where I work, so having something like this may ease the troublesome decision which we all make on a daily basis. I've also made use of the ned 8MB ADSL line by doing a bit of downloading and listening to online radio. Certainly makes a difference and if you guys can get it, then get it! I just read th

Well their birthday was actually yesterday, but I didnt get chance to update the blog. Anyhow, better late than never! David was really kind and treated us all to afternoon tea. In return we got him a cake (blueberry yoghurt chocolate one) to celebrate his coming of age. What else to report? Hmm, well finally, we got the 8MB ADSL up and running! Wahey! Not only we get better download rates, but my upload speed has increased to 640k. Hopefully this should make a difference to my homepage . I've also been in touch with an old friend Steve Ku. I worked in the lab with him a while back, but he has since gone to bigger and better things. He's now an International Sales Representative selling all kinds of gadgets! Anyway, he was at Computex, a electronics show at the World Trade Center in Taipei and he sent a couple of photos of some his company's showgirls. I thought I'd share them here with you ;-)

I decided to go to work today since the foot is feeling a little bit better. But I#m resting it as much as possible, which is why I asked my colleagues to bring me something back for lunch. My wife is feeling poorly today with a bout of food poisoning. She's at home with our daughter Amelie. Amelie must be enjoying it this week, since she has seen her father and mother a lot! Anyway, I have added more photos to the homepage at http://www.jiveturtle.blogsite.org to the Amelie, Places and Work sections in the photo gallery. I have finally got round adding photos from my work in Taiwan. In the meantime, here's a picture of my brother and I with my mother celebrating Chinese New Year in Manchester's Chinatown.

...is getting there. After watching X-Men III on Friday night, the right foot was feeling rather painful, and by the middle of Friday night, it was throbbing with pain. Luckily I had medicine from UK with me, so took those straight-away and (to my wife's annoyance) kept my foot up for most of the weekend and resting it as much as possible. The resting of the foot certainly helped as well as the medication. I went to the doctors yesterday to see a specialist, and she required me to have a blood test to check for levels of uric acid (as well as other stuff too) just to make sure the kidneys livers are in working order. Fingers-crossed! This morning the swelling has gone down considerably and I can put a little more weight on the foot so walking would now be possible. Hopefully I should be fine for walking tomorrow if I get another day's foot rest. On X-men III , I recommend you to go and see it. As usual it has all the great special effects and snidey jokes from Logan whi

Yep, its back, good old gout , which normally means I have a foot looking like a stewed pig's trotter (a local delicacy in Taiwan). Taking a couple of days off to rest the foot and taking medication to bring the swelling down. On another note, the website is back online and all is good for now. We are planning to get a 8MB adsl upgrade soon, which would mean a 604k upload rate too. This "may" improve the site's speed. We should be getting that sometime this week. Can't wait!

Good news, my Jiveturtle site running from home is back online now! Go visit and take a look at the fresh looking Jiveturtle site . Meanwhile, here's a picture (I just discovered you can now upload pictures on blogspot :-P )

...its something else. The actual phone line in our room was cut off because the wanker-in-law did not pay the rental line (another thing which he promised to do when we arrived in Taiwan) for the last 3 months. Why can't they just carry out their promises? Obviously promises means nothing to them at all. I've don't know how much of this crap I can take now. I blew up at my wife for no reason. I guess I just needed a release from all the crap I have been taking on. My wife blew up back at me too, again a release for her from all the crap she had to endure too. What's worse, because of all this crap happening and blowing up at each other, I missed England's game against Trinidad & Tobago. Feck. I couldn't even check the scores until I entered the office this morning, only to receive a red ticket for not locking my cabinet when I left last night (security stuff). What a great start to Friday.

I just checked my website just now from work and it seems to be down again for some reason. I can't even VNC back home, so it must be something with the router. I will check it out when i finish work. Most probably got something to do with the Microsoft update I applied last night...damn you Bill! Just to update, I have changed the look of the Jiveturtle.blogsite.org. It has more of a simpler and cleaner look to it now. I've also added a dynamic-ish banner so that every time you refresh a page of click on a page link the banner changes. The design of the banner are based on photographs I have taken in and around Taipei. Some banners of course features my daughter. There are 20 to collect, see can u spot them all! Just another note, please use Firefox if you can to browse the website. The new site template I used seems to have trouble when viewing under IE. When I get a chance I will look into it more. Besides, why aren't you folks using Firefox anyway? I've