jiveturtle

I was struck with surprise when the Chien-yu's father came to visit us. Its a very rare occassion, and I an not sure why. Maybe the relationship between my wife and her father is getting better, which I guess is good for her. But for me...it meant another two hours of business and how to make money talk. Feeling a lot of pressure to make a lot money for the past few days. On top of that, just because the father-in-law is standing in the room talking happily with my wife and Amelie is in the room playing, the damn mother-in-law has to come in too and make herself welcome, even when Amelie made it clear she does not want to see my mother-in-law. I am not sure what I am feeling right now. All I know, I do not like the presence of my mother-in-law right now, in my room while I am writing this post, and I am not too pleased with all this pressure of making money from the father-in-law, and him saying that working for someone is not important, and it shouldn't matter, Chien-yu should...

Yep, last weekend, within two weeks of returning from the UK, my oh so considerate (please note the sarcastic tone) father-in-law thought we should endure a weekend in Hsin Chu once again. I didn't really mind, but the fact that I was still jet-lagged and at work we were entering into an important part of our project, I really needed the weekend to relax a little. Actually, we all needed the weekend to take a breather and relax, but God thought we don't suffer enough and behold, the father-in-law is sent onto us. Anyway, I don't really want to go into it, but be sure, I was not a happy bunny. So I took it on myself just keep myself busy by taking more photos. The theme at first was Taiwan's fruits. We stopped by a big fruit stand, and there was a lot of fruits on display, many of which you cannot buy back in UK. One particular strange one is called "Dragon Fruit" (literally translated). The flesh inside is either red or white, and has what looks like lit...

After a bit of a battle in the bathroom with Amelie, she chose to go Japanese tonight. Chien took some pictures, and I thought I'd like to share them. Enjoy!

I walked past Taipei 101 today, and saw that it looked a bit different today. Not sure what the special occassion its for, but it looked pretty neat. Taipei 101 has special light patterns for certain special dates and festivals. I plan to take a picture of these "special editions" of Taipei 101 and share them with you. I think the next special edition should be Christmas related. Watch this place. For now, does anyone know what occassion is this special pattern symbolises? It looks like its something to do with Cancer or something, but I'm not sure! Can anyone enlighten me?

No, its nothing about over-clocking the CPU to get faster and better performance, while raising the temperature of the motherboard. Its a site which was given to me by fellow blogger Hsuyo. At Overclocked you can download loads of computer game music which have been remixed. I went on there looking for the track they used for Lotus Turbo Challenge 2 on the Commodore Amiga, and they had it! Go check it out, maybe they have something for you to take to back to the good old gaming days...

Some more photos for Chien's birthday. We kept it a quiet affair, since we not into big parties. Maybe we'll do a birthday dinner with everyone sometime. Let me know what you think guys!

Yep, its another year on the age ladder for my dear wife Chien-yu. Happy Birthday! Hope you have a wonderful day and get lots of cards. I'll finish work on-time today so I can get home and be with you. See you later ChienChien! (^_^)

Haven't really done much over the weekend. On Saturday, we went to Guang Wah to look at hard disk drives for my computer at home. I have 3 hard drives, all 80GB each, but it never seems to be enough :-p. So I invested NTD$3330 for a 320GB Western Digital SATA2 hard drive with 16MB buffer memory, thats about 56 English Pounds, which isn't bad really. Took forever to format though, but it was worth it as it freed up my two portable 80GB USB hard disk drives. We went with Chien's old colleagues, Alie and Tom and basically caught up with each other asking how everything is and what everyone is doing. On Sunday, we paid a visit to my chum Steve, who recently had an operation on his left knee. He had suffered a ligament injury a few years back while playing basketball, which made him give up his team captain position at University. He seems to be recovering alright, and being able to walk like an old man. I should have got him a zimmer-frame, but instead brough him some En...

English can be such a hard language to master... In case you are wondering, I am not affiliated with YouTube. Just that there's a lot of funny stuff on there to watch!

Who will win? Damn the Japanese have some funny, cool shows, better than Robot Wars back in UK...

...you'll love this parody!

This is so funny, their expressions and all! With NG clips at the end too! LOL! They must be real BSB fans.

This was when baggy trousers and lycra was all the rage in the 1990's. Marvellous! The Hammer was the one of the first artists (debatable?) I listened to when I was at school. Watching this video certainly made me feel nostalgic. Hammer Time!

Came across this little intro on YouTube...

Congratulations all round to you both and your family on bringing a wonderful baby girl to the world! Welcome to parenthood the both of you! May your beautiful daughter bring you many joy and happiness!

Another classic from the creators of Doraemon, Ninja Hattori. This is the Japanese opening sequence from YouTube.

After the dose of nostalga from Saint Seiya, I searched YouTube (recently bought for $1.65 billion by Google) for other classic cartoons which I used to watch when I was a kid. Here's Paa-man, a great cartoon from the creators of Doraemon. Paa-man Opening: Paa-man Ending:

What do you get if you cross Transformers and Saint Seiya? A nifty opening sequence!

Just a quick post to wish Wing-kee a Happy belated birthday (22nd September). Also belated-birthday wishes to David H (3rd October) and Gavin L (2nd October). Hope you all had a great birthday and may your wishes come true!

Just a quick posting to let you know we're back in Taiwan. We left the UK house at 7:00am on the 5th October (UK time) and did not touch Taiwan soil until 12:30pm on the 6th October (UK time), thats a 30 or more hours of travelling hell, but we made it admist delays upon delays. I swear, I don't think I would want to do long haul flights for a long time, especially with a toddler, and to be more precise with Singapore Airlines anymore. I think their service has gone down considerably since I flew them a year ago. Anyway, we got safely and at the moment, trying to reset our body clocks to Taiwan time. There's still a lot of un-packing to do, but one step at a time eh? What's more important is that I had chance to update the blog with photos and posts. For the past two weeks, I had to resort to notepad for blogging. Better than nothing I suppose! Here are some more photos in around Ashton-under-Lyne and Manchester. I took most of these on the last few days while d...