See previous post, or go back to the beginning.
5/25 continued…
On the beach, was a rope bridge, perhaps 100 feet long, that went out to a tiny little island, which is apparently the southern-most point of Asia. on the island is a little wooden house thingie you can climb up into, so we went there while waiting for our dolphin show.
It was still sprinkling a bit, but by the time we got back to our dolphin thing, it had stopped. We ordered some french fries, and sat to watch the show. Michelle got what looked like packets of ketchup, but the second one I ate was really spicy! I looked closely, and they are both red and look similar, but one says “Ketchup” and the other says “Chili Sauce.” Turns out people in Singapore like to eat hotsauce on their fries instead of ketchup. Anyway, the show started, and Michelle was a little disappointed, because the posters had promised us famous pink dolphins, but in reality they were normal dolphins with pink bellies.
The dolphins jump, and the dolphins swim upside down.
Back to the beginning, or previous post.
5/24
We didn’t do much this day, though we did have some more of the yummy noodles near Mint’s house. Here’s a picture:
In the afternoon, we took a taxi to the airport, it cost about 200B (~$6.25) including toll roads, for about a 30 or 40 minute drive. I was a bit hungry, so I had some Pad Thai, which was expensive and not very good from the airport. Our flight left at 6:30 pm, and we arrived in Singapore at 9:30 pm. At the airport, we met Dawn and Cheryl, they took us to a coffee shop where we ate and had some drinks. Things are a lot more expensive than Thailand, but still a bit cheaper than in the USA. Country seems nice, clean, no pollution. Weather seems nicer than Thailand, but it is at night, and we are near the ocean, so hard to tell for sure at that point. We get dropped off at Cheryl’s place, which has a small guest room for us to stay in. We went to bed, pretty tired since it was late already.
Cheryl’s house.
See previous post, or go back to the begninning.
5/23
We got up, and had breakfast at a small restaraunt near Mint’s home (just a block or two away). We ate some yummy noodle things, there were two kinds, and I believe each bowl was around $0.40, they were pretty good. Mint then dropped us off at the river ferry, our original plan was to go to a certain large temple, it was black-colored on the outside. We were supposed to get off after one stop only, but by the time we realized we should get off now, they started moving the boat again. So we got off at the next stop instead…it was maybe half a mile to a mile down. We could see the river, and the general direction we wanted to go, so we decided to walk back through the streets, instead of trying to figure out how to take the ferry back.
Along the way, we ended up walking through what appeared to be a vegetable wholesale market. It was kinda neat.
For some reason I find this song very inspiring, it’s called A Talk with George (click for lyrics, info, etc)
Today, we made some cookies. We used a recipe from my mother, and they turned out really good. They are nice and soft, the way I like them. Click the second picture for a super-closeup macro shot.
Afterwards, we went for a little walk on the trail by our place. It wasn’t as nice as I expected at first, it basically goes along the side of the aqueduct…I think we were imagining that it would go into a forest or something. It was still pretty nice though. Plus it’s nice that the beginning of the trail is only 1 block. Well, not the beginning, but an entrance to the trail (it goes both north and south from us). We saw many people biking and jogging.
This is a continuation from this post
5/22
We got up the next morning, it was as hot as usual. We ate this funny fruit, I forget what it’s called in thai, but the english name is ‘rambutan’.
I’ve decided to start writing about the trips I’ve been on, from what I can remember of them at least. First I will start with our trip to Thailand last year.
5/20
Our plane left on the night of Michelle’s graduation from UC Berkeley. Michelle’s family was there, and it was a big production to get to the graduation. We got there, realized we forgot the tickets, so I let Michelle go, and I went back for the tickets. I dropped everyone off, and then it took me about half an hour just to find parking within walking distance. I made it in time though, only missed some speeches. It went well, then later that night, my parents dropped us off at the airport.
Problem: Headphones have a 3.5mm plug. My cellphone has a 2.5mm socket
Solution 1: Buy an adapter. Downsides: Costs $10 at radio shack, and they didn’t even have them in stock. The cellphone shop wanted $20, but offered me a ‘discount’ and would sell it to me for the low price of only $15.
Solution 2: Build it myself!
TI Graphing calculators also use 2.5mm connectors, so I had 3 of these cables. That solves the plug, and for the socket, I took it from some random PCB that didn’t really need it. When I first put it together, it worked fine, but after I added the heatshrink tubing, the right channel went dead. I had to cut the tubing off, and it seems that it was shorting to ground. (If the two channels were shorted together, instead I would hear mono). I added some extra insulation inbetween the wires, and then re-added the heatshrink tubing.
It’s a bit ugly, but it gets the job done. Now I just need some better headphones, the cheap ones I have, I can’t even hear anything when riding on the BART due to all the noise.
Last friday night, Adobe had what they called “Apollo Camp,” which was basically them presenting their new application codenamed Apollo to developers. It was at their San Francisco headquarters, which is basically all the people that used to work for Macromedia before the merge with Adobe. They had free food (pizza, salad, etc), and it was cooked in their in-house cafeteria, so that was neat. It ran from 5pm, when the doors opened (for food), the first speech was at 5:45. They ended at about 11:30pm. It was a pretty big event, it seems like they are really trying to push this product. As for what exactly it is, basically it is a way for people who write web applications (like Vyew, GMail, or Yahoo Maps for example) to easily create desktop apps, that don’t run inside the web browser. They’ve implemented a lot of cool technology, I think we can do some neat stuff with it.
We got a bunch of free stuff, the list was:
- Free copy of Flex Builder (this sells for like $500!)
- Free T-Shirt
- Mini getting-started book for Apollo
- A CD with the Apollo alpha version & related files
- A DVD training video for Apollo
- 3 Huge posters for Flex 2 / Actionscript 3.
A picture of the place, I’m currently standing a bit towards the back.
The posters on my wall in next to my desk at my office.
A couple minor updates:
1. I got an oscilliscope for cheap on ebay.
2. I saw the racoon again the other day, someone had left some food out for it.
3. Me & Michelle are going to go on a vacation to Hawaii in March
4. Here’s a picture of the creek which is 1 block from our apartment: (I walk over a bridge every day on my way to the bart)
5. Our company was in some tech expo thing at UC Berkeley the other day. It wasn’t very exciting, but I got free quizno’s sandwiches.
