Hiking Trip

I went on a hiking trip with a couple of co-workers this morning. I haven't hiked since the NewSong trip to the California Poppy Reserve almost three years ago so I was worried if my hiking boots still fit. I left my only pair of sneakers in China so all I had at home were dress shoes and sandles. We met up at Steve & Sunny's house and ended up at the Laguna Canyon Wilderness Park near the 73 freeway and Laguna Canyon Road.

We took a trail that went around the entire wilderness area and it took a little over two hours. The first part of the trail was a pretty steep climb so I was already tired when we got to the top of the ridge. The trail then flattened out, then looped back to the parking lot. We were worried that it would rain this morning but the weather was pretty nice, though it got a bit cold when the wind picked up.

Near the end of the hike, we were unsure of how to get back to the car; all we had was a hand-drawn trail map. I pulled out my GPS receiver (Garmin nüvi 650) but all it showed was a car in the middle of a large green area. Not sure if I can get topographical maps for a car navigation device.


View from Steve & Sunny's garage in Laguna Beach


James and Rosemary Nix Nature Center


Ear muffs!


Strange spiky fruit


Blue skies


Hiking/biking trail


Cactus


City view


"Mount Rushmore"


Wild flowers + bee in upper right

New Used Bass

I found an ad for a bass on Craigslist. It's a 5-string Ibanez SR505 with active pickups. I'm going tomorrow to pay and pick it up. The only time I tried to play a 5-string bass, I got all confused and kept messing up... ok, I mess up all the time on my 4-string bass too.


Picture from the ad

Ducks vs. Canucks

I went to another Ducks game last night with Leon and Fred. This time, the free tickets I got were far apart so we got bumped a couple of times trying to sit together. The Ducks came out and scored 4 quick goals so it was 4-1 after the first period and that was the final score. I was able to look across the ice at Henry's luxury box but was too far to recognize anyone.

I talked a little bit with a guy sitting next to me. He was on vacation from Vancouver with his family and decided to watch a game. They were the only Canucks fan in our whole section. He asked me if it was normal to have so many empty seats. I said "Sure!" then we left after the 2nd period to beat traffic... :)


View from our seats in section 431, row N. I had some tickets in row A but they were in different 400 sections.


Girls in lowrider pants shoveling snow. I think I can skate well enough to do this job.


We didn't see any fights... this was just a shoving match


5 on 3 Power Play

Fossil Watch

Several years ago, Shirley gave me a Fossil chronograph watch. Sometime last year, the watch band broke so I've not been wearing it for about a year. This morning, I took the watch in to the Fossil store at South Coast Plaza to see if they can fix it. To my surprise, they found a pin that fits the wristband, fixed it, and also changed out the dead battery... all for free!

On the downside, I just saw an auction for the exact same watch on eBay; starting bid = $9.99.

Car Keys

A couple of cousins and their friends are here in Los Angeles from Toronto. They're going on a cruise to Mexico and decided to come a few days early to go to Disneyland, etc. Cousin Helen and her son is staying with me and I let her borrow my 4Runner.

Early tonight, I get a frantic phone call from her; she lost my car keys. Also on the same keychain was my house key, a key to the bike rack, and the community gate key to my apartment complex. I can make copies of most of the keys and probably get another gate key from the apartment office (not sure how much it will cost though). The only problem is the remote fob... I probably have to go to a Toyota dealer to get a replacement.

Anyway, since she drove to my other cousin's hotel to carpool today, I had to drive up to LAX to give her the spare set of keys. They're leaving for the cruise ship tomorrow so I have to drive them to San Pedro... lots of driving this weekend. :(

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Update: Whew, they found my keys in my cousin's friend's luggage... strange. However, they've already boarded the cruise ship so they'll need to take it back to Canada with them at the end of the cruise and give it to my parents to bring back to LA in April. Convoluted. At least I won't have to spend $100+ on a new remote fob. The apartment manager also gave me a new gate key for free!

Walk the Walk on Emissions

Do as we say, not as we do.

Sexual Harassment Training

California law mandates sexual harassment training for managers every two years. While I was in China, I got an email from our legal department that I'm due for another session. Last time, I attended a class on-site and it was a complete waste of time. This time, it's computer based and I'm expecting it to be another complete waste of time.

The program is 247 slides long and there is a timer on each page preventing you from click ahead before the alloted time (52 seconds for the excerpt below). Sigh... it doesn't take me that long to read a paragraph; I guess they're serious about it taking two hours. :(

What is workplace harassment? In simple terms, it's inappropriate conduct based on a legally protected characteristic that's serious enough that it violates the law.

Under federal law, the legally protected characteristics are sex or gender (including pregnancy); race, color, national origin or ancestry; religion; age (over 40); and mental or physical disability. In California, the protected characteristics also include sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, and medical condition.

Later we'll take a closer look at how the law defines workplace harassment. While it's important that you understand harassment laws, you should also understand that your job is not to figure out whether inappropriate conduct actually violates the law, but rather to deal with it before it can.

So in California, if a guy thinks he's a woman, I can't make fun of him at work?!

Jet Lag

It's 5:11am and I'm wide awake. Shouldn't have slept all day yesterday... :(

Blogger Virus Spam

Sigh... I have to turn on comment word verification again due to spam. Before it was just kinda irritating; now the comment spam sends you to fake virus scan sites and hijacks your browser. How do I know it's fake? It was "scanning" Windows XP system files on my Mac.

Military Service, China Style

In China, there is a mandatory one-week military training for all college students during their first year of school. My friend was unfortunate enough to be there before Christmas and took some pictures.


Up early in the morning. There were over 3000 students from just one university (UESTC in Chengdu).


All college students means all students, including girls. Somehow they don't look ready for military duty. They had to pay for their own costumes uniforms too. Taiwan is in no danger if they send these kids to "reunify" One China.


Tear gas demonstration. The funny thing was that once they fired the canister round, the wind shifted and blew the tear gas back towards where all the students were seated.

I'm not sure what the whole point of the exercise. There's no way these students are prepared for anything after only 7 days. There was a lot of standing around watching demonstrations and everyone brought their cell phones and cameras. Since university students are still considered an elite group, maybe it's a way for the communist government to enforce some hardship (only one shower allowed the entire week and no meat at meals), like the good old days during the Cultural Revolution.

Chengdu Trip #4 - Food Pics

Chinese people like to eat so I've been taking pictures of food and food related stuff...


Curry Chicken at a department store cafe. Chinese people don't like white meat so it was mostly thigh meat with a lot of bones. Not too good. The reddish brown stuff at the lower left is the ubiquitous "Szechuan" preserved vegetable that comes with every meal and is available worldwide. I get mine at 99 Ranch Market in Irvine.


Packaged chicken feet... yum, not!


More spicy hot pot ingredients: pig blood cake, beef, and Japanese soft tofu (very weird texture). The dipping sauce was a bowl of oil in which you add minced garlic and cilantro. This is quite different from what I'm used to and made the meal very greasy.


Sushi cart in Wenshu Temple. Since Chengdu is 1000 miles from the ocean, you gotta wonder if the seafood is fresh.


Bowl of spicy rice noodles with pig intestines (RMB4.5)


Liver... not sure from which animal


Strange mushroom and other fungi


Peppers!


"Fresh" seafood... one of the fish is dead and floating upside-down


Dinner on HKG-LAX Cathay flight: tilapia


Breakfast on HKG-LAX flight: pork with rice rolls (they were out of the omelet by the time they got to the back of the bus)

Chengdu Trip #4 - Home

Finally home after two weeks. I've pretty much been up for the past 30 hours traveling from Chengdu back to Costa Mesa. Once again, the worst part of the trip is coming back through US Immigrations in the Bradley terminal. I think we were in line for close to an hour though my turn with the USCIS agent only took 5 seconds. It has never taken me more than 5 minutes to clear Hong Kong immigration as a visitor.


Sunset over the Pacific


Packed... like sardines


My first stop driving back from Leon's house

Chengdu Trip #4 - Over the Pacific Ocean

What’s worse than being stuck on a 11+ hour Trans-Pacific flight is having a broken TV screen in front of you. So instead of my usual routine of half-hour naps in between movies, it’s half-hour naps in between staring at the seat in front of me for two hours. Unlike the flight from LAX to HKG two weeks ago, this plane still has the older seats and the flight is completely full. Right now we’re about two hours from LAX; I’m typing this up in MS Word to copy/paste when I get home.

My second week in Chengdu has been a blur, partly because I’ve been hit with stomach problems during the last few days. We had spicy hot pot for dinner Monday night and even though I ate from the non-spicy pot, the combination of breathing spicy oil fumes and eating funky ingredients probably got me.


Spicy hot pot... I think we were the only table with the non-spicy middle pot.


Excuse me, who ordered the pig brains?

I've also been eating at local hole-in-the-wall places so that probably is not helping. At lunchtime, the places are packed and stools are placed on the sidewalk for people to sit and eat. This is outside a noodle place; I went back and got a bigger bowl of mustard green noodles for RMB6.


Lunchtime crowd

It’s also been more and more difficult for me to breathe as well; each breath burns my nose and throat. I guess I’ve reached my limit on smog and cigarette smoke. I think visiting for a week at a time is fine but I’m not sure if I can ever live here long-term. The worst is probably the cigarette smoke. Anywhere you go, there are people smoking, even in elevators, right under the “No Smoking” sign. Living in California, you just don’t see that many smokers in public anymore.


"Hey Mr. taxi driver, can you focus on driving instead of reading the newspaper?" Since I'm not staying at the university hotel, I have to take a taxi across town (~5km) to catch the ride into the office.

On Tuesday, we went to take a look at PMI’s new factory. It’s coming along quite well, even with the month-long delay due to Chinese New Year and power outages. The building structure is pretty much complete and the workers are just painting the outside and finishing the interior. Our first piece of heavy equipment, a 400 ton hot press, is scheduled to arrive in April.


PMI’s three-storey factory


Space for large furnaces


Building construction… a family business! Actually, all the workers live on-site in temporary shacks. I'm sure this violates all sorts of OSHA rules.


Chinese broom: a stick and some twigs tied together


We haven’t decided whether to put solar panels or a basketball court on the roof


Worker finishing up the concrete roof


Just to the north of our site is Motorola's software development center in Chengdu. Leon said that we won't need such a large parking lot.

On Wednesday, Leon gave me the day off which was good since my stomach started having problems. I did get to take a look at Wenshu Temple and went with a friend to sing KTV at night. We had the room from 8pm to 2am and after discounts, it was only RMB128. I still need a lot more practice since I couldn’t read a lot of the Chinese song lyrics. Interestingly, since the KTV place we went to was run by Taiwanese people, many videos were from Taiwan and had traditional Chinese lyrics. My friend’s friends were local so they only knew simplified Chinese and couldn’t read some of the characters. I blame the Commies.


Street vendors inside the Wenshu Temple complex


How much for that Rolex?

Thursday morning my stomach was feeling a bit better so I attended a PMI meeting and even showed them my financial models. However, after lunch, I got worse so they had to drive me home in the older car. It’s a small “meinbao” car since it’s shaped like a loaf of bread. Leon said it didn’t cost them that much (less than $10K US) and they put a lot of miles on it. Usually cars are more expensive compared to the US. The president of our main vendor just bought a Lexus LS460 for ~RMB1.2M which is more than twice what the car costs in the US. PMI’s driver, Mr. Lin, is really in to cars. He was impressed when I told him that I have a 350Z back home. The only one I ever saw in Chengdu was in the Nissan dealer showroom. Evidently, they cost ~RMB500k in Chengdu.


Lexus dealer. I also saw Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and Porsche dealers. Leon said that there is also a Ferrari dealership in Chengdu.

My last day in Chengdu is a long travel day. This time I’m traveling back with Leon although I can get into Cathay’s business lounge in Hong Kong by myself now (oneworld Sapphire!). Our CTU-HKG Dragonair flight didn’t get a gate on arrival so we had to take a shuttle bus from near the air control tower to the terminal. It was kind of odd since there were many free gates (HKIA has 80 gates). I hope our luggage transferred okay; we’ll know in about 90 minutes. During our six hour layover, we took the Airport Express train into Hong Kong Island to meet with a couple PMI investors over dinner. We ended up at a French restaurant in the IFC mall so it wasn’t cheap. I told Leon he can eat at Broadcom’s cafeteria all next month to save money.


Close up of the HKIA control tower


747 with three missing engines parked at the airport. I got yelled at by Dragonair crew for taking pictures.


Kowloon skyline. The better view would have been the other way, looking at Hong Kong Island from Kowloon.

Chengdu Trip #4 - Chengdu

I'm back in Chengdu and it's freezing. I'm pretty much wearing my ski jacket everywhere, even in the office. Even though I'm cold, the weather is actually warmer than a few weeks ago so there's less demand on electricity which means the power is back on in the factory.

The weather during our last day in Sanya was rainy again. Regardless, I still went to the beach in the morning and waded a bit in the ocean. I haven't been in ocean water for awhile, even though I live in Southern California, so I don't know if it's normal that my skin was all sticky after I got out of the water. Even though the Crowne Plaza hotel is not right on the beach, they have a small private section next to the public beach so at least I was able to get towels and stuff. The beach was actually pretty crowded but there were very few people in the water.


More appropriate beach attire... although it was raining. She was the only non-Chinese person on the beach, and the only one in a bikini.


The only other person in the water during the rain

Anyway, I checked out of the hotel at 2pm and basically sat around until 7:30pm when they picked us up to go back to the airport. The airport in Sanya is pretty small, about the size of John Wayne Airport back home. There were a lot of people departing so it took forever to get through security. Usually if you set off the metal detector (belt buckle this time), they use a wand to check you. This time, the lady at the security gate also used her hand in addition to the wand... weird.

The flight back to Chengdu was delayed for an hour since they didn't have a plane available. When the plane did show up, an Airbus A320, it was a different type then originally scheduled so the seat numbers were all different. Some people's boarding passes were for row 33 when there were only 30 rows in the plane. There were still passengers standing in the aisle when the plane was leaving the gate so the flight attendants told everyone to just grab any available seat. I ended up next to an old lady carrying two huge bags; I helped stow one for her under the seat in front of me so she could put her legs down. She tried talking to me a couple of times but I couldn't understand her accent/dialect at all.


Lots of Chinese tourists on the beach


Crowne Plaza's beach bar


In addition to the regular hotel rooms, the Crowne Plaza also had villa and townhouses on-site.


Lotus flower


Some Engrish at the Sanya airport

Leon is arriving this afternoon so it's back to work... :)