Chris Drumgoole

Folks,

If you’re like me, you have a sidecar motorbike, you like to drive year round. And if you’re like me, it’s because you hate taxis for a multitude of reasons - those of which I will not go into now.

But, I have a small word of advice:

During the winter, check the damn weather report for current conditions before driving to work.

Today, I didn’t. Oh my god… Pain. Pain all over my body.

When I finally got to my office (lucky I didn’t freeze to death), I checked the weather on CNN’s website, and this is what I found:

New rule: no driving in below freezing with wind more than 5mph.

Ok, I only took 3 photos… Here they are (click on them to see them in flickr)

I landed in Portland, Oregon in the early morning of Friday, 6:30AM to be exact. Immigration and Customs was a breeze. My next flight, to Las Vegas, isn’t until 7:15PM this evening.

So, I took the light rail downtown - will be meeting with an old college buddy who lives here (although not for long) for lunch. Right now, I’m killing time at a Border’s bookstore cafe on a 24-hour US$10 internet connection.  Stupid country with their non-free WIFI….

As I said, it’s Friday morning, and the city is quiet. I was expecting lots of activity: people going to work, getting their starbucks coffee, etc… But, I suppose that as Portland isn’t Chicago or NYC, (it’s much much smaller), there isn’t a whole lot of activity downtown any way… It’s a nice quiet city…

This is my second time coming to Portland - the first was last year (2006) in September. I was in the U.S. on a business trip with my former company (specifically Michigan and Texas), and decided to fly through Portland on the way back to China to see Matt (who I’m seeing today), his wife Joanne, and another good friend Loren, who unfortunately for me, no longer lives here. I liked the city last time - Loren took me to a nice microbrew… If you’re interested, have a look at my Portland flickr set. I’ll try to take some more photos today - if something looks interesting, that is.

Portland sort of reminds me of Seattle (Melanie and I went for the first time in October of this year), in that there are a lot of scruffy looking people here - I’m going out on a limb here and assume most of them are tree hugger types… I know many of them aren’t homeless bums as they are enjoying their US$4 Starbucks latte while chatting with friends on their Apple MacBooks, but why they choose to dress like bums is beyond me. I’ll ask my friend Matt when he finally gets downtown, maybe he has some insight. I remember last time I visited, he told me Portland, as well as most of the Pacific Northwest, tends to attract environmental-types…  Maybe because of the excessive logging in this area…  Or maybe environmental types like rain…

But hey, whatever floats their boats… Who am I to judge?  (Quiet!, those of you who know me…) But, regarding the “bumness”, maybe it’s a way to reduce the risk of getting mugged - if you look scruffy and poor, why would a thief bother you? Kind of like buying a 200 RMB local-brand bicycle in Beijing instead of the fancy 2,000 RMB Giant from Taiwan - everybody and their brother has a crappy bike - no need to steel yours… O.k., maybe this analogy is a bit far fetched… Anyone care to comment?

Any way, changing the subject so I won’t dig my hole any deeper… If it weren’t for the strange Oregon State law regarding gas pumps (it is ILLEGAL to pump your own gas in Oregon), I would add Portland to my “short list” of acceptable U.S. cities for living, should I ever decide to return…  The list is short…  This strange “law” sounds like a socialist strategy to reduce unemployment, you know, methods countries like China “employ” (no pun intended) to “hide” their unemployment.  Hmm, I’ll stop this subject right here because I’m not really sure where I’m going with this…

Great, Matt just called saying he’s getting on the train to come downtown soon - ETA: around an hour.  He lives out in Intel and sushi country - Hilsboro, you could say a suburb of Portland.  (I say Intel county because apparently Intel employs some 10,000 people in the area.  Who knew that chip designers were environmental types?)

Wow, this is actually a pretty long post… Maybe I’ll stop here.  You can thank me in the comments for not continuing on blabbering about nothing.  I’ll write a post tomorrow or Sunday about Las Vegas.

I got an email today in my company email box from the conference organizer that I dealt with couple of months ago (for the BCP conference).  The email was a Christmas Greetings.

It’s classic!

Go ahead, click on it to see the full size!

Imagine all the little people graphics are animated.  They’re jumping up and down (including Santa), doing whatever it is they’re doing…  My favorite is the “If you are a girl, wish you more beautiful (pic) more considerately (pic), where the first pic is of the girl nitting, presumably a sweater, and the second is of her making eggs.  “Make me eggs, woman!”

Pure classic.

And the big bunny at the bottom, well, he’s just walking in place…

But, don’t get me wrong - I like it.  It’s certainly the thought that counts!

Not sure if you’ve been following my flickr photo stream, but I posted a photo I took the other day of a notice in my elevator.  I knew it had something to do with turning off electricity as it had the “dian”, or 电 character, a date (Dec. 20), and a time range (00:00 - 02:00).  So I pretty much guessed what this was about.

Thanks to one of my few loyal readers, Ray, who can read Chinese, he translated it for me in the flickr photo comments:

Power outage from 00:00 to 02:00 on Dec 20. Affected area: South region building 1, 5, 6, 7, 9, 11, Kindergarten, Office building and elevator.

Well, I’m in building 7 (By the way, that’s 6 numbered buildings, and the office buildings, which is pretty much the whole complex! [almost]).

I’m a great pre-planner!

I went out to dinner last night (Dec 19) with some friends, we then had a few drinks, and left for home around 11:30pm.  Plenty of time, I thought. 10-15 mintues to get home - time to spare!  Ha!

I did get home around 11:45.  The lights in the building were still on - a good sign!  I enter my building, and low and behold - they turned off the elevators already!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  Both of them!

People: remember, I live on the 26th floor.  Minus the superstitious floors, so I effectively live on the 23rd floor.  Ouch.

I managed to get into my apartment before the whole building shut down…  No TV for me…

I woke up today to the first snow of 2007. While it’s not a nice thick dry snow (it’s actually thin and wet and the roads are gross), it was a nice sight, nonetheless. But then I remembered “SHIT! I’ve got to get a taxi!!!”

Good thing that I’m getting in the habit of waking up earlier (7:20 as opposed to ~8 - which means I can get out of the door by 8 instead of 8:30 whcih gives me an hour to get to work - for the just in case moments we all love…)

Waiting for a taxi wasn’t too bad - 20 minutes or so - and it was a “hei che“, not a proper taxi (i.e. unofficial car-for-hire - hei means black, che means car.) Normally if I take a taxi, it costs ~30 RMB to get to the office (depending on traffic). The “hei che” normally charges 40 RMB. The driver this morning charged me 35 RMB - I think he was a reletively new “hei che” driver as he probably should have charged even more due to the snow…

Oh well.

Picture Time!

The above is a picture of the road and trees in front of my office. You can see the snow isn’t real thick.. but it’s a start for the season!

As China is getting in the yule-time spiri, Christmas Trees, like the one pictured above, are popping up around town. This one is in front of my office. Sorry for the out of focusness (hmm, that’s not a word…). Also, the flash on my camera was unintentionally on, so it gave a neat (I think so) effect reflecting off the falling snow.

About 20 minutes after I posted my blog post on Google’s new Google Maps Mobile client, I noticed I got a pingback, or whatever it’s called. This pingback goes to a website http://0d1.info/gps/, which looks like a Google Adsense farm rss aggregator. This means, they’re taking other people’s blog posts and putting Google Adsense adds on them.
Here, have a look (click on the image to see the full size screenshot). Look at all the ads! They didn’t even keep my photos! I wonder if they’re spidring the net for any post with “gps” as a tag?

I don’t think so…

Time for a cease and desist?     (See here for the infringing URL)

China prepares for Christmas

Originally uploaded by chrisdrum

This is a photo I took outside my office building today in Beijing. The building management is preparing to decorate for Christmas. This shall be interesting…

Remember the trouble I went through to get my Pumpkin Pie supplies on Wednesday? It was totally worth it.

My pie won “Tastiest Dish”. And my last-minute vegetables? Because I took a seemingly boring food and made it tasty, it won “Pleasant Surprise”. How do you like them apples pumpkins?

I want to give special thanks to Melanie for helping when needed and putting up with my high levels of lack-of-time-induced stress.

I have been assigned to bake pumpkin pies for my Toastmaster’s club Thanksgiving day party (that’s tonight).
(Actually, I volunteered because I thought a pumpkin pie would be relatively easy, and I love pumpkin pies…)

A little background, my toastmasters club decided to have a sort-of Thanksgiving feast instead of our normal Thursday evening meetings. Just so happens, Thanksgiving is on Thursday. Works out well. Well, it was decided that the Americans in the group do the cooking to show our non-American club members what an American Thanksgiving would be like. (well, we’re going to try!)

So, Wednesday after work (that’s yesterday), I decided that I’d better buy my pie baking supplies (as I had two pies to make before Thursday!). “How hard could it be?”, I thought. I decided to go to Jenny Lou’s, which is, may I say, the most popular, and extensive, import goods grocery store here (they have several locations around town and completely blow away their smaller rival April Gormet, and the big boys’ [Carrefour, Walmart, Tesco] sorry attempt at selling import goods.) I also have seen baking trays and already-made pie crusts (just in case) being sold there.

Well, I go to one of the larger Jenny Lou’s in Sanlitun (on the way home from work) at about 6pm as I thought that would increase my chances. I get there and begin looking for the stuff.

OK, first, let’s find the crust. Well, I looked all over the shop, and no already-made crusts. Hmm, I guess no one ever bought them. Well, is there any pie crust mix? Man, that was hidden! Took me 20 or so minutes to find that. And there were two boxes left (each box makes 2 pie crusts). I decided to take both, just in case (sorry guys).

“What the heck does Pumpkin Pie mix look like?!” Crap.

After another 10 or so minutes of looking down the aisles and a few phone calls to my girlfriend, I finally found the Pumkin purée in a can. It was in the jam section (I think). Thankfully, the import company didn’t put the stupid ingredients translation sticker over the Pumpkin Pie recipe. I needed to get ground cinnamon, ground chives, and ground ginger (all n problems at Jenny Lou’s - they sell this stuff by weight) and evaporated milk (also no problem). I had eggs at home, as well as salt. I’m in business.

Pie Dishes! Doh!

I went upstairs where they normally sell this stuff. Lots of cupcake dish options. Some square dishes. No round pie dishes. Crap. I decided to pay for this stuff and check the lousy April Gormet just down the road. Not surprisingly, they didn’t have what I wanted.

I then decided to drive to the Jenny Lou’s at Chaoyang Park West Gate - thinking maybe the Sanlitun store was just out of stock of round pie dishes. I was wrong. The Chaoyang Park store has identical stock.

Now, I’m getting a bit desperate. I decide to go to the Carrefour near my home. That was a complete waste. I forgot that pretty much no one here has ovens - thus no one bakes! I try a last ditch effort to go to the Jenny Lou’s near my home at Jianwai SOHO. Nothing - even worse of a selection than the first two.
It’s 8:30. Then I remember IKEA! It’s a bit of a drive, but they’re open ’til 10.

I get there around 9:00 or so. Not many people there at that hour, so it was a breeze. In, Out. Got my pie dishes! Now time to get home and actually make the pies!

Well, I’ve got the goods, now I am sure you want to kno just how far I drove, and in what wacky order! Here’s the map!

View Larger Map

Note: I didn’t put my return route on the map as I pretty much followed the going-to-IKEA route to get home. Do the math.

This is what I ended up with (actually two of them).  It worked well in my small oven.

I checked the IKEA site this morning and found this pie dish.  This one probably would have been better, but I didn’t see it at IKEA.  Oh well…

Note: Images “borrowed” from IKEA China’s Website.