failure weblog

well, everyone will be happy to know that even though i was doing some legwork toward various things since i bought my ticket two weeks ago, i really didn't start packing and/or pulling stuff together until yesterday. (i wouldn't want act out of character all of the sudden -- i have a reputation to uphold.) i did, however, plan my final meals.

thursday for lunch i ate at tacos-a-go-go. thursday evening i had chicken carbonara at corner market. friday for lunch i ate at goode company bbq with some co-workers (who had suggested i needed to eat some bbq before i left...something i had no problem agreeing with). friday evening i spent at coffee groundz for the geek gathering. (thanks for the shirt, loopylow!) there, kojo gave me a list of a few books he'd like for me to look for and buy while i'm in taiwan. and sue showed up and hung out. saturday i went to the saint arnold's brewery tour. on an empty stomach. and i brought one of their glasses. i came home and slept about 5 hours. then i met the potts at chuy's. i went over to their house and watched snl. today i ate lunch at the house of pies. i watched the super bowl. (yea, saints!) then i walked over to subway and picked up a chicken breast on flatbread. the only place i'd had on my list that i didn't make it to was niko niko's. oh well.

i appear to have managed to fit everything i want to take into what is traditionally a full-size carry-on bag -- which i will be checking, and a combination laptop bag / backpack. i bought a full bag of cat food, made extra house keys for the potts, made copies of important documents, talked to my parents and grandmother, and so on and so forth. i went to the grocery store and picked up some stuff for ash, and bought some cashew packs, granola bars, and cracker packs. (half went in my carry-on, the other half in checked for the trip back). i've got about 5 or so days worth of clothes. i put an empty backpack in my checked bag just in case i need to come back with more than i took. i've got a point-and-shoot camera, an iphone, an unlocked razr, my macbook air, a micro mag lite flashlight, a fine-point sharpie and a cross pen, etc. i've emptied my pockets of my knife, my lighter, various keys, etc. i will be putting my wallet chain in my bag i'm checking. (although i did decide to wear my belt that is covered in metal studs. i'm guessing i'll be taking that off at security.) i just checked the weather and it appears to be lows in upper 50's to mid 60's, highs in mid 60's to mid 70's. i was planning on taking a jacket of some kind anyway.

i have not made any lists at all. hopefully i'm not forgetting anything. yesterday was the first day i finally started getting a bit nervous about forgetting something, not knowing something and causing/creating issues for myself, etc. i'm completely out of my element, having never flown internationally before (and it's not like i've flown domestically all that much either), so i have no experience and don't feel completely at ease with this unknown-to-me process. but hopefully everything will go well.

it continues to be funny to me just how many friends, family, co-workers, etc. appear to be really, genuinely excited about my trip. a lot of them have gotten giddy when they found out, or continue to talk about it to me. but i'm still not excited. i finally (as mentioned above) got a little nervous. i'm overall just not all that excitable. it just doesn't seem like a monumental thing to me. maybe it's because i've known a lot of people who came from other countries, go on overseas trips, live in other places, etc. i know i don't/haven't, and i know a lot of people i know don't/haven't, but maybe that is what helps make it seem less like a huge deal. plus, like i said, i'm generally not known for how giddy and excited i get about...well, much of anything. i'm going overseas. lots of people do it. i hope it's cool. i hope i have a good time. it'd be really nice if it did affect me in some meaningful and profound way. but i'm not counting on it.

the current plan is for jack to come around around 6am and go eat something at the house of pies, then he'll take me up to iah. my flight is at 10:45am. i should be in the air for about 14 hours on a 777, flying into tokyo. then i'll have 3 hours to switch to a jal flight from tokyo to taipei, which is supposed to clock in at around 4 hours. i'll hopefully be using wifi a lot. doing stuff with google voice, skype, twitter, flickr, email, and maybe even this blog. if i can pull that off then it'll be just like they say in the russian blog spam i get:

Мы путешествуем по всему миру и исследуем. Присоединяйтесь к нам и вам не придется скучать!

(you'll have to copy that and paste it into babelfish or google translate if you don't read russian. i'm not going to be around to hold your hand the next couple of weeks, you know.)

(no, that subject is not a back to the future reference. well, now it is i guess, but it wasn't originally meant to be.)

let's see...i called the taipei economic and cultural office (or something..."teco") here in houston monday or yesterday to inquire about visas. i had to leave a message. i called a few hours later, to voicemail again (didn't leave a message). i called again today and someone answered. they said if i had a u.s. passport valid for at least 6 more months and an itinerary showing a return flight within some number of days (30 or 60, i don't recall) then i don't need a visa. so hopefully they're right, and that's one less thing i have to deal with or worry about.

car update: edelbrock never called me after the new year. i gave them a week or two and called them. i eventually got in touch with someone. they said they would get info and call me back. they haven't. so my expensive edelbrock crate engine still sounds like crap, ostensibly because of a lifter knock. i guess i'll have to call them again. it's annoying to have to push a company who i had thought would be professional and customer-focused.

another car update: a couple of weeks ago the windshield wipers, which had always worked, stopped working. the mechanic re-wired them because they were going straight to the battery. now they don't work at all. (although i'm pretty sure they were working after i got the car back from him.) also, i recently realized that my gas tank is leaking gas. well, at least when the tank is full. i'm not sure where it's leaking from. so i guess i'll need to get a new tank here sometime. joy.

on monday i had my mom (who works at a bank) wire some money from an account at her bank to my local accounts here. one for my credit card, one for my atm card. i'm pretty sure i'd be okay financially, but since i've been pushing a lot of money toward the credit card with my engine/car work on it, and i hadn't really planned to take this trip, my local reserves were low. so i'm borrowing money from myself to help make sure i'm good to go during the trip.

i upgraded my macbook air to snow leopard earlier this week. that went fine. what didn't go fine though, was time machine. i use an external drive hooked up to an airport extreme base station as my time machine backup drive. this is possible, but not supported by apple. unfortunately, something with snow leopard borks time machine backups -- especially when doing them over wireless. since it's not a supported config, apple doesn't have to offer help. but what happens is for some reason time machine ends up corrupting the sparse bundle that all of the backup info is stored in. so the only solution is to delete your sparse bundle and start over. or pull the drive local and use hdiutil to try and fsck fix the sparse bundle. joy. other than that annoyance, so far so good with snow leopard.

i had a scare yesterday after work. i got in my pickup and went to start it and the starter made scary ratcheting sounds. that in and of itself isn't too scary, it does that now and then. but usually i turn the key off and back on and it works fine. but this time it never did anything but the scary sounds. i was annoyed about having to figure out how to get home, when to replace the starter in the parking lot, and what i was going to do about getting out of the parking lot. (you see, you pay for parking and then take the token to get out. but you have to get out within a time limit.) i eventually got out and knocked the starter around a bit with my mag-lite. after that it started right up. unfortunately, i had already paid my outrageously overpriced $12 for parking, and by the time i got to the gate after the starter fiasco the system decided i'd taken too long and charged me $2 more. i hate tmc parking. and i had to pay more than the maximum amount because of that.

back to my impending trip. i want to take my wallet chain, but i'm worried they're going to have a problem with it because it's sort of long and heavy. since i'm now planning on checking a bag, i can put it in there. but i've read about stuff like that going missing from checked baggage. so i don't know if that's any better than just having it on my person or in my carry-on baggage. i should probably just leave it, but i pretty much always wear it and i like having it. of course, i also always carry a lighter and a pocket knife, and i'm planning on leaving those behind. i guess i'll figure it out in the next few days.

i've still not come up with any good way to get free (or even cheap) calls back into the u.s. via cell phones, or google voice. so i think i'm probably going to see about using skype for that. (if i need to make calls back to the u.s.) if i have a wifi connection, i can use my laptop or iphone (i have the skype app) to make calls to u.s. phones via skype for about $0.02/min (plus a $0.04 connection fee). not bad. (stupid at&t/apple and not unlocking u.s. iphones...otherwise i could have a local taiwanese sim in my iphone with a data plan and make cheap calls to the u.s. over 3g/edge as well.)

ever thought about being paranoid when using an atm? i mean, being really paranoid? perhaps you will after looking at these examples of modern skimmer designs. (skimmers are devices that swipe atm card info without you being aware of it.)

http://www.krebsonsecurity.com/2010/01/would-you-have-spotted-the-fraud/

and a series of pics showing one being removed from a machine:
1. the machine when you walk up
2. the card slot
3. hhmmm...that was an added part
4. hello...what's all this then?
5. and the reveal
(originally via a tweet from mikkohypponen)

gives you something to be even more paranoid about, right?

in sad news, evidently today i blew a seam in one of my metallic-blue-flame leather sha-sha shoes. it doesn't appear to be fixable. i mean, it's seriously ripped. oh well, they were cool shoes and lasted a few years. this may have been a premature blow-out since the rubber sole was coming loose on this shoe and i hadn't glued it back together. but i treated them pretty roughly and wore them quite a bit.

pee-wee herman gets an ipad(via funnyordie). i used to love watching pee-wee's shows. i haven't seen any of that stuff in years. this made me kind of nostalgic, it did.

css is awesome coffee mug (for those of you familiar with css, you'll enjoy it)

here's a nice blog entry about how the way people view and use computers is changing.

want to be scared of mac fanboys? here's a one-hour documentary on them you can watch on hulu: macheads

chevrolet is working on a new ad angle (link from chron.com), and one of them uses the front of a black '55 chevy (i.e., looks like mine).

i started checking on luggage limits today. both continental and jal (japan airlines) have a carry-on size limit of 45 linear inches (height+length+width) (although it's 115cm for jal). the bag i'm planning to take, from measuring with it empty, comes in at around 49, although the ends are loose pockets and the top height varies based on what i put into it. hopefully it'll work out. the other thing is the weight limit for continental is 40 lbs, while the limit for jal is 10kg. that's 22 lbs. that's about half! i haven't packed yet, so i have no idea what my carry-on will weigh, but i might have to check for the jal leg.

in addition to the carry-on, you can also bring one "personal item" which can consist of a briefcase, purse, laptop bag, planner, etc. other than purse or briefcase, the list is pretty small. i was hoping to also use a college-style backpack. even though it's really not much bigger than a briefcase or some purses, i'm now concerned they may have an issue with it or something. i've also got a sort of day-bag/satchel kind of thing, i guess that might work. i don't think it can hold as much as a briefcase though. :)

update: while i was attempting to not check luggage for simplicity's sake, i was also under the mistaken impression checking luggage costs extra money. that changed for inside-the-u.s. flights over the last year or three, where now even the first checked bag costs (except southwest, at the least) -- but evidently in trans-continental flights you still get free checked luggage (as long as it doesn't go over the size/weight limits).

i've scanned, ripped, collated, etc. cds from several purchases over the last few months, but i forgot to note the cds i bought at the half price books on westheimer out past beltway 8 a few weeks ago. so i went through the stack and tried to separate what i've already mentioned from what i haven't. here we go:

• aphex twin - richard d. james album (sire / warp / elektra / warner)
• assemblage23 - binary ep (metropolis)
• bjork - drawing restraint 9 - surrounded (one little indian / rhino / warner)
• david byrne - the forest (luaka bop / sire / warner)
• david byrne - live from austin Tx (new west)
• calexico - carried to dust (city slang / quarterstick)
• the chemical brothers - come with us (astralwerks / virgin)
• cute is what we aim for - the same old blood rush with a new touch (fueled by raman)
• dieselboy - project human (human imprint / system)
• dj dara - the antidote (breakbeat science)
• moby - i like to score - music from films vol 1 (elektra / warner)
• mortal - nu-en-jin (tooth & nail)
• the revolting cocks - cocked and loaded (13th planet / megaforce)
• she wants revenge - she wants revenge (flawless / geffen)
• sixpence none the richer - sixpence none the richer (squint)

i was stepping a bit outside of my normal purchases, picking up some stuff i'd thought about but never done, taking a few chances on some unknowns.

i think i also forgot to mention that a while back i picked up (on ebay, i think...or maybe it was on amazon) one of the last devo recordings i've been trying to get:

• devo - pioneers who got scalped: the anthology (rhino / warner)

in other news, i managed to borrow a t-mobile sim from someone at work today and used it to unlock my razr. it appears to have worked. i have also spent some time trying to figure out if there was any way i could use my google voice phone number to get cheap or free calls from taiwan back to the u.s. i couldn't figure anything out.

this evening i watched my life, which i had rented for 99 cents from itunes. it has tom hanks and nicole kidman in it as husband and wife. nicole is pregnant and tom is going to die from cancer. he decides to make a recording for his child so the child will know who his father was, and in the process tom learns about himself and deals with stuff from his past. blahblahblah. it was okay. the movie didn't seem to move very smoothly, particularly in the beginning -- the story just felt sort of stilted and forced at times. it also got a little too into the (imo, shallow) fascination some americans have with eastern / mystical spiritualism and healing. but whatever, it had some good things to say and point out too. i took a chance on it, and it turned out to be fair.

i got up today and actually got out of the house and took care of some things, even though it was in the low to mid 30's. i drove down to clear lake and went to my credit union there. i have been needing to close a second savings account i've had on my account. i created it the day after tamara told me she was having an affair. i was in shock that she would be doing that, and i was concerned if she could do that and was telling me, that she would then take money out of our accounts. because, hey, if she could commit adultery and was acting like a completely different person, why should i have any belief that she would have respect for my money? and i say mine because in our marriage what was hers was hers, and what was mine was ours. (which is how the divorce went too.) she had a bank account i had no access to, and never asked about. i had no idea how much or little money was in it. her checks for work were put in there. how she spent it was her own deal. my money, on the other hand, went into two joint accounts. anyway, all that to say, i was the primary breadwinner, and if she wanted to commit adultery and treat me like sh!t and leave me, then she had no right to expect access to the money that i provided to our relationship. so i had driven down to clear lake and taken her name off of all of the accounts, atm cards, visa cards, etc. i couldn't take her name off the primary savings account though, and i didn't really want to close it and have to get all new checks, new visa card, new atm card, etc. since all accounts were tied to it. so what i did was open a sub-savings account in only my name, then transfer all of the savings account money into it. (i had to keep the minimum in the primary savings for it to stay open, which was like $5 or $20 or something.) that said, a few years later, sometime after the divorce was finalized, i was able to get her name taken off the account completely. but later when i went to collapse the sub-savings back into the primary savings, it turned out i had to be there in person to do it. so i'd just never gotten around to driving down there to do it. so i did today. but i also went down there so i could tell them i am leaving the country for a couple of weeks and will likely be using my credit card.

driving down there is always kind of odd, since i have a lot of memories tied to the clear lake area. buildings that were there are razed, businesses changed, new large apartment complexes up, new overpasses and road changes. the diedrich's on bay area is now a darque tan. in the credit union i ran into a guy that i worked with at lockheed martin (at least i think that's where i remember him from). we made extended eye contact and i smiled, but he didn't seem to show any signs of recognition at all. i didn't talk to him. (that's a good analogy for that part of my life in general as it relates to me now, actually.) i drove bay area, saturn (which goes near the apartment tamara lived in when i met her), and nasa road one. i ended up going by the bank of america, which reminded me when tamara and i were in there, desperately trying to figure out how to get access to the money for our house closing, which was in a couple of hours (the only time i was ever in that bank). i went by jsc. i saw rocket park. i thought about the buildings i worked in at jsc, the people i worked with. i drove up to the lockheed martin building on nasa road 1 i spent the first four years of my "professional" career in. i saw the convenience store we used to walk to for afternoon breaks. i saw the cheap two-story parking garage beside the building and remembered parking my car and pickup and motorcycle in/on it. i remembered the first time i ever drove down nasa road one, going to my friend tom's apartment so i could "interview" with lockheed. (they were desperate for people and i already had an offer, i was just checking out the place and the people and such.) i remembered the time i spent at coffee oasis with ash, and other people, and meeting tamara for the first time. going to the waffle house. going to denny's. and more recent things too, like when i was dating jennifer, or when i've had to go down there to do stuff at the credit union, or when the hrc and i went down there one time.

all this crap, stored away in my brain somewhere that i hardly ever think about. and i realized just how much i've completely forgotten, that i know must have happened but i can't recall. i spent about 4 years living down there, and about 6.5 working down there. i drove those roads hundreds...thousands...of times. i ate out all the time. i did everything in that area. and most of it isn't even memories anymore, it's just ceased to be.