amdavidson

Working the Day Away

posted on 2008-06-29 - amd.im/iJiL

Here's a pic from working over in Taiwan.

Just thought it was kinda neat.

Unfortuantely, the photo has been removed...

Artistic Blast from the Past

posted on 2008-06-27 - amd.im/yVxs

So I finished the book that I had brought along on this trip, and went to an English bookstore today to get something else to read.

I got "Everything is Illuminated" as I watched the movie and was confused and heard the book was much better and explained a great deal better.

Anyways, what did I see playing on a TV in the "Art" section?

None other than Bob "Happy Trees" Ross

Sorry that I didn't get a better picture, unfortunately as soon as I took this one, that lady in the background came running after me to tell me that no cameras were allowed... Or something that I assume to mean that, after all... she was speaking Taiwanese.

Taiwanese Lunch

posted on 2008-06-26 - amd.im/Zfsx

So today I had Taiwanese for the first (real) time, it was interesting, thought I'd pass it along like last time.

Today I was daring, tried everything they put on the table. I even ate the bitter melon and clams.

The bitter melon was interesting... There really is no other flavor but bitter. I've never tasted anything like it, and despite me and Ethan trying to find a comparison to make, we were unable. It is a truly unique food.

I actually had to try it twice as I couldn't believe it the first time around. I don't think I'll be ordering it for myself, but it's an experience I recommend to others.

The clams were in the shell and in a soup with asparagus and string beans. They were better than I expected. I'm not usually a clam guy, but I ate a whole bunch of them. Otherwise not too remarkable, it wouldn't even be worth writing if I hadn't been so against clams for so long... Maybe I'll even give clam chowder another try.

Other items on the menu were fine, none too interesting.

• Chicken with Cashews
• Eggplant with some sort of fishy sauce
• Fish fried in and then crusted with a garlic-y something or another
• Goose breast slices that were soaked in wine and served cold
• Tofu with peppers and stuff, kinda spicy, not too bad
• Solidified Duck Blood and Pig Intestine

The usual.

Chinese Lunch

posted on 2008-06-21 - amd.im/GxA2

Had lunch on site with the vendor again today. They have a Taiwanese chef they imported that makes the execs lunch each day, and we join them.

They called it Chinese Spaghetti and, for the most part, it was really good.

It was like a rice based spaghetti noodle, that we put a Chicken based mixture of vegetables on. That part was all good.

There were additional garnishes that I did and didn't recognize, but this trip, I decided I was going to try it all, and yesterday I did the same and it was all fairly good.

Today however, I put a brown thing on there that looked like a sliced mushroom, but did not taste like one at all.

Missing from my mouth was the earthy mushroo flavor that I expected, and introduced was the delightfully gross taste of kidney from an unknown animal.

Gross, I won't be eating that again. We're going out for Thai tonight, from a restaurant that the vendor assures us is "very plain", so hopefully that means no kidney, liver, gizzard, or whatever.

European Attitudes

posted on 2008-06-11 - amd.im/tMqb

They say that Europeans are a bit less conservative than people in the states. I think this photo says it all.

Hohe Domkirche St. Peter und Maria

posted on 2008-06-09 - amd.im/xTzd

I woke up super early this morning (5AM but I went to bed at 12:30) and just wandered around Cologne... Figured that I don't have many other opportunities to visit Cologne (or Koln in German).

Anyways, check out what I'm told is the "oldest cathedral in Europe".

Website Changes

posted on 2008-06-06 - amd.im/w9Qq

There was a lot of stuff going on in the site that was just left over and cheap hacks.

I cleaned up a lot of the old bandaids in the blog section of the site, and may have caused major issues with it that haven't cropped up yet.

Tell me if you see things that are out of order chronologically, pages that don't display any posts, or get any weird errors.

Also, over the last week or so, I've rolled out a few features, there's now an RSS feed that fully validates, CAPTCHA authentication for the comments, added some javascript here and there, changed image display in the gallery to a "lightbox" format, and cleaned up some other old gallery stuff.

Tell me if you see anything else going on.