Nov 03 2010
It’s pretty lame to start every post with a jetlag update. But, seriously, both people waking up to the morning at 11:58pm was not funny. We lay down less than 3 hours ago!
Mixing half-ass attempts to sleep, shower, and magazines, we killed enough time before getting breakfast from 7-Eleven at 4:30. Oh thank heaven. Then we took our first nap of the day until like 8am.
Nov 02 2010
The jetlag problem improved drastically today as we woke up at 3 and stopped pretending to sleep by 3:30. We carried on some deep conversations (because 3 hours of sleep really cleared our heads like Drano would a toilet) for two hours, then we stepped our for an early morning walk like a grandparent-aged couple.
Breakfast at a convenience store was something else needing to come off our check list. What better time to do it than a time when nothing else was open? I got myself a ginger-honey-lemon drink from the heater (instead of refrigerator) because any warm drink other than tea/coffee would be considered weird in the US. For food, I got a sandwich and she got a curry bread, both of which were pretty good.
Nov 01 2010
From way back, I had expected to experience jet lag on the first morning. I even planned around it strategically by arranging the trip to the fish market, which starts its daily business before dawn, on the first day. There’d be neither painful attempt to wake up early, nor would early bird sleeplessness be too much of a problem.
Or would it? It’s 1 freaking am and I’m more awake than I ever would be in the office. It’s not even funny… what kind of transpacific trip wakes one up before 3am???
Oct 31 2010
The thing I hate the most about traveling to Asia is, how do I count? Is the first day a 36-hour day, or are the first two days 18-hour days each?
When you’re grown up and each vacation day is worth at least a few hundred bucks, it’s scary to think that a good three full days are spent on the travel part of a trip. I hope that within our lifetime, we’ll get to see much cheaper means of long-distance transportation at ten times the speed. Coming from the world of computing, I might just be too optimistic on technological advancements.
Oct 30 2010
Sitting on the airplane, at the gate, waiting to take off from one of the crappiest airports in the country. The lady next to us has both hands covered in blood from some serious wounds – good thing I’m going on a honeymoon with a doctor, who’s prepared with first-aid supplies. What concerned me more than the runny blood was when she informed us about the wounds coming from her cat under the seat. Um, that means I’ll be within 4 feet from an allergen power house for the next 15 hours? Holy shit this could mean the worst start of a trip ever.
Two hours later, the smell of iodine kept me from falling asleep. The lady’s hands had puffed up quite a bit, and I learned from my sweetheart about the danger of an animal bite and how this could be the beginning of an ugly systemic infection. “She needs to get antibiotics within 24 hours.” Okay, two hours down, 13 more hours on the plane, and there is still hope. Now I don’t know whether I should stretch out my legs, leaving the feet next to the bag of cat.
I flipped through the Delta magazine, trying to figure out what movies we could expect to see. Meanwhile, commercial after commercial had been streaming on TV. “Welcome aboard! Have you thought of owning a stand-alone chicken roaster?” I guess if nobody is paying checked baggage fees, the airline’s gotta find a source of income somewhere else.
The commercial that bothered me the most was about Delta’s commitment to the breast cancer campaign. Would you like to purchase a $2 PINK lemonade and donate to the cause? Oh please. I don’t mean to belittle this disease, but it’s far from the leading cause of death, leading cause of death for women, or even the deadliest cancer. The fad that drives every freaking corporation in America to jump up waving its hand saying, “we pretend to care too,” is just, well, a fad. It’s unclear how the donations are curing cancer except to sponsor more pink-colored merchandises and to pay for the $500k salary of Susan Komen’s CEO. So when can we have a walk together, in brown, to find a cure for colon cancer?
Alright. Time to attempt zonking out again. Hello Japan. Here we come.
Oct 25 2010
Over the past year, the word “motor vehicle recall” and “Toyota” seemed to have some strong correlation, including the headline news last week. They sure screwed up with corporate response for that incident, but that by no means suggest that Toyota is the only manufacturer that makes bad cars. “Good” cars get recalled all the time, but the current public perception combines both Toyota’s market share and the evil media’s tendency to continuously trashing a reputation. You know, like the five thousand stories written about BP this summer.
The fact is, even if 100% of Porsche cars are defective, they won’t recall as many as Toyota did this year. So the question intrigued me: which manufacturer makes the most reliable cars, measured by the least proportion recalled? I did some homework, combining a comprehensive recall history database from the Department of Transportation, and a car market share report from Motor Intelligence (which is the basis of this WSJ report). The results for 2001-2010 recalls are:
It works like this: Toyota has a 15.9% market share (combining cars and light trucks), and among all cars recalled in the past 10 years for defective critical safety components, Toyota only makes up 6.0%. Therefore, they get a score of 6.0/15.9=0.38. That is, if you drive a Toyota, the chances of it being bad is barely more than 1/3 of the chances for the average car on the road. On the other hand, Chrysler has 9.4% market share but 20.0% of all critical recalls, so they get a score of 2.13 meaning it’s twice as likely to be bad as the average car.
The chart above shows two bars for each major manufacturer, with the solid bar indicating recalls of critical safety components (engine, brakes, power train, tires) and the striped bar indicating all components (from traction control systems and seat belts to seats and hitches). Nissan/Infiniti, for example, have less than average total recalls but more than average critical recalls. Volkswagon/Audi is the opposite.
Volvo, for some reason, is 4.5 times as likely to be recalled as everybody else. But they deserve the benefit of doubt since given the tiny market share, their data is more prong to high volatility. It’s important to keep in mind the credibility of each data point and assess the conclusion carefully. The market share is graphed in blue, with GM at 19.4% and Toyota at 15.9%. A more detailed table is at the bottom of this post.
Conclusions? Although scare-driven bad publicity about Toyota is all over the news these days, hard data indicate that they are still one of the most reliable manufacturers out there. Kia is better, and the big three from Detroit are still sucky.
Oct 19 2010
When we first decided on going to Japan for honeymoon, we wanted to go with a tour group. It is, after all, a foreign country where none of our 3 languages would work very well. But after going through a lot of travel agencies and comparing packages from both the U.S. and Taiwan, the plan didn’t seem so promising. First off, very few packages are long enough to cover both Tokyo and Kyoto. Secondly, almost none of them works with Hong’s vacation schedule – even the most compromising departure date would effectively cut off 1/3 of our vacation time.
The frustration from calling travel agents coast to coast built up to the point where we just said, screw it. Why go with a tour group when we could do it ourselves? Thus, the real planning began. I wouldn’t have dared this 5 years ago, but now with Google Maps, Wikipedia, Wiki Travel, and sites like Japan-Guide, creating a bettery itinerary than any travel agent’s version is just a piece of cake.
But mapping out all the logistics could be time consuming. While a lot of tourist information provide directions from a central location (i.e. train station) to each site, it’s only partially helpful when you want to bundle multiple destinations into a seamless trip. Weighing sites by importance, proximity, convenience, hours, closed days, etc, and this becomes a complex traveling salesman problem. Can we kill a few hours in Ginza? Is a half day enough in Odaiba? What if it rains? Will we change our minds? There’s a need to prepare more than necessary for backup plans, but there’s also a risk of reading too much and wanting to see everything.
Coming from NYC, we take intuitive street layouts for granted. However, Japan has a strange addressing system where neighborhoods are not numbered by any geographical order and many of its streets do not have names. Directions like “the street parallel to and north of 4th Avenue” or “the narrow alley between this and that” really bother me. Supposedly, they say, you can’t really get around without asking for directions. But do I really want to do that? Meh.
We got a pretty comprehensive street map of Tokyo. But that’s probably not enough. I imagined getting lost on an island where I can’t communicate with anyone and don’t have access to Google Maps on my phone. Kind of scary, in today’s technology-dependent perspective. But I would still be able to receive GPS signals and identify my location by absolute coordinates, right? Figuring that far, I started writing down coordinates of each location, so at least we’ll know which direction to head toward in case we get seriously lost. For example, Tokyo Tower is at 35?41’35″N and 139?42’19″E. Will that work? Let’s hope.
Oct 14 2010
McDonald’s has been given so much bad publicity in recent years, based on biased and scientifically unsound claims. I’m not a hardcore fan trying to defend the corporation, but as an analytical bystander I feel the need to bring about some justice.
Introducing: the correlation between McDonald’s historical growth and improvement in life expectancy. Credible data sources suggest that before Americans had McDonald’s, they didn’t make it very far.
Keep this chart in mind the next time you buy your kids a Happy Meal. Thank it.
Oct 11 2010
We’ll be visiting Japan in about 3 weeks. This is exciting.
Among all foreign countries that we haven’t been, Japan is the one that I love and hate the most, find the most similarities and extreme differences, really want to visit and at the same time desperately trying to avoid.
It was, after all, an enemy in war against both my countries. Like what Germany did to the Jews, Japan had left a pretty serious scar in the Chinese community. If either of my grandpas were still alive, they might be enraged at the idea of setting foot on the Japanese soil. Both my grandmas can probably name friends or family who fell victim to the Japanese imperial army, just hardly mention it. Many in our parents’ generation still hate the land of rising sun with passion. I try to remain rational, but it’s hard to say whether leaving all the past behind is at all rational.
On the other hand, time, and commercialism, did loosen things up. I grew up watching Japanese anime and reading Japanese comics, constantly under a guilt trap by my mom as unpatriotic. Now I take pictures with my third Japanese camera, go places in my second Japanese car, and can’t imagine replacing them with a “patriotic” American brand. My free time at home is spent between Sony’s PS3 and Nintendo’s Wii, which would not have been possible without the “dwarf pirates” as my ancestors called them.
When I read about the Nagoya Castle being destroyed in a WW2 air raid, I was both excited about “our” victory in the war and sad that the original building is there no more for us to visit. When I finally set foot outside Narita Airport, I know a picture of Detective Conan will light up in my right brain and a page from the history textbook will go through my left. What a complex!
The Chinese shaped the traditional Japanese culture. What most White people identify today as Japanese are in fact a direct copy a a derivation from original Chinese inventions. Kimono, origami, chopsticks, green tea, calligraphy, ramen, and the three wise monkeys are all on that list (exceptions include ninjas and sushi). Kyoto, the most “traditional” Japanese city, is modeled after the capital of China 1,000 years ago, from the design of sliding door panels to the city grid layout. From a certain aspect, for a Chinese person to admire the traditional Japan is like for a Mac person to admire Microsoft Windows, which originally had been accused of stealing Apple’s graphical windows interface.
On the other hand, the Japanese has had heavy influence in modern history on most East and Southeast Asian countries, including Taiwan. All my siblings and friends grew up with Gundam, wataru, Street Fighter, Final Fantasy, and Megaman. Our school and medical systems were adopted from them, our streets are filled with Japanese-styled stores and sales gimmicks, and every street corner has a 7-Eleven that sells some Japanese food items.
The love-hate feeling has always been a subconscious struggle of mine, and undoubtedly shared by many others. To avoid confronting the irony in this relationship, I limit my exposure to their language, history, and customs, regardless how heavily they are referenced in my favorite manga and games. The plan to tour Japan has finally brought me to face this country and its culture, something I desperately look forward to but would never honestly admit.
More posts to come!
Oct 01 2010
New Jersey is a fairly watery state. On a normal day, it’s filled with rivers, lakes, and swamps. When it rains, well, those bodies of water reclaim their territories from men.
Newark, the shitty town where I work, gets flooded easily. You’d expect that of a port city, I suppose, but based on people’s gossip, it seems like the entire state is under water. Coworkers stayed home for the day, switched to train, or specifically picked SUVs for the commute – made me feel rather naive and clueless about the hazards.
From the Turnpike to my office, I drove through a swamp and two rivers this morning. There were only one each yesterday, and the hazard seemed cumulative as the storm went on all week.
The swamp was on the ramp off the Turnpike, under the overhead pass. On a sunny day, it’s an unpleasant stretch to drive on because of the unevenly cracked pavement and the sewerage smell. When there’s even a few drops of rain, this very section of the ramp accumulates water, and it’s always dark opaque like when your toilet needs Drano.
The Jungle Cruise at Disney World doesn’t get any more exciting than this. So glad I don’t drive a Lamborghini.
A quarter mile down, there was a river orthogonal to the 4-lane, 1-way road. Given the curvature on the pavement, everyone squeezed to drive down the middle where the water was only 1-2 inches shallow. I felt good about the water splashes because it’d partially wash away the sewerage water on my car. At least this river was somewhat clear. A slight hydro-plant was part of the package.
The resistence driving in water felt quite funny.
A block down, an SUV was stalled in the middle of the road. Reason unknown. Beyond that, traffic merged again to cross a newly emerged and highly substantial river.
“Yay, another underbody car wash”
Audi soaking stalled in this river. Uh… should I be concerned? (I was)
BLINDED!
Some jerk decided that it’s okay to ram through the deep part of water in his big ass vehicle, with a lead foot on the gas. The splash I saw in my peripheral vision was shocking like an action scene from Jaws.
I wonder how heavy a car has to be to safely splash up this much water without losing control. Media reported a Grand Cherokee hydroplanted killing four people yesterday in North Carolina, so I doubt this jerk was beating traffic with much traction.
Coworker told me that the water level had somewhat reduced by the time I arrived. It was supposedly so high that a Toyota Sequoia was stalled on the same road.
They say it’ll keep raining for another week 