Ok, so I didn’t get completely smashed last night….
Ok, so I didn’t get completely smashed last night. I sure felt like it (still do, actually), but although I have some Romulan Ale stashed in my drawer just such an occasion, I didn’t feel like doing it alone, with only my stuffed monkey and my turtles as an audience for my drunken rants, which are theoretically much more eloquent than my sober rants. Instead I tested the compatibility of Billie Holiday and the latest Half-life game. Verdict: not very. While both are effective at making me feel less depressed, they tend to work in different, mutually exclusive ways.
Xiao Bing did come over last night, and while he was able to empathize with being stuck in a certain job, working as he does at the post office, he’s a family man and couldn’t get drunk with me. Plus he was riding a scooter home to the wife and kids in Yonghe. Xiao Bing was one of the first people I met when I first came over here. He went to the same college as I did, Tunghai University in Taichung, although he majored in accounting and is now going to night school to learn about information technology. He knows html, and I suggested that he come up with a website, like mine, just for fun and a project to hone his web design skills. Ironically, however, he’s too busy studying website design to design a website.
My heartfelt thanks, by the way, for the hundreds of emails I received expressing sympathy over my recent failed attempt to improve my employment situation. It was a real testament to the compassion and soul of those individuals who make up the Internet.
Someone once told me that sarcasm is the lowest form of humor. Shyeah!
I just got a call from Doug, who used to work as the News’ “Man in Taichung” until the News went crazy and fired everyone who wasn’t wearing a banana-leaf hat and slippers. He now manages a magazine down there. He is in Taipei now and we are going to meet up, along with a few other people, at 45 after work. Since I am stuck in this 10-6 job five days a week, I don’t see how much I can help him with his endeavor to do a Taipei edition of his magazine, but I’ll see what he wants and oblige as far as I can. Steve’s book is out and hopefully he’ll bring a few copies along as well.
It looks like I will be able to go on the company trip to Hong Kong and then take a month off to go to Australia. Cool. I hope it works out. There’s a couple of webloggers I’d like to visit in Australia, as well as some other friends. What I’d really like to do is rent a decent-sized motorcycle and ride across an appreciable portion of the Australian coast, taking lots of pictures with my manual Nikon instead of my digital camera so I can run out of film in the middle of nowhere instead of running out of batteries in the middle of nowhere.
In other news, the inept IT department at my company has almost literally stepped aside and let the Code Red II virus infect our server, causing everyone’s computers to crash even more frequently than before. I asked them why they didn’t download the patch, and they told me “Well, we checked to see if we had the virus, and we didn’t, so we didn’t feel that we needed to download the patch.” I think, when we move to our new offices next year, that we should do it at night and not tell the IT department where we’re going. I really don’t think we’re in much danger of them finding us again, at least not while their heads are still up their asses.
