I went to the gym yesterday for the first time in four weeks, having been away so long at first due to a nasty cold, and then a trip to Malaysia.

I track my weight at the gym, and as mentioned before, I've been losing weight steadily. Yesterday, I found that I'd lost another 1.4 kg (3 pounds) in the intervening month since my last visit, and now am at a many-year low of 92.4kg (204lb). At 6'4" (192cm), my target is 200 lb (91kg), so I'm almost there.

Anyway, I'm trying to guess what it [...]
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We took a total of six Malaysia Airlines flights during our recent trip, and in every respect but one, Malaysia Airlines was a first-rate airline. The staff (reservation and ground and air) were very nice, service was prompt and good, the planes and gates and terminals were all clean and bright. Flights generally left and arrived on time without fuss or problem.

But I need to rant about one issue: the airline's collective lack of common sense when it comes to night flights and the basic human need for sleep.

Our flight from Kuala Lumpur to [...]

We're back in Kyoto after 10 days in Malaysia.

Fumie and I had left Penang earlier in the day to head to Kuala Lumpur for some shopping. We had been originally scheduled to make the flight in the evening, to connect with the midnight departure of our flight to Japan, but we went in the early afternoon so Fumie could visit some shops. Fumie's mom and Anthony took the original 9pm flight, and we met them in the Kuala Lumpur airport.

For our shopping trip, we first went to "Suria KLCC" (KLCC is "Kuala Lumpur City Center"), [...]

I've been in Malaysia for a bit over a week. We stayed the first three nights at a hotel on Penang Island (a large island about the size of Silicon Valley and just about as well developed) and then moved two miles away to Fumie's dad's place, also on Penang. He's here on a long-term work assignment.

For the weekend we went to Langkawi island, a somewhat smaller and vastly less-developed island a 20-minute flight north of Penang, just off the southern border of Thailand. Our hotel, the Andaman, was a thirty-minute drive from the airport and exactly at [...]
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The Kuala Lumpur airport (KLIA) seems as modern as any I've ever seen. Just as when flying into the international wing of Chicago or LAX, you must go down a long hallway after exiting the gate. Unlike Chicago and LAX, yesterday we had long "peoplemovers" to do the walking for us. They dumped us into what turned out to be a remote terminal hub, a beautifully architected multi-story open atrium area of shops (yes, including a Starbucks) overflowing with green. The elevator enclosures were clear tubes of glass that had people flowing on all sides -- really, quite impressive. [...]
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