I'm still sluggish from my cold, but nevertheless, tomorrow we're all leaving for George Town, on Penang Island in Malaysia, to visit Fumie's Dad who is there on a long-term work assignment. (You can see George Town on the far left of this map)

Five of us (Fumie and Anthony and I, Fumie's mom, and Fumie's brother Shogo) take a shuttle to Kansai International, then fly to Kuala Lumpur (about 7 hours) and on to Penang (another hour). Shogo is staying only three days; the rest of us stay ten days.

It's at about 5 [...]
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I don't know whether it was flu or a common cold or SARS or what, but whatever it was lay waste to me and my family this week. In my case, Thursday was the first day since Sunday that my temperature didn't rise above 40C (104F), and today (Saturday) is the first day that I have no fever at all (well, so far).

It started a week ago (Saturday) with Anthony having a mild cough. On Sunday he had a temperature up to 40C, and Fumie was feeling bad too. It hit me on Monday with a force [...]
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There are a lot of wires strung across the sky in Japan. A lot of wires.

Here's a picture of the utility pole closest to our place:

As you might imagine, it's quite pleasant to see every day. (NOT!)

Looking straight up from where I took the first shot, you can see in the photo below the utility pole closest to the other side of the entrance. All the wires strung between the two go right across the face of the building.

Double yuck.

Frankly, since these poles and masses of wires are [...]

My posts seem to have a negative tint lately, so I thought I'd try to counter that with a post on the somewhat of a success story that are my recent workouts at the gym.

In the very old days I was quite skinny (more gangly, really, considering that I'm a geek), and weighed in at about 180 pounds [82kg]. I'm 6'4" [192cm], so 180 pounds is pretty lean. Then I started working out and I built up a fairly nice build; at my peak, I had Popeye arms (okay, not really, but at least [...]

So, I call up PG&E to make a payment on the gas/electricity for the Cupertino house. They have one of those voice-navigation phone systems ("say 'card' to pay by card; say 'check' to pay by check") that for some reason I find really annoying. (Most of what I find I want to say to such systems are words they would likely not recognize, and which are not printable in a refined forum such as my blog 🙂 )

Anyway, I navigate through entering my account number and credit card number, but it keeps reporting that there's an error [...]
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