Last night I went on a little mission of exploration around the hotel here in Taipei, despite the light drizzle. Here’s a few of the snapshots I took while out in the rain as night fell…

What’s so special about a toilet in Japan you ask? Well, I thought that the one in my hotel room (photo below) was already extreme with the two temperature heated seat, and the control panel down the right side with three buttons and a rotary control.

From the front to the back, the controls are:

• Stop
• Shower
• Bidet
• Status Light
• Heated seat temperature setting
• Water jet pressure control

That’s not the most advanced though it seems. Reading the in-flight magazine on my flight from Tokyo to Taipei, I discovered an article describing the author’s visit to a friend in Tokyo. It seems that his toilet actually talked to its user. It told him he was overweight and more (seems it analyses what you give it and reports on your health too!).

Here’s a selection of photos from around Tokyo showing some of the differences between old and new (click each photo to popup a larger view):

Clockwise from the top left, these are:

1. One of the gates to Asukusa’s temple area
2. A little girl dressed up in traditional costume to visit the temple
3. One of the many duty free shops in the Akihabara/Electric Town area
4. A lantern in the main temple area at Asukusa

Well, I am sitting in a Yahoo Internet Cafe here in Tokyo’s Narita Airport looking out over a number of planes standing at gates. The access is free, but you have to use their machines. Not a huge problem, except that they have Japanese keyboards – press the wrong button (like one of the ones on either side of the space button – it is not big enough to be a bar) and the thing starts trying to convert everything that you type into Japanese characters. Clever, but not easy for somebody who doesn’t understand any Japanese to turn off.

I will probably upload some photos from Tokyo when I arrive in Taipei – did not have internet access in my room last night because I had to move to a new room in a different part of the hotel.

Just left London after spending a few days there for my brother’s wedding. The day went off really well, even the weather held. (Sunday made up for that by raining so hard that all the roads in the area were flooding).

The reception was held at the local vineyard/restaurant (Barnsgate Manor) and I think everybody had a great evening. I will try to upload some photos later on – I have 145 of them at the moment.

My brother and new sister-in-law are now enjoying their honeymoon down under in Australia, and I am in Japan for a business trip. Staying in the Shinagawa Prince Hotel in Tokyo.

I am currently typing this in on a laptop in the hotel’s Yahoo internet cafe – which has proved challenging as the machine’s native language was of course Japanese. Took me a while to find somebody to get it out of its native mode and into a mode I could use, but even now the keyboard layout is slightly different making it a little challenging for me… I think in future I will do what I did earlier today and just bring my laptop down.

Once again my Yahoo! email address is attracting large numbers of ~150K emails containing the SWEN virus. Does this signal a return of SWEN? For those of you unfortunate enough to be using the world’s least secure (not to mention worst) operating system on your desktop or laptop machines, here’s some advice:

1. Run Windows Update/Bandage daily (hourly?). The best chance you have on a Windows box is to make sure all the patches are installed. Still won’t solve the problem as there are so many holes in Windows it would make a Swiss cheese jealous, but its the best option you have short of unplugging the thing from the world (choose either the power cord or the network one, and leave it disconnected ;-).
2. Stop using IE and Outlook/Outlook Express – these are the portals that virus writers most often use to get in, not using them prevents these two easy access gateways to your system. Instead, I recommend Mozilla which does a better job of web page rendering and email handling. It also includes, out of the box, popup blocking and a very effective spam filter. Upgrade now, and purge as many MS virus gateways as possible from your system. Software from MS has a proven track record of allowing these things in, so avoid using their poor quality code where possible.
3. Please delete emails with attachments, always. Especially ones that claim to be patches to any or all of the problems with Windows. We all know that there are so many holes in it that a single 150KB download is not going to be able to repair them all. I don’t think I’ve seen a single Windows Update download that small.
4. Download (or buy) the ultimate patch for Windows: a Linux installation CD. I’d recommend RedHat or Mandrake, though Mandrake can be a real pain to add anything to – most of the add-on packages are only available through their club, which is just another way of saying maintenance program.

Of course, you could always switch to an Apple platform… access to all the applications you’re used to (even the nasty browser from MS, though a very old version of it), with the added benefits of better security and a nicer user interface. It also happily displays X11 applications on the desktop, giving you access to all the unix graphical tools and remote display capabilities.

I meant to post a link to the photos I took in Taiwan a while back and never got around to it (can you tell it’s clean up day today ;-). They are on Ofoto which is my preferred service for digital photo sharing and printing.

Hope you enjoy the photos. I had fun snapping them as I walked around the back streets and the amazing National Palace Museum.

Well, my new laptop arrived at the office while I was in Taiwan, so this evening I have been playing with it. In particular, I have been listening to streaming radio over my 802.11 connection (wireless internet radio).

So far I have been mostly listening to Club 977 which offers commercial free 80’s music streamed at 128 kbps via the iTunes application. Even while downloading software for my new toy (like Konfabulator) it hasn’t dropped out at all. Very cool.

I’ll probably post more about the new laptop as I spend more time playing with it. Sometime soon I want to try creating a DVD with it and see how that works out. For now I’m just concentrating on getting my basic software installed, and the wireless connectivity sorted out too.

Well, congratulations to Ping for the correct location: I was in Taipei to drop off a board for a demo at Computex and make sure that it all worked correctly.

Apart from Computex, which was both huge in terms of the number of exhibitors, and packed (to the point that it was difficult to move around), I also went to a few other places.

Food & Drink

• China Pa – a restaurant/bar place that served the most amazing spicy food and any kind of drink you could imagine. All in an environment that included carved wooden furnishings, comfy chairs and live music.
• Naomi – a underground lounge bar with unusual decor, good snacks and OK cocktails (the Long Island Iced Tea was good, but I have had better – and worse). There was a fairly trendy crowd in and the video being projected onto the walls from overhead projectors was decidedly odd in places. Also, a little expensive – there’s even a cover charge.
• Champagne – just a few doors down the street from Naomi, but this one is at street level. Very impressive wine and champagne collection (with prices to match), but also a very good selection of every other kind of drink you can imagine. Well worth a visit.
• The Hyatt does a buffet that I’m told is amazing, but I missed it. Instead, I ate in the little lounge/bar area on the second floor, overlooking the lobby. They had a dim sum type thing going on, but extended to include bite-sized servings of foods from all over the world – for example, cucumber sandwiches made on a slices of bread about two inches square – with crusts, so not just larger slices cut down to size.
• The Brasserie at the Landis Hotel – this one was not so good, at least for me. The Singapore-style noodles I had were totally devoid of any spices, and the chilli sauce I requested was equally mild. That said, the pain au chocolat and croissants they served with breakfast are among the best I’ve had anywhere in the world, including France. The rest of the breakfast was excellent too – anything from Chinese style to full English cooked to cereals & fresh fruit.

Attractions

I only really saw one attraction in my limited time there (I don’t count Computex). That was the National Palace Museum, and it is well worth checking out, though it is somewhat large and perhaps a little overwhelming.

Well, it is not California. But for those who want to guess here are some photos. If you have any idea (and those who already know are not eligible to enter 😉 please leave a comment with your guesses…