Month: February 2004

Taiwan! But before that …..

Day 1:
Well, I finally made it to this island….. after many fits and starts, I have arrived. Prior to getting here though I had quite the adventure.

In LA for training, I scheduled to drive up the same day I was flying out of SFO. I was doing great time (about 5 hrs) and then disaster struck — I blew out my front driver side tire. Big-o bang and then clunk clunk clunk. If I had to have a flat then, I lucked out. I pulled over right behind a state trooper who was already there with a tow truck and a big rig that was having problems. I found out that I had a crappy and rusted out spare, no jack and nothing to take the tires off with. The trooper had the spare equipment, the big rig had the ability to pump air in my airless spare and I managed to get to the local Wheelworks and fix my tires.

All the while I finished packing and got on the road to pick up my friend coming back from Malaysia with his wife. Handed off my car keys to him so he could look after my car and I was on my way to Taiwan. Lucky me! While there the flight was overbooked and they were offering a great deal for people to fly the next day. I was so tempted, $400 travel voucher, $150 hotel voucher and a guaranteed seat upgrade the next night. I decided not to because Tony was waiting and I was anxious to get going. I didn’t need another reason to delay my long awaited trip to Taiwan.

I settled in quickly and well, before you know it, the family in front had a temperamental baby. Couldn’t stop crying all the way there. It was unreal. The baby was in pain and the parents, I dunno, but I think doing that to a baby is abuse and cruel and unusual for the passengers. The only way the baby stopped crying was to be held and carried but the parents didn’t do it and insisted that the baby lie in the portable crib. Shoot, I would’ve carried the baby and slept standing up.

In between the crying, I caught Master and Commander and The Other Side of Heaven. Slept some and was pretty well relaxed. The 747-400 was a little cramped, but managable considering in the past two months I’ve lost 1 waist pants size which so helped. If not, these Boeing seats are small. I think the Airbus seats are a little bigger.

Now I’m typing this in Tony’s office. Taiwan is all rain. Worse than Seattle and London combined. It looks like that for the next couple of weeks which is a total bummer. It’s alright, my trip here is mostly business anyhow. There was some culture shock but not too much. One nice thing is that it looks like the US. Driving from the airport to central Taipei, it looked a lot like Norther Jersey Turnpike into Holland Tunnel. Driver’s are crazy though… Saw a little Toyota cut off a large bus and almost thought there’d be an accident. Didn’t realize a bus could be so nimble but it’s par for the course I gathered later in the day.

=YC

Purple Rain

It’s raining in New York. That’s significant because it’s no longer freezing, even though some stupid punk groundhog Phil from PA says that we’re going to have six more weeks of winter.

Super Bowl: Ads were not that great. As a whole they were really not that inspirational. The geezers fighting over the potato chips was just wrong. Homer was good, but didn’t really change the way I thought. The two that were thought provoking were the shardsoglass.com anti-smoking ad and I kind of liked monster.com’s ID card sequence. I can’t believe that Bermuda spent the $30M for an ad though.

The Janet Jackson thing was totally bogus — everyone knew exactly what they were doing. I generally do like the CBS lineup these past 2 seasons (you can’t pry me away from the Amazing Race with a crowbar, and CSI and Joan of Arcadia are great), and this will help them on their entertainment side, but ultimately is going to hurt them on the news side — Ed Murrow and Ed Sullivan are rolling over in their graves, and Walter Cronkite would be if he had one.

Oh yeah, the game — what an awesome game! Although I had no idea who anyone was, it was the best game in at least 5 years. They were so craving for points that they were going for 2 point conversions after the touchdown, which almost never happens nowadays. You also have to think that there were 8 touchdowns and 2 field goals: the ball travelled 1,000 yards during that game — that’s more than half a mile. I don’t think I could have run a half mile like that.

I was down 25 fan in the pre-game mahjong fest, but in honor of Mastercard, I won a Homer Simpson Braineez talking head on the first half box (thanks Carolina for coming through, even though I’m sorry you didn’t go the distance).

Super Tuesday: I think that it’s obvious Kerry’s the annointed one at this point. Edwards has been trying for a stealth 2nd, but Kerry has the single package.

Post-Super Bowl Analysis

My observations of the Super Bowl ads, as I was actually watching (more or less with some attention) the game:

– Commercial for Hugh Jackman’s “Van Helsing” movie – interesting, but felt more like “Look at our CGI effects!” rather than an actual promotion for a movie (and I didn’t exactly come out of it liking the CGI effects either).

– Commercial for Budweiser about The Donkey That Wanted To Be a Clydesdale – cute.

– I got real tired of these Levitra ads (for those who don’t know, it’s a Viagra rival, which may or may not make it an important product to be aware of).

– I also got real tired of the ads promoting all the CBS shows. Yeah, I know that this was exactly why any network would purchase the rights to air the Super Bowl, but I was only able to swallow so much of self-promotion.

– Charmin commercial: a quarterback was about to take the ball, only he was too busy admiring the touch and feel of the slip of Charmin toilet paper that was just hanging on the backside of another player. Whistle was blown and a guy in the Charmin bear suit was waving his roll of Charmin paper at the camera, evidentally proud of his little prank. Sideline folks proceeded to chase the bear down, as a vendetta for the prank. This was a strangely funny ad that kept one’s mind on the product.

– Staples commercial – happily mocking Godfather types and office supply managers, wherein office workers bribed the gatekeeper of the office supplies with doughnuts, cookies, and muffins for paper, pens, and paper clips. This one guy asked for a folder, but regrettably only had half a Danish; he was given only half a folder (ripped before his very eyes). The next day, the guy returned, with a bodyguard at his side; guy announced, “I went to Staples and everyone will know it too!” “And, what do you want from me?” said the gatekeeper. Bodyguard guy approached Gatekeeper guy nose to nose, and said, “I want a cream puff…” A funny ad that stayed on point! Go Staples, land of cheap office products.

– I didn’t care for any of the Pepsi commercials I managed to catch – I thought that they were a little silly. “Yeah, I’m going to continue wrongfully downloading music!” said the adolescent types toasting their Pepsis at us viewers. Oh, go away, kids.

– I also didn’t get the AOL Super Fast (or whatever they were called) ads. They were supposed to promote AOL’s faster connection to the Internet, by showing how this geeky guy tried to get his dad, a grungy mechanic/motorcyclist, to understand what Super Charging means (Dad thinks it’s something more useful to his line of work and cannot understand Geeky Son); at one point, Dad connected a little motorized wheelchair to an AOL server to watch it go super. Geeky Son sat in said chair and, of course, it wasn’t like the wheelchair’s motor will go any faster (or maybe it did; I don’t remember)… Oh, well, the ad completely failed to make me care for AOL.

– Commercial for Viggo Mortenson’s “Hildago” – already a movie that I was looking forward to seeing (having seen the trailer for it at the movie theaters) – but the commercial had more clips and gave a nice feel that made the excitement even stronger. Ooh, Viggo!

– Cute MasterCard commercial with the Simpsons – Homer did his chores: oil change, costing X amount of money; hair cut for $75; and then… Voiceover Guy stated, “Chores done quicker to spend extra time with one’s family: priceless.” Problem is, Homer was spending quality time at Moe’s and guzzling beer. Homer grumbled, “Okay, Voiceover Guy,” and marched out of Moe’s, slamming the door at the face of Hans Moleman (the little pruney old man with thick glasses). Hehehe. Good Simpsons feature, essentially.

Conclusion: All in all, the ads weren’t too bad, I guess. I’d give them a better than average rating. The ads as a whole had nothing too tasteless, but they weren’t exactly terribly stand-up-and-cheer exciting either.

For other views, consider the Super Bowl ad analysis in Slate.com’s “Ad Report”. Among other ads, which I completely forgot about or haven’t commented on: Slate.com’s Seth Stevenson noted the Muppets’ Pizza Hut ad (I cooed over seeing Kermit, personally); the Monster.com ads (I didn’t particularly care for those, but then again, it was nice to see Monster.com trying to stay in there after having seen too many CareerBuilder.com ads over the past couple of weeks); and the Chevrolet ads with the kids with soap in their mouths (I thought it was funny).

Oh, and the Super Bowl itself – congratulations to New England (wasn’t rooting for them, hardly against them, since they were good during playoffs and heavy favorites to win the Lombardi trophy). Congratulations to Carolina for trying (but, you know, someone had to lose). Pretty good game, despite the boring first half-hour (although, I still don’t understand football – which makes me, what, a stereotypical female? Obviously, I don’t fully appreciate defensive football, or even football with teams I don’t root for). Next week is the NFL’s Pro-Bowl, but that’s anti-climactic – as a tv thing, it isn’t that exciting watching any bunch of All-Stars who do show up to play football (touch football, really, because no one wants to get hurt during the off-season) in the middle of Hawaii when the season’s all over. Humph. I guess there’s the entertainment value to the football fans who can’t give up. Until next time…