I’m completely sold. The Weber Smokey Mountain (WSM), i.e. the Weber “Bullet”, is a fantastic smoker. Easy to use, fantastic results and a entire geeky cult surrounding it (www.virtualweberbullet.com) with tweeks, mods and upgrades (Double stacking?!?). What’s not to love? This was chicken we had today. Fantastic flavor, extremely moist. Ribs, chickens, turkeys, roasts, etc, etc.; you’re all destined for that grate to the left. Thanks, Calvin and Iggie for a great birthday gift! Thank you Amazon Prime for getting it to our door with no shipping costs!
Nice phrase. The pressure of perfection is moving from you local hardware (where it nearly is perfect) to the cloud, which isn’t quite there yet. But it is getting there. In 5 years will our bandwidth be wide enough and ubiquitous enough that all of our storage will be online and not local? I think so. Look for a Google cloud to Drobo connection, except that Google will maintain your data and push the backups down to you to your Drobo box a la Google Gears. You’ll always have a copy of your data (with changes) under your desk, but always have access to you data from any device.
Even with all of those “Leave Brittany alone” skateboarding wipeout videos, YouTube can still have some great content. Here’s one:
Wordpress looks like the way to go…Let’s see what happens.
OK. A word of advice if you travel outside of the country. Don’t try and take pictures of the US embassy. They, meaning the local security force that is the first line defense around the compound, don’t like it (sort of). Paul and I decided that it would be cool to get some shots of the Embassy, which has a very impressive sign out front. It’s large with gold lettering and would make a great photo.. Another shot we wanted to get was the jeep out front with the machine gun mounted on the roof. Like nearly all commercial vehicles it had a “How’s my driving?” sign painted on the bumper with a phone number to call. We got a great kick out of this. Paul was going to Photoshop “How’s my shooting?” onto the bumper.
Well, we where walking towards the front gate and Paul raised his camera and got off one picture. Immediately there was whistles and shouting and a couple of uniformed guards started running towards us. In broken English the first guard to reach us asked us if we were taking pictures. We told him that we were and that we were U.S. citizens, upon which he asked us to show him our passports, which we did. During our entire conversation he was smiling and very pleasant. He kind of indicated that he needed to take us inside and ask us some questions. He lead us to the main guard house which had an inner office that had steel doors and thick bullet (and presumably bomb) proof glass. He motioned to someone inside and said that he needed to talk to his supervisor. When he did they both were laughing and his supervisor waved him on indicating that he should just fill out the paperwork and everybody laughed. He took down the our information on our passports while one of the guards from the jeep outside, which turned out to be Philippines Special Forces, strolled in to check us out. After about 15 minutes or so, he let us go.
Paul and I figured that he just wanted to get out of the heat for a little bit, which was why everyone in the guard house was laughing when he pulled these couple of gringos in.
We actually thanked the guards for doing such a good job and told them that we appreciated them protecting our embassy.
We never did get the shot of the jeep.
Small price to pay for a great story.
As I’ve traveled in Asia, I’ve noted the different ways that people traveled about. In Hanoi, everyone rode what we would call in the States, mopeds. In Delhi, tuk-tuks where everywhere. In Manila, Jeepneys ruled the road. Jeepneys were originally created from the jeeps that the American army left in the Philippines after World War II. They were stretched and had roofs put on them for shade. Later, local companies and backyard builders started creating them. The fare to ride these is 7 pesos, which works out to about 10 cents. This picture on top is a fairly typical Jeepney. They go from somewhat austere to completely outrageous paint schemes and decorations (Mercedes emblems seem to be quite popular). The quality can run from rattling rusting deathtraps like the second picture down to completely buffed polished with air-conditioning like the third picture. People just hope in the back, pay the driver and off they go.
What is amazing is the sticker on the sides of each one showing the specs of the vehicle. The weight for these is in kilos, so the Jeepney weighs a few hundred pounds more than my Honda Civic. It is about the size of a big SUV, say a Ford Expedition and it will hold 20 people (with the driver).
Ingenuity + necessity + culture = cool unique stuff
There is amazing amount of wealth in Manila it seems. First there is the opulent hotel Shangri-La, with its huge lobby, dozens of staff on the floor greeting each guest, armed guards with bomb sniffing dogs and metal detectors. Across the street from the hotel is an enormous mall which could be mistaken for any high end mall in the states. Indeed, there were times in the mall that it did feel like you were in the states. In the mall is a Hard Rock Cafe, California Pizza Kitchen, and a wide range of stores from Dolce & Gabbana to Ducks Unlimited (?!?).
Sorry I’ve not posted sooner. It’s been a bit of a whirlwind so far. The hotel is outstanding. Probably the nicest hotel I’ve ever been in. I’m off for a city tour of Manila, and I’ll post more tonight, including pictures. They didn’t have my room ready when we checked in, so I was upgraded to a suite for one night. Really, my room that I have now is almost as nice. The main lobby is huge.
Haven’t had a lot of time to site see yet, just a little bit yesterday. More today and tomorrow, now that our commitments for the conference are done.
It’s 2:07 AM here. Arrived safe and sound but late. Hotel is beautiful. Pictures and more to follow tomorrow.
Off to bed…
So far, so good. Long flight into Tokyo. All went well. The international side of the terminal is eerily empty for a Sunday afternoon. It’s more crowded when we get to the gates for our flight.
More later. …