Taipei Shanghai Zürich day 6 - Shanghai arrival

75 minute,  mile long,  fast moving line for a taxi from Pudong airport!

Rain,  but no wind or thunderstorms, so the flight from Narita was smooth. The flooding around Pudong as seen from the air is not so bad.

Smart-phone Offline Blogging Apps

No data plan?  No bars of phone service?  No keyboard?  No problem!

Smart-phones have zoomed past several milestones in many areas that make them an ideal offline blogging platform.  Consider:

• Phone cameras are as good as point-and-shoot dedicated devices
• Phones now have offline speech to text that transcribes much faster than typing, and with surprising accuracy
• Phone GPS devices enable recording and storing exactly where you are, all the time
• Phones have huge storage capacity to cache your blog entries until your device “sees” the Internet again

It is therefore no surprise to see smart-phone applications spring up such as TripJournal, MobilyTrip, BlogPress, Tumblr, Blogger, and WordPress.

Like TripJournal, MobilyTrip uses your GPS sensor to mash up locations, maps, and routes in Google Maps.  It keeps a slick floating time line calendar widget in the web pages it publishes for you.  And it integrates your own trip journals with polished, professional online “Guides” about the places you visit that they curate on their web site.

MobilyTrip is, of course, travel-specific.  And it locks you into their web site to publish your trip journal. The company that publishes it is a French start-up; their port from iOS to Android is weak, unstable, and clunky. 

It takes forever for their web pages to load in North America, and the inefficient JavaScript is slow to update outside of Safari.  I tried to make the Android app work for me, but I could not out how to use the features.  I plan to re-visit the application because it shows enormous promise.  My friend who uses it on iOS wrote a fantastic trip journal that I enjoyed reading as he updated it.

Since this blog is on Google blogspot I decided to try their Android client in my phone.  The App is very minimalistic but worked surprisingly well for my needs.  In particular it can attach photos, add tags, and it uses the Google offline speech to text.  The blogger app really wants to “see” Internet all the time but it does store your draft offline.

Taipei Shanghai Zurich day 6 – flying to Narita

The business class lounge has excellent Internet in Taipei but I was too late to attend the business meeting and there were no notes, grrrr.  I was able to work for a couple of hours, however.  The food was also quite good:

Notice the water cup is sealed.  Even the $2 street meals in Taipei heat-seal the tops of the drink cups instead of giving you those silly lids we use in the USA that always spill.  I speculate this is a Japanese custom.  The broccoli soup was very good (not too salty) and the rest of the meal was ok.

Up here in the air over Japan, there is apparently a spectacular view of Mt Fuji but I am on the wrong side of the plane to see it, sigh.

Leaving taipei we passed over the remnants of the big Typhoon that arrived in Shanghai yesterday.

 

And the food on board ANA is very good.  I love the presentation of Japanese haut cuisine with the pretty boxes and wrappings.

Taipei Shanghai Zürich day 6 - flying to Shanghai

My 0-Dark hundred (5:00am) taxi was early; the sun came up during our very fast drive to the airport.

The ticket counter for ANA was closed when I arrived. It opens at 06:30. Coffee!

Taipei, "the bastard rape child of China and Japan" is well worth the visit. I'm glad I came.

Taipei Shanghai Zurich day 5 – campus tour

The vegan buffet lunch was quite good (a bit greasy but fresh) with large quantities for $1.50.  We ate outside in the sweltering heat, with sweat dripping down our faces and clothes sticking to our bodies. My hair frizzed up in the wet heat.

After lunch, my daughter showed me around the huge library where she goes to study. They have a large archive of physical maps and charts that patrons can unroll and examine.  Some of them are very old.  Many are from Japan.  This one is pre-WW2 era, Japanese.

The library also has a large “media room” with dozens of stations equipped with vinyl LP record players, cassette players, DVD players / burners, and other hi-fi equipment.  They post a large poster weekly of which movie DVDs are most-checked-out of the library by the students.

floor plan of the library Entry-way

architectural model much-beloved by the locals

 

Then my daughter had to get back to her afternoon classes so I headed back.

I finally found a taxi to take me to the airport.  Enterprising drivers post their contact information online and I was able to email a few of them with Google Translate. In Taipei it appears impossible to book a Taxi in advance – everyone calls at the moment they need a cab, never sooner.  No driver or dispatch operator speaks anything but heavily-accented Mandarin; I find this situation odd, since there are so many of us foreigners running around.  I hope I make my flight.

Taipei Shanghai Zürich day 5 - lunch

The weather here is swelteringly sunny humid hot like Savannah Georgia summer hot.

I arrived early, am waiting in the big cafeteria lounge.

Taipei, Shanghai, Zurich Day 5 - Working

By pointing and hand signals I was able to get that awesome $1.50 chili Eggs with sweet tofu drink from the restaurant 3 doors down from my apartment.

They do a brisk business.

I spent the morning online doing work.  There was some FUD about the typhoon situation in Taipei and Shanghai.  However it moved quickly in-land so the winds are dying.  Now it’s just dumping too much water.  The local weather here in Taipei is sunny this (Monday) morning.

Because my Microsoft Lync system is still broken at work I have been using Google Voice (GV).  Despite GV’s recent switch to the clunky “Hangouts” for dialing out from a computer, it has become even more awesome.  And the Internet here in Taiwan is extremely low-latency, high-bandwidth, and clean.

All of the apps and services in GV are free except international calling; the cost per-minute for international calls is much less expensive than anything I have seen.  GV’s speech to text-into-email for voice mail and the whole bidirectional text message (SMS) to email gateway thingy are very cool.  If Lync continues to be so flakey I may start using it more when I am back.

If you are inside eBay corp, here is the current draft of a document I was editing.  Please let me know what I missed or what is unclear.

If you are not on corp you will see a sad face in the iframe.

This afternoon I am meeting my daughter on campus for lunch.

Taipei, Shanghai, Zurich Day 4 -- Taipei Sunday

The Typhoon winds have picked up in preparation for their crescendo on Monday. And the intensity (volume) of rain is higher. We had a local "diner" style breakfast at a place close to the apartment and I really loved the chile, eggs, and sweet tofu drink. It was about US$2. I don't know if I could order it without my daughter whose halting Mandarin enabled us to get what we wanted.
After breakfast we went to the University where my daughter does her homework away from her disrupting roommates.  We had coffee and discussed her career options.  She is still quite passionate and dedicated about becoming a Chinese history professor.

Then I headed out for a walking tour in the high winds and heavy rains while my daughter did her homework. Late in the afternoon when we were both hungry, we ate sandwiches at a charming punk rock themed cafe. After lunch we tried (and failed) to book my taxi back to the airport online (very frustrating).  We ate dinner at a health food restaurant.  I did not enjoy all the ginseng and herbal remedies they put in the vegetable soup I ordered but the sesame cabbage was great.

Then we came back to my apartment and drank beer, talking until late about life, the universe, and everything.  It's great to spend time with my daughter.  I miss her dearly.

More photos here.

Taipei, Shanghai, Zurich Day 3 - some videos

Here are some videos of our tourist adventures in Taipei

Taipei, Shanghai, Zurich Day 3 – Night Shopping

The typhoon hit a little harder last night with higher winds and more rain.  Undaunted we went first to the Sababa Pita bar for an inexpensive but extremely high-quality mid-eastern dinner.

Does anyone notice the double-meaning of the logo (Chinese / Hebrew)?  Great food, deserves the 5-star rating.

Then we hit the “night shopping” area near-by.  The winds destroyed Elisheva’s umbrella so we bought her a new one for NTD 70 (US$2.25).  There are huge areas and alley ways filled with booths, shops, and street food.  There are no performing artists, beggars, or solicitors, other than hand-bills at street corners (Japanese style).

We didn’t really need anything else and neither of us is much enamored by shopping so we went to Elisheva’s apartment to escape the rain and winds.