You see, I come from the DC suburbs of Maryland (pronounced like "merlin" - [mɹ̩lɪn]), went to school in the district, but have parents from Boston.  And then I went to college in Boston.  For the last eight years I've lived in LA, so I assume I sound more west coast than anything else at this point.  From time to time I get told that I say a few things incorrectly.  However, I believe, like most linguists, that correctness has more to do with context and dialect.  So, from here on out I'll just speak as feels natural, without regard to the details.  To that end, here are some notes on things that sound correct to me, in the Nick Dialect.

"Orange," "iron," "tired," and "forest" are one-syllable words.  Ask me to say them sometime.  (In IPA, I think I'd write "iron" as [aɹn])

"Caught" and "cot" are different words that sound different.  West coast speakers appear to be unable to say "caught."  But now here I am judging correctness, just like I said I wouldn't. :-)

"Yeah" [jæ:] and "nah" [næ:] (not [naw]) are acceptable forms of "yes" and "no."

"Route" (as in route 66 or route 2) has two acceptable pronunciations: [ɹæʊt] and [ɹut].

The following sentences sound completely correct to me:

"We might should try using google video search here"   ("Perhaps we should...")

"Where y'all from?"  ("Where are you all from?" I think is how others might say it)

"This here's the latest Android phone." ("This is" rather than "This here's")

"He dove into the pool." (Apparently "dived" is more standard?  That sounds so wrong.)

"Hi hon! Let's go down to the ocean."  ("Hello, dear.  Let's visit a beach-front town.")

"I'd like coffee, regular."  (With cream or half-and-half and two sugars.)

"When you get to the rotary, take the third right." (A rotary is a traffic circle in the northeast.)

 

Some of this is vaguely Southern American, yet the DC suburbs are far from southern, and I sound nothing like Paula Deen.  Other parts of this match a midlands accent that can be found in north-central Maryland and south-central Pennsylvania.  That much, at least, matches where I grew up.  Except most midlands accents call coke, er I mean soda, "pop."  Seriously, who says that?  Oh, and when I get angry while driving, I sometimes break out a mild Bostonian accent.  Because I was always angry while driving in Boston.

The restaurant is really small, and is located in the corner of a strip mall that houses a 99 Market, and a bunch of other Chinese restaurants, which is pretty much how the area around any 99 Market is developed.  I didn't count how many tables were inside, but it felt like they could only seat like 20-25 people total inside, plus an additional 12 outside.  Since we had to wait, we asked to look at a menu, and the first page had a warning that anyone stealing the menu will be reported to the police.  Seems odd that of all things to be concerned about, menu theft isn't really high on my list, especially if it's just a cheap notebook with color copies in it.  Anyway, we finally get seated at tables that are supposed to look like Taiwanese classroom desks:

Step 1: use Memcache::increment in PHP to have a view counter that we increment on certain pageviews.

Step 2: write a cron job in Python to log the current value of the memcache entry periodically and reset it.

This sounds easy, right?  Wrong!  It turns out memcache has a set of flags (an int) stored with every value.  This seems practical, and lets us mark if something is stored compressed or is an int, etc.  However, the set of flags is pretty much left up to the client.  The python client (easily installed via apt-get) actually can throw an exception if it sees a combination of flags it does not understand.  The exception is very useful: "UnboundLocalError: local variable 'val' referenced before assignment."  What actually happened, reading through the python memcache client source, is that if there's a value for flags that it does not understand, val never gets set.

That's odd, though.  I hadn't set any flags on the value when I wrote it from PHP.  So, just to be safe, I tried explicitly setting '0' as the flag value.  Python was still crashing.  I got frustrated and decided to have a chat with memcached directly:

$ nc localhost 11211

The flags are 768??  In binary, that's 0b1100000000.  Two high order bits and then the lower 8 bits are all 0.  

Where are those bits coming from?  The PHP client.  I can't tell why, or what they are trying to communicate, but those two bits are always set.

Anyway, the workaround, weird as it seems to me, is to set 2 (MEMCACHE_COMPRESSED) as the flags from php.  That also makes the python client happy.  The thing is, I'm just setting numbers as my value, so compression doesn't make any sense.  In fact, humorously enough, there's a warning that you shouldn't use the increment command with compressed values.  Thankfully, it seems to work nonetheless.

The underlying issue for all of this is that the memcache protocol specification left the flags up to the clients.  For example, python has a flag that marks the stored data as being pickled.  That makes sense; there should be some flags reserved for client-specific information.  However, PHP marking random high order bits, not at all specified in the PHP documentation for the memcache client, does not make sense to me.  Sigh.

But memcache is still wonderful, and how often do you need to go cross-language anyway, right?  Of course, you commonly want to scale it.  That's great, because memcache supports sharding by the hash of the key!  Except that is also left up to the client.  And, guess what?  PHP and Python use different hash functions to shard the data!  You can emulate the PHP function pretty easily in Python using stuff from hashlib, but wouldn't it have been nice if the spec had a well-known, recommended hashing function? 

The easiest way to train a cat is to encourage activities the cat already enjoys.  With Kitty this included "sit" and "come here".  If you're holding food and you call a cat by name, it's no problem getting her to do things.

Getting a cat to not do things he wants to do, however, appears to be impossible.  Captain Jack basically terrorizes us to get food.  To the point where I frequently eat standing up.  I tried to utilize this to make him do a trick.  If I dangle food and tell him to jump, he leaps up (4-5 feet), grabs the food from my hand with his claws and brings it down to the floor to eat.  This seemed cool once or twice.

Then I tried to stop.

I didn't even have any more food.  I tried showing him my hands to convince him of that, but as I walked he kept jumping up and grabbing my hand with his claws.  

He eventually gave up, but now I've foolishly taught him to jump up and steal food from me even when I eat standing up.  oops.

We left the Alila Villas Soori shortly before lunch time because we planned to have lunch at the famous Tanah Lot temple in the Tabanan region.  On the way from the airport to the hotel, our driver said that Tanah Lot was the most visited temple in the region, so we decided to take a look at what was so special about it.

Once we got to the temple grounds, we immediately saw the beauty of it.  There were two temples, a smaller one that sat on a rocky ledge in the ocean, and the main temple that was also on a cliff ledge.  

The sight and sound of the water just added to the splendor of Tanah Lot.  We didn't go up the main temple--it cost a fee and we didn't think it was worth it for the view.  At the base of the temple was a spring where visitors could be blessed by the sacred water.  After seeing both temples, we had lunch in what seemed like a traditional Balinese picnic table.

Then we continued our trip to Alila Villas Uluwatu, stopping at a local coffee shop along the way to buy some Kopi Bali (no, this isn't the poop coffee from before).  When we arrived at the hotel, we were greeted by hotel staff who already knew who we were.  The hotel manager greeted us as well and gave a short spiel about the restaurant and the pool.  Oh, the pool...we've already seen many amazingly beautiful views on our trip, but the view of the infinity pool looking out over the Indian Ocean was spectacular.  We were driven in a golf cart to our room--apparently the hotel layout is such that there are four tiers of villas, and we were at the top.  It wouldn't have been that much of a walk, but being driven there made it much easier to deal with our luggage.  Our villa didn't have a great view (Soori had a much better one), but the indoor space seemed better, especially the huge lounge area that separated the inside from the outside.

After getting ourselves acquainted with our room, we headed down to the main pool.  Technically, the pool's 50 meters long, but the infinity edge was less than half that length.  

Although there were other guests at the hotel, we were the only ones in the pool.  Within 10 minutes of us putting our stuff on the lounge chairs and swimming around, a pool attendant came with a basket of complimentary water, sunscreen, cold towels, and drink/food menus.  Nick ordered some blended drink and I got a Thai iced tea.  When our drinks arrived, I was in the pool and Nick was off getting his Kindle from the villa.  I was about to get out of the pool to drink it, but the attendant offered to bring the drink to me instead.  So there I am drinking my Thai iced tea in this ridiculously large pool, with an attendant to bring me my drink and put it back on the table when I'm done...seriously, I could totally get used to this.  We tried to swim one lap of the pool, but I can't figure out how to breathe and stroke continuously, so I failed miserably, and Nick got tired out from swimming 1/3 of the length of the pool.  

The next day, we took surfing lessons.  Nick had surfed before in Hawaii, but I've never done it before.  We started off with some stretching and warm up drills, and then we went over how to safely handle the board.  Once the easy stuff was out of the way, we immediately went into how to get on the board, paddle, and essentially body surf back to shore.  Once they felt that we got that part down, it was time to learn to stand on the board--this didn't go so well, especially for Nick.  

We went through something like 15 attempts, and I mostly did fine, but Nick was having a very difficult time staying on the board.  I guess being tall doesn't necessarily help you.  If I did catch a wave correctly and successfully got on the board, it was a lot of fun.  The hard part was walking back into the water and going against the waves.  I was so exhausted just from doing that :(

Once our lesson was finished, our instructor told us what we would learn in the second part of the course, and in my mind, I'm thinking "Really? You think we did well enough to learn turns and other crazy stuff?"  

We returned to the hotel to have lunch and, once again, lounge in the main pool.  And on our final full day in Bali, we did a crazy spa day, which included morning yoga, massages, facials, aqua flow, and foot reflexology.  It was a nice way to end our trip in Asia.  

And the next day, we left Bali to head back home to reality.  Personally, I want to go back again, but it's a really long flight from the US, so I don't think that'll happen anytime soon...

See photos here.

After our very busy, but awesome, vacation in Taiwan, we headed south to Bali, where the plan was to relax and take in the beauty of the island.  We couldn't decide between a remote beach getaway and a newer, super-eco-friendly property.  Thankfully, they were both owned by the same company, Alila Villas, so spent a few nights at each.  The first hotel was the Alila Villas Soori, which is located in the rice paddy filled Tabanan region.

Our first impression of Bali was the driving and road conditions.  What looked like a two lane road seemed to hold something like four lanes of traffic.  And the two lane road was the main thoroughfare on the island--the majority of our drives on the island were on one lane roads.  Think 8 foot-wide pavement with deep open sewers a couple feet past the edge of the pavement.  Now think of two cars trying to pass each other here.  Our driver masterfully weaved through the slow scooters and oncoming traffic, all while I'm sitting in the back giving Nick many looks of sheer horror.  But after a while, I got used to it and realized that since this is normal driving conditions for the Balinese, that they are all very skilled at navigating the roads.

It took over an hour to get to the hotel, and it was totally worth the drive.  As our car pulled up to the entrance, we were greeted by an entourage of people.  The assistant manager of the property showed us around the hotel, starting with the pool.

And then we were taken to our villa, where we met our host.  Our host carried around a cell phone, and our hotel phone would immediately connect to that cell phone if we ever needed something at any time during our stay.  We aren't very demanding people, so I think we only called our host like once for in-room dining.  

Anyway, she showed us around our amazing villa.  I think the best part of our villa was our personal infinity pool that overlooked the Indian ocean.  We were footsteps from the beach, and we could see and hear the small waves crashing onto the shore.  Our view from the bed was of the pool and the ocean--not a bad way to wake up :).  

For our one and only full day at the Soori, we went on a tour of a Kopi Luwak roaster.  If you've never heard of Kopi Luwak, it's also known as civet coffee, or by a more unappealing name: poop coffee.  You see, this rodent like creature called a civet eats a raw coffee berry.  After it goes through its digestive system and is pooped out, the coffee farmer collects the turds to clean, dry, and roast it, just like they would any other type of coffee bean.  Apparently, the trip through the digestive system gives the coffee a milder, smoother flavor.  We tried a cup, but I'm not a big coffee fan, so I couldn't tell the difference.  Nick said that there was a unique flavor to Kopi Luwak, but wasn't sure it was really worth the $100/lb. price.  Nonetheless, we bought some small containers of it to bring to the states because, really, when else are we going to get a chance to buy Kopi Luwak?

We then drove to what our tour guide said is the most beautiful rice field on the island, and he wasn't kidding.  The elevation and large expanse of green rice paddies was spectacular.  And when the breeze hit the waves of grain and caused them to move in unison, it was majestic.

While it looked like one endless terraced rice patty, there were actually a very large number.  Each farmer had their own little shack wit ha cow in it (the cow is used as a work animal, to pull tools or carry supplies).  Most of the farmers were off at the local temple having a ceremony.  According to our guide, everything merits a ceremony at the temple.  Planting, harvesting, whatever.  He said there were multiple ceremonies a week just to try to make the rice grow.

Before returning to the hotel, we stopped at Butterfly Park.  They didn't have as many butterflies as Butterfly World in Fort Lauderdale, but they did allow us to hold butterflies and have them placed on us, so that was cool.  

Back at the hotel, we were again greeted by an entourage of hotel staff at the entrance.  There was always someone there to offer us a cold towel, which was a very welcome item in the humid Balinese weather.  The service at the hotel was amazing.  People who we've never seen before would greet us by name.  The restaurants and the spa would already have our names and villa number on the receipt.  They also knew about our tours, so they would ask how the Kopi Luwak was and we'd have a pleasant conversation with them about our day's adventure.  

From talking to many of the hotel staff, it seems like they don't get very many American tourists, which makes sense since it is a very long flight to get there.  And also being a gay couple probably made us more distinctive.  While Indonesia has the largest Muslim population in the world, Bali is ~80% Hindu.  Everyone we met was extremely pleasant and welcomed us as their own.  

Oh, I forgot to mention that we ended our day with a sunset horseback ride through the small village near the hotel.  

I apparently didn't get the memo that you need to squeeze your knees on the saddle.  I spent the entire ride with a death grip on the front of the saddle because I felt so unsteady.  Nick, on the other hand, kept his weight on his feet, so that once we finished our one hour ride, his legs and knees were so sore that he could barely walk.  For me, my arms and hands were sore from my constant grip...we complement each other so well.

The next morning, we were off to the Alila Villas Uluwatu.  I'll write about that in our next blog post.

From the 73rd floor, the view is not bad.  However, it was fairly cloudy, and at times the clouds obstructed our view.  Beyond that, when the receptionist came by to check on us, she asked that we not take any photos from inside the office.  Now, I know Google policy quite well, and yes, we make sure that nobody takes photos that include computer screens, whiteboards, etc.  But, taking a photo out the window?  That's always fine.  Oh well, I would have argued had the view been worth it.

Afterwards, we went back to Din Tai Fung for lunch with everyone.  It was good.

Jerry's family headed off to his aunt's house.  Jane and us went over to Mitsukoshi for some shopping.  Jerry found some asian designers we don't have back in the states and spent some money.  We also bought cake.  It was great having Jane along, partly because it's great to spend time with her, but also because we desperately needed a translator.  At one point, in one of the shops, the saleswoman started to say something to Jerry, then caught herself and walked over to Jane to tell her instead.  Of course, it doesn't help that Jerry looks (well, is) Taiwanese, since everyone there would assume he understood Chinese.  

Jane headed off home and we went to Jerry's aunt's house for the evening.  On the way, we stopped in Shilin night market.  In general, the night markets are busy and chaotic, but on a Friday night, it's far more so.  This one was chock full of local teens.

Jerry's aunt and uncle pushed into the market to buy us fried chicken and some lemon tea with agar jelly as a cold drink.  When I say fried chicken, I actually mean giant fried chicken.  In fact, the sign had the word for "big" (大) in it twice in a row, which is fairly accurate.  

We went back to his aunt's place to eat and play mahjongg.  I'm not great (in fact, watching over my shoulder, Jerry's mom said that my methods were strange), but somehow I just kept winning.  Frequently winning from Jerry, unfortunately.  Jerry, however, had a terrible losing streak.  At the end of the night, while I was up almost forty, Jerry was down about twice that much.  He was pretty annoyed.  Clearly it's all luck, of course.

We began with a gold mining town up in the mountains.  Much of the mining operation was run when the Japanese controlled Taiwan, so there were some old Japanese-style homes preserved there.  Also, the audio guide (for us English speakers) was a cute ipod nano-sized thing with some proximity device.  We had to hold it up to little wood signs along the way and it would automatically play the right description.  Unfortunately, the voice for the information was slow.  Inhumanly slow.  We couldn't get through half a description before we'd be at the next wooden sign.  And, when I tried to return the instructions (a bulky laminated sheet of paper), we were informed we had to keep it with us until we returned the audio guides.  Oh well, when it started raining, the instructions made for a very small umbrella.

We went to the nearby town on the hillside, Jiufen.  It did not look like much from the road that passed through, but it had a crazypants street full of small shops.  We had lunch among a couple of these shops.  Some really tasty noodles and sausage and stuff.  One thing we had was called a "Taiwanese Meatball", but it really wasn't a meatball, to my definition.  The center consists of barbecue pork (the sweet, red-colored kind) and bamboo shoots.  But, they are encased in some form of clear tapioca.  It was very gummy, but mostly flavorless.  Interesting to try.

After our quality time in the alleyways of Jiufen (and climbing down a lot of stairs), we headed off to the coast, to an area called Yehliu, where some crazy rock formations are on the coast.  In a bizzarre web 2.0 twist, I'll quote Jerry's response to Alan from the buzz about the photos:

We went on to a town that's supposed to be famous for local ceramics (I forgot the name).  We ended up taking a surprise hour-long pottery class.  It turns out I'm terrible with clay, and Jerry is ridiculously good with it.  To be fair, he apparently had a ceramics class in high school, though they never used the wheel.

I was really impressed with Jerry's final products.  I made a reasonable-looking salad bowl, one of the easiest things to make, and on my second lump of clay, I destroyed it.  I literally pulled most of the clay off the wheel while spinning it.  Oh well.  Unfortunately, they take a while to fire the pieces, so Jerry's aunt will have to go back later and hold on to them until either she comes to the US or we go back there.

Finally, we headed back into Taipei to have dinner and sing Karaoke.  So, the first problem we had is that I am allergic to shellfish.  I mostly ate vegetables and the cooked chicken that night.  Thankfully, there was a lot of chicken.  Just to ensure we got our whole chicken's worth, they even threw in the head.

We sang karaoke along with dinner.  Private setup in our big dining room.  By "we", I mostly mean Jerry's aunts and one of the uncles.  Jerry and I enjoy singing, but the 3-page english song selection seemed to only contain songs from the 60s.  We  knew a couple Beatles songs, but I'm no Sinatra expert and the rest was a complete unknown to me.  I attempted to sing "House of the Rising Sun", which both seemed a bit offensive (what with us being in asia) and had some bad typos in the transcription.

Americans tend to treat Karaoke as more of a campy, silly thing to do.  However, it is taken more seriously in Taiwan, even including clapping after long, impressive notes and at the end of songs.  We did our best to follow the example of the others.

All in all, it was a good, but tiring day.

(source: http://bbrryyaann.blogspot.com/2005_11_01_archive.html)