New albums up
by Jack on Feb.09, 2010, under Photography, Travel
We did last summer a trip to San Francisco and British Columbia, to see Cindy’s brother get married and then visit some of Cindy’s friends in BC. Chantel was able to make the trip up to BC as well, so it was great getting to see some familiar faces from Lafayette – I know Cindy was pleased!
San Francisco definitely lives up to its nature – a very “fruity” city, but the charm was there, from the Golden Gate Bridge to Pier 39. Cindy and I also took a wine tour through Napa Valley, and we really felt cultured while going through it. Will’s wedding was quite nice also, Cindy was asked to read an original poem during the ceremony. <3 <3 to my writer wife. Great trip overall.
British Columbia really reminds me of Norway, with the greenery, rainy weather, and incredibly nice people. Terry was nice enough to take us on a tour of Vancouver Island, from one side of the island to the other, before taking us on a trip to Whistler-Blackcomb mountain. EXTREMELY beautiful nature out there. I guess I can mark up British Columbia as another place I’d like to retire to :p
And finally, Johanne and Magnus came to visit us, all the way from snowy Norway to enjoy our winter heat. We spent some time in KL showing them around, then made a trip to Kuching in Sarawak. I had hoped that we would be able to do some jungle hiking, but the weather was too rainy and chancy to do much – even the tour companies weren’t running 
We still got to see a bunch though! Tusen takk for visiting us!
Coming in next update… our Norway trip pictures!
Singapore Marathon
by Jack on Jan.04, 2010, under Photography, Travel
I apparently forgot to make a post about the whole reason I brought back my website, the Singapore Marathon! Cindy and I decided to challenge ourselves to run in it, with her doing the 1/2 marathon and myself doing the 10km run. It was our first time for either race, and we spent the last few months training for it. My training started off pretty spotty, but by race day, I can proudly say that running for 30 minutes isn’t a problem anymore! Cindy did her 1/2 marathon in <strong>under 2 hours</strong>, and I managed to get through my 10km in 1 hr 19 min. Not the best time certainly, but I’m happy I was able to do it. I likely would’ve made better time, but at the 5km mark we had a steep bridge to go up, and that just took the wind out of me from that point on. I simply hadn’t trained for that kind of steepness. Up until then though, I had really been kicking my treadmill time by a fair margin. Best of all for me though, is that this was 2 days after my 30th birthday – I really proved I was in the best shape of my life, and I hope to get better. I’ve slacked in December some on continuing to run, but I will be getting back into the swing of things for January.
I had some work to take care of that week afterward, but we did manage to make our way out to the Singapore Zoo. We had done the night safari last year, but the zoo proper is just astounding, right up there with the San Diego Zoo.
And to share the general photos of Singapore
Spiraling to Disaster
by Jack on Dec.29, 2009, under Travel
You know, there are times that I’m glad that I’m not in the US to get caught up in whatever the hysteria-of-the-month is, and this is one of them. The “crotchbomber” on NWA 253 has really messed things up for flying in the US with the jerk knee reactions, namely the “don’t have things in your lap 1 hour before the flight lands.” Granted I kinda get why they would put a limit on this, since a plane crash on approach is more disastrous than one midway over the Atlantic, but it still doesn’t end the problems. A plane going boom is a plane going boom, just the body count might be different. With these new idiotic policies, and likely more coming down the road, one could say they’ve…
I travel fairly frequently for business, nearly always internationally. Even traveling to Sarawak requires me to go through immigration. And I am so thankful that on my last couple of trips, that I just have to throw my bag on the belt and waltz on through security. No taking out my laptop, keep my shoes on, or anything awkward. On the flight it is business as usual, do some reading, doze off momentarily with my headphones on, have a quick snack, and continue reading until we pull up at the gate. I don’t think there is any way I could survive that last hour without something to keep my mind off the sometimes very shaky landing approach. Ah well, thank goodness for places that don’t go insane over useless shows of security.
The issue that disturbs me the most though, is that the rules were already in place to prevent his actions, starting before the would-be-bomber even stepped foot on the plane. The man was apparently on a watch list, his family had reported him, pre-flight security detected nothing wrong – I can’t imagine the explosive residue that would have been all over him – and he still just walks on without a problem. Thank goodness the man is either an idiot or incompetant with his bomb plot, or the total failure of security would’ve had horrible consequences, and likely even worse shows of security theatre.
Then again, it would be nice to live in a world where people don’t try to blow up planes and buildings.
Gung ho! Gung ho!
by Jack on Nov.09, 2009, under Photography, Social
I’m kinda getting used to wearing a tux now… Marine Ball for the 234th U.S.M.C. anniversary was a blast. The dinner unfortunately wasn’t very large, especially since I had more or less skipped lunch that day. But tasty! We ended up going out with Finten and Jennifer with some of the Marine guard to Asian Heritage Road, and managed to crawl off the dancefloor around 3 in the morning. Most fun I’ve had in awhile really, and made me miss all the dancing and going out Cindy and I would do in Lafayette.
I am about “balled” out this past couple of months, looking forward to being a homebody for the rest of the year. There are some Thanksgiving and Christmas parties at some friend’s places, but at least I can just show up in jeans to those!
Now that I’ve finally beaten GTA3-San Andreas, I’ve been catching up on my reading. First, something easy – Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. You’ve probably already heard about it, but it’s making the rounds in our household now. Much of what is in the book are ideas that I’ve (and many others) have had before, that success is more of a matter of “right place & right time,” but it is interesting to see just at fundamental of a level it exists at, how the seemingly insignificant at the time makes such a huge difference in people’s lives later on. It’s made me review my life a little bit more and identify those crossroads, and how it affected my life. Anyway, it’s some fluff reading before I get into the real bastard of a book and the preceding books in the series.
Spooky times we live in….
by Jack on Nov.05, 2009, under Photography, Social
especially during Halloween! It was two nights of witching hours for us this year. Cindy and I again went with a theme, this time of Scooby Doo. She made a great Daphne (rawr) while my slacker butt went as Shaggy. We even had scooby snacks to pass out! The first party was at the lounge in the US embassy – we made a few friends there, some of which CIndy had already befriended and I got to meet for the first time. The next night we went party hopping to a couple of places, the first near Changat with a superhero theme. We had such illuminaries as Captain Offensive, The Flash, and various other superheroes that didn’t have names, but did have some interesting powers. It was quite a cool party and a good way to start the night before moving on to the next.
And the next place paid off. By far the winner of Halloween partying are the Norwegians, with the Fagervik’s very impressive decorations and entertainment. Good food, good music, good dancing, and loads of people there to chat with. Best of all it’s only 6 floors above where we live, so it’s easy to stumble home afterwards 
I was pretty much drained by the time we went home, after two nights of staying out late and having fun.
I think it’s funny how at a lot of social gatherings we go to people still get a kick out of Cindy and I being Americans living abroad, and the fact that we’re not being total rednecks :p
The wonderful world of finances
by Jack on Oct.29, 2009, under Money
This week has been quite the busy week for financial matters at the homefront. First the bad news, Bank of America abruptly cancelled one of my credit cards. And of course, that account not only had my highest limit but it was also my oldest credit account, since I was 18. Effectively my credit history has been shortened by 80% and my overall credit limit cut by 60%, at least once the account is actually removed from the report. Wow. Granted, I hadn’t used the card in years. I would’ve used the card more, but it was a college card account, and I’m simply not going to use a card nowadays that doesn’t give rewards (although that may be going the way of the dodo). Doubly this since I live overseas, and would also get hit by the foreign transaction fees. Capital One is my choice for overseas travel and living, no foreign transaction fees, never had problems with them, and the one time some asshat at Delifrance stole my card information CO shut them down and got me a new card quickly – no hassles aside from not having a card for a few days. So yay! Hopefully no hijinks start with them next. I’ve more or less committed myself to eventually going down to 2 cards that I use on a regular basis, as long as they hold out I think I’ll be ok.
Just to eyeball things a little harder, I checked my credit report to see what’s the story there. Apparently things have changed in the past 6 months or so since I last attempted to check. It used to be if you were accessing the site from a non-US domain, you would get rejected – hence my rejection and a slight bit of consternation over if everything was still legit there. Nowadays however, it looks like you can (edit – apparently not, using a Malaysian domain I get the boot, but using the Australian servers at work I can), and furthermore it’s even easier to get your report – none of this “please make a new account with TransUnion so we can taunt you with spam, and hopefully you remember this login a year down the road when it’s time to check it again.” So I was able to pull a report – aside from Victoria’s Secret doing a check on me, everything there looked in place (I guess they were checking if I was a suitable sugar daddy or not… giggity).
I also found out about a free service, Credit Karma, that while it doesn’t give you the details, it does provide a high level overview of your report. Even better, you get your Transunion score, which theoretically should be close to the FICO. Give them a whirl, the statistics they collect is interesting to look at. I’m not so sure how good their modeling ability is, but the other features on the website are nifty.
The good news is, I finally found a pretty kickass replacement for Quicken that I’ve been using since 2005. I finally got fed up with the slowness of the program and the overall complexity for something that I just want to keep track of my expenses. I demoed a few and finally went with iBank. It’s a pretty fast and intuitive piece of software. Simple to set up accounts, simple to bring in the past 4.5 years of Quicken, simple to make a variety of reports and charts, and a very OS X interface. I just updated my accounts today with the latest statements, and it was a satisfying breeze to do. Definitely a keeper! If you’re looking for a good alternative on OS X for some banking software, give iBank a try.
To sum up things – we’re still in the black, BoA sofa king sucks, iBank rocks, Credit Karma is fun, and lingerie supermodels are checking my credit rating.
N/P – The Cardigans – My Favourite Game
Whee – Canadian Ball!
by Jack on Oct.11, 2009, under Photography, Social
Last night was the Canadian Ball. It was a fairly lively event, lots of playful jabs at us Americans, some good clean Canadian humor (is there any other kind of Canadian humor?), and some quite delicious food. Salmon, turkey with all the “fixin’s,” and a dessert medley. Cindy as usual looked stunning in her dress, and the hair/makeup combo particularly made me think of her as a wild creature that came to dance the night away. Dance dance dance we did, unfortunately “happy cat ran out of happy” towards the end and I couldn’t keep up with the activities – we left around midnight, and as soon as the tux was off I promptly passed out in bed. Oh yeah, I won two tickets to Phuket! Least I know what I’ll be doing for vacation early next year.
Below are pictures I took from the event. Cindy has some at her Facebook page
Back online…
by Jack on Aug.16, 2009, under Uncategorized
dusted.net is slowly coming back online, I had a devil of a time trying to figure out wordpress and figure out how to incorporate my old theme and colors to the software. The motive towards getting this back up (finally) is that I am going to run in the Singapore marathon this December. Just a 10k, but if you know me, it will be quite a feat. I plan to document my efforts towards this goal, and keep this updated as a way of driving me towards it.
I intend on building this website back up organically. I expect it to have much the same categories as before, but instead of the mash up of topics and general clutter, I will be adding them as I get enough content sorted out to post back up. Likely my photos will be going up first and soon, and hopefully I will be able to get my texts and music back up as well.
-Jack
