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.

San Francisco I

70 Photos

San Francisco II

87 Photos

Golden Gate Bridge

61 Photos

Napa Valley tour

28 Photos

Kristen & Will's wedding

57 Photos

 

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

Victoria

33 Photos

Buchart Gardens

55 Photos

Party at Terry's

11 Photos

Wild Pacific Coast

83 Photos

Whistler Blackcomb

51 Photos

 

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!

Fun in KL

24 Photos

Batu Caves

40 Photos

Kuching

35 Photos

Matang National Park

32 Photos

Sarawak Cultural Village

45 Photos

Zoo Negara

31 Photos

 

Coming in next update… our Norway trip pictures!

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

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.

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.

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

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

Below are pictures I took from the event. Cindy has some at her Facebook page

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