Amazon currently has some good deals on a few Mayfair games, particularly the crayon rail games.  There were a few that had been on my list, so at 50% off they were impossible to resist.  Just purchased:

• Empire Builder [Amazon link]
• Silverton [Amazon link]
• Iron Dragon [Amazon link]

I finally got around to posting some photos from my recent trip to Kuala Lumpur and Beijing.  Now that I'm using the Digital Rebel, the photos files are quite large.  Rather than trim them down and post them here, I'm going to try out the Ofoto service for a while.  When you click through the album links below, Ofoto will ask if you'd like to join.  You are not required to join to see the albums, so feel free to opt out.

• Photos from Kuala Lumpur
• Photos from Beijing, including the Great Wall, Tiananmen Square, and the Forbidden City.

This is mostly just an entry for me to remember where to find the stuff, but here is the best place to find the list of Tivo hacks for modifying default settings.  Every once in a while we reset the Tivo and I need to reset some things to my desired state.  Most usefule is the 30 second advance feature (Select-Play-Select-3-0-Select).

Made it back home safely yesterday, flying from Beijing to Tokyo to Seattle to Portland.  Quite a bit easier coming back than flying out (shorter, less hassle).

I'll be posting a gallery of photos from the trip shortly.  The trip overall was very successful from a business perspective, and by extending my stay by a day I was able to take in some of the sites around Beijing including the Great Wall and Ming Tombs.

We safely made it to Beijing today, arriving about 7am after a restless redeye from Singapore.  Given the choice between catching up on some sleep and seeing a few sights before our 2pm meeting, we chose to head to Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City.  Our rooms weren't ready in any case, so this was an easy decision.

There's a lot to say about Beijing - more than I have time to write tonight.  A few random thoughts are in order though:

• The weather is brisk, sort of like a late winter / early spring day in the midwest plains (like Omaha).  Today the skies were clear blue but it was very windy.  In the summer, these winds often result in sandstorms from the Mongolian plains.
• Compared to Singapore and KL, Beijing is very culturally homogenous. We stand out like sore thumbs here.
• English is clearly not a priority here (nor should it be for most, of course) - taxi drivers in particular speak zero to little English.  The kind hotel stuff were helpful here, writing down instructions in Chinese for us to hand to the tax drivers.  That still didn't help in one case as we drove around for over an hour looking for our partner's office building.  The driver had to ask for directions four times.
• There are cranes everywhere - perhaps in preparation for the summer Olympics?  Reminds of when I was in Barcelona in 1990.
• There's lots of greenery in the city - for example, many of the major thoroughfares are lined with trees.
• Bicycles are everywhere.  I read that over half of the world's bicycles can be found in China.
• These folks understand capitalism.  I'll explain later how efficient they are at separating tourists from their RMBs.
• Summary - this is a beautiful city, with beautiful people, and I'd love to have more time to explore it in depth.

Tomorrow is all-day business meetings, and I'm staying through Saturday to allow time to see the great wall.

I am sitting in the Singapore Air lounge in Singapore right now, waiting for my flight to Beijing.  It is about midnight here, and we arrive around 7am.  Things went well in KL - we had a great customer conference and I was able to spend some valuable time with our integration partner based in KL.

The days and nights were fairly busy after the first day, so the tourist activities were limited to one evening spent wandering around Chinatown looking for some good shopping deals and having dinner.

Depending on how much rest we get on the flight to Beijing, we may be able to go see the palace before our first business meeting at 2pm.

After a breakfast here in the hotel this morning, I went for a stroll to see what is near the hotel.  I wandered into the KLCC shopping complex, a very modern western-style mall with an interesting mix of local flavor and name-brand stores.  I managed to resist the Starbucks - who needs a hot latte when it is 90 deg outside?

My friend Trevor took some time out of his Sunday to get me acquainted with the area.  We talked for a while about our business plans for the week, then proceeded to visit some of the tourist spots near my hotel.

Trevor has a new office (he shares with our regional partner) in one of the Petronas towers, so we took the elevator up to the 50th floor for some fantastic views.

Trevor and I hopped in a taxi to go see the Menara Kuala Lumpur, a very impressive telecommunications tower.  At the top I listened to an audio tour that describes the skyline from various vantage points.

One of the interesting views was of Dataran Merdeka, named after the Malay word for independence.  You can see the very large flagpole to the left of the field - it was here at midnight on August 31, 1957 that the Union Jack was lowered for the last time and Malaysia (then Malaya) became an independent state.

The rains come like clockwork here each day around 3-4pm.  At 3:15pm today, a tropical thunderstorm rolled through.  As of 5:00pm, it is mostly clear again.

Yesterday (2 days ago?) I made the long journey from Portland to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I departed PDX about 9:45am on Friday morning, flying to SFO.  Thanks to United's much improved wireless access (thanks TMobile) I was able to catch up on quite a bit of work in the Red Carpet lounges in both PDX and SFO.  At about 1pm I boarded the 747-400 in SFO to fly to Shanghai, China.  It has been over three years since I did a flight of this length - over 14 hours.

The impressive Shanghai airport.

We arrived in Shanghai about 6pm local time (did you know that all of China has the same time zone?) - this is where some confusion set in.  The kind flight attendants on the United flight assured me that I wouldn't have to clear customs in China if I was simply transferring to another international flight (turns out I was the only one on this flight doing so!).  So I didn't bother to fill out the immigration and customs paperwork.  The agent that processed my check-in at PDX had been a bit ambiguous about what would happen to my luggage in Shanghai; I think it is unusual for people to connect to China Eastern.

Upon departing the plane, I was pretty worried about my luggage and I had a couple of hours, so I proceeded to baggage claim to see if it showed up there.  Of course it did, so I grabbed it and tried to follow the signs to international transfers.  The agent there insisted that I need to go through customs and check in upstairs at the desk.  I am heading to Beijing after my stay in KL, so I have a Chinese visa in my passport - this made clearing immigration and customs very straightforward.  But what if I didn't have a visa (which would have been the case if I had only been traveling to KL)?  I was able to check in for my flight, but before heading to the gate I had to come up with an airport tax of 90 Yuan RMB.  This seemed much more complicated than it needed to be, and I'm still wondering if there was a way to deal with this without passing through immigration.

Still, I made it to KL without a hitch, arriving at 2:15am local time, and finally arriving at my hotel around 4:00am.  I had managed to sleep for about 6 hours total on my two flights (over a 24 hour period), so I didn't need a ton of sleep.  This was good, as my rest was, well, restless but at least I managed 3 hours of sleep.

We are in the tropics here, so things are quite warm, and I woke up to a fairly hazy Sunday morning.  Today is a day of rest and, hopefully, some recreation with my colleague Trevor who is stationed here.

Julie's mom Jan was in town for most of the week, which is spring break for the kids.  Papa David also arrived in town today, and Jan/David headed for the coast for an overnight stay.  Tomorrow morning I head to Malaysia and China for about a week for some business travel.  I'm taking the new camera with me so needed to empty the pictures off the memory card.  Here are some of the results!

I recently picked up a copy of Union Pacific from my friend KC - a remake of the great game Airlines that I was able to play about a year ago with Doug and Mimi.  We are all very fond of these stock acquisition games (very reminiscent of Acquire), so this was a winner.  Jacob gives it a 9, Matthew an 8.

I gave the new version of Puerto Rico Online a try last night.  Overall I was very impressed.  The interface isn't great, but is still much better than the one at BSW.  What I like the most about it is how quickly I was able to get online and jump into a game.  This is because this version supports computer AI players.  Oddly enough, and I could be wrong here but I'm pretty sure I saw this happen, human players can join in after a game has started and replace a computer player.  The AI appears to be fairly weak, but I suspect it will improve over time.