The news this week reports that Taiwan

“has stalled a proposal that would see cyclists in Taipei City fined for carrying passengers or riding at speeds greater than 15kph”

NOTE This is for CYCLISTS. NOT the scooter seen here. Some of the offenses include:

• NT$180 (~$6USD) for failing to install brakes, lights and bells.
• NT$300-$600 (~$18USD) for those who carry another person, fail to ride in bike lanes, break traffic regulations or park their bikes illegally.

By my account I am guilty of all of these except fail to install brakes, lights, and bells (How far do you get if you fail to install brakes?). The “other person” is Gioia who I often carry to and from school on the bike. I am not sure the government has their priorities straight here. I know they “stalled” it and that is good, but why is it even being considered in the first place?

We haven’t owned a car in 3.5 years and are darn proud of it (sorry GM)! This means, no fuel, no insurance, no car taxes, no repair costs, and most importantly no pollution. Taiwan is super easy to get around on bike, foot, and taxi and it just makes no sense. When we need to we rent a car and go a lil farther out of town.

Now Taiwan would also have you only ride on approved (cough, cough) bike paths.
The problem is unless I want to go to a river, a river, or a river, there are just not too many “approved” bike paths. Fortunately Ren-Ai Road (where we live) IS an approved stretch so we don’t run into too many problems, but come on. Share the Road!

I guess it makes sense that they “Stall” this week, especially since they just started the U-bike system where you can rent a bike and ride it around town. Only problem is you need to be rich and own a credit card. (Dear Taiwan, here’s a tip: The rich aren’t riding their bikes!)
Taiwan is also currently holding Taipei Cycle 2009 this week. Guess it would have looked bad to fine everyone you were trying to get excited about riding bikes.

So, in short:
Bikes with babies and no pollution = BAD
Families of four on scooters = GOOD
…and we will “un-stall” later and fine bikers. Great.

In the mean time, don’t get your testicles in a bunch ;)

G is loving the snow
Originally uploaded by beuk

We love the snow and so does G. Our friends are powder hounds and doing a lot of skiing “off map.” They call it skiing the “back woods.” I call it insane. If I need to use a helmet and I can’t use a map it’s insane. If the sign says, “No groom, no sweep” I say, “No way!” Rest assured Rebecca and I are going down only runs that have a color. Granted Rebecca now goes down ANY color as she went down a black diamond today! There is no stopping that girl! G is too little for skis, but that doesn’t stop the marvels of the snow.

Your eyes are not playing tricks on you. After many requests by various* people I have returned Beuk.tv to its original format. Apparently, the bright colors, happy pictures, red, white, blue motif was just too much for some people to stand. Maybe it made them too joyful inside. Maybe they were embarrassed to be reading a “standard” blog. What ever the reason I have returned to my roots with a few exceptions.

Pipes. Yahoo Pipes. If you have not played with this then you definitely need to check it out. For all my IT-capable friends (*cough*, Andrews, Spacko, Jason, PD, Shane, *cough*) you will love it. It is basically Google Reader for grown-ups. You choose feeds then you can use regular expressions and various operators to filter and manipulate the content. The catch? You need to understand that last sentence. If you do, then you have UNLIMITED POWER! Ok, not unlimited, but it is still cool. I changed my two Twitter feeds (@cbeukenk and @mywines, no I am not @beuk) into a pipe so that regardless of which one I update, the data gets fed to my site in date order. Simple, but effective. It also serves to drastically reduce the code needed to add the feeds to my site. See the Twitter example at the left and let me know how you like it (*cough* Jack *cough*). The alternative, with much more HTML, limited flexibility, and just boring, is the Videos and Picture feeds also at the left.

The other addition is Dopplr. I just think this service is cool. You can setup an email address, and save it in your contacts. Then every time you have a calendar entry requiring travel, invite Dopplr. Dopplr will post and maintain your travel for sharing with your friends. The only trouble is: 1. Having friends that travel enough to give a crap (What up ATL!) and B. getting them to ALSO use Dopplr over, say a LinkedIn version.

So, I have a question for you: In preparation for this post I was trying to find a reference to a comedian who used to have an act featuring the line, “…and I’m back.” He/she would get all worked up in a tizzy, go off on a rant, then all of a sudden snap back and say, “and I’m back.” As funny as it would have been to reference it here (and a YouTube spot), I can’t remember who it was.? My guesses were:

• Denis Leary
• Bill Cosby
• Paula Poundstone

Free Whopper to the first person who helps me remember. That’s it for now. You can get back to pretending to work while you watch the inauguration.

* various being a grand total of 3, but hey my readership is not the same as MissGioia so what can you do.

Yes, I broke down and bought the iPhone. “Broke down” is not quite the right phrase. In truth all other phones were merely a string of waiting rooms until the iPhone arrived. Let me back up a few months. I used to be a die hard Sony Ericsson fan. Buying the latest and greatest camera phone each time. In truth the K750i was the last great phone from Sony, but I upgraded anyway. They were all nice phones, but the they were just that and some took nice pictures too. I ~wanted~ to get the Sony X1. This phone looked like the sleekest most powerful business phone on the planet. The problem is I wanted it in Jan, 2008. Come November? Still not available. My next decision was one of my worst.

I purchased the Nokia N96. It is loaded and does everything, or so Nokia had me believe. That purchase has now made #3 in my list of life’s regrets. The phone chose what time it would take a call. People (namely B) would call and the phone would decide “not today, I’m tired.” No problem, I thought, why does a phone need to be a good…phone? I does other things, right? Well it played games. Brothers in Arms was actually pretty cool in NGage. Large game, install on large memory card right? Wrong. You must install it on the phone memory thereby decreasing valuable space AND (get this) turn the sound off to get it to play smoothly. Lame. even worse, why are there three memories? It is just a phone. Worst was the wifi/3g access. I had to answer a SAT practice test each time I wanted to connect to anything. Couldn’t the phone… er… device simply just serve up my data?

Enter the iPhone (to choruses of angels)*. When comparing phones EVERY site out there seems very focused on specs. Is this camera better? How does this game play? What is call quality like? Battery life? I say phooey on all of this and call for a a total rethink in how we measure devices. None of these “tech” sites seem to have a valid measure on usability.

The only problem I had with the iPhone 3G is that it was SIM locked. This meant IF you managed to buy it, it would be locked to a contract and a provider in a certain country. When I was in Australia I looked into it and they wanted: driver’s license, 2 bills, proof of address, copy of passport, work visa, first born, the usual. Even then I would have had to setup a contract, cancel it the next day, and pay an additional fee to unlock the phone. Waaaayy too difficult and costly. Other options like grey markets in Taiwan just scared me. Who knows what they pre-installed. Finally, it hit me. Hong Kong. Hong Kong and Italy are the only two countries that sell unlocked iPhones. I ordered 3 to my office there (for others, and no not your Christmas present) and 1.5 days later they arrived. Once you tell the phone where your iTunes is (a requirement) the phone is just… AWESOME. The simplicity is amazing.

The touch screen works flawlessly and is crazy fun to drag, slide, squeeze and even dial a combination lock. Each app runs as the focus for the user. You never have to worry about other apps running in the background. They seem to go into some sort of stasis and await the next time you need them. This helps me tons. I often have Chinese characters in email that are addresses, names, book titles, etc… Queue them up in email and lock the phone. W you need it, it is one button slide away from showing a person. The wifi is as simple as it can be. Your options are on/off (take that Nokia) and it simply connects, no asking “Do you really want to?” The simplicity and responsiveness is beyond anything I have seen in a phone. It also happens to be a full ipod, but that is the least of what it does. A search for “free” apps in the App Store and you are a kid in a candy shop. I now have 5 pages of apps. Rather than run down my list of favorites, let me share some of the ways my life has been changed in the past week:

• Tweets are more consistent than they ever have been.
• Exchange integration is flawless. I have returned my BlackBerry.
• Cooked two meals for B based on recipes that can sync online and I can read/store on the phone.
• Reading the Bible daily
• All passwords sync wirelessly with computer password app.
• Longer walks and bike rides just so I can track my progress in iMapMyRide
• Increased treadmill time from 20 to 40 minutes watching TV shows
• No more dropped calls
• Looking up Chinese words on the fly and…
• Beat TapDefense

In short, my life is considerably better and to say, “I love the iPhone” is an understatement. I know Matthew 6 says, “Lay not upon yourselves treasures upon the earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt” ’cause the iPhone told me so, but I’ve got to believe Apple is working on the rust bit.

Don’t get the wrong idea, I am not an Apple fan boy and do not normally gush about technology, but this warranted it.

Rebecca took off to the US today for 8 whole days! G and I are both very sad. G walked around asking for “mama” all morning. Funny thing was, I was asking for the same thing. So, to bring us out of our slump I got the bike out and we went riding. We paid bills, rode around, walked through the park, and had lunch. There were surprisingly few people around. Maybe because it was noon and it was hot. We had a blast. As usual the park had all kinds of silly games and random stuff for sale. We had a blast playing the little games and Gioia won all kinds of prizes. I scoffed at the silly arcade games when I saw them a few days earlier. Now I realize they were not made for me :)

We miss you already mommy!