One of my favorite photos from Japan is of these colorful little temple dolls. We found them at the last station in a temple 6.3km from the top of Mt. Fuji. Although the weather refused to cooperate with us that day, we still had a great time exploring the area despite the fact that the elusive mountain remained hidden behind her cloak of clouds and mist.
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Our third day in Penghu dawned nice and early. After a quick breakfast, we collected everyone and headed to the pier to take a high-speed boat to Ji Bei Island, home to blessedly beautiful sand and coral beaches.
My first glimpse of the island was from the sea. A long golden beach stretched out along the horizon, studded with a few colorful beach umbrellas. There weren’t any buildings of any kind visible. I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was like finding a tropical oasis in the middle of the ocean. I felt a rush of excitement as we pulled up to the dock. Give me a beach anyday! Screw the deep-sea squid fishing!
Jibei Island, also known as Baisha Island, is most famous for its beaches and windsurfing. The topography is remarkably desert-like, with low-lying bushes. This magnificent stretch of beach runs for a few kilometers, catering to beach lovers of every sort. I would love to see an aerial view of the island.
The best way to explore Jibei is by scooter. We wound along the narrow cement paths through the low-lying brush in the heat of a summer morning, before finding a small respite from the shade under an open-air wooden picnic area. A few short meters away lay a perfectly placid and unspoiled coral beach. We ‘whiled away’ the hottest hours of the day in the shade, enjoying the cool breeze blowing off the water. Then we headed into a small village for a fresh seafood lunch before hitting the beach for a few hours.
All in all, this trip was a good first experience for Penghu and it certainly had the desired effect of leaving me wanting more. John and I are considering a return trip over the October holidays. Seems to me that it might be the perfect place to enjoy the sun and relax before our big day!
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As a replacement for the failed M5, shameless Japanophile that I am, I recently bought myself a Fujitsu LifeBook S2210. She weighs a petite 1.9k (about what the M5 did with the big battery sticking out its ass), has a matte-black finish, a rather posh 13.3” LED screen, and a comfortable, full-sized keyboard that I think is more pleasant to work on than the M5’s — although I still have fond memories of the M5’s slightly cramped but tight keyboard.
Also, there’s a major difference between a 12” and a 13.3” screen: if you read Chinese on the net a lot you will most likely already known that you are fucking your eyesight by reading those tiny micro-fonts most websites use these days on the web. As a result of my own stupid insistence on fairly hirez (1280X1028) settings, I’ve probably done more harm to my eyes than the average netizen (?) in this regard, but it appears reading erotic fanfic in Big5 on this incredibly luminous, bright as the sun 13.3” will make my eyes less bloody…In retrospect, ultraportables might not be good for us users of Huayu/華語 anyway.
So far, the S2210 has a “maximum battery life”—w/screen brightness down, writing/surfing only, and w/normalish settings in WinXP—of 3 hours 55 minutes. (NOTE: reviewers using Vista say they get far less than that). For me, 3.5+ hrs is ‘acceptable’ considering my café-going habits have slacked off a good bit recently, but to be honest I’m sure I’ll miss the 4 hours and 55 minutes of my M5. I actually began to complain and pick fights with the notebook touts at NOVA (in TPE) about poor battery life, but they just blew me off or stared at their shoelaces while I ranted like a madman about my current pet peeve. I hate to get angry and all, sorta, but you’d think that in what’s supposed to be the world’s most “cutting edge” industry they could figure out how to make a ca. US$1100 notebook computer that can run on batteries for more than 3 hours! But from what I learned over the past several weeks around 90% of all notebooks have an avg. battery life of around 2-2.5 hrs…if you’re lucky! WTF?
Anyways, in case I didn’t point it out already, the main selling point of the Fujitsu is that it’s actually, unlike most every other notebook computer and electronic device for sale today, made in Japan. Although the Chinese-made ThinkPad X61 did look well made/reliable, when I started asking around about it the best price for the features I wanted was around NT$40,000 (still w/no DVD player). The Fujitsu is made in Japan, has better battery-life, a removable DVD player, and cost me only NT$35,800 (around US$1180) in toto. Outfitted as-is, w/2gb of RAM, 64 AMD Turion chipset, and ATI graphics card she seems about 10 times faster than the M5—but the real appeal is that I can actually see myself using her, as my glorified typewriter, 5 or more years from now. So, I think I got a good deal.
Post script: it’s a bad time to buy a portable notebook computer if you ask me, unless you’re really looking to shell out $2000-3000US on something like a Panasonic Toughbook, a high-end Fujitsu (the P8010 is going for $68,000 at present), or something similar (not mentioning SSD notebooks because we are disturbed by the reports of massive fail on those). I wasn’t ready to spend that, as mostly my use of this computer will be limited to composing articles in OpenOffice/Word, blogging, pirating the occasional zombie movie, writing up assignments for the kids, and, of course, reading “yellow literature” on the webs…
Post scriptus scriptus: I actually had to harangue the guy at the Fujitsu dealership a bit to get him to install WinXP (rather than WinVista) on this machine for me. Apparently only a few of the models—more expensive ones—allow you to switch without paying for the (cheaper) operating system…This happened at the two Lenovo dealers I went to (at NOVA and 光華商場) as well, so if you want XP you should plan to have to beg, lie, or cheat to get it.
That is all.
