Happy Lunar New Year

Just sending some warm wishes your way at the beginning of another lunar year.

In Korean "새해 복 많이 받으세요!"

I hope this cycle finds you happy, healthy, and prosperous. Enjoy this year of the dog.

Click the image above to check your own Asian horoscope for this year. Give it a little time to load.

Random Photo from the Past

Penang, Malaysia, Sometime around January 2000.

This photo is from my first visit to Malaysia. Malaysia is a pretty nice country and an especially nice place to visit. It is both developed and developing so there are lots of interesting things to see and experience. The great road system makes it easy to get from one place to another.

Penang is a nice place, but I just didn't quite see the lure of it that some guide books mention. For me it was more of diversion and a gateway to the island of Langkawi. Now Langkawi is nice. Beaches, jungles, waterfalls, crocodile farms, what more could you want?

This photo was taken around one of the main travelers locations. Everything you might need or want is there, and with "Chicks^* and Furniture" what more does a guy need. Notice the small tree starting to grow on the edge of the roof. I don't remember if that tree was there the last time I visited.

^*For those of you who don't know, "chicks" is an English slang for girls.

Oh the Places I've Been

OK, here it is. I briefly mentioned this before, and since I have been off my bike for a while, I thought this would be as good a time as any to put it together. Here is a view of almost all the rides I have been on around Andong. There are still a couple I have not done again yet, but those ones are a bit more challenging and, with the possible muddy roads, I think I may wait a bit to do them again (especially because of my knee).

(You should click the image to see it bigger.)

All the new rides are in color. The black lines are the same rides shown in an earlier post here. I am not sure why most of the longer rides seem to bee to the north of the city, but it is kind of interesting.

This is not the only riding I have done, in the sense that each one has been ridden once. Most of these I have ridden several times. Generally the riding around Andong is pretty nice. In the spring the hills are green, the roads are not too dangerous, relatively speaking, and it is fairly easy to get out of the city quickly. The only downsides are the fact that when traveling north, it is a bit of a climb to get out of the valley, and that many of the back roads end up being dead ends. That means you have to backtrack and head somewhere else. Still it's nice though. I am glad I have my bike here.

If you are interested, here is the file you can load into Google Earth. Just click on it and it should load into Google Earth and you can explore to your heart's content. All of my rides.

"When the spirits are low, when the day appears dark, when work becomes monotonous, when hope hardly seems worth having, just mount a bicycle and go out for a spin down the road, without thought on anything but the ride you are taking."
~ Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

"Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race."
~ H. G. Wells

"Get a bicycle. You will not regret it. If you live."
~ Mark Twain

Looks can be deceiving.

The folks at Analogia Star Estimator run a service that claims to "find the analogy between your portrait and the top celebrities." After a quick trip to their site, it turns out I am in some pretty good company. Whether you think so or not, and I am not so sure I agree, the fine folks at Analogia seem to think I look like George Clooney, Ewan McGergor, and David Duchovny which they happen to misspell.

In case you are confused by the similarities, I am the one in the upper-left.

I am not sure how they determine similarities, but as much as I don't want to admit it, I really don't think I look like any of those stars. Possibly I have the ears of George Clooney, the face-shape of Ewan McGregor, and maybe the forehead of David Duchovny, but one possible similar point from each star is not much of a match. Surely there is at least one celebrity out there that shares a few more things in common with me. After all, I consider myself pretty average looking.

I suppose any similarity, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, but this matching process uses technology from a company called Optical Recognition Objectives LLC. This company makes software "... for person identification in criminal investigations ..." (I love their tag line, "The unique software for criminal needs.") I assume their actual software for helping to catch criminals is better than the one used to match me to the stars, or at least I hope so. Hmm, I certainly hope George Clooney doesn't decide to change careers and go on a crime spree. I wouldn't want to be mistaken for him and be arrested by mistake.

Here in Korea I have been told several times that I look like someone famous. Early on when I first arrived in Korea, and had longer hair, students used to tell me I looked like Macgyver, not Richard Dean Anderson but Macgyver, which is what he will always be known as in Korea. Personally I don't think I have the eyebrows to pull off a Macgyver, but it's not bad being compared to him. And I did always carry around my Swiss Army knife.

Later on, I was occasionally told I look like Harrison Ford. I actually still get that one sometimes. I really like this comparison, not so much because I think I look like him (I don't), but because I really like him as an actor. There is no way I am as suave as Harrison Ford, but maybe I am pretty good with that non-smile smile.






And just recently I was told I look like David Caruso, currently Horatio Caine of "CSI: Miami" fame. This is not a bad comparison either, but I think there are some fundamental problems with this one. First of all, my eyes are brown, not blue. Additionally the most obvious difference is the hair. He has less, I have more. His is red, mine is a bland gray and brown. Maybe there is something in the face, but I am not so sure.

Perhaps if I had a few of those traits that David Caruso has, I too might have been a star of the small screen. What do you think?

"People are pretty much alike. It's only that our differences are more susceptible to definition than our similarities."
~ Unknown

"Our Similarities bring us to a common ground; Our Differences allow us to be fascinated by each other."
~ Tom Robbins