After all the nice birthday wishes and e-mails I got today I guess it's time to give something back. How about relief from sarcasm? That's right, unless you happen to be unfortunate enough to live in Taiwan, in which case you'll have a hard time escaping my sarcasm, you should be pretty safe from my sarcastic comments for the next couple of years. (I can hear the first smart asses out there ask "What about your blog?"--well, that's really your own fault now, isn't it? ;-)

So, what are the reasons I'm staying in Taiwan instead of going back to California like it was planned? As always my reasons are manifold.

Let's start with the intelligent U.S. immigration politics. As you may have heard the run for this year's H-1B visas was generally a little underestimated, which prompted the USCIS to resort to a (more or less) random draw procedure that favored holders of U.S. MSc diplomas. I'm not going to dive into this topic cause others have done that plentiful, but I would be very interested in the opinion of a qualified economist. To me it looks like the U.S. government is passing on a lot of income taxes and pissing off their own companies, forcing them to move their workforce elsewhere. There may be more to it but I don't see it.

Then, the more I thought about the U.S. and my future in general, the less I saw myself living in the California. The poor health care and social system, the unhealthy and repetitive cuisine, the amount of driving and traffic, or paying for unjustifiable wars with my taxes are just a few things that bugged me more than I allowed myself to believe.

The longer I stayed in Taiwan, the more I felt that I would be happier here than in the U.S., especially since I can do the same great job here. It's pretty cool to work for a company that proves flexible enough to adapt so easily to the changing minds of their employees. :-)

I think I've said the same thing when I went to California last year: Feel free to come visit me at any time! At the time it didn't work very well; few people actually took the opportunity to do so, but I'm very happy about the ones that did! If you like a beautiful country with nice people and delicious, albeit slightly "unusual", food, this is your chance! (Today someone at Logitech offered to take me to a nightmarket to eat snake one of these days. I'll try to gather a few photos of dishes I've tried and come to like around here. I'll make sure the snake is on one of them! :-)

Last Friday we went on what's officially called a "team building event". Less officially it was a kick-ass karting event organized by the Logitech video driver and firmware team at the LeMans Karting Center here in Fremont.

I finally (some claim I do it on a regular basis on windy roads in the Santa Cruz Mountains or between Chur and Peist) got a chance to practice and proof the skills earned while driving in the Swiss mountains. Either that or pure luck made me come in second out of fourteen leaving behind everyone but Patrick. Everybody had so much fun that I feel the chance of a rematch in 2008 coming up. ;-)

There are some pictures in my gallery. Sorry for the bad quality, indoor lighting and cell phone cameras are to blame. Nevertheless thanks to Richard and Loïc for taking them!

After living in Palo Alto for over two months (and working inside for most of the weekend) I decided to go look at the origin of the city's name: El Palo Alto, a more than 1,000 year-old redwood tree.

It's neither the most beautiful nor the biggest and most impressive tree that I've ever seen, as a matter of fact, I had already ridden past it on my bike without even noticing it. Anyway, I added it to my gallery for completeness' sake. :-)

What's much more interesting is the official importance of the tree. For example, look at this 8-page report by the Planning Division Arborist. It's even on the list of California Historical Landmarks. That's a lot of paperwork for a tree. I wonder how many other, less famous, trees had to die for the benefit of El Palo Alto ...

Last boring fact of this treey post: El Palo Alto is also on the Seal of the Stanford University.

If you're wondering why my blog is a little empty these days, there is a very simple reason: No time. I currently work more than 50 hours a week (and Loïc more than 60, it seems, but he claims that he takes more breaks ;-), so by the time I get home I feel exhausted and overwhelmed by a lack of creativity.

The actual news would probably be that I'm in the middle of (or should I say: at the very beginning of) learning Mandarin and preparing my three months' trip to Taiwan. I'll hope to post something about that very soon. It'll probably be in English, though. For some reason my blog doesn't support Chinese characters ... And that will remain the only official reason. :-)

Either way, I thought the following picture taken last Friday at Logitech was pretty symbolic of the current situation:

After the weather gods finally decided to let the Bay Area have a sunny weekend I got the chance to go on my second bike trip of the year. I drove up to Skyline Boulevard, headed North and drove down Kings Mountain Road again.

The view along the route wasn't exactly magnificient because it was mostly in the woods and even the scenic sounding Skeggs Point Scenic View vista point let me down. But the exercise was good nevertheless; about 40 km of cycling were a good change after yet another week of way too much work.

Since I didn't want to bring down the scenic level of my gallery :-), I decided to upload the few pictures I took to Panoramio. Also, there is a Google Earth route available, so you can follow the tour the way most people do sports: from your couch. ;-)

Okay, here they are, the remaining pictures of our Death Valley trip: Many beautiful views of the Death Valley National Park, a slightly scary road trip through snowy mountains, and a visit to the cold but beautiful Lake Tahoe area. All of them to be found in my gallery.

The pictures of the first day of our Death Valley trip are online.

As always, it comes in a Google Earth version and a map version; or you can choose how many pictures you want to see--from "I have one minute while my code compiles" (Quick tour) to "It's 4pm and I don't want to start something new" (Full tour).

Also, I've added a few snapshots and screenshots, both of which can be found in my gallery.

In case you were wondering ... We did survive our trip to Death Valley. Unfortunately, so did our cameras, which means that I will now be spending a few hours during the next couple of days to sort the photos, upload, and tag them. I took quite many because Death Valley National Park is really interesting and offers great opportunities to take photos. So stay tuned; at least part of them should be ready by next weekend.

By the way, I came across a great tool while trying to fix the timestamps of Loïc's photos. (His camera was 12 hours off, which led to some minor problems.) The tool may not have a well-defined name (it varies between "Time Stamp Modifier for JPEG Files" and "Image Time Stamp Modifier for JPEG Files") but it is perfect for the job since it modifies both the file time stamps and EXIF data.

For some reason I didn't manage to blog something at the office today, so here's a quick note from Gilroy, where we've stopped to have dinner. Guru, Loïc, and I are on the way to the Death Valley National Park where we'll spend the long weekend.

Monday is president's day, which doesn't mean that anyone thinks any higher of the clown that plays president at the moment. It just means that we get a day off. (If I have time I'll look up the real meaning later on. ;-)

Ok, time to get back to dinner. More news and pictures next week, that is if we survive Death Valley ...

Turns out I was at least half wrong in my last post. The second half of the weekend happened to be very beautiful and sunny, pretty much the opposite of what the weather forecast predicted. (I'm not complaining.)

So instead of going to the Asian Art museum in San Francisco, which was the original bad weather plan, we spontaneously decided to drive along the coast to Santa Cruz. There were a couple of amazing views, and Pescadero Beach is so beautiful that you just want to stay there for the rest of the day.

If these pictures don't make you want to visit me in California, then I can't help you. ;-)

To see the pictures you have the choice:

• Boring old album with plain photos
• Exciting 3D view with route and photos! (requires Google Earth)
• A few other fancy options ;-)