The House of Representatives voted today to ban TikTok in the US- unless its Chinese owner, ByteDance, sells it to a company not based in China. After advancing on an unusually unanimous vote in committee the bill won wide bipartisan support from the full House. It was approved 352-65. To become law the bill needs approval by the Senate and then a ( Read more... )

Vegas Travelog #5
Hilton Resorts World, Las Vegas - Wed, 29 Nov 2023. 3pm.

I wrote yesterday about my room on the 54th floor at the Resorts World casino. There's something that's been bothering my engineer/architect-fu all week, though. It's not actually the 54th floor. Sure, the room numbers all start with "54" and the button in the elevator says ( Read more... )

A few nights ago I made General Tso's chicken at home. General Tso's is my favorite Chinese* dish. It's my go-to dish when it's on the menu in restaurants. I've tried a few ready-to-eat versions of from grocery stores. They've never measured up.

Here's what I cooked at home:


( Read more... )

Concern about Coronavirus has been sweeping the world the past few weeks. The virus has, too, of course, though arguably not as fast as worry about it has. That's often how these things go. Technically called Novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV), it originated in Wuhan, China, with the first human case documented in December. As of today, six weeks later ( Read more... )

San Francisco - Sat, 18 Jan 2020, 6:30pmWe're in San Francisco today and tonight. Hawk needed to get fitted for clothes for a wedding in which she's part of the groom's party. The groom and the other groom (yes, it's a gay wedding, commence countdown to end of world) had most of their posses there to get fitted at the same time with the same tailor ( Read more... )

Donner Pass, California - Sunday, 29 July 2018, 2pm

A funny thing happened on the way through the Donner Pass today. ...No, I'm not talking about the doomed Donner Party (Wikipedia link) who resorted to cannibalism after becoming stuck up here in 1846. Though it is the selfsame pass. What happened to us today was an enjoyable dollop of serendipity ( Read more... )

China today announced an end to its controversial "One Child" policy, the law for 35 years that punished most couples who gave birth to more than one child. Now two is the new one: all couples will be allowed to have two children. The stated purpose of the move is "to balance population development and address the challenge of an ageing population ( Read more... )

Beijing Travelog #11
Sun 29 Nov 2009, 5pm - Third Ring Road, BeijingWe're settling in to our new hotel along Beijing's 3rd Ring Road after visiting the Summer Palace earlier this afternoon. The Summer Palace is huge, 9999 rooms. The tradition is that heaven has 10,000 rooms and building that many on earth, even for the emperor would have been ( Read more... )

Beijing Travelog #10
Sun 29 Nov 2009, 10am - Temple of Heaven, BeijingWoke up early again this morning, around 4am. Used it as an opportunity to get a head start on sightseeing. Today's plan is/was to visit the Temple of Heaven near downtown in the morning, move to our next hotel around lunchtime, and then spend the rest of the daylight hours at ( Read more... )

Beijing Travelog #9
Sat 28 Nov 2009, 5pm - Back at the hotel in Beijing

After visiting Ming's Tomb and the Great Wall we stopped for lunch before visiting a series of tourist traps to round out our bus tour. We knew these places were going to be cons when we chose the tour package so we mentally prepared ourselves to ignore the inevitable sales ( Read more... )