Leopards are Champions

I had this whole thing typed up for Monday, but then forgot to submit! Sorry about that! It's worth the wait!

OJ...... guilty.... again..... no gloves to get him out of this one. Interesting how they tried to find jurors that were not biased based on his first trial many years ago. Good luck with that one! I remember the FIRST OJ verdict - I watched from the barber shop in the MU back at ISU that had a mini-TV up in the corner of the little shop. There were some 30 of us crammed in there and in the hallway to watch the OJ verdict of not-guilty. Karma is a bad thing.

Lots of new pictures up on the right. I finally have the photos from last weekend's Taipei Gay Pride Parade up. Should be some in there that will make you smile no matter what your opinion is on homosexuality. I also updated pictures from this past weekend of the IBM Sports Day here in Taipei, as well as our trip to the beach yesterday.

Sports Day.... Saturday was about 95 degrees but a nice cool breeze. IBM puts on a yearly gathering for all 5000+ employees here in Taiwan that lines up 4 different divisions against each other in about 20 events. The Golf and Softball events were done in September while the weather was still "safe" for those events. The rest of them were this past weekend. I was signed up only for Tug of War which had 20 people per team. Our team was team "Leopard". Since it's hard to find a mascot costume for a leopard, you will see we had the Pink Panther as our mascot. But not even the true Pink Panther, one of those cheap knock offs that is close enough to recognize, but not too close as to infringe on copyright protections. Same thing with winning a Winnie the Pooh or Tigger at the carnival... close enough to convince a 3 year old, but far enough that you'd appear "cheap" to a 6 year old. Anyway - our team is basically all the Engineers in IBM Taiwan. The other teams were HR, Finance, Marketing, Sales, etc..... so think of this as "Revenge of the Taiwan Nerds".

In the end, our team won. Seriously - you can't write a better ending to the movie. We were horrible in all the individual events like 100m sprints, last in the cheerleading competition (we have a very low female population in engineering and unfortunately we don't get the sorority girl type personalities either), last in golf (not sure what our excuse is for that one), last in manager's relay (I didn't run but considered it). BUT, we did win the 1500m men's run (two of my employees took overall 1st and 2nd with times in the 5:20 zone), won Tug of War (granted we had the Biggest Guy in Taiwan on the team for intimidation), won Dodge Ball, and SOMEHOW we won the 20 person 2500m relay despite finishing last in 10 of the 12 100m races. Still not sure how that worked out. But in the end, we won on Team Performance.... so again, the TEAM effort got us the overall championship. It really was a fun day with food, games, Human Foosball (great for birthday parties in my opinion). Make sure you enjoy the pictures on the right.

Sunday was a great day for the beach. We were pretty burnt from Saturday, so we went later in the afternoon to avoid even more hot sun. The late afternoon was awesome time to be there and we got to see the sunset before returning to Taipei.

This Friday is National Day which is basically Taiwan's "4th of July". Ten/Ten (Oct 10=10/10) is their magic day here and it's already well decorated with Taiwan flags lining most of the major streets in town. They also have a 10/10 (in Mandarin of course) on the top of Taipei 101 for everyone to see at night.

We have Friday off, so Sarah and I are going with friends to Vietnam for the weekend. I'm sure there will be lots of pictures to share next week.