Roger Hsu's Blog

Originally posted to RohJuh.com on Oct 23, 2005. Judy’s artistic streak continues with this masterpiece entitled “Mountains”. It’s a transcendental expression of the magnificence and grandeur of nature juxtaposed with the ethereal preponderance that characterizes the fragility of our existence. Or something like that.

Originally posted to RohJuh.com on Oct 17, 2005. I was just Googling around and found this link to RohJuh.com. They highlight our San Juan Huts trip: "Gotta check this blog out… RohJuh.com. They have a couple great posts on their San Juan Hut Trip. Also, check out their gallery for lots of great pics." I’m not sure how they found out about RohJuh.com, but somehow they did. Pretty cool! Here’s the link:  http://bikeblogs.blogs.com/main/2005/10/1032005_updates.html

Originally posted to RohJuh.com on Oct 17, 2005. Our landlord informed us today that he is planning on selling the house we are living in (good timing on his part IMO as the housing bubble is showing strong signs of deflating). As a result, our lease which ends January 15, 2006 will not be renewed. That’s one of the big downsides of renting – you can be uprooted on a whim. We thus have to find a new abode. This is not necessarily a bad thing, especially if we are able to move to a place closer to my work. A shortened commute would almost make the hassle of moving worth it. Of course, our new residence will also depend on where Judy ends up getting a job. If she ends up working in or near San Francisco again, we could very well end up close to where we live now. If we have to pack up all our stuff just to move down the street, that would be an annoying pain-in-the-ass to say the least. Here’s to hoping Judy gets a job near TiVo! :-)

Originally posted to RohJuh.com on Oct 11, 2005. We decided that we needed some travel bags for our Nepal trip. Although I’m very fond of roller bags (why hand-lug something around or load your back if you can just roll it?), that type of bag probably won’t work very well in places like Nepal. They might work OK for getting our stuff there, but our porters certainly wouldn’t appreciate them during our trek. We thought about just using our backpacking packs, but all the loose straps and buckles coupled with the inability to effectively lock them make them less than optimal. The best scenario would likely be to bring some sturdy duffel bags as well as a smaller daypack. The duffel bags would hold our gear to and from Nepal and also be carried by the porters during our trek. We’d keep stuff that we needed more frequent access to in our daypacks. So we decided to get some good duffel bags which of course obliged us to look at the famous North Face duffel bags. These highly-conspicu...

Originally posted to RohJuh.com on Oct 6, 2005. Well, today I officially departed my early-30s and entered my mid-30s. Thanks to all who wished me a happy birthday. It was a fairly low-key and uneventful day as my birthdays have generally become, but that’s fine by me since I’m not much of a spotlight kind of guy. Plus, for nearly all of my adult life, my date of birth really hasn’t had much significance to me – it’s really no different from any other day. Judy wanted to take me out to dinner, and since I don’t really have a favorite restaurant, I had to think about where to go. Initially, we were just going to go to Fresh Choice (a soup/salad buffet joint – like I said, birthdays aren’t a big deal to me) because they currently have this “upside-down” pineapple coconut pound cake which, when mixed with the vanilla soft serve, is absolutely delicious – it’s really really good! But we decided to go to Fresh Choice this weekend instead and ended up trying out a new Japanese restaur...

Originally posted to RohJuh.com on Oct 5, 2005. Version 4 of RohJuh.com ended up being a much more time-consuming endeavor than I ever imagined. With development work progressing at a fairly consistent pace over nearly 9 months, what began as a medium-scale project soon mushroomed into quite a large undertaking, and I ended up spending about quadruple the amount of time and effort that I had originally estimated. Good thing my day job isn’t software program management. :-) With Version 3, I had completely over-hauled the site in an attempt to separate the content from the presentation (translation: to make it easier to change the look and feel of the site) as well as to facilitate content management (translation: to make it easier to add new trip reports, pics, and videos). I largely achieved this objective as V3 was much improved in these regards from previous versions. Despite these improvements, however, there remained a number of areas that were still lacking. Content Addi...