The road to Kudus took us through Demak, the center of the third Muslim sultanate in the 15th and 16th centuries (Nes’ dad gave me quite a history lesson). Islam is still very important here; there seemed to be a mosque for every neighborhood. Pappie also took a detour that took us by the Masjid Agung Demak, one of the oldest mosques in Indonesia (built in 1466). It’s architecture features no dome or minarets; the building itself looks a lot like the Hindu and Buddhist temples in Central Java.

When we arrived in Kudus, our top priority was clear: bounce around the local food stalls and load up on local Kudus food. We had sate kerbau (buffalo satay), nasi ayam, and pindang. They sure like to eat buffalo here. It’s delicious; tender and tasty and just little bit of gaminess.

Back at Om Hwat’s, I realize what a character he is with all of his interesting business pursuits. His house includes a goldsmith storefront, an indoor koi nursery, and and what I can only describe as “mission control” for his swallow’s nest operations; an array of monitors set up that stream live video of the nesting swallows in barns in Kudus and Borneo. The harvested nests can fetch around $2,000 per kilogram. Crazy!

We met her dad while he was visiting her Grandma (he was genuinely surprised! I was sure he knew). We stayed a while and played with the half dozen or so Pomeranians and puppies. Nes was in heaven.

We then drove over to her mom’s sister’s house to continue the surprise. We snuck in and said hello. Ina’s face went from confused to bawling in an instant. Another successful surprise!

After a short visit we packed up the car and headed up into the mountains to Bandungan, a small village about an hour south of Semarang, for the annual “Widjaya family reunion/Christmas/New Year’s extravaganza”. It was intense; like a Dinger family get together on steroids. 50 people in one villa; more food than 100 people could eat; a full-on Christmas mass (yes, they brought in a priest and everything); several Santa and Black Piet outfits for some “Christmas theater”; and the 20 or so ever-present concurrent conversations, each competing in volume with the others. Exhausting (but fun) for an introvert like me!

After two days here, we’re packing up this afternoon to head to—I think—Kudus.

I’m really regretting not bringing the laptop… photos are coming soon!

Nes at her happiest… with Pom pups

Nes and Ina celebrate New Year’s “Ina-style”

Airplane pain

Getting to Southeast Asia from Minneapolis is a chore. We spent 32 hours this time (the ORD-HKG leg was 15.5 hours!) getting from home to Singapore. We arrived at around 2 am without hotel reservations (clearly I’m rubbing off on Nes) so we popped into the Crowne Plaza attached to the airport to scrub off the day-and-a-half of travel grime and to get some real sleep in an actual bed.

Day one

We slept in the next morning and had some decent Singaporean breakfast before leaving the airport. We grabbed two-day subway passes and headed out to check into Hotel 1929 near Chinatown. We spent the rest of the day wandering the Chinatown markets and the Clarke Quay neighborhood dodging short spells of rain in cafes and shopping malls.

We planned on a Hainanese dinner at the popular Wee Nam Kie near Orchard Street, but when we took a table on the patio, a gang of mouse-sized cockroaches joined us and left me escorting a teary-eyed Nes to find dinner elsewhere. We returned to Chinatown and had some good char kwe teow and mee goreng with the perfect amount of that burn flavor you can only get from a blazing hot street wok. Yum!

Day two

The next day we got an early start and joined hundreds of other tourists on our obligatory walk around the Marina Bay area and the huge and outrageous Marina Bay Sands (an enormous hotel/casino/shopping mall complex).

We returned to Orchard Street to lunch at Din Tai Fong, a famous Taiwanese restaurant where the noodles and dumpling wraps are made fresh moments before they’re cooked. So delicious! Later we met Darwin, Nes’ college roommate, and we explored the Bugis night market and the Dhoby Ghout area. We ended the night at a bubble tea stand where I accidentally tossed my 50mm lens onto the concrete. It now sounds like a baby rattle if you shake it—probably not a good sign!

…more pictures to come once I get access to a computer…

Four simple steps

1. Open regedit.exe (Start Menu > Run > regedit)
2. Navigate to HKey_Local_Machine > System > CurrentControlSet > Control > SecurityProviders > SCHANNEL > Protocols > SSL 2.0 > Server
3. Right-click on the Server key and choose New > DWORD Value
4. Name the key Enabled with the default value of 0

There is of course a fifth ubiquitous step when making Windows changes: reboot!

In Rails, I’d be able to reflect on the ActiveRecord::Dirty::changes hash to see which attributes were modified and their before and after values. I love how it works and I searched for a javascript diff’er that did something similar. There are a few out there, but none worked quite like I wanted, so I decided to roll my own. objectDiff() will recursively compare two javascript objects and return an ActiveRecord-style changes object. Check it:

Usage

Suppose you have two javascript objects (like serialized form data):

var before = {
  "id": 123,
  "name": {
    "first": "Johnny",
    "last":"Johnson"
  }
};

var after = {
  "id": 123,
  "name": {
    "first": "John",
    "last": "Johnson"
  },
  "age": 30
};

A call to objectDiff(before, after) would return an object of only the changes:

{"name": {"first": ["Johnny", "John"]}, "age": [null, 30]}

I hope this is useful to someone. It’s wrapped up in a jQuery plugin on Github: jquery-objectdiff.

Gross. Luckily, Chrome (my primary web browser), Firefox, and most other modern browsers, support user stylesheets. Here’s how I gave Gmail an ad-ectomy in Chrome.

Custom.css

Locate the default user stylesheet in /Users/YOUR_USERNAME/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/User StyleSheets/Custom.css

Add this line and save:

div.u5, div.nH.mq, div.nH.u8 {display:none;}

Restart Chrome and enjoy.

Motivation

I recently took a semester of Mandarin at the University of Minnesota. For an English speaker, learning Mandarin is challenging. Not only are you learning new words and grammar, but you’re also learning new characters. I’ve used flash cards in the past to learn foreign language vocabulary, but they didn’t seem to fit in this case. Ideally, I’d have a flash card with three sides: a Chinese character, the Pinyin pronunciation, and the English translation.

With the two-sided limit of a physical flash card, I began exploring some of the free flash card web sites out there (there are TONS). I found none that would let me define more than two sides and most of them were clunky, confusing, and riddled with obnoxious ads. Ick.

Discouraged by what was available, I fired up the ol’ laptop and created a simple Rails app that gave me what I needed. After a couple of hours I had my three-sided flash cards and easily aced all of my vocabulary tests (my wife still got a better grade than me though—grr).

Flashie.org

Since then, I’ve been playing with this Rails app and adding things here and there. I’ve added some animations, keyboard shortcuts and other fun features. In the hope that others will find this useful, I’ve wrapped some authentication around it and made it available at http://flashie.org.

So if you’re a student (or an educator) and find a use for Flashie, please give it a try. You only need to create an account to make card sets. Your friends and classmates, or your students, can view your public sets without registering or signing in.

Day one

We arrived in Lisbon just before the sun set. We took a bus to our hotel, checked in, and immediately sought dinner. As always, Nes had done her homework and already had a list of good restaurants to try. We went found the closest one and had a delicious meal of cod fritters and roasted chicken with piri-piri sauce (a salty and spicy chili oil). We finally found where Europe hides its spicy food!

After dinner we wandered Lisbon’s dark streets for hours. We walked toward the port and back through the Baixa and Commercia neighborhoods. The city is beautiful at night–dark and quiet, but not creepy or scary at all.

Day two

Thursday we made day trip to Sintra, an little old city just outside of Lisbon. In Sintra, one can hike up a mountain and visit the old Royal Palace, a Moorish castle, and several other fascinating places.

First we walked out to Quinta da Regaleira, a beautiful and unusual private estate in the hills of Sintra. The house is covered in incredibly ornate and detailed carvings, all if which get lost through the camera. The grounds are equally impressive. The property is spotted with medieval-looking towers, caves, and tunnels. It was lots of fun to explore.

Afterward we started the climb up to the Castle of the Moors, which was shrouded in clouds the whole time we were enjoying Quinta da Regaleira, but were finally starting to peak through.

About an hour later we arrived at the castle, a huge wall built around the peak of the hill in the 9th century. This place was wild! You can walk around the wall and up the towers, the whole time just feet away from the steep cliffs. Sometimes a cloud would roll through and limit the visibility so much you have to stop walking. Really, really cool.

From there we hiked to Pena Palace, a royal residence built by Ferdinand II. When we got there, a cloud had parked itself right around the palace, but you could tell a giant building was in there somewhere. It was very eerie.

We walked around the outside and tried to make some photographs before going inside. The inside was even more impressive (no photos allowed, though). We’ve seen several palaces during our travels; some bigger, some MUCH bigger, but this one was the best. Each room was decorated, furnished and even lit exactly as it was when royalty lived there. It was as if you were a visitor of the King’s rather than a patron of a museum.

On the train ride back to Lisbon, Nes and I agreed that other than the Swiss Alps, Sintra was the coolest stop of the trip. You should add it to your list now!

When we returned to Lisbon we headed out to explore the Barrio Alto neighborhood, a hip area at the top of the hills of Lisbon. Barrio Alto is packed with fun little restaurants, bars, and people. We roamed it for a while before descending back to the city center where we tried another one of Nes’ restaurant finds. That night we had another amazing Portuguese meal at a restaurant inside an old palace. Spicy fried pork with clams and baked cod. Delicious!

Day three

This was the day that had been sneaking up on us for the previous four weeks—time to head back home! Our tickets back to Minneapolis leave out of Paris, so it’s time to head back to Paris for one last night in Europe. Then it’s back to alarm clocks, chores, and responsibilities.

Rossio square in central Lisbon

Castle of the Moors in Sintra

Trolley to Barrio Alto in Lisbon

Day one (Sunday)

We arrived in Madrid very early which gave us full day to explore. After checking into our hotel we walked down the still empty Calle de Arenal, a usually busy pedestrian street. Madrid keeps very late hours (our hotel served breakfast until noon!) and it felt like we arrived before the city was awake.

We followed Arenal up to Gran Via, old Madrid’s main drag and stopped to see several impressive old buildings. We then came upon the huge Parque del Retiro, just one of Madrid’s many large parks. We burned away several hours there eating street food and people watching. Just enough time to catch the free entrance to the Prado Museum (it’s free after five on Sundays).

The Prado’s collection was impressive, but we had to keep our visit short; we had a pair of tickets to a Real Madrid match that evening.

Nes had always wanted to see this team play so we couldn’t pass up the opportunity. I never knew she was such a soccer fan! We made our way to the huge Santiago Bernabéu Stadium (over 80,000 seats–that’s like two Metrodomes!) along with what seemed like the entire city in the subway. We found our seats just after kickoff and watched along with a packed stadium as Real humiliated Deportivo 6–1 in the rain. What a blast!

After the game it was a race back to the subway. We were all literally running through the tunnels to beat the crowd. A long but fun day.

Day two

Monday started late. After breakfast we consulted Santiago’s map and walked over to see Plaza Mayor and the Royal Palace. Along the way we stopped at the busy San Miguel Market and tried some stuffed olives and Vermouth–so so good! From there we wandered toward Templo de Debod, an Egyptian temple that moved from Egypt and reassembled in Madrid.

We then headed back to our neighborhood via Plaza España and Chinatown. For lunch: dollar menu (Euro menu?) at Museo de Jamon–the Ham Museum. A thrifty cured-meat lover’s dream. Two ham and cheese sandwiches and a beer: €3. Awesome.

Later we hiked over to Calle Serrano to check out the shopping and then had a tasty dinner at Santiago’s recommended Albaderos Taberna. Another great day.

Day three

Tuesday we took a train south to Toledo. The former Spanish capital is beautiful and the history is interesting, but most of the sights have hefty entrance fees and many don’t allow photography inside. We wandered Toledo’s streets all day, up and down its steep hills. We had a quick snack of Toledan stew and returned to Madrid.

That evening I was the one with the sudden craving for Asian food. We grabbed some Thai takeout (NOT good) and a few beers and returned to the hotel.

Day four

Our last morning in Madrid was for chores. We took advantage of the hotel’s self-serve laundry before returning to the airport. Off to Lisbon!

Madrid’s Gran Via

Real Madrid vs Deportivo in Santiago Bernabeu Stadium

The Royal Palace of Madrid

A view of Toledo from the old gate