Electronic Cigarettes

by Eric Hsu

I am checking out SiGCiG.com's Encore electronic cigarette as a method to reduce smoking. Smoking without the cigarette smoke is pretty cool actually.

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Taipei, Taiwan 2009

by Eric Hsu

What to do, where to go, what I did, and as usual, my opinions during my Christmas trip to Taipei, Taiwan. Plenty about Taiwanese food, night life, friends, and tourist spots inside.

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Super Broke Ass Gourmet

by Eric Hsu

Best friend stew is coming right up!

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Tuning, Life, Beef Ribs and Remodeling

A couple months ago when Ben and Roland from Pi were visiting from the UK, we were having dinner somewhere and this conversation came up about tuning. I think we all ordered big ass beef BBQ ribs at Lucille's that night. Ben finished the ENTIRE full rack. Believe it or not, they don't have big ass tender tasty meaty beef ribs in the UK. They do have the best Guinness in the world, but that still doesn't quite make up for the missing beef ribs. Anyhow, as I remember the conversation it went a little something like this (in full on English accents except for me):

Roland, "You going to move into that big house and work on the t...

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Unagi in Mishima

Saya and I rented a little Toyota Passo and drove out to Hakone to check out the hot springs. On the way back we stopped by Mishima to eat at this little restaurant that serves one of the best Unagi bowls in all of Japan.

...

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Track Day @ Fuji Speedway Jan 11, 2009

On Sunday Roland and I hopped on to the DSPORT tour bus again to go check out the Carmate and Nitto Tire drift ride along. More on the drift day later (probs with sd card). The DSPORT Tokyo Auto Salon tour is actually pretty good, but my schedule did not allow me to go on the entire tour. Today they went to the Nissan R35 GT-R VR38DETT engine factory in Yokohama which was undoubtedly pretty cool too. I do recommend the DSPORT tour for next year if you are thinking about going to the Tokyo Auto Salon. I met some cool people on the tour too.

After Fuji was rebuilt a couple...

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Danny & Marilyn in Arizona

A couple weeks ago, Nick, Yaya, Saya and I headed out to Arizona because our friends Danny & Marilyn got married. Other than being really, really, really hot in Arizona (hell on Earth), it was a great time. I got a chance to hang out and celebrate with a bunch of friends I haven't seen in a while, relax, binge eat and binge drink. I met Marilyn about 8 years ago through a friend who I used to work with at Apex. Danny is Jensen's brother. Jensen used to work with me when I was at Apex, but when Danny moved to the mainland from Hawaii, he worked for me at XS fabricating and installing stuff. After XS, Danny went to work with the infamous Stephan Papidakis at AEM on the drift team, but got ...

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Thirty Fucking Five

11 days ago I turned 35 years old. I think the physical decline started around 26 which I'm sure was expedited by the uh...partying, alcohol, girls, working long and late hours, carbon monoxide from the dyno rooms, etc. Exercise was non existent and still really isn't present in my life. I think I should start soon or else my health will take a shit. These days, if I strain myself physically it takes days for me to recover. If I party too hard it takes days to recover. If I work on a car too late into the night and stretch muscles I no longer stretch regularly it takes days to recover. Damn, I used to bounce back overnight. Talking to the older guys at Cosworth, they all say "You ain't...

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Shanghai Grand

I've been in Shanghai since last week enjoying the city. My buddy Daniel opened a factory several years ago over here that does all sorts of metal working. His factory currently does work for some of the larger OEM vehicle manufacturers throughout the world and is ISO 9001 certified. So Daniel invited me to check it out to see if he could solicit some business from me. I figure that I talk all this crap about Chinamen companies so it was time to see for myself at a high end factory. Those of you who have been reading my blog know how I feel about manufacturers in China. To be honest though, I really went because it...

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Boiling Tarzan

Last night I went to the Boiling Crab in Wetminta again with the Ark Design posse to get down and dirty with Viet/Louisiana style shrimp, lobster, crawfish, crab legs, chicken wings, fries, corn, etc. The original plan was meet at 7:30pm and probably wait 45 minutes or so to get a table. We were still waiting outside at 8:30 when we got a call from Tarzan on his way back from the Long Beach Grand Prix (chauffeured by Daiji from C-West USA). So we added 2 people to the reservation and they said it wo...

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