This is the final installment of a series of blog posts about my 2026 trip to Taiwan. I’ve tagged them all with the taiwan tag so they should be easy to find! I was at the Taipei airport and had just seen my girlfriend off on her flight to London, but had another 36 hours or so in Taiwan. Up until this point my girlfriend had been my sort of security blanket, but now I had been set loose to fend for myself in a country where I didn’t speak the language and was visiting for the first time! It Continue Reading
Adventure
Exploring Taipei (and the surrounding area)
This is the fourth installment of a series of blog posts about my 2026 trip to Taiwan. I’ve tagged them all with the taiwan tag so they should be easy to find! After spending 5 days in the southern city of Kaohsiung it was time to change things up and head to the capital Taipei! I’ve already explained in some detail the speed rail journey between the two cities, so I won’t bore you with more of that. Suffice to say, we arrived in Taipei with little incident, though my girlfriend’s propensity to arrive just minutes before departure makes me Continue Reading
Journey to the bridge – a Taiwanese road trip
This is the third installment of a series of blog posts about my 2026 trip to Taiwan. I’ve tagged them all with the taiwan tag so they should be easy to find! It was Friday, my last night in Kaohsiung, and a holiday in Taiwan commemorating a massacre that took place in 1947. It was also my first opportunity to meet my girlfriend’s father and brother, since I was visiting during the week and they were both working, and what was a better way to get to know everyone then to spend a few hours in a car on a Continue Reading
Five Days in Kaohsiung
This is the second installment of a series of blog posts about my 2026 trip to Taiwan. I’ve tagged them all with the taiwan tag so they should be easy to find! I had left Victoria on a Saturday night, but because of the time change and the duration of the flight it was Monday morning before I landed in Taipei, and mid-morning by the time I arrived in Kaohsiung. Because I had left late at night, and because it was now morning, and because I had slept for some hours on the plane, I actually didn’t experience any jetlag Continue Reading
Getting to Kaohsiung and Taiwan first impressions
This is the first in a multi-part series about my 2026 visit to Taiwan. I’ve tagged them all with the taiwan tag so they should be easy to find! For over a year now I’ve been dating a girl from Taiwan; it’s an interesting long-distance relationship since she actually lives in London (and we met in Amsterdam – one of these days I’ll write about that) but we make it work, and I’ve been out to visit her in the UK a few times and she’s come to Victoria a lot. Throughout our courtship, I had come to learn a Continue Reading
Exploring Cafes at Home
I posted this in August of 2025, but I will keep appending to this post as I visit more cafes, so check back on a regular basis! Prior to 2025 would often spend time Saturday mornings walking down to my local Tim Hortons to pick up a coffee and a muffin which I would then enjoy at home while working on my computer. It was convenient; I could walk there and back in about 15 minutes and it was a great way to start getting my steps in for the day. This routine satisfied me for years and would probably Continue Reading
The day that never ended and the trip with too many tasks
Sitting board on a flight, I found my mind wandering and eventually landed on memory lane about a chaotic trip to Amsterdam in early 2024, which inspried me to write this blog post. Nearly a year after my last chaotic trip to Europe, I found myself shoved, unceremoniously, into an economy-class seat at the back of a KLM flight, returning home with a stack of power supplies in the overhead bin above me, and an oversize server box somewhere in the luggage hold below. Yes, this was the conclusion of yet another completely insane trip to the Netherlands, one which Continue Reading
Coronation Part 2 – The Great Do-over
If you’ve been following any of my previous posts you are probably aware of my last trip to Coronation which was, shall we say, less then a total success. As a quick recap, I found myself left with a satellite tuner server that was inaccessible and a backup Internet connection that reset itself every 3 hours. The situation was less then ideal, and I knew that if I left the status quo it would bother me endlessly until my next trip. So…. I looked at my travel budget for the year and determined I had just enough leftover to squeeze Continue Reading
Delays, Overshoots and Misfortune – Another trip to Coronation
I should have known the trip would have problems when right from the start a foggy day delayed our flight, but when travel is booked and boxes are shipped, what can you do but press forward and try to make the best out of a rough situation. It was a Tuesday morning and I found myself sitting in the lounge at Victoria’s airport with two of my good friends tracking what should have been our plane as it did loops over Hope, BC. It was a foggy morning in Victoria and our plane wasn’t able to land until the fog Continue Reading
Of Antennas, Trees and Cranes – Just Another Tuesday
Being heavily involved in the local amateur radio community has resulted in some interesting adventures, but one for the memory books took place on an otherwise unassuming Tuesday in September. For the past few years I’ve been tangentially involved with the University of Victoria’s amateur radio club – helping out with projects and the administration of the lab’s network. I’ve become a reasonably well known fixture in the lab and so it was not a huge surprise when I was invited to help out with an antenna install on the director’s property on Sidney Island. Sidney Island is an 8.6 Continue Reading