As promised, here are some of the pictures of the COMPUTEX girls that I promised the boys. This was from my trip there last Friday afternoon.

With 4 exhibition halls, this year’s COMPUTEX is one of the biggest COMPUTEX exhibitions yet:

NVIDIA women were pretty cute, although their games were pretty lame:

Renesis’ were pretty hot:
And my colleague practically drooled over the ATI girls:

But I think it’s only because they danced the hottest. 😉

Intel girls this year sucked big time. Their clothes didn’t fit, and they just looked stupid.

Anyway, it was pretty cool as I got to check out my company’s booth and see for myself our new 21″ LCD laptop, as well as talk to the AMD and Intel guys about their new product launches (AMD Live and Intel V Pro, respectively).

I was particularly impressed with Intel V Pro as it offered several neat security features such as remotely controlling and monitoring over 500 laptops from a central computer (thus saving the SOHO money from hiring too many MIS techies). It’s also able to shut down and turn on the PC remotely, as well as offering hardware and software-based protection to your files. What’s more, added features such as an optional add-on card allows you to use your home phone to talk free via Skype. Hence, this feature allows you to move away from your PC, and still be able to talk to your loved ones via long-distance.

Super cool!

The just-released AMD Live wasn’t bad as well, and is AMD’s answer to Intel’s MCE OS. According to the lady, it helps conserve power, and is terrific for home entertainment.

Just between you and me though, I think AMD Live and Intel Viiv aren’t that much of a big deal. They’re not that easy to use, and you even have to pay when you subscribe to third party companies. The only thing good is that you can use your remote control to access your PC… but if that’s just the only thing it can provide, well, just give me the lowly OS instead and I’ll just use my TV and VCR to access my multimedia.

It’s the same logic as using your phone to take pictures.

Sure, that’s a cool feature, and yet, the quality of the pictures is still not in par with the regular digital cameras. So, for now, I’d rather use the camera instead and just limit my phone for phone calls and texting.

But anyway, let the techies handle this… am just a lowly consumer. How the heck would I know what’s good for the market anyway? 😉

What made the trip extra cooler was when I advised the Intel guys where they can grab a beer and have fun. It all started when the guy was complaining that there was nowhere to grab a drink in Taipei.

Couldn’t help but laugh.

I mean, Taipei’s the city that never sleeps!

You can never run out of places to party on in Taipei… except on Mondays.

I told them to check out Anhe Road for drinks, and Carnegies for some fun. Haha, they actually went and told me about it the next day. So that was pretty cool. 😉

Afterwards, I had a nice Japanese tempura dinner with a friend, before waiting for my other friends to show up at the Taipei Main Station. Since we finished a bit earlier, we had some red wine at the Caesar Park Hotel, and I even got a bit buzzed doing so.

Now, that was fun.

So why was I waiting near the Taipei Main Station?

Simple, because that weekend, rain or shine, we were going to Kenting!

Hahahaha! After a weekend in Burma, I just couldn’t help myself and headed down to the southern tip of Taiwan with 20 other friends for a lovely weekend of sun — and fun!

After 7 hours on the bus where we left Taipei at around midnight and arrived early for 7AM breakfast at trusty ol’ McDonald’s, we finally arrived at Kenting. Thankfully, as this Raven can blissfully sleep anywhere, I woke up refreshed despite a small back problem.

My other friend was wiser and came very much prepared for the trip:

Anyway, sated after a quick sausage and hotcake meal, we then went sightseeing. Although super-duper windy, Kenting’s very beautiful with its breathtaking coastlines, mountains, limestones and rock formations. Of course, being the foreign tourists, we took quite a bit of pictures, and enjoyed the scenery.

Ahhhhh… fresh air. 🙂

Afterwards, we then went forward to ride 4X4 jeep buggies as it went up and down the sand dunes. It was crazy with wind blowing on our faces and driving fast across the muddy water. I think I myself have eaten my fair share of sand. 🙂

Check out the huge sand dunes we drove into, as well as our jeep. We were standing on the back of it btw:
It was the first time I’ve ever ridden on the back of a crazy jeep, and I can totally applaud the skills of our driver as he swerved from left to right as well as driving up and down super-high sand dunes without the car toppling over.

Other members of our party rode the bikes instead. Check out those babies:
But yeah, gimme those jeeps anytime. They’re faster, safer, and bigger.

Who says size doesn’t matter, ey? 😉

As it began to start pouring again, we then grabbed a neat semi-seafood lunch before heading to the Kenting Marine Aquarium and checked out the absent-minded Dory!!!

Here’s a picture of Dory’s uncle, who is less absent-minded than his more popular niece:

There was even a huge walkway where we saw scuba divers feeding the fishes. It was pretty cool. We even had a rare treat and saw two belugas:

And of course, who could miss the cute feeding of the penguins:

As well as checking out the largest fish in the world — the whale shark (presented to you in this super-blurry picture):

Actually, the one on the picture is a mere teenager so it’s a lot smaller. An adult however, can reach over 46 feet or 14 meters! Average size of one is 25 feet.

After getting wet on the marine aquarium, we then checked in at our hotel, the Kenting Youth Center, which features traditional Taiwanese houses for accomodations and lodging:

It was pretty cool, and a lot different from normal 5-star hotels. Made me feel as I was back in the olden days of “Farewell, my Concubine.” And since we were already hungry, where else did we go than hit the grills for some Taiwanese BBQ and open a few bottles of Taiwanese beer!!!:

Despite smelling like smoke, I thoroughly enjoyed the food. It was totally YUMMY!!!

We were supposed to go riding on scooters and go stargazing. However, it was raining and that would’ve been unsafe with the weather. So intead, most of us checked out another thing that Kenting was famous for…

Yup, you’re right!

Kenting’s also famous for their transvestite/la-mei (hot sister)/acrobatic shows!

Hence, for a mere NT$200 (+NT$100 for a bottle of Heineken), we saw a transvestite strut her stuff both by lip-synching on the mike and doing acrobats on the steel pole…

Saw a 60-year old betel-nut chewing stunt man do courageous stunts including jumping into a circle full of knives:
Believe it or not, we were more worried for his safety than he was… imagine, he was over 50 years old!!! It was indeed a heart-stopping show.

And!

Seeing our friend being stripped to his underwear and fondled by the la-mei (hot babe):

Pictures a bit blurry, but hey, you get the picture.

So funny, we thought she was going to even strip off his briefs!

Now, that’s going to be a REAL show!!! 😀

Haha, after that cool treat, we did a bit of dancing and tried out some pole dancing (to no avail) and then chose to go around town and have a beer.

As a result, we chose a bar which featured a pretty cool live band and spent hours dancing to the beats of modern music!

Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeehaaaaaaah!

Super-DUPER FUN!

The next day, it was still raining, so instead of trying out the banana boat and go snorkeling, we instead went to an indoor amusement park at Caesar Park’s Waterworld:

It was pretty cool.

For two hours, we attempted to form the longest salbabida line going down the slide (we realized the more people going the slide were, the faster we went) and managed to get 6 people going down all at the same time. We also went down a UFO-like slide several times, which made us feel we’re being flushed down the toilet.

Overall, it was fun because of the company. During the trip, I’ve made a lot of new friends, many of them from various countries. For example, Spain, Italy, Taiwan, US, Brazil and more! It was really interesting doing all these fun things with them, and actually, am still in close touch with some of them via MSN.

And to top this exciting Kenting trip, we even managed to drape our yellow raincoats and goggles…

And try out our driving skills on the go-kart race track!
VROOOM… VROOOOM…. VRRRRRRRROOOOOOOOOOOM!

The floors were slippery, mud and dirt blew into my face, and I was such a mess, but it was tons of fun! Especially since I can’t really drive, so thankfully, the instructions were really simple (stop and brake).

So overall, despite the rain and bad weather, we still managed to have fun in Kenting. People are already MSNing and asking me where the next trip would be. We couldn’t just wait. So yeah, this was my krazy Kenting weekend, and looking forward to the next succeeding weekends as well!

Hell, what happened to my slowing down?!

But yeah, my life’s been on full speed for the past couple of weeks, and will go on overdrive in a few more weeks. As indicated earlier, changes are afoot on both my personal and professional life, so in a way, I move forward with a bit of anxiousness and trepidation, as well as excitement and hope.

Please pray for me, and hope that I can get a stronger foothold in my life. 🙂

And hopefully, by tomorrow, I can spare enough time to finish my commentary of Myanmar, if I don’t get distracted by other parts of my life.

C’est la vie!