Just came back from a two-day business trip to Kaohsiung and Taichung. It's been awhile since the last time I took a domestic flight. In the first day, with three colleagues, I took an airplane of Far Eastern Air Transport to Kaohsiung. Lot of empty seats left on the plane and only drinks were served. The cabin crew demonstrated the safety guidance, which I have not seen for a long time. (If you followed the link to their official web site, you might find, as I did, it is poorly constructed.)

Howard Plaza Hotel Kaohsiung was the hotel where the kick-off party was held and where we stayed for the night. The photo in the left was taken right out of the window of my room. It's a swimming pool on the eleventh floor. My roommate, who is in charge of the party, told me that they had swum in it before. I can imagine that must be like in heaven, but of course not in a winter time like now, which would probably freeze one to numb.

We went to Liuho Night Market for a late dinner after the kick-off party, which was full of unexpected incidents and my roommate was not very satisfied with it. I also made a mistake myself. I accidentally pressed the redraw button when what I wanted to do was to show the winners. Luckily, the mistake was recoverable. The program kept history in it's log, from which I could manually dig up the original winners and update them back to the database. To prevent this error from happening again, I had to make a change to the program so when trying to redraw a prize, a confirmation dialogue box will come up. As a fool-prove protection.

After a three-hour drive on the highway, we arrived in Howard Prince Hotel Taichung for the second kick-off party in the next day. The photo was taken right out of the window of the room where the event was held. It's the top floor of the building, seventeenth. The photo shows that the hotel is surrounded by a lot of farms. A colleague in Taichung told me they spent twenty to thirty minutes to get there from downtown. Such a remote location.
On the contrary to the previous one, the party was full of excitement because of excellent hosts and shows presented by well prepared employees. My roommate didn't say anything but I could tell he was quite satisfied with it. And the lucky draw program I operated ran without any glitch.

The big poster for the 2005 kick-off party was hung on the stage. I took it after the party was over. Because next year is the Chicken year, the logo for the party has three chickens dancing on a big "G", which means 3G. The pronunciation of "G" is very similar to "chicken" in Chinese.