Blown home

Typhoon Haitang has blown through Taiwan and buried itself on the mainland. As category 5 hurricanes go this one was surprisingly mild, I’m told. The eye skirted Taipei to the south so we missed the worst, though it did get damn windy there for a few hours. Trees that were individually lashed down were uprooted and rows of parked scooters were scattered like Matchbox cars, but there was very little flooding and no broken windows that I could see. Frankly, it was anticlimactic — which is probably exactly how extreme weather should be. From my hotel window I could see a lone 7-11 convenience store. It was my little measure of how bad things were getting. It never closed.

Unrelated. If a cell phone company can know enough about your whereabouts on the global network to charge you international roaming rates then surely the technology exists to warn callers that a call recipient is in a radically different time zone, no? It would be great to receive an alert like “Are you sure you want to dial [name]? It is 3 AM in his timezone right now.” Oh, and to the person who called for a password in the middle of the night: I have virtually no recollection of our conversation. How’s that for password security?

Time to go home.