sleepyheads

taking a nap with olivia...

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look who's talking

for the past couple months now, olivia has been babbling and gabbling away non-stop

i've been trying to get a video of it for quite sometime now, but everytime i approach her when she's going off doing her "talking", she just stops and blankly looks into the camera motionless

well, i tried again a few days ago slowly sneaking up on her and again she stopped and looked at me but then kept on "talking"

check it out...



did she say "papa"?!?! :P

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i know what i want for christmas

just f'ing awesome!

gotta have one!

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olivia to the rescue!

it's a bird...



it's a plane...



it's a super olivia!

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the santiago business trip

i've received a couple messages from people asking me what exactly i do and what i was doing in santiago, chile

for starters, what i do...

i am a program manager for an ems (electronic manufacturing services) company and the business unit that i work for in this company is in charge of designing and contruction tool & dies for metal stamping (with progressive dies being our specialty)

the reason i had to go to santiago was because we built some progressive dies for a company there so we had to go help debug the dies

this is not normal practice to go help debug dies at the customer's end as they normally have their own die makers, but since it was their first time using progressive dies they requested that we go help and support bringing these dies up to production

to put it in layman's terms, we went to help install some "machinery" and "equipment" to produce metal parts

hope it all made sense

if any questions, please do not hesitate to let me know

a few photos...


this is the 400 ton press which our customer bought from taiwan.


another look at the press.


here's a part coming off the die through the press window. this particular part is the window of an oven door. our customer's company manufactures appliances such as ovens, washers and heaters.


rack of the oven part shown above.


on the left are racks of parts which we had ran during the day off of our die. on the ground to the right as some coils of raw material standing by ready for production.


rack of dies.


line of hydraulic presses.


painting line. those parts hanging there are the barrel drums that go in a washer.


formed washer barrel drums ready for the painting line.

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drive-by shooting: guadalajara, mexico

short video taken from inside the taxi on the way to the hotel from the airport...

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drive-by shooting: santiago, chile

videos taken while driving from our hotel to work in santiago, chile. it had been sunny in santiago everyday we were there, but unfortunately the morning i decided to take out my camera and shoot these videos, the sky was overcast so they were not the best shooting conditions.


this was taken about 5 minutes after departing from our hotel. this in an area called providencia, which is more of an upscale district.


still on the same road as last video. at the end of this video, you can see a hill in the background. that's the san cristobal hill.


here we are driving through the heart of downtown santiago along the main road. note, on the 30 seconds mark, we pass by the presidential palace.


we are now in maipu, which is where our customer is located at. this is more of a rural and industrial area.


a couple minutes away from our customer. again, this is more of a rural and industrial area.

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santiago walkabout - part 2

our flight out of santiago was at 8pm and since we had to check out of the hotel by 12pm noon, we had some time to kill. we decided to go up the san cristobal hill located on the edge of downtown santiago...


we walked there from our hotel, which about a 30 minute walk. this is the river that runs along the city. even tho' it has not rained since last july, the current was really strong. i'm assuming it's due to the snow that melts away up in the mountains, altho' they have not had much snow this year either.


we rode the teleferico (cable cart / gondola) to get up to the top of the hill.


video from inside the cart




at the peak, there's a big statue of the virgin mary.


the view of santiago from the peak was spectacular.


here's a video of the view.


we descended from the hill via the funicular.

from the funicular station (at the bottom of the hill located on the other side of the hill where we boarded the teleferico cable cart), we walked back to the hotel which was about an hour walk. as we were walking, we saw a group of young people walking towards us. as they passed us, a couple of them started shouting "ching-chong-ching-chang-ah" and making kung-fu fighting sounds. yup, we've officially experienced south america. guess after all, not much as changed in the past 20 years since i was out here.

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dinner with the santiago gang

on our last night in santiago, the president of the company we were visiting took us and the entire crew out for dinner to celebrate the successful tooling transfer.

meet the crew...



we were treated to argentinian churrasco, which is basically bbq. tell you what tho'. i've had a lot of bbq in my life and this was some of the best bbq i've ever had! also, see that drink on the lower right side of the photo? that's pisco sour. besides wine (which just about every bottle was very good and i don't even really like wine), this is pretty much the national drink in chile. it was very good and strong. it tasted like a very strong margarita.

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