Dinner at Julia's

Party at Julia's House

Southward Hose Storefront

In the house.  Shoes are left at the door.

This year we were invited to the home of Julia Lon for a New Years dinner party.   

She , and her husband Franco, are the owners of Southward Hose & Engineering and has been a good friends since we came to Malaysia.

The party was an open-house which was frequented by neighbors and extended family members from the other end of Malaysia.

Julia did all the cooking because as she said “all the caterers were already taken”.   

The food was great and there was also a family sized Prosperity Salad.  

The Prosperity Toss

Tossing the Prosperity Salad supposedly brings luck and wealth to the tossers.   

Beer, wine, and Whiskey were plentiful which was a nice change from the normal Muslim alcohol-free dietary standards.  

Most Malay-Chinese are Buddhist but there are a few Christians.  Julia is Buddhist.

Now for the Salad Dressing

We were welcomed like family and even though we knew her sons from the store, it was nice have longer chats and meet her parents, cousins, and other friends.  

She was born in this area and grew up here so she had plenty of local friends visit.

Outside dining in the 'Front Yard'

The Chinese work ethic is very driven to succeed and be rich.  The most common thing we were asked by the young kids was what our jobs were, how much does a yacht cost, and how are we able to sail and travel like we do.

For us, it is always nice when someone welcomes travelers who are far from home to participate in a small part of their lives and culture.  We have had this experience from Panama to Fiji to Australia and it really makes you feel like part of the community.

We hope to be able pay it forward to other travelers that we meet in our future.

Add caption

CNY 2020

Joss Incense Sticks

100 meter Prosperity Salad

A quarter of the Malaysian population is of Chinese descent.   

Needless to say, Chinese New Year is always a big deal.   

We have seen some nice celebrations while we have been here and this year was no different.   

The entire Spring Celebration takes over 2 weeks.

The area where we are (Sitiawan) is kind of rural and small town so public CNY events are not super huge but they do a good job.

This year there were Giant Joss Sticks that were lit at midnight New Years Eve. 

They finally burned out a day later.  

The higher the toss, the better

There was fire dancing at night on the floating pavilion at the Marina Island Hotel.

Tossing of the Prosperity Salad (Yusheng), Lion Dances, and fireworks were also done by the ferry terminal to Pangkor Island.   

Tossing the Prosperity Salad supposedly brings luck and wealth to the tossers and the higher you toss, the more luck and wealth.

.   

Fire Dancing on the floating pavillion

Drummers at Marina Island

Dancing Lions,

Remnants of the Prosperity Tossed Salad

Smoldering Joss Sticks.  Almost finished

Detail Sanding – The Arsenal

Bosch - Modified Chinese - Hutchins - B&D Mouse and  2"

It is always best to use the biggest sanding pad possible to minimize the amount of ripple in the surface.   The 8” sanding/buffing grinder works well for this.

When the surface gets more intricate and curvy, a smaller disc has to be used otherwise the edge of the sander will cut too deep into the gelcoat.  I have 5” and 6” pads in both stick-on (Velcro) and glue-on pads that can be put on either my electric or pneumatic sanders.

One thing about post-sanding the gelcoat is the amount of dust created.  I really like to wet sand since it minimizes the airborne dust and also washes the dust out of the sandpaper, making it last longer and work better.

 

Hutchins 7544

As explained in a prior post, using an electric sander with water is not such a big deal because of our power setup.  However, since now have an air compressor, the pneumatic sanders are lighter and definitely  the way to go.

Water Injection Adapter

I bought a Hutchins 7544 water injected pneumatic sander since it seemed like a good way to go.  These cost $350 on Amazon but I got a used one on ebay for around $100.   It worked well and can be used with all pad combinations 5”/6”/Stick-on/Glue-on.  After seeing how it was designed, I felt that and random orbital with vacuum extraction could be used as a water injection sander. 

The Hutchins has a small tube that injects the water through the holes in the sandpaper.  Most of the time, I use sheets of sandpaper cut and glued on to the disc so the water just runs out from around the disc and onto the surface anyway which works fine.

Internals of the Chinese Sander

My hack was to connect the water hose to the vacuum port and pump water into the sander.  I bought a $35 Chinese sander for the modification.  It worked well but works better if you sand with the water tube up so the water runs down onto the surface.

2" Pneumatic with velcro and glue discs

Sometimes a 5” disc doesn’t quite cut it so I bought a 2” pneumatic sander.  This is ideal for most small radius corners and close in edging.  This sander doesn’t have any real way to inject the water so I tried attaching the water hose to the frame but in the end, it was much easier to just hold the water hose and dribble it on the surface.   

These sanders come with Velcro pads which are fine but since I also need glue-on, I took a razor blade and cut off all the Velcro,and melted the remaining bits with a torch to make a glue-on pad.  Both pads have worked great except for some cheesy sandpaper from Amazon that just gets destroyed within a minute from the vibration.

Adding a Google Photo Album to Blogger

As explained in the previous post, some work-around needs to be done to regain control of your Google Photo Albums on Google Blogger.

I am mostly doing this post to help me remember how to do this, but hopefully someone else will find this post helpful.

So, if this does not interest you, please feel free to skip the lesson.

This method works when you add albums links to pages but not posts.  I don't know why.

Step 1. 

Insert an image like you normally would do in Blogger.  Insert the image that you would like to have as your album cover.

The New Album

Now you have a picture on the page but not the album.

This is where the interesting part happens:

Step 2.

Go to the Google Photo Album and Click the 3 little dots in the upper right hand corner of the album.

This menu should appear:

Step 3.

Select the 'Share album' link and you should have this:

 
Step 4.

Click the "Create link" button and you will be given a link that is the link for the entire album.

Step 4.

Copy the link.


Step 5.

Now go back to the Blogger page where you inserted the cover picture of your album.


Click on HTML code button and look for the part that is in a format like this below.  Look just before imageanchor="1"

The highlighted text above is the location where the browser will take you when you click on the picture.

Before editing, the browser takes you to a picture, after changing the link to the album shared link, the browser will take you to that shared album instead.

Step 6.

Replace the original yellow highlighted HTML code with the shared link that you copied from the album.  Only replace the part between the parentheses and leave the parentheses

It should look like this:

You can also edit this section of HTML to change the size that the album will be on your page.  In the example above, it is 150 pixels high by 200 pixels wide.

When done, Click the 'Compose' button, the 'Save' button, and press on.

One last thing, remember to turn on Share for your album.

That's it.  Hope I didn't geek out too much.

Photo Albums on Blogger

I started doing this blog in 2012 while in Mexico.

I really didn't like what I had seen in other sailing blogs because they were too much based on drama.  It seemed like every day, there was a different drama unfolding like dragging at anchor, breaking something, bad weather, etc.

I do not like to get sucked into drama and instead wondered why not discuss anchoring techniques, fixing things, or discussing how not to get in bad weather.

Dave Kane on LIGHTSPEED had a blog that I really liked and was like a mentor on writing a good blog.

Sailors like to keep logs of their journeys, myself included.  I used to upload photos to Google Picasa.  This was a photo album site back in those days that people could link to, or look at, to see what it was like to be out cruising.  No drama, no writing, just photos.

These albums date back to 2008 when we were in St. Maarten and cover our trip down the eastern Caribbean, southern Caribbean, the entire trip up to the Bahamas, to New Jersey, back down the US coast to Key West, the western Caribbean, through the Panama Canal, and Central America.

These albums used to be linked on this blog by a thing that Google calls a widget.  Well, Google has removed Picasa and it's now called Google Photos.  However, now the widget link doesn't work and there is no widget for Google Photos.  Go figure?

So,    thanks to some smart HTML coding people, there is a hack that you can use to put Google Photo Albums on Google Blogger.

I will explain this hack in the next post but for now, these albums have been resurrected under the heading tab named "Photo Albums".

Give them a look-see to get a feel for our 'missing' early cruising years of 2008-2012.

The Hanoi Hilton

The front entrance

Leg irons and sleeping area

No trip to Hanoi for an American would be complete without a visit to see the Hỏa Lò Prison or what was sarcastically referred to as the Hanoi Hilton.  The prison is now a museum.  

 

The name 'Maison Centrale' in French means Central House.  This is where the most dangerous prisoners were housed.

Like the Opera House, it was built over a hundred years ago.   It held political dissidents who opposed French colonization.

 

Electric wire and broken glass atop the wall

The conditions during the French rule were extremely brutal.  Prisoners were packed into small rooms and bound with chains and rebar leg irons.  The conditions reminded us of our visit to the Khmer Rouge S-21 prison in Phnom Penh described in a previous blog.  There was torture and even a Guillotine on site.  Much of this remains today in the museum.

This is the real deal.  Left by the French

In 1945, there was a famous escape right out of the movie Shawshank Redemption where 16 death row prisoners cut a hole in a sewer pipe and escaped. 

 

They later became independence leaders and later officials of the newly formed government. 

 

The sewer pipe used in the 1945 escape

During the Vietnam War, American pilots were held here for interrogation and internment.

 

The most famous prisoner here was Senator John McCain.  There are storyboards displayed showing that the pilots were treated very well and that their activities were like those at summer camp.   

Anti-American Propaganda

 

We know from debriefings from released prisoners that it is total propaganda.  There was torture and harsh conditions but not as bad as when the french ran the place.

See how much fun it was to be a POW

They even have a flight suit displayed that is claimed to be John McCain’s even though he said that his was shredded from his ejection and that it was cut off of him by the medics because of his injuries. 

 

They probably just bought a flight suit on ebay. 

The John McCain Storyboard

Much of the prison has been torn down replaced by apartments.  The only original part that remains is the museum.

 

More Propaganda

 

The apartments that replaced much of the prison