I always knew it would happen eventually. My boss, who has the fastest motorcycle in Taiwan, broke a leg in an accident. Was it from enjoying his bike’s awesome power to go from 0 to 200kph in four seconds? No. It was from some idiot lady deciding to cut in front [...]

I apologize to everyone for the Chinese being messed up on my site again. Hostgator just moved me to another server so that I won’t be blocked anymore. Just as when I tried out their back-up features earlier, their database settings have corrupted all the Chinese on my blog. Why their default [...]

I got this email from my old friend Mike last week:
I don’t suppose there’s
much going on in Taiwan at Christmas. Do you have any
plans? Do you get a break from teaching? I figure
most people there are Buddhists… do they have
holidays? Maybe the first Buddha’s birthday. I don’t
know.
I guess maybe Christmas [...]

Integrated Chinese 1 (中文聽說讀寫一) is by far the most used introductory Chinese textbook at US colleges. In fact, it was with this book that I began my studies of Chinese as a college freshman. According to the preface, Integrated Chinese uses a modern communicative approach. The book covers about 800 [...]

Just after I finished teaching a 補課 (remedial class), one of the students came up to me. She was a cute little 4th grader and a really outgoing one at that. She said she had a question for me, so I stopped to help her.
Girl: What color is Spiderman?
Me: Well, he’s red, blue [...]

Today on slashdot I saw an article talking about how the DNA of the wolly mammoth has been fully sequenced. This reminds me of another article I read a few years back about Japanese researchers going to Russia and collecting as many frozen mammoth bodies as they could get a hole of.
This is from [...]

I’ve saved up enough money that it’s time to choose another investment. A couple of months ago, I did an analysis on Baidu. At the time, I found the investment very attractive, but I didn’t have enough money to make any investments at the time. A few days ago, I seriously considered [...]

A few days ago, I went back to 台北 to hang out with one of my old co-workers one more time before he went back to America. It was pretty cool to hang out with him, and it turns out he’d been reading my blog. He said he liked the News in Chinese [...]

The backdorm boys have released another video, and here it is. Tian took his copy down, so I linked to a different one.
In this video, the 後舍男生 (The Backdorm Boys) cover a song called 不得不愛, or “Irresistible Love”. I’ve been hearing it quite a bit on the radio recently, especially when riding [...]

As you can see from my browser share statistics from sitemeter, 37% of my readers are still using IE. Unfortunately, over the last week my page hasn’t looked to good from IE. There have been some sidebar and font issues every now and then seeing as I edit primarily with standards-compliant tools. [...]