How do you find the best? Whether it’s an apartment, a tenant, a job, or an employee, I don’t believe the answer is classifieds. As I wrote a few days ago, classifieds tend to aggregate the worst of what a market has to offer, since the poor offers remain while the good ones [...]

As a partner of Pagewood English school, one of my responsibilities is finding top-notch EFL teachers. We’ve hired two this year, and it wasn’t nearly as easy as I had expected.
In years past, the standard methods of finding English teachers were primitive at best. In bigger cities, a lot of companies sent people [...]

I’ve written before about the crazy English names people in Taiwan often go by. This year, though, there’s something entirely new for me.
I’ve had students before who often changed their English name, one of whom even went so far as to take a new one every month. However, I hadn’t ever had a [...]

Regular readers of this site will be aware of my feelings about the, uh… “creative” romanization schemes used in different parts of Taiwan. As a newcomer, it really did make life a bit more difficult not having any clue how to pronounce various street signs or MRT station names. It appears that the [...]

Several months ago, Glen Clifford interviewed me over the phone for a piece on blogging in Taiwan for Centered on Taipei. It has appeared in the September 2008 issue. It’s also online in PDF form, and an expanded HTML version.
The article includes quotations from Michael Turton, Scott Sommers, David Reid and myself. [...]

I have to say, this is a good week not to be back in Colorado.

It looks like bystanders are getting herded up, too.
And what’s up with the storm trooper look?

Recently, I’ve found myself in a position to be hiring EFL teachers for the first time. While I did gain some management experience as the owner of a three crew house painting business back when I was trying to pay my way through college, this is mostly uncharted territory for me. With the [...]

I’ve been living abroad for a while, and it’s given me a slightly different view of stuff at home than I’d have if I’d stayed. On my way to Boston I had to stop at a gas station. A couple of things leaped out at me. The first was the price of [...]

I made a thoroughly unpleasant first visit to Boston today. You know, I was totally predisposed to like the place, too. I loved the accents in Good Will Hunting. My college buddy’s girlfriend who visited from Harvard was awesome. Just their stand on Pop vs. Soda vs Tawnick is sweet.
The problem [...]

Solar Power, it’s not just for granola-chomping hippies anymore. Solar power generation has been increasing exponentially for decades, but as futurist Raymond Kurzweil once said, nobody notices exponential growth until it hits the “knee of the curve“. Fortunately for us and our planet, it nearly has.
Between 2000 and 2004, the increase in worldwide [...]