One of the weirdest things I found myself enjoying on my trip back to the states was Taco Bell. I’ve never liked their food. I still don’t. But it reminds me of high school.
Too bad Jason wasn’t there, too.
I thought I’d seen everything in Taiwan’s English cram school market. Recently, I’ve had an experience that shows how naive I (still) am. I can’t really get into any details online, but here’s the gist: A school owner offered to sell her school’s students.
In general, when an English buxiban changes hands, the going rate is about the amount of tuition the students can be expected to pay in a single financial quarter. Thus, if a school is charging 3000NT per month and it has 200 students, then it would be worth 3000NT * 3 * 200 = 1.8 million NT. Location, curriculum and reputation obviously factor in as well, but these things are generally reflected in the school’s student numbers.
I can understand this. A school’s value is definitely dependent on the amount of tuition money it brings in, and while most schools lose some students as the result of replacing any teachers or making any other large changes, most students usually stay. Especially if the teachers stay, and the curriculum is left intact, it makes sense for students to continue. Why bother looking for another place to study if there’s a good chance that things will be fine?
I just can’t wrap my brain around this one. Say one owner decides to “sell” the kids studying at his or her school to some random other school owner who can’t attract students through conventional means. I suppose it’s possible to get them to go initially, if the first owner is pushy enough about it. If the first owner tells the children’s parents, “Sorry, we’re going out of business, but my buddy at another school will teach them for the rest of their semesters,” the parents would be justifiably upset, but they’ll probably take what they can get since they’ve already paid. The problem is, their kids will almost definitely get shortchanged educationally, and they’ll resent it. I can’t see that many staying long enough to ever pay tuition to the school owner who “bought” them.
I know education, even public education, is a business. But this is out there.
While getting dressed for work today, I noticed a new house guest! Right by my wardrobe, there was a gecko!
Geckos aren’t very big, but they’re great. They clean houses of pests, they don’t bite people like spiders do, and they aren’t nasty like cockroaches.
Something was wrong with Geckers, though. l stepped towards him and he didn’t even react. Oh, no! Stuff’s always dying in my apartment. It is nice that the only two cockroaches I’ve ever seen in here have been belly-up, dried up and dead on the carpet, but that’s just not a just fate for such a noble creature as this lizard!
I used to vacuum every couple of weeks, but with the trip to New Hampshire and everything, I let it go for about a month and a half, and my room was just too dusty. With a heavy heart, I went to get a kleenex to use for picking up the dead lizard. I got back to my room and carefully reached for it. It was soft! It reacted a little bit! Geckers wasn’t dead! I hurried to the bathroom for a paper cup, and put a bit of water in it. Then I put one end by Geckers and prodded him gently towards it with the kleenex I was holding in the other. Very slowly, for a gecko, he scrabbled into the cup.
He swished around a bit, and huge clumps of dust came off, but then he just went limp. Yikes. I took the cup out to my patio, and poured the contents, lizard and all, onto the tiles, next to a plant. Slowly, but surely, he dried out in the sun and actually managed to start foraging a bit. An while later, I checked back in a full recovery had been made! He was so startled by the patio screen opening that he ran about three feet up the wall, with the celerity that only a gecko can. Yay!
Oh, how the mighty have fallen. And to think, I used to consider Reddit a place for enlightened, rational discussion.
I’ve replaced Reddit’s former position on my blogroll with Y-combinator’s Hacker News.
Related Post: Good God are There a Lot of Morons on Digg
Suntech shares have become compelling enough that I’ve decided to sell my United Fire&Casualty position. When I have more time, I’ll update this post with why.
03/03/2008 Sold 50 UFCS @ 34.6006
03/03/2008 Bought 47 STP @ 36.9
Juan Enriquez is the founding director of the Harvard Business School Life Sciences Project, a widely published expert on topics from the technical (global nucleotide data flow) to the sociological (gene research and national competitiveness), a former member of Celera Genomics founder Craig Venter’s marine-based genetic data collection team, and former CEO of Mexico City’s Urban Development Corporation and chief of staff for Mexico’s secretary of state. In the past, he played a role in reforming Mexico’s domestic policy and helped negotiate a cease-fire with Zapatista rebels. Here’s his TED talk on genomics. I enjoyed it.
It’s about time Brendan got some love for his skills! When he showed me around Beijing the summer before last, I was amazed at his Chinese. To me, he sounded completely indistinguishable from a native Beijinger. Admittedly, coming from Taiwan, the Beijing accent is a bit hard for me to judge, but there were other signs. When got in a taxi on the way to a punk concert, the cab driver was in a pissy mood. Within a minute or two, though, Brendan’s chit-chat seemed to have to guy at ease. Even though we didn’t know how to get to our location, the guy was smiling and chatting cheerily with us. Then there’s his disturbingly large vocabulary of characters. Despite the fact that he lives in Beijing, he seemed to have an eidetic knowledge of traditional characters, and their etymology over the couple thousand years.
At the time, my thought was, “this guy’s an animal“. Now, the China Daily seems to think so, too:
Anyone who has been in Beijing for a while knows how the taxi drivers behave - they talk a lot about everything. Hence the other day, Brendan O’Kane, an Irish American who has been living in Beijing for the past four years, was not surprised that the cabbie started chatting even before he’d gotten comfortable in his seat.
For about 10 minutes, the driver tried to convince him that “foreigners can never really learn Chinese”.
O’Kane was amused. Apparently, the taxi driver had assumed he was a Chinese. Dark brown haired, O’Kane is of medium height and has a slim figure. He admits that from time to time, people in China mistaken him as a Uygur.
“I am American,” says the 24-year-old in articulated Mandarin, as clearly and fluently as one might expect from a native speaker.
The taxi driver was suspicious. For a while, he threw several glances back at his passenger.
China Daily: Linguist left speechless
This is a demonstration of David’s new Adsotrans plugin. Below is a copy of 85度C’s drink menu. Click on any Chinese words you can’t read to see a popup with both pinyin and an English translation. You can also edit translations. I’m interested in hearing how you like these popups compared to those previously on my blog. Unfortunately, while this plugin is installed, my old pop-ups will be broken. There’s one on my Chinese blog to see for comparison, though. Hover your mouse over the English words in this post.
招牌冰咖啡
美式冰咖啡
冰巧克力牛奶
冰拿鐵
冰卡布奇諾
冰摩卡可可
冰焦糖瑪琪朵
冰法式榛果拿鐵
冰法式焦糖拿鐵
招牌熱咖啡 美式熱咖啡
熱巧克力牛奶
熱拿鐵
熱卡布奇諾
熱摩卡可可
熱焦糖瑪琪朵
熱法式榛果拿鐵
熱法式焦糖拿鐵
烏龍煎茶
茉莉鮮綠茶
大吉嶺紅茶
蔓香梅果釀
多多綠茶
梅果綠茶
葡萄柚綠茶
韓式柚子茶
健康梅果醋
檸檬梅子
鮮桔茶
烏龍煎茶
茉莉鮮綠茶
大吉嶺紅茶
梅果綠茶
韓式柚子茶
檸檬梅子
鮮桔茶
英式奶茶
布丁奶茶
杏仁牛奶
鮮奶茶
阿華田
英式奶茶
布丁奶茶
杏仁牛奶
鮮奶茶
阿華田
芒果雪泥
卡布冰沙
拿鐵冰沙
摩卡冰沙
黑炫冰沙
香橙抹茶冰沙
What do you think of the adsotrans plugin? What would you change if you could?
Note: Todd’s got this drink menu up on his blog (where I found it). It’s straight text, and it’s not undergoing constant revisions!
From the first time I played Super Mario Bros., I’ve always loved platform games. Unfortunately, the genre has been pretty dead ever since Gex. Fez, from Montreal-based start-up Kokoromi, looks ready to change that. The game is so creative that words just don’t do it justice.
Related: Lead designer, Phil Fish gives an interview on Fez.
Imagine my delight when I heard that there would be a Poker Tournament at Dartmouth! I really used to enjoy playing poker back in the day, before it was cool. For a while, during my senior year at UCBoulder, my friend Matt and I were both writing software to study Texas Hold’em and regularly going to the casinos in the few mountain towns in Colorado were they’re legal. It was a lot of fun.
After graduating and moving abroad, though, I just didn’t have any chances to play for several years. In fact, the only game I can remember playing in my entire time in Taiwan was the “penny” game I set up a couple of weeks ago. It wasn’t a huge priority to find a poker game or anything, but I was definitely stoked about hearing of a tournament.
It was a zero dollar buy in, with only gift certificates as prizes– a fun tournament. Potato chips and random junk food were at every table. After checking with Sonia to make sure I was allowed to play, I eagerly headed over to the basement room in which it was being held. I showed up about 10 minutes early, and sat down at the one table that already had a few guys seated around it. They seemed oddly tense for being at a fun game, but they were all pretty friendly. Soon, more and more people came streaming into the room, until eventually about dozen tables were full, with eight to ten people seated at each.
It was a no-limit Hold ‘em tournament. We started with a “dollar” (i.e. white chip) small blind, and a four dollar big blind. According to the organizers, the blind would double every 20 minutes, so we couldn’t dawdle too much. That wasn’t a problem at my table.
On the very first hand, four people at my table went all-in. I couldn’t believe it. Either they had all gotten some remarkably lucky hands, or I was at a table full of maniacs. I sat the madness out, knowing I wasn’t throwing my chips away on a sub-par hand, but also knowing that nearly half my table’s chips would soon be in the hands of whoever won that hand. And so they were. After he had all the chips, he just leaned on the rest of us, threatening to put someone all-in on nearly every hand, bullying us out of the blind bids.
After the deal had gone around four more times, I was down to two-thirds of my initial number of chips. I was starting to think it would be worth it to bluff, which would have been credible at that point, when I got a great pair of hole-cards, AQ suited. I bet 10, and called a raise of 30 to see the flop. There was an ace, a jack and a three. With the high pair, I bet again, and one of my opponents called, and the one with all the money put me all-in. In the end my pair of aces beat his pair of jacks, my pile of chips was about the size of his, and the other guy was knocked out of the game. At this point, only three of us were left at my table. Not even a single person from any of the other tables in the room had been eliminated yet.
In the next hand, I had garbage, and the opponent without many chips went all in and lost. Then the game organizers announced to us that the blinds would be doubled to 2 and 4. Seeing as my entire table’s chips were divided between me and one other guy, this struck me as funny, but we kept going. Within 5 more hands, I had about 80% of the chips. Then Sonia and her friend showed up and said hi to me. I think the were a little surprised to my table mostly empty, and most of the chips in front of me.
About that time, the organizers noticed we were down to two people, and a couple of the other tables had eliminated players, so they sent us to those tables to take their places! It wasn’t even fair. I showed up at the new with about the vast majority of the entire table I’d come from. They were weaker players than my previous opponents, too. They were betting on inside draws. Some of them were trying to bluff on every other hand. They weren’t raising when they had winners. It took me 15 minutes to wipe out the entire table. By that time, more people were getting eliminate around the room, and people were getting consolidated to fewer and fewer tables.
To make a long story short, the competition was weak. Extremely weak. I knocked out a dozen more people and moved on to the final table with dozens of times more chips than we’d each started with. Unfortunately, that wasn’t quite the right impression to make. As soon as I sat down, one guy at the table said, “Woah, this guy must be a pro!”
I said I wasn’t a pro. Nobody believed me. Somehow, they figured that a professional gambler would come to their campus for their zero dollar buy in poker gave, load up on free soda and Doritos, and try to win a small gift certificate instead of going to a casino, getting comped steaks and cocktails, and winning real money.
“What year are you?” asked another.
I answered honestly that I wasn’t a student at all, and that I was playing in place of my girlfriend I was vising. That didn’t go over very well.
“This is a student tournament!”
“You can’t just invade it and take advantage of it!”
They were really competitive about this game. Admittedly, I’ve never been to a tournament before, and some of them might not have realized that this one was open to non-students. Still, I’ve been in casino games with hundreds of dollars on the table and I’ve never seen people get so worked up like this before. It was really eye-opening. If Sonia had been there, I’m sure she could have smoothed things over, especially being a UGA. As it was, though, it just wasn’t worth ticking everyone off to win. I couldn’t really walk away, either. They’d still feel like I’d wreaked the game.
So, I started doing randomized bluffs, but far too loosely. I continued to bet and play good hands, but I also played every single hand with a diamond of 7 or less. Amazingly, people became more and more talkative as my pile of chips dwindled, and soon they were asking me all about living in Taiwan, and what I thought of their school. Within 15 minutes, I had eliminated myself in what I hope looked like a completely natural performance. Then, without the gift certificate, but in a great mood, I headed over to the animation lab to find Sonia, Adelle and Dawn.
Doubting to shuo
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