Toshuō

The newest version of the Sinosplice Tooltip plugin for WordPress is out! I chipped in and helped John and Andy a little bit this time with code from my pinyin tools, so it now displays pinyin with tone marks in its pop-ups.

If you have a wordpress blog and you ever put Chinese phrases into your posts, this is definitely worth checking out. With the plugin, you can enter translations or pinyin to pop-up when when your readers mouse over the Chinese characters in your post.

Here’s an example: 中秋節

You can download the plugin at its page and you can see a usage and installation tutorial on Sinosplice.

Over the years, I’ve offered an extra bed or at least a couch to a number of online friends who have stopped by Taipei or wherever I happened to be living. I’m not sure my grandmother would approve, but I think the conventional wisdom about is wrong on this topic. The risks are mostly over-stated and the benefits are often overlooked. People are mostly good and on the whole and as far as I can tell, helping travelers out is a net gain for both the traveler and the host.

The online friends I’ve invited over fit into three groups. Some, such as Brian, keep mostly to themselves, spend a lot of time on their laptops blogging or doing whatever it is they do and don’t really impact my routine one way or the other. Without exception, they’re always good for an interesting conversation or two. Hosting them is definitely a net positive. The second group are people like Darin. They make plans to come and I offer them a place to stay, but then they end up canceling the trip. Nothing is lost and nothing is gained… except maybe an increased chance of them offering me a place to stay when I visit the country where they live. The third group is those like my friend Wayne who end up becoming great friends and hanging out with me regularly for months or even years. That’s not only worth it, but it’s enough to upset the risk of a really bad guest (which I haven’t experienced yet).

One other thing that has been absolutely wonderful is that an unusually large number of people have let me crash at their places. John, when I visited Shanghai, PR when moving in Taipei, Matt before I left Colorado and now Ben in Kunming. I can’t really draw any connection between me having other guests at my place and them inviting me to stay at theirs, but if I did believe in earthly karma this experience would certainly reinforce that belief.

Matt has republished some of our best iDrone posts:

Writing an accumulator generating function in Ruby (Mark Wilbur)
Thoughts on the Subset Sum Problem (Matt Ball)
On Google’s Evilness (John Pasden)
The Perfect Programming Language (Matt Ball)

We had some serious geekery going there while it lasted.

A couple days ago, Ryan and John pointed out to me that they had some usability issues with the color of the links on my site when you hover over them. I had been making them white, but that was just too hard to read on the light background of the site, especially for on some displays.

In a nod to all of the help and advice John’s given me, I immediately set the a:hover style to “Sinosplice Green“, i.e., the background color of John’s site that he’s been using since the bronze age of blogging. I was been busy with the school, and Google Docs had basically wreaked a gigantic curriculum document I’d been working on. There just wasn’t time to think about it. I just had to pick something that was readable. The only problem is that that particular color (#363) is ugly on this site. After giving my students a few new chapters in their textbook and getting their CDs burned yesterday, I finally had a little bit of time to turn my attention to fixing up my site a bit.

I ended up choosing just plain old blue for my link hover color. But, once I start fixing things, it’s hard to stop. As soon as I settled on blue for my links, I started getting irritated by other usability problems. For one, there were forty comments on my post about SEO. Most of them were from people, but a lot of comments were also just trackbacks from other people linking to the site. It was kind of hard for me to follow the discussion thread and read through them. In other words it was time to edit my comments.php and see what could be done.

Here’s what I came up with:

1. Comments are now numbered.
2. Comments made by me are now light blue, #eef, to be precise.
3. I’m not quite sure what the difference between a trackback and a pingback is, but they’re pink now.
4. All other comments still alternate between normal (#eec) and lighter (#ffd) shades.

Now, it’s easy to tell refer to comments by number, it’s clear which of them are from the me and which are from guests, and it’s easy to skip over trackbacks and pingbacks while reading a thread. I’m pretty happy with it, but feedback and suggestions about the layout are more than welcome.

For those curious about how I did it, I’ve posted the code below: continue reading…

Toshuo.com is in the process of changing hosts. Soon it will all be hosted on Dream Host, thus making it one of the cool kids again. I’ll have over 1.7 terabytes of bandwidth a month, too! Details will follow shortly!

Update: The migration is complete! Toshuo.com, as well as all of my other sites and the sites I’m hosting for other people have been moved. Bandwith is now virtually unlimited, and there’s over 175GB of disk space allocated to me as well. It’s also a $2/month cheaper than Hostgator, and automatically comes with full shell and support for Ruby on Rails, among other things. Thanks to John, for prodding me to make the switch.

When John recently designed a “please speak Chinese” T-shirt, I was immediately tempted to buy one. I always love it when locals talk to me in Chinese, instead of trying to use English first.

请讲普通话。

Putting this on a shirt worn by a foreigner is cool on multiple levels. Not only does it demonstrate that the foreigner can speak Chinese, but it is also a play on a PRC campaign that used the exact same line to encourage the Chinese to use Mandarin as opposed to Cantonese or any other local dialects. The only problem is that the shirt would be weird to wear in Taiwan. Nobody here uses the phrase 普通话, or even simplified characters for that matter.

As usual, John had a great idea that was in serious need of some Taiwan-ification. That’s where TC came in. He reminded me that there’s a completely analogous phrase that was plastered all over Taiwan for decades. It was even used for the same reason- getting Taiwanese people to speak in Mandarin instead of the Minnan, or “Taiwanese” dialect.

講國語

I decided on the spot that it was time to design a Speak Mandarin shirt that can be worn with pride on either side of the strait. And in TC’s honor, I made one more shirt fitting for a foreigner who actually became Taiwanese.
(Readers have pointed out that former president Lǐ Dēnghuī introduced this phrase 新台灣人. Later, Mǎ Yīngjiǔ, a Hong Kong man by birth, gained popularity in proclaiming himself to be “New Taiwanese”.)

新台灣人

You can see a full list of my designs at the newly created Toshuo Shop.

Over the last year or so, I’ve been thinking about making an online drill for Mandarin tone pairs. I don’t think I’m very unique in that I had the four tones down within in pretty short time as long as they were in isolation, but struggled with pairs of tones for a long, long time. The homework book for Far East Everyday Chinese I included a pretty useful drill for pairs of tones, that got the wheels turning in my head. It was really useful for me, and it’s not really anything that would have been that difficult to put online. Being the procrastinator that I am though, it’s still not done.

Fortunately for all of us though, John had the exact same idea years earlier and got it done. He just put up a new section, titled “Mandarin Chinese Tone Pair Drills” ,on his site.

The main idea behind these drills is that learning tones of individual characters is not enough. Learning tone combinations is the key. Mastering those combinations necessarily involves extensive practice with tone pairs. A mastery of tone pairs will lead to significant progress with any number and combination of tones in succession. Although I was not fully cognizant of the exact process at the time, I believe it was this method which lead to my own successes in correctly producing tones of Mandarin Chinese in succession.

It’s very similar to what I was thinking of, but it’s clear that he put far more work into the presentation than I ever would have. It has neat little graphics with mirror effects, little flash buttons for each mp3, and better yet, it’s also offered as a free download. It was clearly the result of a lot of hard work. Thanks, John!

You move me —
You move me —
Open sea and city lights
Busy streets and dizzy heights
You call me —
You call me —

-The Analogue Kid

It’s 2AM, and my last night in Shanghai is drawing to an end. It’s hard to imagine that in half a day’s time my vacation will be over and I’ll be flying back to Taiwan. People say that when time flies when you’re having fun, but in this case it didn’t. This has been the best vacation I’ve ever had, and yet my two weeks here have felt more like two months.

After an enjoyable day of reading The Diamond Age, I met up with John and his wife and had some 火鍋 for dinner. Unlike most of the 火鍋 I’ve had before, it wasn’t buffet. Still, it was extremely good. Heck, I always love that kind of food. I also saw an interesting before dinner.

I arrived at our meeting place pretty early, so went walking around a bit. Nestled between skyscrapers, I found a relatively large Catholic church. The architecture looked like it wasn’t that far off of what one would find at home, or in Latin America. There were also some fountains in front of it. At the time, it really seemed like an amazing sight. In the middle of so many commercial buildings, in an area where I’d least expect it, was a a church. It was a nice looking one, too. I really wish I’d been able to get a snapshot of it. It wouldn’t have made quite the picture that the Starbucks in the Forbidden City did, but it would have been good.

After dinner, we went back to his place, and watched Ice Age 2- a pretty entertaining movie. Just as I was about to take off, I finally saw Lennet. I’d heard he wanted to ask me some stuff about living in Taiwan when I’d been staying at the apartment before, but he got back late every night and amazingly it was the first time I’d talked to him. I guess he’d lived in Taiwan before, but that was before he could speak much Chinese. Now that he speaks Chinese really well, he’s gonna move back to Taiwan. He was saying something about not letting the Taiwanese “corrupt his Chinese” or get rid of his ability to pronounce “zh”, “sh”, “ch”, “r”, etc… I’m really curious to see how it will go for him. I hope people don’t laugh at his “standard” accent.

Part of me doesn’t want to go to sleep. Right now, I know what’s on my mind. I know what I feel and I know what my plans are. By allowing myself to fall asleep, I’ll be yeilding control to my future self. Who knows how I’ll feel or what I’ll want to do tomorrow? Can I trust my future self to make the most out of my last few hours on the mainland? Sigh… now there’s a healthy line of thought. Bed, it is.

Yesterday was my first whole day in Shanghai, and it was awesome. After showing late the night before and crashing at John’s place, I was psyched enough about finally being here that I was still able to get up pretty early. John had a final in the morning, but after he got back from that, he showed me around the subway system a bit, and we grabbed some lunch. After that, he took me over to the Chinese Pod studio to check the place out. It was quite a bit different than I expected, but still very neat. continue reading…

Chinese Pod has changed quite a bit in the last two and a half months. Some new features have been added, there are many new podcasts, the quality of the podcasts has improved, and there have been several minor but important changes in the lessons since the last time I wrote about them. continue reading…