This person seems to have misunderstood the nature of graffiti.

A smiley face over Taoyuan!

Those aren’t stars in your eyes…
“Stellarium” is a useful, free program. Here it shows Venus and Jupiter.

She had a great time - all my friends were really nice to her, and helped me to show her some cool places. I saw a few new places myself, too..

Mum, Leila, Ethan, and their children, shopping in a giant mall in Zhongli.

Exploring Taoyuan city centre

Tasting shui jiao (dumplings) for the first time, near Taipei Main Station.

Taipei City Hall area.

Enjoying the view from Taipei 101.

Looking out across Taoyuan city.

Exploring ceramics at Inge with Sean, Kyle and Leila.

The main Taoyuan city temple.

Visiting the Grand Hotel, Taipei.

Enjoying the decor, before lunch.

Travelling to Hualian County.

Discovering that in one Taiwanese hotel, only midgets can use the facilities (look carefully).

Reaching Toroko Gorge, Hualien.

Can you see mum on the bottom right?

Walking through the corridors of the Toroko.
This part of the road is said to be as ‘twisty as a Chinese dragon’.

Mum with Davie (our friendly host in Hualien) and his daughter Tina.

Stopping for a break at a lake near Hualien City.

Late night shopping in Hualien City with Davie, his son and a friend.

Exploring the beach.

First view of the Pacific Ocean

Myself, mum and Tina near “Cow Mountain”.

Exploring a temple on the East coast.

Back to Taipei. Looking from the Chinese Culture University (YangMingShan).

What’s that little building over there on the left?

Exploring the sulphuric geysers of YangMingShan.

Leila and Mum at an organic farm in YangMingShan.

Lots of wildlife…

Strange buildings in the mist…

Say Cheese…(Kyle, Sean, Leila, Mum and myself).

Kyle treating everyone to a healthy organic meal.

Picking Canna Lilies at YangMingShan.

Underground shopping at Taipei City Mall.

Visiting the Maokong Gondola, Taipei.

This can be found near Chihkan Fort, Tainan…

I’ve been waiting for this exhibition for a month or two, so I went along this week to take a look. At the front door I was welcomed with a free guidebook and several computer games. The exhibition is well staffed, with guides on most exhibits, fluent in Chinese and English. The exhibits themself come from all around the world, from a number of famous digital artists.

Some artists are making a statement; the ‘bingmayong puppets’ for example have an interesting backstory. Others are experimental or geeky, such as HardDisko, the orchestra made from broken hard drives locked into an eternity of spinup cycles, or Khronos, which makes you feel like “Hiro Nakamura” from the TV show “Heroes”. Many exhibits may also look completely different depending on who visited them in the last half hour. You can quite literally leave your own mark on the exhibition - here’s my own brief appearance in one exhibit!

I took along several non-geeky friends, and they had a fun time, so this is definitely suitable for anyone, not just computer geeks. You can find the Red House theater next to the MRT exit (5?), near the ‘Ximen Walker’ statue, on Chengdu Road. I strongly recommend taking advantage of this extremely unusual free exhibition and visiting before it closes on Sunday.

More info here: Taipei Times, Open Play website.

Don’t worry - none of these photos give away the most surprising features of any exhibit.

Read more about his experience (and see some wonderful photos) here!

Thanks Michael!

Michael, Scott, Graeme (thanks to Eva Wai).

But wait! Life will be just fine. Asus has stepped up to fill the gap. What they have produced is not a perfect competitor. The OLPC is aiming for 10-12 hour battery life with a rather slower processor, whereas this new Asus model only aims for 3 hours battery life. However, the EEE has a 900Mhz pentium M, which means it should be rather awesomely fast. It appears to be related to the Intel ‘Classmate’ low-cost subnotebook design, which was bouncing around the interwebs earlier in the year.

You can find information about the EEE PC here, here, here.

Some of the interesting features:

- 900Mhz processor.

- 7″ LCD display.

- 4-16GB solid state hard disk (basically, flash-based, tough as hell, fast, no fragmentation delays, smaller, lighter, lower power than a traditional hard disk).

- built in webcam, VGA out, USB, SD… (ooh, SD! Perfect for ‘on the move’ photo-editing then?)

- 512MB Ram.

- thin + light (0.82in thick, weighs 2 lbs).

- wifi.

- Linux-based operating system included.

Initial reports are that the machine boots up from cold in 10 seconds and shuts down in 5 seconds, so it should be great for ‘writer’s notepad’ type work too as well as the afore-mentioned ‘photo editing on the fly’.

In fact… this could well be the perfect tool for written or photographic blogging. I wonder if they realise that? Heck, dangle a GPS unit off the side, and you have a location-aware uber-blogging platform for less than a normal laptop!

According to Qbit Online, we can expect to see these tasty wee things arriving in late August. If you’re interested in seeing this mini-laptop in the flesh, there should be a demo next week at the Taipei Trade Center, as part of the TICA exhibition.

The alternative explanation is simply too stupid to be true.

And yet people wonder why I travel by bus rather than scooter.

Taiwanese scooter helmets.

A baby kitten with poo on its face.

Students dancing.

Sunset over Taoyuan.

Pastel mountains.

Taoyuan, the dark city.

Welcome to Taro-Town!

At the market, you can buy all sorts of strange things to eat…

…but my favourite had to be dried out chameleons stuck together with rubber bands.

Angela, Erich and myself enjoy the crunchy texture of deep fried insects on sticks.

It’s the Year of the Pig!

Banqiao has some reasonable green area nearby the HSR, MRT and train/bus terminals.

(more…)

Plain old rusty barbed wire - this stuff is ubiquitous around here.

So, having found this exciting, shiny, lethal, razorwirey stuff, I thought it would be interesting to take a picture of it. The problem being, that it was positioned so that I had to either take a bad picture (holding out my camera in front of me, pointing down, and unable to frame the shot correctly), or take the picture I wanted, but leaning out over the razor wire. I decided to lean out, as carefully as I could, using one hand and my knees to grip the wall and therefore prevent a premature painful and messy demise.

I had to take a couple of shots to get the framing I wanted, so I ended up leaning right out over the razorwire (with a 3 metre drop below me) for about a minute. Long enough, it turns out, for a local guy to sneak up behind me in a suspiciously quiet blue truck, and suddenly yell out

“HALLLOOOOAAHHHH!”

This one’s for you, Mr Batshit-Crazy-Blue-Van-Helloing-Dude.

Well, it didn’t do my heart any good I can tell you, as I barely stopped myself falling onto several rows of shiny, painful slicyness. I don’t mind the odd casual ‘hellohhh!!’ but the enthusiasm and timing of this one was very nearly the end of me.

Once my heartbeat went back to normal, I went off to find the temple…

An aside: The title of this entry is inspired by a local idiom, ‘expensive to the point of death’, which is a convenient way to describe the price of almost everything, when you have white skin and you’re in South East Asia. In Mandarin it’s: 貴死 (guìsĭ) [thanks Mark, Pete!]

Where I grew up, it was possible to see thousands or tens of thousands of stars at night with your naked eye. Here, so far I’ve been lucky to see 40 or 50 - but at least it’s something, and I feel like I’m still in touch with the night sky.

This week, I’ve been standing on top of high buildings at sunset, straining my eyes while hoping for a glimpse of Comet McNaught. This comet was identified a year ago by an Australian astronomer, Robert McNaught. Since about a week ago, it has been visible around sunset and sunrise in many countries, starting with the northern hemisphere and more recently the southern hemisphere. You can read a little more about it here: Sci-Tech Today.

Unfortunately, Taoyuan has had cloudy weather for the last week or so, especially at sunset, which is quite infuriating. The only compensation I’ve had is that there have been some pleasant sunsets to enjoy.