To get a feel for his audience, he asks “How many people here believe in ghosts?”

About 90 students raise their hands.

“Well, that’s a good start. Out of those of you who believe in ghosts, do any of you think you’ve seen a ghost?”

About 40 students raise their hands.

“That’s really good. I’m really glad you take this seriously. Has anyone here ever talked to a ghost?”

About 15 students raise their hands.

“Has anyone here ever touched a ghost?”

3 students raise their hands.

“That’s fantastic. Now let me ask you one question further… Have any of you ever had sex with a ghost?”

Right at the back of the room, one guy raises his hand.

The professor takes off his glasses, and says, “All the years I’ve been giving this lecture, no one has ever claimed to have had sex with a ghost. You’ve got to come up here right now and tell us about your experience.”

The student begins to make his way up to the front of the class. When he reaches the front of the room, the professor asks, “So, tell us: what it’s like to have sex with a ghost?”

The student replies, “GHOST???? I thought you said GOAT!”

Meanwhile, in today’s news…

“National Chengchi University’s English Department yesterday defended its annual year-end production about man having a sexual affair with a goat as an appropriate choice and said they were puzzled why people would consider the play profane and foul.”

So, I explained that in BASH, we can do this quite easily:

for i in 13 17 21 23 ; do

commandname   $i

done

However, she explained that each of these pictures has a corresponding data value that has to be entered, and that doesn’t relate to the picture directly. For example, 13 might have the value 93, 17 might have the value 90, 21 might have the value 99 and so on. We need to enter these tuples in order to write the script.

Now, you could set up some list, and iterate through it, but it’s a nightmare if you want to add or delete a value, because you need to make sure your two lists don’t accidentally get out of sync as you add or remove numbers from them.

Unlike PERL, I don’t believe BASH has sufficiently complex data types that you could pass (13,93) as a single value. So… here’s a quick and ugly way to do this in a single loop without using a more complex datatype.

for i in 1393 1790 2199 2389 ; do

$a=$((i/100))

$b=$((i%100))

commandname  $a $b

done

In a situation where names are needed rather than numbers, you could use “firstpart-lastpart” style items in the for loop declaration, and then use the regular expression features built into BASH to split it apart as you iterate.

So, what’s the advantage of doing things this way? It’s easy to remember and you can code it in about 5 seconds flat.

The disadvantages? Read an article about Strong typing!

Of course… talk of whether McCain or Obama have greater support for Taiwan seems somewhat surreal to my mind - given another 4 more years of the present Republican party, America may not even exist anyway :-)

Elsewhere … Korea finds out the long-term costs of fueling an economy with high levels of debt.

“The won, which is already the world’s worst-performing major currency this year with a loss of 26 per cent, will weaken to 1,400 to the dollar as Korea struggles to refinance its short- term debt, CFC’s chief investment strategist Dariusz Kowalczyk wrote in a report Monday. The last time the currency breached that level was amid the Asian financial crisis, in 1998, when the won lost half of its value.”

Oh, and the FTSE is having the *3rd* worst day in all of UK history…. yawn. This crisis is getting boring.

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.

The idea that in Taiwan, I should avoid seeking ‘friends for the sake of friendship’, is one that I’m not very comfortable with. I don’t see my friends as tools I can use to achieve tasks. Therefore, it seems there may be some cultural lines that I am unwilling to cross in my engagement with Taiwanese society.

After writing my previous post, I received some interesting replies, particularly those from Cary Allen, and Kerim Friedman. Thanks for writing, guys! For the moment, I’m taking the original post offline while I reflect upon the ideas raised in correspondance, to make sure I am being fair to Taiwanese culture.

Particularly, the idea of ‘cultural translations’ as a way of understanding ‘white lies’ in other cultures, is an interesting one.

“I just wondered if I could borrow some coffee” might be considered an example of a similar situation in early dating in western society, which due to its familiarity seems more an excuse than a direct lie or misrepresentation.

Is that something to do with the ’short-term’ nature of borrowing coffee, as opposed to the longer-term nature of ‘language exchange’ or ‘research’? Or, is it perhaps the ‘distance’ of borrowing coffee from a stranger, as opposed to seeking closer forms of interaction such as language exchange? Or is it something else? Am I applying two sets of standards here?

Either way, the idea of the necessity of an excuse in Taiwanese society, as part of forming a friendship, seems to remain as a seperate issue. This is something I’m still puzzling over.

This can be found near Chihkan Fort, Tainan…

It seems this is a genuine ‘news’ report from the US shown on Fox. Unbelievable. Absolutely unbelievable.

• POP3, the Post Office Protocol, is an old technology for email which is based on the idea of ‘visiting the postoffice’ to collect your mail. A POP3 server is a computer program that is always available on the internet, and which gradually stores up a collection of emails for you as they arrive. A bit like the business ‘PO box’ service still provided by many post offices in real life.

  Every now and then, your computer at home connects to the POP3 server and says ‘Have I got any new mail?’. The POP3 server then sends through a photocopy of the emails it has received, and (optionally) clears out the folder. That means your computer becomes the new home for all your emails. After all, who stores their postal mail at the postoffice?

  There are a few problems with this. First of all, it’s just a single giant box for new emails. You can’t put anything in it yourself (unless you send yourself an email); and you can’t organise your emails into different types or put them into different folders. It’s simply an ‘always-available’ dumping ground for email, so that you can receive email even when your home computer isn’t turned on.

  Also, you can’t store your sent-mail in your POP3 inbox. There are ways round this; you can always send a duplicate copy of outgoing mail to a second POP3 inbox, but that can get a little bit confusing, especially if you send things from different identities, i.e. your official ‘office’ persona, your ‘home’ persona, and your wacky ‘World of Warcraft’ persona.

  Finally, it’s annoying to share email between several computers using POP3. You can’t always be sure that both computers have the same emails downloaded. Imagine I go to the office, collect my email, and delete some spam. By the time I go home, I realise I left the computer on at home, and it also downloaded a copy of the spams, but now they’re not deleted!

  Or, maybe I organise my emails neatly into a folder. The problem is, on the office computer the emails are neatly organised into a folder, but at home they’re still sitting in my main INBOX, making a mess! Argh! If only you could easily keep things organised and up-to-date, across all of your computers…

• Webmail was introduced as a way of overcoming this problem, as well as the problem of accessing email from a temporary location such as an internet cafe where you can’t install your own programs. By storing both your ‘email program’ and ‘email archives’ on a web server, all you need is a web browser to access your mail from any location. The problem now is simply that the interface is limited, in terms of speed and ‘niceness’, by the limits of web browsers. Also, usually, webmail is not very well integrated with your home computer. By this, I mean that you can’t simply drag and drop files to and from emails in your webmail. Instead, you have to take a few extra clicks to save them. But webmail at least offers a standardised way of accessing your email from two or more places.

The third option that most people don’t know about is IMAP. IMAP was designed as a technology to make it easy to share your emails between different locations, and it is built into most modern email programs. It stores your emails on a centralised server, but in a way that is accessed a little like a POP3 mailbox rather than webmail. However, now you can seperate your mailbox into folders, and you can store your sent emails, all in the same inbox, and all with a single password. In fact, a set of IMAP folders in Outlook (or any other mail program) can be accessed exactly like a set of mail folders stored on your local computer.

This is remarkably handy. It means you can have an organised system for emails and files, shared between two or more places, but with a nice, fast graphical interface (Mail.app, Outlook Express). In practice, to make it run quickly, email is ‘cached’ on your home computer. In other words, a spare copy is sent to your computer from the IMAP server, so you can read your email even when your computer is not connected to the internet. But, the ‘official copy’ is stored on the IMAP server. That way, if you delete an email from your office, it’s also deleted when you log into email from home. If you organise your email on your office computer, then when you get home, the emails there have been automatically re-organised too, to match your office.

IMAP has a few other nice features that people don’t always notice. For example, instead of having to check your email every few minutes (we call this a pull technology in computing), IMAP contacts your computer to say ‘hey, I’ve got something new for you!’ (you guessed it - push technology). This means more work for the email server, but from your perspective, it means your emails always arrive instantly. Brilliant!

After setting up your new IMAP account (exactly like setting up POP3 - just enter the details in the IMAP section), you may want to make sure you’re not shouting everything to the world, everytime you send an email. By enabling ’secure/SSL SMTP’ and ’secure/SSL IMAP’ in your email program, you can be sure that both your outgoing and incoming email is communicated securely in a way that no-one else can read. Perfect!

Since I centralised my own email system on secure IMAP/SMTP, life has been so much easier! I use ASO who can provide about 75MB of space for around $25 US per year. This is overkill for most people’s needs; though 400MB is available for just a few dollars more. ASO, incidentally, are by far and away the most impressive webhosting/emailhosting company I’ve had the pleasure of dealing with in the last 10 years. Great prices, great services, great customer service. You think this sounds like an ad? So be it - they deserve a free ad! :)

I can even use my email system as a way of storing files I want to access from both the office and my home. I find it’s very convenient, since I can drag and drop things quickly in my email program, and by paying for a decent-quality internet account with ASO, I get super fast email, too.

My email client is mail.app, the default mail program on the Apple mac, which has incredibly powerful email searching and organising features thanks to a technology called “Spotlight” on the Apple mac. On a Windows computer, Thunderbird is a really nice free program that seems more reliable than Outlook Express.

Anyway, in summary: if your POP3 email is always a mess; or if you’re using a webmail system, but deep down, you hate it; then consider using secure IMAP as an easy, fast, and secure way of organising and sharing your emails between several locations. It’s great!

http://www.who-sucks.com/people/the-exciting-world-of-south-korean-protests

I wonder, has anyone ever compiled a compendium of unusual Taiwanese protests?

The alternative explanation is simply too stupid to be true.

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

These elections are decidely quirky:

The Scottish National Party has moved nationalism/independence to the very end of their agenda.

The Labour party is getting most of its votes from the areas with highest unemployment - i.e. from those people not actually engaged in doing any labour.

The Liberal Democrats have made it clear they don’t want to allow Scotland to be free to have a referendum vote on indepedence. Intriguingly, neither liberty (the right for Scottish people to choose how they are governed) nor democracy (holding a vote) are rated very highly by this political party.

The Conservative party is putting itself forward as a party of change.

I hardly know what to expect from The Green Party. Given the way that every other party’s policies seem to be the antithesis of their name, I expect the Greenies are busily jetting around the world in bright red-coloured aeroplanes, chopping down rainforests and clubbing baby seals to death with leaky barrels of oil.

[UPDATE]: THE SNP WON! :) (for those not familiar with Scottish politics, the SNP is a moderate, left-of-centre party, that in no way whatsoever resembles what would normally be called a ‘nationalist’ party in other countries!)

Click the picture for a full-size version.

Ok, back? Then let’s talk about Second Life. Second Life is an online virtual reality world, which appears to be inhabited by two types of person, each labouring under a terrible delusion:

• “Furries”. These are people who believe themselves to be animals trapped in a human’s body. They relieve the inner tension this causes, by creating online ‘furry animal’ personalities and doing the cyber-nasty with various other animals/furries. Yes, really.

• Journalists who are attempting to write a trendy article about Second Life, and who believe themselves to be fashionably catching the leading edge of a technology wave, but who are in fact catching the leading edge of the brown wave caused by a giant, 100ft turd slapping into the world’s biggest toilet bowl.
  

Two journalists stepping into Second Life with their freshly commissioned ‘cool’ looks, hoping for an interview that will cement their position as ‘tech journalist’, but actually about to discover how it feels to watch a giant cartoon horse forcibly violating your virtual body for two hours. (Pic: zingo)

An online world inhabited by these two types of people might not sound like fun, but when you consider that a tiny percentage of people using this ‘world simulator’ must have a sense of humour; and that some of these people also have technical skill; you can see it soon adds up to technocratic fun and hijinks. This comment, posted today on Slashdot, neatly sums up the situation.

“(PS. If you ever go into the sandboxes in Second Life, you’ll see all sorts of other types of abuse too - floating batman cubes/bananaphones which follow you around playing an annoying/catchy* loop, hundreds of stupidly high-detail models just left lying around by their long-gone creators, bendy [genitalia] which follow people around annoying them, thousands of physics objects which attempt to waste the simulator’s resources, etc.)

*delete as appropriate”

I very nearly laughed my balls off.

Wannabe-tech journalists, Second Life is nothing more than a poorly run ripoff of ‘Active Worlds’, a near-identical platform that came out *13 years ago*. Get with the program. Everyone else, here are some links to let you learn more about how incredibly wrong Second Life can be:

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=36509

http://www.10zenmonkeys.com/2007/03/05/john-edwards-virtual-attackers-unmasked/

http://www.secondlifeherald.com/slh/2007/01/ageplay_in_seco.html

First Life.

It’s been a mixed season - an interesting start, interesting middle and a few occasional wonderful plot twists (several involving Gaius), with filler episodes spread throughout. But this? Genius! Sheer genius.

I’d had my suspicions for a while, though I still got several surprises. I won’t say any more since I don’t want to spoil it. Suffice to say, if you’d lost interest in BSG, catch up, for goodness sake! It’s worth it, just for Ep. 20!

I think this episode deserves my maximum rating: 5/5 cylons.

In fact, the type of memory I’m thinking of just now is computer memory. In the last 2 months, the price of DRAM chips has more than halved. I hadn’t noticed, since I haven’t been particularly looking to upgrade my computer, but this means it’s now an excellent time to make your computer that bit faster under Macos or Windows.

Usually, the price of memory follows a predictable curve. It starts out very high, and continually falls towards a quarter or even a tenth of its original price over a year or two. After hovering at the same low price for 6 months, prices rise again, as supply is cut off, when new memory technologies begin to be produced in the DRAM factories.

To be honest, there is hardly any reason to have less than 2GB of memory in your desktop or laptop at present prices. It will have an incredible impact on system performance, especially if you leave your computer on, or in sleep mode, instead of restarting.

One of the best sources for computer memory is “Crucial” in the US. They have a fantastic track record for distributing very high quality memory, direct from the manufacturer Micron. High quality memory is important; a large percentage of unreliability found in computers, comes from having unreliable memory. Just one ‘bit’ that doesn’t work correctly can ruin the stability of the whole machine, since computing is a very precise science.

If you’re scared of choosing the right sort of memory for your computer, Crucial also offer a ‘memory selector’ which chooses the right type of memory for your computer or motherboard. I strongly recommend using this, to avoid incompatibility problems. You can find Crucial’s online stores in the US, EU and UK. Shoppers in Asia should use the US store.

As with most international retailers, beware of buying from the UK store. The $ to £ conversion rate is often unrepresentative of the real foreign exchange rate. Price drops usually hit the US long before they hit the UK, too.

2GB of DDR2, 667Mhz suitable for a MacBook is currently $145.99 at the US site.
1GB of DDR2, 667Mhz suitable for a MacBook is currently $73.99 at the US site.
These prices are as of 26 March 2007. In late January, 2GB was around $300.

You can also buy memory more cheaply (but of lower average quality) at NewEgg.com. However, I don’t recommend doing that.

(When buying memory for an Apple computer, or any laptop with an Intel motherboard, be sure to get a pair of ‘matching’ DIMMs. Memory access can double in speed for certain uses, if the timing to both chips is the same. In general this is a good policy for ensuring a stable, reliable computer anyway).

Artist’s impression of Mu at time of writing.
(This image was liberated from the tyrannical grasp of ign.com.)

I could hardly believe my eyes when I stumbled across this syndicated report in a South African newspaper. Here’s a quick snippet:

“Taiwanese gamers are bringing home thousands of new Nintendo Wii consoles from the United States and Japan ahead of its release in Taiwan, with Premier Su Tseng-chang among its many fans.

Passengers have returned carrying 2139 Wii consoles — featuring unique motion-sensitive controllers — in the past three days alone, according to customs figures.” - iAfrica.com.

Fascinating stuff, though I suspect almost none of those Wii’s are actually for Wii-ing, but rather, for selling at grossly distorted prices. So, when will the blasted gizmo actually get here? The new word on the street is: next month (April) will be the official launch by Nintendo.

So, it looks like you all have another month to save up for that spare IR controller, and your must-have copy of Rayman vs. The Raving Rabbids to go along with Wii Sports.

Tick… tock… maybe I should find a way to cryogenically freeze myself until the Wii actually gets here.

From Space.com

This is absolutely incredible news. Unbelievable news. This discovery literally makes the prospect of human colonisation of Mars both feasible and realistic, by itself.

Water is needed for everyday human survival, crop irrigation and so on, and if we can also crack the problem of managable nuclear fusion (which would provide nearly unlimited power from the deuterium that can be easily found in water), then you basically have absolutely everything you need to survive and prosper on Mars.

Dirt: to build buildings, grow plants, shelter from radiation (not much atmosphere on Mars, remember).
Water: to keep biospheres running without the need for some kind of complete water recovery.
Water: to eventually provide power via nuclear fusion. And power means crops, heating, refining, manufacturing, communications, and so on.

It’s hard to overstate the value of finding this much water on the nearest planet to earth. What a fluke! And best of all, it’s all in one place, in the form of a giant water storehouse. So it won’t even be difficult to collect and process it. Brilliant!

Even in the event that fusion doesn’t prove realistic, it has also been discovered that Mars has a geologically active core. So geothermal energy could be another option, added to the discovery of water, that makes Mars a realistic next step in space exploration. Kick ass!

Essentially, it asks: Why is the universe “human-suitable” in terms of the difficulty of understanding what’s going on out there? Really, what are the odds that the complexity of reality should be (more or less) comprehended by a small, squidgy piece of goo weighing a few kg?

The rather concerning answer that is put forward is: “What if it isn’t?”. In other words, what if the stuff we’re comprehending and measuring when we do physics is just a mere fragment of the ‘real’ reality - and in fact we lack the kind of thinking power that would be needed to ever deal with the ‘real thing’?

Now, my normal reaction to any kind of limit being needlessly imposed on the human ken is ‘poppycock’, but still, it’s an interesting read.

Another article I’d like to draw your attention is about some Malaysian Monks with an Ant Dilemma at the BBC. Worth a read - the final paragraph is genius.

Last of all, some interesting pictures from the New Horizons Pluto probe: The rings of Jupiter (I didn’t even know it had any!) and Volcanoes erupting on Io (one of Jupiter’s moons). Pretty unbelievable stuff.

In case you’re one of the curious people, “Suwadee” is part of a Thai greeting. Suwadee means both Hello, or Goodbye depending on circumstance. It’s a little like how ‘ciao’ is used in Italy.

Normally, for men to politely greet each other, they would say “Suwadee krahb” (which actually sounds more like “sawadee krah” when Thai people say it). Remember that Thai has it’s own alphabet, so “Suwadee” or “Sawadee” is just a transliteration of a Thai word into an English form to make it easier for westerners to say.

As you meet and say it, place both your hands together (palms together, fingers straight) in front of your chest, as though you were praying. If you’re a girl, say “sawadee kaa” instead. It’s good to keep your hands high up your chest as a token of respect.

You can also say it when parting from a conversation politely.

You can learn more about this greeting here. Given the vast numbers of Thai people in Taoyuan (and Taiwan as a whole), it probably doesn’t hurt to memorise this phrase… =)

Suwadee Krahb!

Why anyone in Thailand would go to McD’s is beyond me…
(This picture is borrowed from betsygoestochina.com. Thanks!)

The film “Hot Fuzz” is debuting currently in the UK. By the same people that produced “Shawn of the Dead”, and ‘Spaced’, this film could perhaps be described as a comedy about a top London cop being transferred to a rural village police force, but it’s probably more accurate just to say “Simon Pegg and chums d*cking around in police uniforms, being funny”. Trailers here. Already showing in the UK, but it doesn’t reach the rest of the world till April. Curses!

Finance: There’s gossip going round various respectable mailing lists about the price movement in Shanghai this week. The word on the street is that China’s government deliberately engineered the drop in Shanghai’s market, to try and prick the speculative bubble that is pointlessly sucking in all the free capital in the country. If so (and unlike 99% of what I read about markets, this actually seems like a sensible thing to do), there will probably be more hilarity to follow as Shanghai investors adjust to the idea of being regularly ninja-nutkicked by their own government as a form of therapy. Oh, and if you’re as much of a finance geek as I am, you’ll be delighted to know Warren Buffett’s annual shareholder newsletter is out and quite deservedly slagging off the efficient market hypothesis.

Fighters: The Taipei Times (& Michael Turton) report that America has decided to sell shiny new explody things to Taiwan to counter the large number of shiny new explody things lined up along the Fujian coastline of the PRC. Who knows - perhaps Taiwan’s invasion of the PRC is now merely weeks away from happening. China is responding by implanting electrodes into the brains of pigeons to control them remotely. Missiles, pigeons - where will this military escalation end?

Flat transistors: You’ll be reading a lot just now about some crazy new carbon based transistors that - just like every other idea you’ve ever heard - will revolutionise computing as we know it, for ever. Graphene is actually rather groovy and the story behind the research that went on over the last few years is kind of funny. Basically, Graphene shouldn’t exist. Nano-meter-thick sheets of material (such as the toilet paper found in British public toilets) tend to tear rather easily. Graphene is kind of wibbly shaped though, and not entirely flat, which provides it with structural integrity that makes it fantastically interesting and useful. It has some unusual properties that also allow it to be made into a fast, reliable and low-power transistor at sizes that would be completely unsuitable for Silicon chips. It is so thin, and uses so little power, that it can be easily stacked up into sheets. Electrons don’t seem to scatter in Graphene, so it makes electronic circuits run super fast. And when I say super-fast, I mean, electrons travel at speeds normally only found in the center of collapsed stars or at the beginning of the universe. Great stuff. The future is Graphene, I’m fairly sure.

Anyway, the amusing story. Graphene is just like a single layer of ‘Graphite’, the carbon molecule that your pencils are made from. Some researchers realised that to draw little tiny bits of graphite, you should make a really tiny pencil. They spent tens of millions of dollars developing this ‘nano-pencil’ that could be used - at great time and expense - to draw little areas of Graphene. Then, just as this huge research effort was finally starting to produce some results, some guys at Manchester Uni and Columbia Uni had an idea. They got some bog standard pencil graphite. Then, they stuck some sellotape on it and a thin layer of graphite came off. Then, they stuck other sellotape to the first bit, and an even thinner layer came off. Repeat as necessary till you have single layer Graphite on your sticky tape. Total cost: $0.30. LOL.

However this cheap production method is actually very important in other ways. Current computer processors are made from silicon crystals that are carefully grown at great time and expense, and represent the biggest part of the cost of a computer besides research and development. Sellotape and pencils on the other hand, are plentiful. Anyway, that’s all I’m going to say about Graphene for the moment.

Finally, Frikkin nutcases: “Canada’s ex-defense minister continues to call on governments worldwide to release their extra-terrestrial, UFO-derived technologies for the benefit of mankind. Film at 11.”

I’m basing this on the reports at Digitimes and elsewhere, that read: “Nintendo’s Taiwanese distributor ‘Hakuyu’ has stated that the new Wii system will fail to make it to the market any time before the Chinese New Year in February.” I also interrogated the staff at a few branches of a major electrical store (3C), and they suggested they expect their stock of Wiis to arrive during the Chinese new year period.

So far, all that has been available here are Japanese or US import models - and getting your hands on one of these a month or two early has come at a pretty high price - anywhere from a 25 to 100% markup, depending on which model you want.

Despite the fact that the Wii is very thin on the ground, I’ve seen them hiding in a few small gaming shops, and a few weeks ago, I even saw people playing with a Wii on a huge projector screen, in a cordoned off area bang in the middle of the Taipei Main MRT station. When I’ve finished celebrating Chinese new year, I’ll dig out a picture.

Meanwhile, in Taoyuan, we have a ‘gaming school’ (and store) near the city centre. They have two Wiis set up outside with two controllers each, a giant flatscreen TV and the best Wii games available - Rayman: Raving Rabbids, and Wii Sports. You can find this store very near the middle of town, and it’s a great place to go if you want to get some hands-on experience playing on the Wii.

Starting at the train station, go forward over the first crossroads immediately outside the station, past “Idee”, and then turn right at the next crossroads (where there is an under-street pedestrian tunnel). Go straight up this street, passing “Nova”, and take a left at the next big crossroads. Walk ahead till you see the store on your left.

So, a total of 5 minute’s walk from the railway station will see you at the door of the store, opposite “Ali Baba’s Indian Restaurant”. Just remember: straight on, first right, first left, and it will be on your left hand side. The store’s name is: “Kukanemoto Game Classroom”, 03-331-0088, www.tastegood.com.tw.

The store also has imported Wii’s available for purchase: 10000TWD for the japanese import; 16000TWD for the US import. There will not be much room to negotiate since stocks of Wii’s are so thin on the ground just now. It’s 1700TWD for games; 1000-1700TWD for extra controllers, which I guess is reasonable compared with extras for the XBOX360 or PS3.

Alternatively, if you are prepared to wait a few more weeks, you may start to see Wii’s showing up in stores like 3C, priced around 8000TWD (according to the 3C staff members I spoke to…). But you may face a long and boring Chinese new year without one.

In the meantime, if you find yourself unable to Wii for a prolonged period, it may comfort you to know that simply walking around Taoyuan can make you feel like you’re in some kind of computer game. Take this street for example, near the police station and bus stop…

Giant pointy bits of metal, waiting to drop. It’s just like playing Tomb Raider.

Particularly, I was amazed by the number of interesting places that people seem to be reading this blog from.

In America: Los Angeles, San Diego, Irvine, Austin, Kansas City, Lorton, Buffalo, Nashville, Princeton, Schaumburg.
In Canada: Cambridge, Montreal, Toronto (lots of people!), Harrys Brook, Calgary.
In Britain: Belfast, St Andrews, Bolton, Whetstone, Bracknell, Pontypridd, North Acton.
In Europe: Antony, Agrate Brianza.
In Asia: Sapporo (Japan), Bendungan Satu (Indonesia), Singapore.
In TAIWAN!!! : 29 people in Taipei! 25 people in Taoyuan. And a few people living in Tsim Sha Tsui, Chingliu and Yuanlin.

So, hey to everyone out there! I hope you hang around! :)

Take a look - you might find something you like…

http://www.taoyuan-nights.com/links/

I’m not sure I want to try saying the name of this bookshop aloud.

An encouraging title.

Now, if only it really was this easy.

There is a special place in my heart for books about English grammar and style
that can’t even get the title of the book right.

Irony.

More irony.

What??? There’s only 103?

Fact 1. It is part of Taiwanese culture to take your shoes off at the door when you enter a house. The reasons for this are tradition (Taiwan was once occupied by the Japanese, who had a big influence on Taiwanese culture) and supposedly ‘health/cleanliness’. Shoes are therefore left on a rack outside the door so that people can ‘healthily’ proceed to walk around their own homes.

Fact 2. Many families keep dogs (or, as I prefer to call them, ‘noisy turd factories’). I’ve even had students show up for lectures with a dog tucked away in their handbag. They’re quite ubiquitous. Dogs are usually kept in the home or sometimes, in the case of large dogs, kept in a rather small cage outside the house.

The problem with this is simple: Dogs do not wear shoes. Therefore, when dogs run around outside, merrily jumping into each other’s turds, dirty puddles and so on, they still have all that crap on their feet by the time they get home. And the very first thing they want to do when they get home is smear it all over your ‘clean’ living room floor.

Some people do attempt to make their dogs feet a little cleaner before allowing them into the house, by grabbing each of the dogs feet and giving it a brisk wipe against the door mat. But this just leads to further questions…

• Do they believe Ecoli bacteria and Toxicariasis worms are destroyed by a quick rub against an old mat?
• And if they do… and if a dog’s feet can be effectively sanitised by rubbing them on a mat… then why not human shoes?

I guess what amazes me most in all of this, is that some dazzling entrepreneur has not stepped forward to provide conveniently available ‘dog shoes’… but I’m sure it will eventually happen. And when it does, I sincerely hope they have ‘Hello Kitty’ emblazoned on the side…

I think it’s pretty safe to conclude that Taiwan’s choice of imports often seems rather surreal from a western point of view.

These signs started popping up on buses around Taipei in response to the bird flu epidemic in Asia, as a means of helping control the outbreak. Literally overnight, it seems, it became necessary to either leave your ducks at home, or take them on the scooter. One thing for sure is that duck-accompanied public transport has become a definite no-no.

Ostensibly, this kind of thing helps control bird flu transmission. In reality, it just makes ducks’ lives awkward, and forces them to take taxis instead when they’re in Taipei.

What is strangest of all though is that these signs seem to be confined to Taipei. In Taoyuan, we welcome ducks. If a duck can scrape together $15 TWD and explain to the bus driver where it’s trying to go, then as far as I’m concerned, it has earned the right to use public transport.

Anyway, this discovery has posed a significant problem for me, as it means I have had to radically alter an already quite healthy diet, to try and make it super-healthy. I’ve had to add in even more exercise into my life.

Fortunately, I struck gold while alchemically combining various foods, and found a wonderful snack that fills you up, tastes great, and is super-healthy. I’m fairly sure no one will have thought of combining British, Italian and Korean cuisine before in quite this way, so here goes.

First, you take a piece of wholemeal bread, the staple of a British diet. Eaten by itself, it is only very modestly healthy (particularly with the sugar they add to bakery products here), and it is certainly not very tasty.

Second, toast the bread. This increases the tastyness by giving it a bit of texture, but does not add anything to the healthiness or ability to fill you up.

Third, get a bottle of ‘extra virgin’ olive oil. ‘Extra virgin’ basically means ‘taken from the first squeeze of the olives’ and tends to be more nicely flavoured than normal olive oil, and also subject to no chemical refinement or processing. Don’t be mislead by labels such as ‘PURE olive oil’ or ‘100% natural olive oil’. Only the words ‘extra virgin’ have a special meaning, and even that might not be worth much outside of Italy.

Fourth, pour the olive oil all over your toast. Why? Four reasons. First of all, we’re going to be adding something in a second which will need that oil. Secondly, it tastes great. Thirdly, olive oil drops your LDL (bad) cholesterol, since it’s a monounsaturated fat. Finally, there’s no way you are going to be snacking on crap food during the day, since this tasty combination will leak calories into your bloodstream all day long.

Fifth, and most excitingly, get a small tub of low-fat korean kimchi. You will have bought this before you make the toast, to avoid any ‘lack of kimchi’ problems at this crucial stage. Kimchi is basically just watery lettuce and chilli. It’s healthy and tasty, but sometimes hard to match with western dishes due to the sheer amount of chilli that decent Kimchi contains. Now, we’re going to put it on the toast. Your immediate reaction to this should be ‘DEAR GOD, MAN, NO!’, because putting watery stuff on toast creates a very unpleasant mush. A most untasty kind of mush, in fact, which you would not feed even to someone you hate.

But wait! Something is happening! The watery-chilli goodness is rolling off the lettuce and somehow floating on top of the toast! That’s right - by allowing the oil to sink into the toast, you’ve imbued it with magical anti-mush properties, since oil and water are not exactly the best of friends. So, now, pick up your toast and eat it, being careful not to allow the kimchi chilli to slide off onto your hands.

And there you have it: Ambrosia Mu’s Kimchi Olive Oil Toast - food of the gods!