Taoyuan Nights

Before you read this article, I want you to watch something…Bananaphone. It’ll take a minute to load, but it’s very worthwhile.
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 [...]

Oh my god. What a great ending to the season and cliffhanger for the next. Confirms beyond doubt that BSG is some of the best sci-fi ever produced.

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? [...]

Memory is what tells a man that his wife’s birthday was yesterday.
~Mario Rocco

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 [...]

I previously reported that the Wii was expected to arrive en masse in Taiwan around the end of Chinese New Year, (mid-February). This was based on what I was hearing from the store managers of large electricals stores in Taiwan. Unfortunately, it hasn’t panned out. It’s now mid-March, and lo and behold, there’s bugger all [...]

Space.com is reporting that absolutely astounding amounts of water have just been confirmed on Mars with the new Mars Express orbiter. There’s at least enough water in this one location to cover the entire planet’s surface 10 metres deep!
From Space.com
This is absolutely incredible news. Unbelievable news. This discovery literally makes the prospect of human colonisation [...]

Today, I stumbled upon this link to a wonderful article at the New York Times. Normally I’d just hit forward and send it to a few friends, but the ideas are so intriguing that it deserves a blog mention.
Essentially, it asks: Why is the universe “human-suitable” in terms of the difficulty of understanding what’s going [...]

I’ve been looking over my website logs, and it appears there are tons of people hoping to find the meaning of the word ‘Suwadee’ on this site, thanks to Google. I recently used this word in one of my articles about Thai restaurants here in Taoyuan. I suspect “Suwadee” or “Sawadee” is a common name [...]

A rambling mixture of gossip today.
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 [...]

The Nintendo Wii is finally about to reach Taiwan officially! (maybe)
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 [...]

I was looking at my statistics today and was stunned to see I’ve reached almost 100 unique readers every day in just 3 or 4 weeks of writing!
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 [...]