Here are links to the data on the earthquake – biggest we’ve had for a few months.

• CWB1,
  CWB2
• CWB1 (Chinese),
  CWB2 (Chinese)
• USGS

As usual, I have lots of respect for the incredible Taiwanese engineers that have built an electrical grid and internet infrastructure that just keeps on running during earthquakes.

Oh, and some good news. I noticed that the English language system is now running in-line with the Chinese system. It used to be that English language version of the CWB website would lag behind by 15-30 minutes (or so it seemed…).

If you have time, you can fill in a report on the USGS website and help seismologists do their work…

• 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!

Heck, I’ve even seen people at markets try to charge me the ‘label price’ (anything from 300-2000% of the real price) for delightfully ‘Authentc Italien’ clothes.

This is only the first half of the problem, of course. The second being that no matter what I do, no matter what I say, they will not drop the price. Haggling is right out, apart from a laughable 10 kuai here or there.

Why? My guess is, it’s about losing face. A Taiwanese market trader, being haggled down by a laowei? If there’s anything that would get them laughed at by their fellow traders for the rest of their life, that’s probably it.

Still, no matter how much I grumble ‘tai gui!’ or ‘gui si!’, the price is absolutely not going to be coming down. So off I go, and at the end of the day I don’t have what I want, and they don’t have any of my money. No one wins!

Even on those rare occasions that I do manage to find something resembling what I want, it’s usually a very cheap and nasty alternative rather than the real deal. Why, oh WHY, do Taiwanese computer shops refuse to stock parts from top quality manufacturers? Some of the best electronics in the world is made in Taiwan, but will the manufacturers sell it locally? Hell no! ATP – I’m looking at you, here!

Anyway…I thought I’d look for a mail order online store, so that I could avoid the annoying “Laowei Effect” when I’m shopping. In the UK, we have semi-wonderful stores like Ebuyer,Dabs, Scan, and so on. In Europe, Itbutikken does a great job. And in the US and Canada, BestBuy, NewEgg and others provide the same function.

Where is the Taiwanese equivalent? Amazingly, it seems almost impossible to locate a decent, big online store for mail order shopping here. Fortunately, I recently came across a new site called Q-Bit Online. They have an English language site with a reasonable (though not extensive) choice of parts, and the prices seem pretty good. The customer rep I’ve emailled at the site (Henry) speaks excellent English, replies to emails quickly, and has already gone to a good bit of effort to try to help me find some very specific high-quality parts I’ve been looking for. I thought I’d reward his high level of attention to customers, by linking back to him from this blog. Cheers, Henry!

You can find their website here: http://www.qbitonline.com/. One offer that caught my eye in particular: a 2GB minature USB flash drive @ 410 NTD. Very decent.

For what it’s worth: I have no affiliation to this store. I just like their service.

Mysterious pig-themed monolith found outside the Taipei Main Station.

The new year buildup starts with having a party (or several parties) thrown by your employer, with lots of singing, food, and ‘prizes’ for employees. These prizes are dealt out either at random, or according to how well you did during the year, depending on what kind of business you are in. Some of these prizes can be very valuable; my own employer had TVs, DVD players etc. to be won – and no one left the room without at least a decent sized box of shampoo/toothpaste/etc, or something similar. You also get a ‘new year’s bonus’, which is anything up to 1.5 months extra salary. A nice perk, to say the least. This is paid almost everywhere, no matter what type of employer you have.

The thing that surprised me most though, as the title of this post will indicate, is ‘wow, they have Chinese new year songs!’. If you think about it, it makes perfect sense. In the west we have thousands of songs about Christmas, so over here, they have thousands of songs about Chinese new year. It just hadn’t occurred to me, till I started hearing things like ‘gong xi gong xi gong xi, gong xi fa cai’ thousands of times, in every restaurant and shop I went into. Here are a few examples:

Awful new year music.
Andy Lau shamelessly presents “Karoake Gong Xi Fa Cai”.

There are some phrases which are particularly useful to know at this time of year.

恭喜发财
‘gong xi fa cai’ (pronounced gong shee fah tsai): literally ‘congratulations, get rich!’

A traditional greeting/send-off around new year. It’s pretty much safe to say this to anyone and everyone. If you’re a westerner who doesn’t speak much mandarin, you can totally surprise people (in a good way) by coming out with this at the end of your conversation, since they’ll probably expect you to try the next phrase (xin nian kuai le) instead.

新年快乐
‘xin nian kuai le’ (pronounced shin knee-an kwai li): literally ‘new year happy’. A slightly more modern new year greeting. There is an associated hand gesture – you are meant to put your left hand into a fist, place your right hand ‘around it’ and wave this 2-handed ‘covered fist’ up and down slightly as you say happy new year.

Picture from http://www.mamalisa.com/blog/

‘hong bao’: A ‘red envelope’ containing some money, which is given by older or married people, to younger or single people. ‘hong bao na lai’ is a response often used by children when people say ‘gong xi fa cai’ to them. I.e. ‘congratulations, get wealthy’ gets you ’sure – where’s my red envelope then??’.

Here are some links you can browse which have more information about the many traditions of Chinese new year.

About.com
Wikipedia
Canadian site about traditions.
Audio/characters for gong xi fa cai

Like Britain, most of the high street banks in Taiwan pay out effectively nothing on their current accounts, and a pittance on the savings accounts. Current accounts run at 0.1%, and savings accounts often only offer 0.5%.

When I got here, one of the first things I did was try to find some way I could get a better savings rate. It turns out, the best short-term savings account rate (currently around 1.735% in most banks) is based on leaving your money in a ‘time-deposit’ setup, which works as follows…

1. Go to your bank.
2. Wait 15 minutes to get served.
3. Try to explain what an automatically recurring one month floating rate time deposit with reinvested interest is (trust me: it’s best to prepare your mimes and diagrams in advance for this one).
4. Fill in about 10 billion forms transferring the money between yourself and yourself and yourself.
5. Wave goodbye to your money – you won’t be seeing it for a while.
6. Wait 30 days.
7. Profit!!!!

By automatically recurring, I mean that after 30 days, your money (and perhaps also the interest) automatically gets fed back into another 30 day time deposit for the next month, without you having to visit the bank again. This is very important, if you value your will to live.

Bear in mind that withholding tax will still be charged on the interest at 20%, as it is on all bank interest in Taiwan, but that any excess you get charged (over your normal income tax band in Taiwan) can be refunded at the end of the tax year. [Unless you haven't spent over 181 days in Taiwan during the year, in which case, sorry mate, you're paying 20% tax, like it or lump it.]

This time deposit malarky can probably be made to work quite well, if you know the Chinese characters for ‘time deposit’ or have a fluency in Mandarin that I blatantly lack. Particularly so, if you know of a time when the bank won’t have queues to get in your way. However the approach has a few little stings in its tail.

1. If you really need that money, you can get it back – but you lose all the interest you would have gained during the month. And it’s hassle, too, trust me. Basically, they will find it hard to believe that any sane person would choose to give up e.g. $23 of interest they have accrued on paper.
2. If you want to cancel the time deposit, you have to go in on the exact day it ‘loops’ and goes into another 30-day cycle. You can’t say to them “Please make it stop on the 16th”, if it’s only the 15th when you ask. Why, that would be absurd! It would go against everything Taiwan stands for!
3. If you want to get your hands on the money, you will need to visit the bank in person. You can’t control it via the ATM.

Fortunately, Nature abhors the savings vacuum of a banking cartel, and so HSBC (one of the world’s largest banks by assets, operating in 80 or so countries) has stepped in to fill the void with a decent account: HSBC Direct. You may have seen this advertised on TV, in the MRT stations, or elsewhere in Taipei. I must admit I haven’t seen any ads in Taoyuan.

It works as follows:

1. Set up an account. Slightly annoying since they will want to verify your ID a lot of times. However, the staff in branch, on the phone, and on the Internet, uniformly speak EXCELLENT English and are unfailingly polite.
2. Transfer over some money from your normal account using an ATM or in branch. ATM will cost about $15 to send the money, in branch will cost $30. But fear not! HSBC will refund this evil charge up to 3 times! Hurray!
3. Log into the internet and admire your bank balance.
4. For security, you can’t move the money to any other bank accounts. It’s designed to be like a ‘moneybox’ for your main banking accounts rather than a current account. Given the levels of financial fraud here, it’s a smart move by HSBC to be super-paranoid.
5. You get an ATM card in case you need to get your hands on the cash quick and don’t want to transfer out of HSBC and back to your current account.
6. Transfers out of HSBC are free.
7. Interest accrues daily (so you could leave your money in for 3 days, and get a little interest), and is paid at the end of the month.
8. Best of all: they pay a whopping 1.5% interest!

Now, you might think 1.5% is rather crap, but I think it beats 0.1% or 0.5% hands down, particularly when it is effectively just an easy-to-use savings account with ATM card. On 300k of savings it’s a 3-4k bonus per year for doing nowt. I toyed with the idea of a mix of time deposits and HSBC for my needs, but after spending an hour waiting in the queue trying to set up just one time deposit, I just gave up in disgust and figured it wasn’t worth the hassle for 0.2% extra on my money. Besides, I don’t have enough money to make it worth any kind of hassle anyway :)

According to the reps I spoke with, HSBC will be raising the interest rate as other banks raise their rates to keep it very competitive compared with high street banks, so that makes the floating rate aspect of the time deposit less critical too.

HSBC direct also have an excellent English language website and phone service for managing your account. By ‘excellent’, I mean excellent. This aspect alone is worth the 0.2% difference.

A final note on bank transfers. If you transfer over 30k TWD at one time between any bank accounts in Taiwan, you’ll need to take in your ARC or ID card and possibly also your passport. That’s the law. Worth knowing in advance.

Oh, and the free money? Well if you sell your friend’s souls to HSBC by filling out their details on a form to be contacted about HSBC Direct, apparently they’ll give you a bonus $25-30 or something like that per person. I don’t recommend it, though, since your friends may reasonably question your neutrality in recommending HSBC Direct to them, if you’re prepared to sell them out for a poxy 25 kuai.

Anyway: I love the service, and HSBC Direct have in-branch staff specifically to deal with any HSBC Direct issues you may have. I strongly recommend HSBC Direct for your short-medium term savings. Further, unlike the local Taiwanese banks that went out of business last month (really!), HSBC have been around for hundreds of years, comply with international banking standards, have sensible lending criteria and a solid loan book, plenty of assets, and operate globally. All of which suggests that any systematic regional financial problems won’t have much effect on them as it might on other banks – making them a relatively safe haven.

Link: HSBC Direct

Amusing sidenote: It’s almost worth asking about getting a normal HSBC account in the branch, just to see their face go into a weird embarrassed smile. They will politely explain how much money you’re going to need to get that account: $3 million TWD in loose change, never mind your actual investments. Seriously, chaps. Wowsers.