Drive in Taiwan – if you DARE!

Would you dare… if you saw this on the road?

I was just chatting to some new friends who live in the same building as we do. They just came to Taiwan a few months ago, and we were comparing how we did the driving tests (esp. the written paper!). In Taiwan, if you don’t bring an international driving license with you, if you are not from a small group of countries, to drive here you need to resit your test.


Check out more posts about blogging, tech and money from a blogger who DARES to live and drive in Taiwan… subscribe to the RSS feed or email newsletter. There’s a lot more in the Random Walk to Wealth on InvestorBlogger dot com.
——-

It’s quite fine to do this and not much of a problem if you already drive, and it’s available in a number of languages online! This is a great convenience to the hundreds of thousands of visitors and foreigners living here who need to take the test but can’t wait long enough to learn to read Chinese. Try it yourself!

The motorcycle test is similar but today I was watching the news when I saw this fascinating video taken on a small phone camera: watch then comment! It’s amazing. You have to watch the entire video of this woman driving her motorcycle at night… it’s freaking awesome… She did end up in hospital though!

This is just one example of the craziness on the roads of Taiwan! I just wish I had one of those new Flip Camera’s that John is blogging about:

The main reason the Flip is so popular is because it’s so inexpensive. The 2GB unit, which can record an hour of video at 640×480x30fps, can be had for less than $150. That makes the Flip pretty much an impulse purchase.

I’m sure I could get some excellent videos of drivers in Taiwan with it! Or at least my co-pilot could! My hands are superglued to the steering wheel most of the time!

Now, of course, if the rider had a Flip, she could make a blog of her own to highlihght some of her techniques and tips!

April Fools: Technorati, Safari, SRG, and Analytics – all borked

t’s Tuesday, and I’m writing this after a rainy and slightly boring weekend in Taipei. Worse, with the continual seesaws of the temperature here, I’m thinking that I’ve got a cold coming on, so I’m going to take some medicine and go off to bed a little early.

In Recent Posts

In recent posts, Sunday was a little quiet on the blog as I spent the rainy day upgrading to Wordpress 2.5 which I’m using now for the first time , and enjoying it. On Saturday we went to the local Carrefour store in Tamsui for some shopping: Are retailers driving you ‘Potty’? and discovered that the store isn’t pricing items properly. For people suffering from less cash these days, I wrote about how a game I played helped educate me a great deal –Cash Low? Play CashFlow 101and learn why. Then I looked at how people in Taiwan used to borrow and lend money: a fascinating insight into how money circulates in societies without formal access to banking. The story is entitled: What’s a ‘hui’? How you can borrow and lend money in China, it also cites some discussions that others have had about ‘huis’. And in Tuesday’s News, I speculated about adopting WordPress 2.5 but now I find that I’m using it and loving it.

Crash Your Safari Browser!

Just discovered how easy it is to crash Safari 3.1, the latest browser from Apple. Mmm. Try this yourself.

Load up the browser. Wait until the homepage loads. Enter the letters in the following sequence: g m a i l (dot) g o o g l e (dot) c o m. Hit enter and …

flaky apple software

And I thought only Microsoft could manage that! I repeated this three times, and it worked each time! Try it! I’m not the first person to discover this, sadly. Enjoy.

On the theme of borked things, I can add at least four more today.

Analytics: 0 visitors!

borked analytics

According to this report in Analytics, I had 0 visitors on this day but somehow they recorded 75 visits. Wonder how that can be. I had noticed this a few days ago, and I have no idea what’s going on.

Technorati: Flaky again

Technorati is better known for its flakiness than either of the other two on today’s list. It completely missed two of my major posts the past five days, and just left me with two quotations… Geez. Are retailers driving you ‘Potty’? and Cash Low? Play CashFlow 101and learn why.

flaky technorati

SRG Archives

I also wanted to update the options in my theme for this plugin. But that is borked too! Look. When you check the options you can hit the ‘update’ button thus:

srg archives bug

But all I get after upgrading to WP2.5 is a blank screen with these words…

r u sure

Well, first, duh! If I wasn’t sure, I wouldn’t do it now would I? It’s hardly a big change to warrant such a request. And second… where is the answer box? Double-duh!

John Chow causes Browser Crashes

Last, you can visit John Chow’s recent post and find out why you have to crash out of your browser in his April Fool’s Day Prank. Unfortunately, he pissed off quite a number of people who lost their work because they clicked on through. Mmm. Is John’s blog finally going off the rails? Well, judge for yourself.

april fool

Be warned! If you are working on anything important before you visit the site in his URL bar, you MUST close the work and save it. Or vice versa. Guaranteed you will have to crash out of your browser to regain control. This could be a spiteful way to get back at someone! 👿

I’m sure that I can spend another hundred or thousand hours looking for bugs, and finding them. But these really are ones that have been bothering me the last few days! Oh, I didn’t mention ‘hosting’, did I? … Mmm.

Does technology make our life easier or not? Sometimes I wonder. What do you think?

Shopping: Are retailers driving you ‘Potty’?

Retailer’s margins are under pressure these days as prices rise, but incomes stagnate. I know that from my own wallet. Competition is intense and sometimes even the biggest retailers will resort to less than kosher methods to shift their products.

You’ve got “One Chance”

For those of you who like Paul Potts CD, I just bought the CD at a local retailer in Tamsui, one of the biggest in Taiwan. While this retailer is known for its aggressive pricing strategies, its behind the scenes pricing looks (to be polite) disorganized at best.

Beware the sale price gotcha’s

A few months ago, I noted one sign advertising filing boxes for NT$279. I bought one, but didn’t note the actual price until I got home on the receipt. It was over $300. This isn’t a big amount of money. I naturally assumed that I had made the mistake and brought the wrong model.

The next time I went to the store I bought several more of these items for colleagues in our office who thought they would be useful. This time I checked carefully the model number ‘DD105’ and I took them to the counter. I thought I had bought three of them with larger drawers, but turns out that the DD113 models were also on display (undiscounted) right next to them. I had bought the wrong models, and again paid through the nose.

What a potty pricing scheme?

So this time I was shopping in the store, and bought a CD of Paul Potts for my wife who liked the video she saw on YouTube! As you can see from the picture, it was priced NT$348 on the shelf. I tried to scan it myself in the store, but couldn’t because the in-store scanner wouldn’t read the barcode on the item properly. I bought it anyway because it didn’t matter that much, I wasn’t price sensitive on that item.

P1000827

On checkout, I found that I had been charged NT$378 for the CD, despite it being priced on the shelf at NT$348. I also found another display showing NT$358 for the same item. Of course, this time I did complain. You can see the receipt pictured here with the price. I can’t ascertain if that is the result of product substitution or not, because the product numbering schemes were somewhat different.

InvestorBlogger sez…

It doesn’t matter the reason: the store should price each and every accurately to the best of its ability and remove old pricing. Nowadays, most products are not priced at all in Taiwan. The price label is only on the shelf. By the time you get to the checkout with thirty or forty items in your trolley, who will remember what each item cost? Who will take the time to check their receipt? And if you’re dragging children, husbands or wives, and your phone is ringing, who will be able to remember?

Fortunately, the store seems to have a no-quibble refund policy in such cases, and indeed refunded me the NT$30 on the spot. But I’m wondering if the policy of insufficient and/or misleading pricing is somehow discretely approved of, quietly practiced but publicly disavowed by the management of this hypermarket.

Advice to Shoppers

The only thing I can urge: if you are facing a budgetary pressure, scrutinize your checkout receipts for both prices and quantities to make sure that you are being overcharged, wrongly charged or leaving items sitting on the supermarket checkout.

Still I learned how to magnify pictures on my camera from the clerk! He was pretty nice about it all! I’m still not sure what the real price should have been because inside the box were two cds, not one. But there was no other pricing on the CD stand or the CD itself to indicate what the correct price was.