Taiwan

666: The number of the devil? Not in Taiwan!

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For reasons that I must admit are a bit murky to me, 666 has been associated in the Christian world with the Anti-Christ. Far be it from me to enter a theological or mythological debate, I would like my readers to read this story…

cbs5.com – SF Cab Driver Claims Taxi Number 666 Bad Luck

In Taiwan, the numbers 6 and 8 are considered very lucky or auspicious numbers. Combinations of 6 and 8 are therefore very desirable. In fact, license plates with these numbers fetch high prices.  Prices in stores often end in these numbers.

The number here to be avoided is the number ‘4’ because the sound is similar to the word for death. Hence there are no rooms with 4 or 44 in hotels, no 4th floor in hospitals, and so on.

I guess my point: numbers and their related meanings are highly culture determined. In Taipei, the SF Taxi Driver would be able to sell his cab for a lot more!

July 21st is here… time for a little break!

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For those of you who noticed, and amid much apologies for not posting, I’m just letting you all know that Christine and I are taking a much needed break. I’ll be posting a few days’ behind for the next week or so as we won’t have continuously good access to the Internet, and sometimes I just want to chill.

It’s been six months since our winter break, and a tough time for us and our business, but we’re slowly putting things back together and trying to fix the business so it runs better. Right now, we’re concentrating on dropping the business talk as much as possible and getting out of Taipei. Will check in in a few days with news of our trip to Yi-Lan, Su-ao and Ming-chih… hopefully with photos!

Google for Broadband: Taiwan, HK and Korea

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With increasingly large parts of the population connecting via broadband, esp. in Taiwan ADSL, Google has been running experimental new pages in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Korea that seek to take advantage of some of the extra bandwidth available to users.

I’ve included a look that shows how the Google or iGoogle page looks in Taiwan at the moment, just in case you can’t access it. Features to note are: a current time (based on the pc clock) in the top left, nicely presented triple column themes with configurable content, links to videos and images in the news section.

taiwan-google

The central column links to Google’s search results: images, videos, etc. The right column includes links to your email, picasa, and calendar. To view this, in Firefox, you will need to choose the appropriate language in the View Menu. I’m using UTF-8 which works well. This story was linked from PC World – Google Testing New Homepage Design in Taiwan, Hong Kong . Unfortunately, by the time I came to write this posting, the Korea page had returned to its normal look.