Saturday, 6 September 2008

Update - new computer - landlord problem - visa issue



Hello Xu Xu has finally taken the advantage of being in Taiwan to buy a notebook, which is to say laptop, that is to say computer. Up until now all has been done at internet cafes or at my Chinese language school. This means I find myself with a "you beaut" machine that seems to be able to do much more than I am presently able to comprehend. I am sure I will figure many things out presently, and I am sure that this machine will become old and obselete before it reveals all of it's secrets to me. Nevertheless I am now able to distract myself from my Chinese classes for what seems like minutes but which turns out to be hours. I have a question, what sort of free stuff do people recommend I download from the net to make my computer more useful? I've heard people talking about mozilla, should I get me some o that? Wouldn't mind a couple of classic arcade games like Galaga and the like. I don't want to clog the beastie up with a load o crap but I have a heap o gig to play with, and I reckon that's gonna keep me happy for a while.......

On another note, my landlord has shafted me on our rental agreement, I have a signed document saying I can live here until the end of October, but I have been told that I must leave at the end of September. This is of course a great inconvenience to me as my semester doesn't end until mid October. I will be out on my ear with another 3 odd weeks of sleeping place to find. I wasn't planning on heading back up to Hell Valley but my good friend Chicago Stu has offered to save my bacon..... pending further developments.
Oh yes ....Taiwanese beauocracy dictates that as my last day of class is on October 17, I must therefore leave Taiwan on October 17, no they won't give me an extra day or two to settle my affairs! As I don't plan to head to Australia until November 15 it means a trip off the island, I'm thinking maybe Macau this time around, after a few days there I can re-enter Taiwan for up to 30 days visa free....

3 comments:

sansIcarus said...

Nice one XuXu - was that a picture of your "notebook"? It looked pretty damn spectacular!

Mozilla Firefox is a alternate browser to Internet Explorer. I highly recommend it - it has all sorts of useful plugins too including Chinese character readers.

Speaking of language, there's a flashcard program called Anki which might be right up your alley and be useful for your study.

I'd definitely get AVG Anti-Virus, which is completely free, less clunky and annoying than Norton and very reliable. I'd also download/run a program called Spyware Blaster which will take care of things that antivirus doesn't.

For finding games, etc, you could play online, or you could get a peer-to-peer program like UTorrent (very easy to use) and then search for your favourite arcade classics at search engines such as Mininova and isoHunt.

Let me know how you get on.

Hello Xu Xu said...

Thanks Mark, I've downloaded firefox and added a cool Chinese character translater. It's pretty good and sometimes when it can only translate a couple of characters at a time, a long sentence with that kind of literal translation can be hilarious!

Captain Oddsocks said...

I hear the Czech Republic is nice in late October...;-)