What to do with an iPod Touch

Okay, I've had this iPod Touch for a couple of weeks now and it's actually incredibly useful. Here is a list of things that I like the best so far:

1. Recognizing Chinese characters using the Pleco app. You draw a character that you don't recognize on the screen and it tells you what it is. The app is also a Chinese-English dictionary so you can also search by pinyin or English word, all from the same search bar.

2. Listening to music. It is an iPod, after all, and why I wanted it in the first place. Not a surprising use; just a very useful one.

3. Task management using Things. I can make tasks for anything from grocery lists to things I need to do the next day at work. The iOS version syncs with the Mac version when the two are on the same wireless network.

4. Reading the news around the house.  You would think that since my main computer is a laptop, I could easily bring it over to the sofa, the dining table, and so on.  But even my laptop has to be carried with both hands, and the battery only lasts a couple of hours.  The iPod is normally in my pocket, and its battery lasts all day.

5. Taking notes at work.  Because my work computer is a desktop, I can't bring it to meetings, which means that I've been using a notepad to take notes.  But I often don't manage to transfer these notes to my computer, so they don't end up in my workflow, which sort of defeats the purpose.  But if I type them in the Notes app, it's not particularly fast, but then I can email them to my work email account, from where I can process them along with my other emails.

6. Watching movies.  The screen is small, but it works surprisingly well, especially in a dark room.  You just want to avoid any epically panoramic films.  I watched The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, and it wasn't comically small, but it was certainly underwhelming.

One thing I haven't figured out yet is a good solution for writing blog entries.  I give my current app, BlogBooster, a fail for not supporting any formatting or linking, and for adding extra HTML code advertising itself to each post that I write.

Guster

My latest music find is a band called Guster. Very roughly, a mix of Keane, Simon and Garfunkel, and the Beatles. Maybe a bit of Death Cab for Cutie.

Here's one of my favorite songs so far.

So inconsiderate!

The other morning Anja was tired and cranky, and wanted to go back to sleep. Suddenly, an ambulance passed by below, and Anja got mad and shouted "That ambulance is too noisy! I can't sleep! Why are so many people getting hurt?"

Greetings from my iPod!

I've got a new iPod Touch, and I wanted to see if there were apps for writing blog posts from it. As it turns out, there are, but with the tiny virtual keyboard, whether you use it depends on how far away from you computer you are. Or how lazy you are.

All I want is my fair share!

Anja wrote a letter to Santa Claus today:

In case it's hard to read, the letters read "Santa please bring me a Barbie" (Chieni helped her spell the words).

Bai tuo!

I understood that the phrase "Bai tuo!" in Chinese means something like "Come on!" spoken in an exasperated tone of voice -- as in, "Come on, you're blocking the road!"  Local elections are coming up, and advertising trucks and scooters are driving around featuring not only billboards promoting various candidates, but also loudspeakers which convey the candidates' messages to everyone within earshot.  I don't understand much of these, but one day I heard one clearly saying "Bai tuo!  Bai tuo!"  This confused me.  Was the candidate saying "Come on, how can you even think about voting for that other guy?  He's got a mole on his face with two-inch long hairs growing out of it!"?

I asked Chieni about this, and the truth is less hilarious.  "Bai tuo!" is actually a formal way of saying "please".  If you say it in an exasperated tone of voice, then it means "Come on!" – or perhaps actually "Please!"  But the candidate I heard was saying it nicely, so she was simply asking people to vote for her, please.

Contact window

I was talking to one of my colleagues the other day, and I thought I heard her say, "You need to talk to the contact window."  "I'm sorry?" I said, "Are you saying 'contact window'?"  It turns out that the Chinese word for "contact person" is "联络窗口", which literally means "contact window", and that Taiwanese people generally think that this is a real English word and use it with each other all the time.  There are an awful lot of English teachers in Taiwan who are native English speakers, but I suppose there are also enough English teachers who are Taiwanese to perpetuate the mistake.


Amazingly, that afternoon I received an email from Dutch colleague who wrote, "Ask E. for the name of the contact window at the vendor."  He had clearly been talking to too many Taiwanese people.