I just found out about this website that can help you learn languages amongst other things for free. I'm quite surprised. Before I went to Taiwan, I was surfing around the web, searching for online opportunities to learn Japanese, then Chinese after it was decided I should go to Taiwan. All I found of free stuff was a few articles with useful words that weren't helping much with learning and weren't really newbie friendly. And then there were also some subscription based services with podcasts and stuff that looked more interesting, which I did, however, decide not to try out.

Anyway: Here's an interesting website which is mostly free I guess. (Actually, where do they earn their money? Users donating or affiliated services?)

Regardless of that, you can try it out at Smart.fm. (Here's My Profile, if you wanna socialize.)

I just tried out a Chinese and a French lesson. Maybe I could use this one to keep my Chinese fresh or even avoid failing my French exam next year if I work hard.

Seems one can also study geography and the period table with more and it's free, so if you have time and feel there might be something you'd like to learn using simple computer games, you should try and take a look.

I also just got back from Taiwan. I'm now in Denmark so it's a little late already. Here's my blog on boonbot.com about me going back home.

Got some slightly unexpected responses from two of my friends from posting this video on facebook, so I'll just share it here as well. It's really good.

It's E.D.I.T. by Capsule, one of my new fave Japanese bands. If you liked that music video, here's another great one from the same band:

Anyway. Yesterday I signed up for Plurk. If anyone is familiar with Plurk and has an account there, go ahead and Add me. Or at least just say hi or whatever. If you don't know what plurk is, it's a Taiwan based website a la something in between Twitter and Facebook.

I also wrote more stuff on Boonbot.com. Please check out my:
Post on the products exhibited at Computex 2010.

Those two are my classmates. Also friends of Rachel - the girl who taught me Chinese before I went to Chihlee College. This picture was taken on a trip to Yingge which I have written about on boonbot.com. Link:

Yingge Ceramics Museum

I also made an RSS feed on the page now, so if anyone wants to switch their subscription over there, it should be fine. Of course you can always keep the feed from this blog as you can never know if I will still put some interesting stuff here.

Please enjoy. :)

I made a new blogpost, but it is on boonbot.com. Click the picture below to go there:
Keelung Peace Island

I've been getting some work done on boonbot.com and it now links around and allows me to put up blogs and images pretty easily. I also changed the style slightly on the site. I'm still not satisfied: The design is kind of temporary. I've been borrowing a lot of the style but really want to make my own: Most of all for the menu. But the outline should stay somewhat the same, that is: Menu should be in the same place, contain about the same things (and perhaps a little more). Structure of the blogs and photos and info should remain the same, but sometime soon I'm going to change the feel of the site to something more personal. Also, colours need to be used better.

All my blogposts have been put in there already and photos that are included in a blog will link to it. Kind of like trackback of a different kind. It's possible to comment, which should leave out the problem there has been with blogengine that this blog here runs on with the website not accepting comments sometimes. I programmed boonbot myself and it shouldn't have so much stuff to clock up in. If there's a problem anyway, I will be able to fix it with ease as it's my own code.

Be sure to put some comments onto my new site!

It's small. It has to be. Or well. That probably depends on what you compare it to. I still have another 6 months here, and I'll have to pack it down with all my other stuff once I get to go back to Denmark. Not that I think packing is going to be much of a problem. I didn't pack much when I went here and still don't have a lot of extra stuff to take back home, even though I had to buy a few more clothes to get through the Taiwanese winter (which is short, not really cold, yet terrible because of the sheer lack of insulation in houses here.)
I'd just like to be on the safe side. Also because these little things might just take damage if I don't pack them really carefully. Besides, I might actually decide on wanting to take some rice cooker with me later on and than one is going to be expensive in space.

Took this photo on Monday. The day before, I had been adding 3 more pieces to the collection. At that time, there had been a very long period in which I didn't visit the Japanese entertainment shops I like to casually drop by. (That's only likely to be caused by my winter vacation and me therefore not going to the area near Taipei Main Station as much.)

I bet you're tired of me whining about getting better cameras. These two girls from the ToHeart2 series are a rare sight in the secondhand stores. Only a few times before did I see the red uniforms from this series, and I didn't really feel the figures were true to the drawing style of the Anime that I watched a few episodes of. This time I thought the two figures here as aesthetically pleasing and coped with their low price.
Actually, I liked the original series of ToHeart more. That's why I only saw a few of the episodes for the second one. It's kind of a different story and even the drawing style seems slightly different, but the young girls from ToHeart2 all make for pretty nice merchandise.

And then they also provide some extra fanservice that you usually don't get so much of from other figures.
This makes me think of the ToHeart franchise actually having started out being love simulators (hentai games), but then developed into the more innocent stories in the visual novels that spawned the manga and anime. Never saw any of those games though.

This one is somewhat more special. First of all, it's the biggest and most expensive of the figures I collected so far. It's also the first figure I buy without knowing what character it's a depiction of. Found her in two places that Sunday. At one shop selling a bunch of different stuff, I could buy it in it's original package for 1800 NT$. The package probably showed her identity, but I could only make out the sounds of a few of the japanese characters and read she was some kind of princess.
At one of my favorite stores - those stores where people can rent a box to sell their used stuff - one could buy her secondhand for 700 NT$. I think it's a just recently released model, and the secondhand figure was at least very new. I can buy secondhand figures here without fearing much for their quality, as people preserve these things pretty well. This one seemed unused. It even still has some plastic remaining between the upper body and the legs. Usually you'll remove that, as it's only to protect it against shocks during shipping.

Finally, as promised yesterday, my as of now latest addition to the collection: Len Kagamine. That'd be the first male character in my collection. What a lucky boy he is.