Jean-Francois' posterous - 簡體字禁止

Nov 15 / 5:16am

Free Chinese lessons at ChineseTeachers.com

By browsing the different teachers available on Chineseteachers.com I found out that one their teacher (named "Annie") is giving away free one to one chinese lesson for the whole month of november. For that You only need $1 in your account to have lessons with her, and of course that $1 will not be deducted! She is the only teacher with the special promotion 'S' red icon .

As you remember, I've already written a long post about Chineseteacher.com, I mentioned that even thought the service is really great (one to one Chinese lesson anywhere in the world at any hour of the day...or the night) it's still can be quite intimidating to have a lesson with someone we don't really know, that's psychological and we cannot do much things about this (at least for now, that's mainly why Loic Le Meur switched its product, Seesmic, from video conversation to a tool that would instead aggregate content from other social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook).

If you are not totally sure about the fact that a one to one lesson through internet is an easy thing for you, you should try this offer and see.

Note : This is not a sponsored post (but they are indeed friends of mine :) )

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Filed under // China Chinese Chineseteachers.com lesson Mandarin

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Nov 14 / 11:45am

That's where we have fun

Every week

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Filed under // Luxy Taipei taiwan

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Nov 4 / 12:22am

The Ikea house

Last Saturday I spent 1/4 of my salary in a place I really hate: Ikea. It's crowded, it's huge (you have to walk hours) it stinks and you basically fuck up your whole Saturday afternoon (and night, as you are exhausted after a 5km walk within the maze) but let's be honest, the result is often nice. However, the apartment is not fully furnished yet, still need to buy bed and mattress (I use futon for now) for the bedroom, plants, retro style armchair and chairs for the bar and another sofa, armchair, rug for the home cinema & computer room.

Click here to download:

The_Ikea_house.zip (832 KB)

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Filed under // house ikea

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Nov 2 / 8:57pm

Mao - A Chinese Histoire

You always find strange stuff in Taiwan (the best and the worst) and I saw one last night in NCCU. Before showing you the picture, I must mention that NCCU (國立政治大學) is a university (where I was a student once) located in Taipei and mainly ruled by "blue" (KMT) people following the "blue" guideline, thus seeing stuff related to mainland china (such as mainland newspapers, teachers and even students) is quite common. But this was quite awkward :

Not because there is a DVD about Mao edited in Taiwan (that could have been awkward a few years ago, now...) but because the title is written in French ("Mao Une Histoire Chinoise") as well as the whole movie (with chinese subtitles of course), now you have to tell me what is the relationship between Mainland China, Taiwan, Mao and the French languages :)

I haven't see the DVD yet (still reading Mao - The Unknown Story for the second time, not that I love the guys but the book is quite complicated with a lot of names and situations) but it'll be interesting to see it as France and some French people (my dad's family for instance, who were fierce communists in that time) has always been a great support to Mao's regime (The General De Gaulle was among the first western leader to recognize the new Beijing government) and ideology (a lot of current (but old) french politicians claimed to be "Maoist" during their youth) and I guess it'll certainly be felt during the film.

Update : This movie is actually a french/german production for the french/german TV channel ARTE. Amazon says that it contains archives that has never been shown before.

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Filed under // arte China communist france germany mao movie nccu taiwan

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Oct 29 / 12:40am

Leaving PBWorks for FOSWiki

The creation and development of any projects (mobile applications & video-games here) need method and rigor in order to quickly move forward and not get lost along the way. To manage our projects, team as well as external contractors I have been advised to create a Wiki and so far, it was a very good piece of advice! I like the fact that I can start a page (ideas, scenarios...) and that everyone (that I accepted) can edit and enhance it...etc.

I chosen to use PBWorks' Wiki service because I used to have an account on the Ogilvy 360's Wiki (hosted on PBWorks) and I just loved it. It's simple, clean, powerful with tons of options and so far I'm still very satisfied even though our organization its way smaller than Ogilvy's. Now that the team is growing (7 people now, certainly more quite soon) and with the appearance of freelance, the free version will soon be not enough (in term of security and confidentiality, particularly) so we decided to subscribe to a premium plan.

In France we say that any work deserve a salary (it's not always respected I know...) and we're happy to support services (Checkvist, 16bugs and Balsamiq for instance) that makes our life easier, but for that the pricing plan must be "fair" to everyone, which PBWorks' one isn't. Indeed, the Standard plan (that suits our needs) cost 8$/m (which is OK) per users (which is absolutely not). 8$/m per user?! How is possibly sane to create a Wiki and base your pricing plan on the number of users?! Can you imagine that it will cost me 672 fucking dollars per annum for the whole team and that only for a Wiki?!

Honestly what are the difference of cost of 5, 10 or 15 people writing few kb of data (our Wiki are only composed texts after all)? Very few indeed, but I'll quickly know the answer because this morning I start to save all our pages and start to set-up a FOSWiki on our server. Cost so far ? 0$. Nevertheless, I'm still very frustrated because I'm really not sure that FOSWiki's services is as good as PBWorks' one, but time will tell.

Update : This post has been deleted by...I don't know whom (not me anyway), so there is a repost.

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Filed under // 16bugs balsamiq checkvist FOSWiki Ogilvy pbworks

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Oct 23 / 8:17pm

Taipei Tech Club Meetup Next Friday

It's been a while since we've had a Taipei Tech Club meetup so here's the info for next Friday's gathering at the Taiwan Beer Factory. If you haven't been before, it's a large venue with food, music, geeks and of course plenty of Taiwan Beer to go around.

Time: Friday, October 30th at 7:00pm
Location: Taiwan Beer Factory (aka Taiwan Beer Garden, Taiwan Beer Bar)
Address: 85, BaDe Road, Sec.2, Taipei, 台北市中山區八德路二段85號‎ 02-2771-9131
Directions: Google Map

Our events are always open invite so please feel free to pass the message to others that might be interested.

Look forward to catching up with you next Friday evening at the Taiwan Beer Factory.

Cheers,

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Filed under // Taipei taiwan techclub

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Oct 21 / 1:33am