I was just up the road in a 3C store in HongShulin where I saw the ‘fabled’ Asus Eee Box pictured below. It really got me thinking about my music plans. We have an older Yamaha audio system, with a line-in socket. With several GBs of MP3’s purchased legally from EMUSIC and several hundred CDs,…
Getting car insurance is compulsory in most countries, but it always pays to check around and make sure you aren’t being quoted a rate that is too expensive. In our first couple of years, we were too busy to check around, and I’m pretty sure that it cost us quite a lot of extra money….
Wow! I was using my wife’s laptop again this week for crunching numbers and writing lesson plans. It is excruciatingly slow at times as it gets bogged down doing the simplest things. We bought her the IBM Thinkpad Series R51 Pentium M 1.3Ghz model about 4 years ago. But we only got 256mb memory, with…
Losing weight isn’t much of a mystery, the formula is quite simple: consume less, exercise more and drink plenty of water… So while it’s tempting to believe all the diet pill reviews that you might read, spend hard earned cash on magic formulae, and join expensive clubs… nothing you do will alter that reality. As…
Buying car insurance is a necessity but always a chore, usually expensive, and somewhat inconvenient. When we renew, we get mailed a quote from the broker, exchange several or more phone calls, argue about the amounts, get revised quotes, and then have to take a trip to the dealer to get the quote finalised and…
I was reminded by my wife that Mother’s day is coming soon in Taiwan. Next Sunday in fact. It’s difficult to buy things for Mother’s Day in Taiwan, giving presents isn’t something that people do much here. Even at more important times of the year, such as Chinese New Year or Moon Festival, most presents…
When we were living in Tienmou, we rented our apartment because we couldn’t afford to buy one there. It was just too expensive for us. One of the advantages of renting is that the landlord will come and fix things for us. And she did. Except one: Our kitchen faucet. It started to drip slowly…
A surefire way for me to break the monthly budget is to go to Costco! Taiwan is now blessed (or cursed) with five branches, including a newly opened one in TaiChung County. I’ve been a member for a few years now, and an advocate since I discovered their hotdogs a few years earlier! Of course,…
Most businesses face an unstable first few years, even with a good accountant helping out. Yet, for micro-businesses, small business accounting is a difficult and crucial issue. We all need good bookkeeping skills, software and advice, yet such advice is difficult to come by, expensive and sometimes even inaccurate. It’s a nightmare since a business…