Aiyo! I sat up late on Sunday trying to make a video for the best trip in Taiwan competition . It's amazing how long this stuff takes, but it's getting easier as I learn more about it.

The deal is: a team comprising at least one foreigner must submit a proposal for a 4-day trip in Taiwan. The focus of the trip is adventure, and cost-effectiveness. You have to assign a clear theme, write your proposal, and also submit a one-minute video introducing yourselves. Here's what we came up with....

Hard to believe, but Carnegie's seems to have given up! I haven't had a decent meal there for ages, and this is just unforgivable.

I have a series of guest lectures coming up at Shida University (國立臺灣師範大學) to teach high school teachers some new activities and methods.

I'm expecting a class of 30 teachers in early July, for two days, and we'll be looking at some alternative ways to help our students. I think everyone these days recognises that memorising vocabulary lists isn't very helpful, but there is a lack of other material available. So my job is to provide some suggestions.

I haven't finalised the list of what I'll be covering yet, but here are the suggestions I gave to the university when they contacted me: 

I woke up hungry this morning and decided to try a restaurant I've heard a lot about - The Diner.

Looking on their website, the food looks great, and we arrrived to find that many other people have reached the same conclusion.

The place was absolutely packed! Bear in mind, this was at 11am on a Monday, not the busiest day of the week nor the busiest time of day, but it was completely full all the same.

We checked with the waitress, and discovered that we *might* be able to get a table in 45 minutes, which was too long for me and we ended up going somewhere else.

But it's worth commenting on the fact that some businesses are doing amazingly well, despite the things that people keep telling me about the economy. There is obviously a market for quality and these guys are  doing very well out of it.

l'll be back

I've just had a nightmare couple of weeks following the sudden death of my computer.

Email, contact books, lesson plans, photographs, music, all of it disappeared just as I had an urgent deadline to meet and I spent a week sweating as I tried to finish a 25-page report without access to my archive. Driving down  the street, cursing myself for not making a backup, I saw a sign outside a church reminding me that "Jesus Saves" - the smug bastard!

Still, then final result was a fairly hefty upgrade to the useless machine, and a whole bunch of new capabilities. While i was focused on my IT I took a little time out to try Goosync, and am pretty impressed with the result.