Taiwan's Hot Springs

The NY Times ran an article a couple weeks ago about Taipei's hot springs. 

 
click for full article

Yanmingshan is a great place to visit. I highly recommend it to anyone travelling to Taipei. It's easily accessible by the MRT, and has public, semiprivate, and private hotspring baths for any kind of stay, short or long.

The atmosphere is festive, with plump teenagers doing sit-ups on the raised stone sitting areas while the elderly, immersed up to their earlobes, gossip over plastic canisters of cool tea. Rule No. 9 on the wall — “It is inadvisable to spend more than 15 minutes in the hot spring” — seems to be universally ignored. “The Japanese gave us this,” said one well-wrinkled matron, referring to the highly social culture of public bathing. “They also built railroads, and schools and roads.

This is one of the more interesting aspects of the Beitou area that I learned about during my visits there. During World War II, the Japanese stationed kamikaze pilots in Beitou, giving them a steady diet of food, wine, and women while they soaked in the hot springs awaiting their ultimate mission. 

Walking Feet

Tiger Text: Not Just for Cheaters!

Tiger Text has been making waves in the media for the past few days. Tiger Text is an iPhone (and soon BlackBerry and Android) app that allows the user to send a time sensitive text message to another person who has the app. The text is deleted either immediately upon reading, or after a set amount of time.

The joke that the media outlets have been applying to the app is of course apparent in the name. "OMG Tiger Woods cheated on his wife! He's a cheater! You can be a cheater with Tiger Text." Sure, you could use it that way, provided the other party had the app too, and neither one of you wanted the affair to see the light of day. Slightly impractical, and really only applicable to long term affairs, instead of one night stands.

A much more effective and useful application of this app (for some at least) is the drug trade. Dealers could message each other for re-ups, and could message their customers for sales. Drug dealers, rest assured that no one can snitch on you, at least not via cell phone evidence, because the messages you sent are all deleted from the other person's phone. Feds subpoena the phone company? No worries. The messages never go through the cell company's system and are constantly deleted from X Sigma's (creator of Tiger Text) servers.

Maybe I've been watching too much of HBO's The Wire, where the dealers are always one step ahead of the cops. In the show, the street dealers use low tech methods like beepers, payphones and burners-- disposable cell phones that are used for a week and swapped out for a new one before they can be traced or tapped. New technology makes this possible in cheaper and more convenient ways. No more looking for public payphones or making trips to the store to buy burners. Now just send X Sigma a few dollars via Paypal and you're on your way to becoming a kingpin.

Police brutality? Forget calling the news van, just yank out your cell.

My roommate Dustin just got a Droid the other day. We were comparing his phone and my iPhone, and the apps that we like the best on the two devices. There are so many cool things that one can do with an internet-enabled smart phone that were almost science fiction a few years. ago. Barcode scanning, text-to-speech (and vice versa) and the ability to stream live video and photos from the phone directly to the web.

This last one particularly caught our interest, as it negates the process of transferring the data from your phone to a computer, and then uploading it to the net. With web apps such as Ustream and Qik, the user must simply point and shoot-- the video is automatically saved to the user's online account, available for viewing immediately by anyone.

We thought of the possibilities of this. In the past several years, footage of breaking news has been captured on cell phone cameras, as they are almost ubiquitous on modern handsets. From the tube bombings in London, to the street protests in Tehran, hundreds of people have been turned from eyewitness to video journalist simply by pulling out their cell phones and hitting the record button. Now with 3G (and soon 4G) connectivity becoming standard on cell phones, this kind of street level, on-the-spot news coverage will not only become more widespread, but will be in real time, with no delay between the event being recorded and people being able to log on and watch it on their computers or phones.

In instances like the shooting of Oscar Grant by BART police in San Francisco last year, the police confiscated the cameras and cell phones of anyone they saw at the scene. This illegal confiscation of private property by the police was not only theft, but a stifling of the first amendment. As Carlos Miller pointed out in a blog post published after the shooting, photographing a crime isn't a crime itself. The police have no right to confiscate cameras (or phones as the case may be) unless the camera has been used in the commission of the crime.

The services that Qik and Ustream provide should serve as a warning to police everywhere: your deeds and actions can now be recorded by the public anywhere at any time and uploaded in real time for the world to see. Stealing our cameras will no longer protect you, and will only make you look worse.

Takoyaki 章魚小丸子

Takoyaki is a Japanese food. It's fried octopus balls. On top of them are mayonaise, wasabi, and dried fish flakes. It is a delicious snack.

50mph Man - Pretty funny.

Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net

'Money' music video

This is the music video for 'Money' a song by Taichung based rock band The Rising Hedons. It was shot in Taichung city in May 2009 by a group of expat and local artists, videographers, actors, and extras. I helped with the lighting and the grip.



I had great fun making the video and meeting a lot of new friends, and I'm happy with the result. What do you think?

Taiwan Photography

My friend Ryan is a pro photographer based here in Taichung. He's got some cool photographs on his website illustrating daily life in Taiwan.

Photo: Ryan Harrington

Taichung Harbor

Check out these photos I took at Taichung Harbor.

Taichung Harbor, Rainy Day

No Asians

In this clip from news archives, an Australian man is confronted by a news anchor about his racism towards Asians. The kicker is at the end.



"Agents," not Asians, are the "mob of bloody crooks."

Crazy Tea Commercial

This is the goofiest ad I've seen in a long time. No surprise, it's from Japan.

Spring Scream

I want down to Kenting for Spring Scream again this year. You can see the photos here:

Spring Scream: Kenting April 2009

Preemptive Memorial Honors Future Victims Of Imminent Dam Disaster

McCain interviewed on Twitter.

I wrote not too long ago asking if anyone reading this page twittered or not. It's ever increasing popularity is a bit baffling, since 99% of tweets (messages sent via Twitter) are pretty much random thoughts or blurbs written by the author with no real recipient in mind. Occasioanlly this service will be used by celebrities to communicate directly with their fans, companies to promote their product or service, or as a means of localized, real time blogging (as can bee seen in the recent flood of tweets produced by over-connected nerds at South by Southwest.)

McCain is a mine sweeping wizard.

Politicians also have their own Twitter accounts. @SenJohnMcCain has 230,000 followers. McCain was recently interviewed by ABC's George Stephanopoulos (@GStephanopoulos) You can look at the transcript on ABC's blog.

The questions weren't that tough, and there were typos and grammar mistakes on both sides, but then again, the fast pace and 140 character limit of the medium don't make it very viable for traditional forms of journalism.

I'm not sure what kind of future there will be in Twitter based journalism, especially with such high profile participants as these two, but it's kind of an interesting experiment, and it makes McCain look a bit less like an old fuddy duddy (only a bit.)

I twitter occasionally, although I don't know why. Follow me if you want @joewyszynski.

Graffiti Animation

I saw this today on digg.com, and I thought it was pretty cool. This artist, Blu, created an animation the way any animator would-- by drawing and photographing thousands of still images and then playing the images back at a high speed to give the drawings a sense of movement. But he chose to scrap the pencil and paper in favor of spray cans and an urban canvas of walls, streets, and occasionally ceilings.

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

MUTO is pretty trippy, but it's amazing to watch if you consider all that the artist must've gone through to make it.

Phone Photos 2

It's still rainy and cold here, and I've got no life, so I'll post more photos from my phone.


This is a new model from Taiwanese auto manufacturers. The idea behind the design is that thieves will be too embarassed to ever steal your car. It gets great milage too, since it can be fueled by a mixture of petroleum and aphids.


Happy birthday! Here's your tapeworm cake!


This caption practically writes itself, so I won't bother.

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Phone Photos 1

I take a lot of photos on my cell phone (Sony Ericsson K550i) when I'm out and about and I don't have my "real" camera on me. I just finally got around to pairing the phone's Bluetooth with my laptop, so now I've got a whole folder full of pictures spanning the last year and a half. Some are funny things that I've seen and had to shoot, others are things on signs or computer screens that I took a photo of in order to remember it when a pen wasn't handy. I'll start to post the best or most unusual up a few at a time.

I just took this one a couple hours ago. This is Hotel One in Taichung, and it's a few blocks away from my house. As you can see, it's a nasty day today.

I see a lot of strange things while driving my scooter around. This woman owns a Husky, a dog that has no business in hot, humid Taiwan, and she shuttles it around on a tiny scooter.

This man has a lot of meat. He needs to move it across town. He does not have a car, he has a filthy scooter.

Fuck. Me too.

More later.

This is Why You're Fat

For those of you who haven't discovered this unique food blog, thisiswhyyourefat.com posts photos of ridiculously unhealthy junk food concoctions. They range in nature from the cute but relatively innocuous McDonald's Martini to the stoner-ish "gravy covered pizza" or "deep fried Tootsie Roll" to the downright scary Bacon Cheese Pizza Burger. Check it out yourself, and it may inspire you to treat your heart like a punching bag as well.

Good Weather, Good Mood.

It's been nice here for the last week or so, and I've been trying to get outdoors more. Nick and I bought a little barbecue grill on Saturday and grilled some brats. No photos other than this one, since I was having too much fun, but I'm sure we'll do it again.



It's supposed to be nice for the rest of the week and into the weekend, a few showers aside. Good weather has the amazing power to affect people's moods, and bring them out of their homes and into the streets and parks. It's nice to go out walking and come across kids playing or old people smiling at you from a bench.

Next up on my list of things to do outdoors is to get up into the mountains for a hike.

Take that, Hawaii.

The Ultimate Rubber Band Gun

I remember playing with wooden toy rubber band guns when I was a kid. The kind with a simple stretch-and-release firing mechanism. There's nothing more satisfying than hitting something across the living room dead on with a rubber band. That's why these guys took the rubber band gun thing to the next level with The Ultimate Rubber Band Gun. See below:


The Ultimate Rubber Band Gun - Watch more Funny Videos

I'd love to try and build something like this someday. Tearing up the back yard with rubber bands would be a Saturay afternoon well spent.