Two wrongs made one right

Life is full of surprises, I was told. But one really would not expect this from a cruise tour … imagine you had 2,000 passengers for a cruise, and there was no departure hall. Yes, even though I have online checked in, I still needed to queue up with all the passengers in a shopping mall for 3 hours just to get the boarding pass. No wonder we need a new cruise pier in our city, badly.

The second surprise was even more unexpected, the ship traveled over 700 nautical miles in 36 hours to the first port of call – Naha of Okinawa, Japan. And then found that the port was closed because of bad weather … then the captain decided to cancel the visit to that beautiful city, and an U-turn to go straight to the next port – Keelung, Taiwan. What a shame ?!

So, what’s the one right ? At least, I took one photo of Naha – i.e. just the sea. Bad weather ? You must be kidding …

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User Experience – Fare Conversion Table

After months’ of discussion, finally the flag-fall fare of all taxis in town raised by $1 yesterday. Since there is only a rise in flag-fall fare but not the fare per kilo-meter, the new taxi fare is therefore quite easy to calculate – just add $1 to the meter reading.

And since there is not enough time to re-calibrate all the meters of all taxis, so the local government’s transport department issued a taxi fare conversion table to display in each taxi for passenger reference (see below).

Taxi fare table

Yesterday in one taxi trip I had a chance to read this conversion table – it read something like this:

$ 15.00 -> $ 16.00
$ 16.40 -> $ 17.40
$ 17.80 -> $ 18.80
….

Yes you read it right, it just add $1 to all the small numbers in the table above. I mean, to make this piece of paper a lot more useful, why not just print one simple but bold sentence ?

Add $1 to the meter reading, thank you !!

Now you can tell, how our government officials use their brain …

Did you know … shift happens ?

Two very good set of slides … “Did You Know” is a set of slide about the globalization and America’s future in 21st century. And “Shift Happens” is a stylization of same set of slides. Two different approaches but same important message. Enjoy !!

“Did you know” by Karl Fisch, a teacher from Colorado.

“Shift Happens” by Jeff Brenman, a graduate from NorthWestern University.

Voices

Months ago I blogged about a voice that’s so moving from Taiwan, and today I found another voice with similar charisma. her name is Joanna Wang, also from Taiwan and again, hearing is believing.

Let’s start from here
Lose the past
Change our minds
We don’t need a finish line
Let’s take this chance
Don’t think too deep
All those promises we couldn’t seem to keep
I don’t care where we go
Let’s start from here

Sometimes, I wonder why the “Superstars” in our city can waste their precious time in TV shows, movie making, naughty picture taking etc. etc. but not some material time in singing – i.e. their career.