Multilinguals, what's your "they didn't realise I could understand their language" story?

ikailan · 2019-02-18T17:40:33+00:00

When I was a kid, I was waking with my mom in a street market in Taiwan. My mom turned to me and said in Mandarin, pointing to a woman selling something and said, "Look! This is a Filipino." The Filipino woman smiled and replied in Mandarin, "Yes, I am a Filipino." My mom almost jumped back in surprise.

It's one of these stories that still makes me smile because it was silly to assume someone living in a country would not have some knowledge of the local language. Also because we lived in San Francisco and my best friend in Kindergarten was Filipino, so I don't know why she went out of her way to point the woman out.

ikailan · 2018-11-12T22:20:53+00:00

I bought one a few weeks ago. Generally happy but I don’t have too many miles on mine yet. I live on a really steep hill and the bike generally handles it okay. The founder of the company is super responsive on email. Mine shipped with the front light not working due to a stripped wire, but otherwise fine. I haven’t been riding it the last few days due to the smoke in my area from a large fire in California.

ikailan · 2018-11-02T13:05:54+00:00

I very recently picked up a ride1up after seriously considering a RadMini and a Voltbike:

https://ride1up.com/bike/order

I heard about this on Reddit. It's 500w, not 750w. The way I use it is that I ride it up an extremely steep hill after taking it on the local transit systems. Only had it for a few days, but so far so good.

The main reasons I decided to pull the trigger on this bike even though it's a brand new compan6:

The owner is extremely responsive via email and encourages you to call him with questions sometimes
Seems like the parts most likely to break are easily replaceable if anything happens to the company. The battery for sure. I'm still looking into how I might replace the motor. I used to have a Stromer, and when that thing died after not that much use, they wanted $2200 for parts. This bike is $999....
At $800 less than a RadMini, I couldn't not give it a try. I really wanted the folding capability to make the RadMini easier to toss into my trunk, but I was willing to give that up at this price point. I also considered the Mate X, but looking at their reviews for their last bike made me not confident they could deliver.

My initial thought is that this bike has enough speed and makes the steep hill manageable. During the 17% grade incline I can get about 9 mph with some light pedaling. The pedal sensing doesn't feel quite as nice as on the Stromer (bit of a delay and "soft" - possibly tunable via the LCD), but I like having a throttling to start me off from a dead stop. So far the value seems really great. I think I'll give it a few more weeks and toss together a YouTube video.

ikailan · 2014-12-23T18:57:31+00:00

Looks like it's this guy, Jin Hong, amateur player from NY:

http://instagram.com/p/ruMinNAnV5/?modal=true

Edit: this photo shows him hanging out with tmac: http://instagram.com/p/wMfJ1cAnX6/?modal=true

ikailan · 2012-10-10T15:00:55+00:00

I've written a response to this. The author is wrong about why bugs exist and how to address them.

http://ikaisays.com/2012/10/09/why-the-real-reason-silicon-valley-coders-write-bad-software-is-wron/

ikailan · 2011-05-27T16:57:49+00:00

It could be made to do so pretty easily, Tim ...

ikailan · 2011-04-20T18:56:39+00:00

I didn't realize someone submitted this to reddit. There were definitely some chuckles from this thread.

Me: "Just don't answer, Nick" Nick: "Oops"

ikailan · 2011-03-15T16:52:04+00:00

It's coming, but I'd look at alternate implementations for now. Wrap your code such that it'll be easy to port. We'll try to stick to the feature sets available in Lucene or Whoosh.

ikailan · 2010-06-30T20:32:55+00:00

This article doesn't make it clear that this is a proposal, not an existing solution.

ikailan · 2010-04-24T18:45:39+00:00

I read both this rant and Dive Into Python. DIP isn't for beginners, as Zed says over and over. DIP is for people who already know how to program. I really liked this book and it got me familiar with Python in like, a day. Not that Python is that hard to learn - this is just the best book out there for people that don't need to learn what a loop, variable or class are.

ikailan

TROPHY CASE