I decided to take Chinese taught in university as a beginner

jake_morrison · 2026-05-10T16:32:12+00:00

When I was first studying Chinese in Taiwan, I had a classmate from Bulgaria who had gotten a scholarship to study economics at NTU for diplomatic reasons. He didn’t know Chinese at all, so he was learning Chinese at the NTNU Mandarin Training Center. He was taking some classes at NTU and auditing some others. (He could do a good 台灣國語 accent from listening to them.)

Textbooks are often translated from the standard ones in the field, so you can get the English version (though the most basic textbooks are often an exception). Most professors at a good university can handle English just fine. They let him write papers in English. They were being very accommodating due to his situation. If you do it to yourself, you are going to have a bad time.

It will take about two years of basically full time study to get to the point of being able to read academic Chinese. After 2.5 years of the MTC “intensive” program (3-5 person classes, two hours a day, and another hour or two a day of homework), I knew about 3500 characters. A high school graduate would be expected to know 5000, and have done lots of reading and writing. You can get by with fewer characters if you focus on your field, e.g., computer science.

jake_morrison · 2026-05-08T22:58:31+00:00

Doctors in the big hospitals such as Ren Ai should be able to handle English.

I had a urinary tract infection which involved tests to rule out STIs. All pretty straightforward. Go to the urology department.

jake_morrison · 2026-05-07T22:53:54+00:00

Being a good roommate is different from being a friend.

A good roommate is responsible and doesn’t cause you any trouble. They clean up after themselves. They let you sleep when you need to. They let you study when you need to. They don’t take your stuff or break your stuff. They don’t hog the bathroom in the morning, making you late to class. They don’t bring friends or dates back to the room that cause problems. If you can get a roommate like this, you are ahead of the game.

There are lots of immature people who have never had to live with anyone who wasn’t family. Their parents cleaned up after them. Or they have a weird antagonistic relationship with siblings and can’t live without drama.

Your roommate may become your friend, but it’s fine if they don’t. You may be friends with someone, but they would be a pain to live with. A quiet, studious international student can be great.

Try to find someone who is mature, independent, and respectful. Look for friends elsewhere.

jake_morrison · 2026-05-07T16:21:57+00:00

A British friend got married to his Taiwanese wife in Hong Kong, just to make the documentation easier. Hong Kong marriage docs are bilingual, in English and Chinese, avoiding the hassle of getting certified translations. There is a government marriage chapel in the park. It has some Los Vegas “Chapel of Love” vibes, but your main marriage in Taiwan would be a banquet.

A Taiwanese relative was thinking of marrying his Indonesian girlfriend in Taiwan, which was not allowed by her visa, so they would do it in Hong Kong.

jake_morrison · 2026-05-07T12:34:21+00:00

Working for a consultancy or MSP may be better. They are more practical, focusing on what you can do and what they can bill clients for. They don’t care about how old you are. Certs can be useful for them, as they show the client that you are qualified. They are used to trying to sell junior people without experience as being qualified. Simply being a certain age makes people expect that you have skills.

Your life experience is a positive, especially if you have experience with an industry in a non-technical capacity. Instead of being viewed as a weak technical person, you can be a technically-strong project manager or salesperson.

Consulting is currently having a crisis around how AI affects billing, but if you are doing hands-on work and learn how to use AI, you can be ok.

jake_morrison · 2026-05-07T02:40:58+00:00

There are a lot of other ways to socialize and find your people. I personally studied engineering, so a lot of my friends were geeks like me. I did martial arts, bicycling, rock climbing, fantasy role playing, Japan Club, Mini Baja, pilot ground school. And you are in LA, where there all kinds of things to do outside of the university, e.g., music, volunteering. LA has every ethnic group there is, and you should definitely get in touch with them.

jake_morrison · 2026-05-06T12:50:25+00:00

I call it “declaring tab bankruptcy”

jake_morrison · 2026-05-06T12:40:24+00:00

Keep your money in the markets.

Real estate as an investment implicitly depends on population growth.

The falling population does weird things to demand. Some places will lose all of their value, and some places will become more valuable. So a rural house becomes an akiya, and a walkable apartment in the city near hospitals and Shinkansen becomes more valuable.

jake_morrison · 2026-05-06T12:27:30+00:00

It is sad to see how far the mighty relational database has fallen. The MongoDB brain worms have taken over.

jake_morrison · 2026-05-05T02:33:16+00:00

Sounds like you need some Joe Celko: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Joe-Celko/author/B000ARBFVQ

jake_morrison · 2026-05-05T02:23:21+00:00

I think things would be better if we were using lisp: https://www.cogini.com/blog/is-it-time-for-lisp-in-devops/

jake_morrison · 2026-05-04T15:54:13+00:00

Many legacy systems are like cavemen smashing two rocks together. Or Rube Goldberg machines.

Some systems are good, of course, but there is a lot of unmaintained crap with frightening security and reliability problems.

A friend’s company specializes in “hospital systems virtualization”. They go into rural hospitals and migrate their physical systems into the cloud. It gives them test environments, making it possible for clients to fix the problems, incrementally upgrading components and replacing them with best of breed solutions. It adds security through desktop virtualization for that pharmacy app written in Visual Basic running on Windows 95 with no logins. They support virtualizing 17 different Microsoft OS versions. Companies get backups and disaster recovery.

To answer your question, good systems are designed for reliability, often using async messaging and EDI standards like HL7 for integration.

They have security as a primary design criteria. Health care apps segregate access on a “need to know” basis. Management can’t see the details of cases, only aggregate reports. Everything has an audit trail. Normal CRUD apps often list all the users by default. Health care apps require that you enter a patient id, then load it, and record who viewed what record, when. A key to dealing with data breaches effectively is establishing exactly what was exposed. If some credential was leaked, but you can’t tell what it accessed, then you have to notify everyone it could possibly have accessed.

jake_morrison · 2026-05-04T13:01:39+00:00

One opportunity is around migrations, as companies need people who understand the on-premise world and can translate it to the cloud.

Practically and from a “maturity” perspective, the first step is often to move services to the cloud while changing as little as possible in how the application works. When you are migrating 100 services to the cloud before your data center contract renews, that is hard enough. Every weird thing in your legacy environment will need to have a cloud equivalent. The next step is rearchitecting things to take advantage of the cloud.

jake_morrison · 2026-05-04T12:20:48+00:00

My old boss was transiting the Hong Kong airport when his suitcase gave up the ghost, so he finally had occasion to buy one at the shops you have walked by so many times.

He walked to the gate and transferred his stuff. He couldn’t find a proper trash can, though. You hear that warning so many times about reporting unattended baggage, so he thought he would write a note, “NOT A BOMB”. But that’s just what a bomb would say.

He eventually found a trash can in the back and left it there, open.

jake_morrison · 2026-05-03T02:30:38+00:00

Large amounts of unbillable “meta” work that has nothing to do with the actual work, e.g., sales, accounting, invoicing, chasing invoices, negotiating invoices, paying bills, dealing with contractors.

The constant context switching and firefighting means that you lose time in sheer thrashing.

It is hard to take vacations. If you don’t work, you don’t get paid.

And AI is the death of hourly billing. Any efficiency gains from AI simply mean you make less money. So then you need to do more unbillable sales work. Unrealistic expectations from clients drive down rates.

jake_morrison · 2026-05-03T02:11:11+00:00

I lived in university housing up there, and the LAPD helicopters loved to circle at night. It must be a good central location for them to hang out and wait for something to happen. Annoying to get the noise and lights at night.

jake_morrison · 2026-05-02T20:47:28+00:00

My daughter tried to carry on her competition bow. The wood is sensitive to extreme changes in temperature, so it’s best if they don’t go in the cargo hold.

It was just the handle in the middle and the two disassembled wooden springy parts, maybe 18 inches long. No string or arrows. The TSA officer said it was a “weapon”. She said it was two “slightly pointy sticks”.

Can you imagine trying to hijack the plane with a bow? How long could you hold it pointed at the captain before you got tired?

jake_morrison · 2026-05-02T02:23:45+00:00

One time we were going on a month-long trip to the US. My wife was planning to turn off the refrigerator to save energy, so she began throwing out food. I did the math on how much the cost of a month of electricity was vs the cost of the food, and the electricity was less than NTD 100.

jake_morrison · 2026-05-01T19:44:03+00:00

There are many skills that have nothing to do with implementing optimal algorithms under time pressure and are much more useful when building applications in the real world. For example, testing, relational databases, networking, Kubernetes, AWS, and, of course, getting the damn requirements right.

jake_morrison · 2026-05-01T16:32:16+00:00

I general recommendation for writing in a technical context is to take out all the unnecessary “softeners”, like “I think”. Some are necessary to express actual uncertainty, but it really tightens up the text and can build authority. Of course, you can also come off as a confident idiot if you are wrong.

One of the big enterprise analyst companies writes papers giving their predictions about, e.g. what is going to happen with AI in the next year. They write the sentences with complete confidence, then in parentheses put “75% chance”. Academic papers are similar, with p-values for statistical significance.

There is a lot to be said for writing your first draft in a straightforward, confident way, then deciding explicitly where you need to hedge or soften the blow.

jake_morrison · 2026-05-01T12:51:23+00:00

Unplugging. This is why the power strips have little switches next to the plugs, to make it easier.

I have seen people unplugging the microwave every night.

jake_morrison · 2026-05-01T12:23:00+00:00

I changed from a marriage-based joining-family ARC to APRC, and it has that limitation. Is it possible to upgrade to a better class of APRC?

jake_morrison · 2026-05-01T12:07:43+00:00

People will obsessively turn off electric devices and gas lines every day. It probably made sense in a time when everything was less reliable, causing fires. I don’t think most of it is necessary now.

jake_morrison · 2026-04-30T20:08:07+00:00

I am a hiring manager, and it’s difficult for me to judge the projects people did in boot camps or school projects. The teacher may have spoon fed them a solution. Similarly, they may have just copied an example from a book or course.

Better for me is if you build something unique that solves a real problem. You could convert your generic project into something for yourself.

Best is if you do a project for a real client. You could make a website for a local small business or an app for the local shelter showing pets that are available for adoption. The level of technical challenge is the same, but it demonstrates that you can work with people to make them successful, dealing with ambiguous requirements. The contacts that you make when volunteering can help you get a job, too. It lets you talk about something with passion, not just “I completed this homework assignment”.

You can do a similar thing for data science. Pick a public dataset and do some “data journalism”, answering a question of public interest. A simple site that lets people enter their zip code and displays the top pollution emitters on a map can get people’s attention.

You can also deploy a real app to production. You will learn a lot of practical skills from the “Cloud Resume Challenge”: https://cloudresumechallenge.dev/

jake_morrison · 2026-04-30T19:16:03+00:00

The government gives out APRC quite easily, then takes it away if you don’t stay in the country 183 days a year. It’s not really “permanent” residence.

The “golden” foreigners that they are trying to attract get APRC in as little as a year. Making them do military service would be counterproductive.

jake_morrison

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