Michael Wu Personal Blog

A Taiwanese drama actor

2010-09-26T23:42:00.002+08:00

I couldn’t help pressing the shutter button of my camera when I saw this Taiwanese drama actor one afternoon in February, 1988. Stepping into Hsinchu Du Cheng-Huang Temple, a temple built in 1748 governing both the “Heaven” and the “Earth”, I was first attracted by a crowd of Taiwanese drama actors rehearsing on a stage to my right. There stood a cosmetically appealing man wearing a drama costume more exquisite than anything I’d ever imagined. His drama gown was glistening silver, with a yellow dragon in the front. Both sides of the dragon embroidery were decorated with shimmering silver and gold beads dangling back and forth as he moved around. I believed the gown had been woven of pure silk and shiny satin. And his costume wasn’t the only extraordinary focus that attracted me.

The mixed ruddy and pale complexion of his face was as appealing to me as his drama costume. His forehead was painted a kind of rich white with some pinkish shades; his eyes stood out on his face because of the black eye shadow put on them. His hair, fashioned into a lobe circled by a strip of russet and golden band, was ornamented with silver strings and red glass beads. As most Taiwanese drama male actors, he wore an artificially grizzled glossy beard hanging from twisted strands of wire around his upper lip. His rosy cheek was a little bit mismatched to his masculine character. Noticing that I was taking a photograph of him, he made a gesture of OK with his right hand, probably implying that he was ready, with his colorful drama costume and shining theater makeup, to perform on the stage.

Time zone of blogger.com

2010-09-24T09:24:00.003+08:00

I like to use blogger.com to be my blog hosting service. It is one of the earliest blog hosting services. Then, Google bought it as part of its Internet empire. Of course, quite a few blogging platforms have sprout up in the past few years such as Wordpress, Vox, Blogsome, to name just a few. However, since I used blogger.com first, I just stick to it and also teach my students to use it whenever necessary. However, many of my students can't wait to post their first blog and usually forget to configure the format of their blog. Here I would like to post a photo to show how you can change your time zone so that time stamp will show correct time. First of all, you are encouraged to switch your language to English. Then, you click 'Settings' and then 'Formatting'. You just click the 'time zone' and choose '(GMT+08:00) Taipei'. That's it. I hope that all my students can change the 'time zone' of their blogs so that their postings will show the correct time.

By the way, when I post this blog, I just find a 'Link http:// ' under the Title of my blog entry. I am quite curious what it is. I just type my personal website URL in that blank, hoping that I can figure out what the function of that 'Link'. OK, once I posted it, I knew what the link is for. It's the URL link for my title. Therefore, I disabled it.

Typhoon Fanapi

2010-09-20T11:50:00.002+08:00

The Central Weather Bureau just called off the typhoon alert of Fanapi on Sunday's night (September 19). From the news report, I noticed that Fanapi made landfall near the east-coast city of Hualien, but caused a widespread and heavy devastation in the southern part of Taiwan because of torrential downpour on Sunday afternoon. Luckily, Hsinchu city, an industry-based city about 60 miles south of Taipei, is usually immune to the strike of typhoon. Except for some heavy rains for a short period of time in the early morning on Saturday, I couldn't feel the power of Fanapi on Sunday. If a typhoon hits Taiwan from the east, Hsinchu usually can be protected by the high mountain range in the middle of Taiwan. Being a resident of Hsinchu city, I should feel lucky that I usually don't have to board up windows or pile sandbags at my doors when typhoon is going to hit Taiwan.

heat wave

2010-08-07T15:44:00.004+08:00

During the dog days of summer, most people in the world can feel the devastating impact of global warming. Here in Taiwan, it is quite easy for the thermometer to register 38 degree Celsius (or 100 degree Fahrenheit) before noon. Being an English teacher, I am not going to talk about why the weather has become hotter year after year, how the global warming has influenced our environment, or what eco-friendly actions we should take to cool us off during the deadly heat wave. Instead, I am curious how EFL learners can describe the heat wave except the simplest word -- 'hot'. Word choices or sentence varieties are always difficult to EFL learners.

Let's start from some words I have collected for my English database in the past few years. Many Americans feel Taiwan is sweltering because they sweat a lot here in Taiwan. Taiwan's weather is hot and humid during the summer, which makes people from a continent feel unpleasant. In fact, many states in the USA are even hotter than Taiwan, but it seems that those states are not as humid as Taiwan. However, from a news broadcast I just saw, the southern states of USA can also be very humid in the summer. Most residents in the southern states of USA can't bear the stifling humidity; according to a news report from CBS (August 6, 2010), this year 29 children nationwide died in hot vehicles because they were accidentally left in hot vehicles. It is no doubt that the smoldering heat has blanketed across many portions of US South this year. In fact, across six states of USA, more than 30 deaths are to blame to this week's extreme heat.

'Hot' is not the only word that we can use to describe the weather in the summer. Some other possible word choices are 'muggy' (e.g. a muggy day in August), 'sultry' (e.g. a hot and sultry day), or 'scorching' (e.g. a scorching summer day). Well, no matter how many expressions you can think of to describe this hot summer, I just hope that these boiling summer days will go away soon.

Event Viewer

2010-07-29T22:55:00.004+08:00

It's summer vacation, but I still go go school during the week days. My 12-year-old daughter Yvonne stayed home alone this afternoon. She called my wife, asking her whether she can play computer and my wife said ok. We usually set 30-minute limit to our kids when they are playing computer games or just surfing the Internet. Therefore, we supposed that Yvonne would turn off the computer after she had played the computer for 30 minutes. However, as most parents can expect, we should not test our kid's self control. It is too tempting for kids to break the rule that we set if they are not under our supervision.

Tonight I turned on the computer she had used to check the 'Event Viewer'. I found that she had used that computer from 2:00 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. rather than half an hour as we usually said. I didn't punish her, but it comes up some issues. First of all, there has been a heated debate in Chinese ancient society on whether people are born good or evil. From Yvonne's example, can we confirm that most people are born 'evil' because it is not easy for us to control ourselves and keep ourselves away from temptation? Maybe we can't make that kind of conclusion, but at least we should know that most kids still need parents' guidance, supervision, and advice. Second, Yvonne kept asking me how I knew that she had played the computer for three and a half hours. Of course, I didn't tell her how. I guess that she may find out by herself one day. I promise my son and daughter that I am going to teach them computer skills next summer vacation. I am afraid that once they learn more computer literacy, they may know how to delete all the records in Event Viewer and also the view history of browsers. I should start to look for freeware that can monitor what websites kids have surfed or how long they can use the computer.

Develop a habit of writing English

2010-07-27T00:05:00.004+08:00

I just read an article titled 'Writing IS Thinking'. The author, Kerry Ann Rockquemore, a tenured professor from Department of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago challenged readers to write 30-60 minutes each day. I have to admit that it is pretty difficult for non-native speakers of English to write 30-60 minutes each day. However, being an English writing teacher, I have to convince myself that I should develop a regular habit of writing English, for example 2 pieces of blog every week.

Let's start from writing issues. To many people, writing is the most difficult skill of the four language skills. Why? There are many quite a lot reasons and I would only talk about two of them today. First of all, many native speakers of English have no problem communicating fluently in English, but they may have hard time writing well-organized essays. I bet it is also true to many Chinese people; people who can get their ideas across in oral communication can not necessarily write a convincing article. Since writing will usually leave something for others to check what they wrote is good or not -- an email, a printed writing assignment, a technical report, a chapter of a book, etc, writers should be more careful about the sentence structure, grammar correctness, and word choice of their writing. Second, because writers usually don't have to respond immediately as they did in conversations, they have more time to organize, draft, and revise their writings. In other words, most people may expect more meaningful content from your writing than from your speaking.

Yes, it is not easy for native speakers of English to have a habit of writing English, not to mention non-native speakers of English. However, I bet once we cultivate the habit of writing English, we will write faster and better.

Yvonne's 2nd speech rehearsal

2008-02-07T17:11:00.000+08:00

My daughter Yvonne Wu made her speech rehearsal for the second time. I think it is a little better than the first one. What do you think?

magic or miracle

2008-02-06T15:28:00.000+08:00

I wonder how he could walk on the water.

Yvonne's 1st speech rehearsal

2008-02-06T14:52:00.000+08:00

My daughter Yvonne made her first speech rehearsal on January 28, 2008. Her topic is 'when I feel angry...'. She didn't look nervous, but it seemed that she was eager to end her speech as soon as possible.

I'm Vlog test

2007-10-17T18:49:00.000+08:00

I wonder whether I can embed a video clip from I'm Vlog to my blog right here. I think I don't have to explain what this Chinese video clip is. You will know what it is if you are familiar with political news here in Taiwan.

YouTube test

2007-10-16T19:04:00.000+08:00

I would like to see whether I can put an embedded video from YouTube on my personal blog. I just found a funny video clip from YouTube. It's about Miss Teen America 2007 pageant. Miss Lauren Caitlin Upton, a finalist from South Carolina, was so nervous that she couldn't answer the question clearly and logically. What a poor girl. She should have practiced more public speaking skills and paid more attention to what the question was.

Windows Start→Execute→Keys

2007-09-18T15:26:00.000+08:00

Windows Start→Execute→Keys

My students working hard in the computer lab

2006-09-23T15:48:00.000+08:00

My students are asking their classmates some questions so that they can write a short paragraph introducing their classmates. They are asked to write the introduction of their classmates on bolg. They will learn how to use blog soon.

Rank one at Google search engine in Taiwan

2006-05-26T10:09:00.000+08:00

My website (keyword: Michael Wu) is ranked the first one at Google search engine in Taiwan among the 27,600,000 results. However, when you key in my Chinese name 吳文舜, my website has not been ranked the first one as it was before. :-(

Travel Grant from National Science Council

2006-05-16T08:39:00.000+08:00

I received a letter from National Science Council (NSC) on May 10. It said that they would reimburse my traveling and accommodation expenses up to NT$50,000 on my trip to Brisbane, Australia from July 4 to July 6, 2006. I am going to present my paper titled "Mental images and contextual clues: A comprehension study of animal idiomatic expressions in an EFL environment" in PacSLRF 2006 held at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. It's the first time I get travel grant from NSC in Taiwan, which is an encouragement to me. I will try my best to present my paper and hope that I can also get some feedback from the audience.

English writing teachers

2006-03-26T23:13:00.000+08:00

I took three English writing-related courses at Tamkang university this semester. One of my classmates said that I am a WWW (three writing classes) student this semester. Once I took three writing classes, I found writing is the most difficult skills among the four language skills. Of course, you have more time to construct your ideas, edit your drafts, and make multiple revisions; however, the most challenging part of writing to me is that you should be careful about what you write, for it is black and white (or 0 and 1 in this digital age). Therefore, people can retrieve it and any obvious errors will be easily spotted. Speaking, on the other hand, has different challenges. In most situations, we do not have time to organize our ideas or rehearse it before we speak out. Nevertheless, you can "deny" your errors unless someone talk to you records your conversation.
The other day, one of my classmates asked a question in one of my writing classes. I think it is a pretty good one. She asked whether we English teachers should become good English writers before we can teach English writing. That is to say, can we teach English writing if we can't write English properly? Think about this question if you are an English teacher. I will talk about this issue in my later postings.
I will try my best to write something and post it on this blog, probably a couple of postings every week. Let's see how it works.

BubbleShare

2006-02-23T14:20:00.000+08:00

I just found a wonderful site called "BubbleShare". It is still in its beta version. I created a photo album for my daughter Yvonne. I upload photos, record captions, and put URL links to my blog. Here it is.

This album is powered by
BubbleShare - Add to my blog

Tung Oil Garden Cafe

2005-03-30T11:15:00.000+08:00

tung oil garden cafe 6
Originally uploaded by MichaelWu.

Since my wife was going to treat me a dinner in Maoli, on the way to the restaurant we stopped by legendary Tung Oil Garden Cafe where tung flowers blossom in May. We tried to visit this garden cafe last year, but we couldn't get in because it was too crowded. We visited Tung Oil Garden Cafe out of season this year. Although we didn't see any Tung flowers, it was much better to sit in the beautiful garden while there were not so many visitors. If you live within one hour drive to Maoli, you are welcome to visit this beautiful and cozy garden cafe.

Google search

2005-03-10T19:53:00.000+08:00

Google search
Originally uploaded by MichaelWu.

If you type my Chinese name in Google, you can find my personal website listed the first one. What surprises me is that I don't use my Chinese name in my English website. It's amazing.

Who is this lady?

2005-03-04T14:53:00.000+08:00

My wife Shiang when she was young
Originally uploaded by MichaelWu.

If you are smart, you should know that this young lady is my wife. She took this picture around 1985.

Miyako_Islands

2005-02-09T16:24:00.000+08:00

Miyako_Islands
Originally uploaded by MichaelWu.

We took the Star Cruise to Miyako Islands, Japan.
Date: June 28, 2004

Ocean_Park

2005-02-09T16:21:00.000+08:00

Ocean_Park
Originally uploaded by MichaelWu.

Before Diag Dour family left Taiwan, we went to Ocean Park in Hualien.
Date: June 22, 2004

18_peak_mountain

2005-02-09T16:08:00.000+08:00

18_peak_mountain
Originally uploaded by MichaelWu.

During Chinese New Year holiday, we went to one of the best scenes in Hsinchu, Taiwan -- 18-peak mountain.

My dear family

2005-02-09T16:02:00.000+08:00

Tunghai01
Originally uploaded by MichaelWu.

Place: Tunghai University, Taichung, Taiwan
Date: Dec. 25, 2004

Upload from cellphone

2005-02-08T02:02:00.000+08:00

I took this photo on Jan 23,2005. But I forget where I took it.