I found one this morning that has a few mildly heavyish songs on it. It’s style is close to Alice 97.3 - if you’re close to the San Francisco bay area (poppy music, but made with real instruments).

It’s called 华流另类 All China Alternative. To listen, you click on the yellow play button, and then open the downloaded file (play.pls) in iTunes.

I wouldn’t call it “metal, rock, or punk” as the description says, but it’s a nice station to practice listening to if hip hop is not your cup of tea.

Oh, and if hip hop is your thing, the same DJ has a “hits” station that is a bit more hip-hoppy.

I found a video taken by a student during the quake - scary stuff.

I would absolutely love to have this - I can’t even tell you how fun this would be. It would make dict.cn and nciku.com usable when away from the computer. Man… my iPhone wants this badly.

I hope this is true, and I really hope it doesn’t have some sort of regional lock down or something. This would be such a boon while studying.

Ok, enough drooling…

According to the story, there are now 220 million Chinese internet users vs. 216 million USA users (USA had the world dominate usage).

The part that is really interesting is the 220 million is only 17% of China whereas the 216 million Americans is 71% of the USA. The growth potential is staggering.

It’ll be interesting times ahead. Savvy people might want to start to i18n their application for 中文…

(All the figures are from the USA Today article)

I woke up Saturday with an idea (which is actually a joke at our house now, “Guess what honey, I have an idea!”). I wanted to have a podcast of news bits that I could listen to while I did my morning routine - the catch being I wanted it daily, and I wanted to control the shows overall subjects at will.

That desire, along with my new found Automator curiosity, led me to throw together Rohan Times Radio News ( :-D ). It’s an automatic process that takes an RSS feed, reads it, and makes a podcast out of the stories. To get the content I want, I am using yahoo pipes to filter and sort the feeds, and then republish the feeds as the shows teleprompt.

Here is a basic overview of how it works (sorry for the oddities with the movie, youtube seems to be doing odd things on upload lately):

One of the coolest parts about this is it basically requires no code (I did, however, use a bit of code to have finer control).

I don’t think I can publish the podcast for the world, as I think it would be seen as a copyright violation, but if you are interested in this let me know.

(I am trying to do some pseudo market research)

Here is what the game looks like:

I have several ideas for other games (board games mostly, but also some online ones), and if there is interest in this type of learning aide I’ll try to find a cheaper way to get the games made.

Thank you for any comments.
谢谢！

My main hang up about speaking is I don’t want to say something wrong, inappropriate or find myself without the words I need. But, as my teacher says, when learning a new language you are going to say silly and wrong things. It is the nature of learning a language.

So in order to try to work through my hang up, I did a few videos of me speaking in Chinese. These are also for my family and friends who are wondering how my study is going.

I’ve only been studying for a year (I am now going on my second), so don’t judge me too harshly ^_^.

This first one is the beginning of a Chinese tongue twister:

If you are curious it goes: 4 is 4, 10 is 10, 14 is 14, 40 is 40 (四是四,十是十,十四是十四,四十是四十)

And this is a poem from a Chinese poet named Lǐ Bái:

Since only my teachers have heard me speak, I am curious if anyone can even hear me…

You can add the gadget to your iGoogle home page (which I am starting to dig), and access it from any operating system from just about any where in the world:

Or if you use the Google side bar in windows, you can add it there too.

You can even embed the Gadget on your own web site.

A new word is shown almost every day (Monday through Friday), posted at 6:00 am PST.

It’s a neat tool. This is a movie of how it works:

(After re-watching the movie, my tones are kind of bad on n词酷. It should be cíkù. Also I say the c sounds more like “s” instead of “ts” a few times -sorry about that.)