The New Year
Happy New Year! Mine was spent with a small group of friends drinking and making merry. Somehow we also ended up playing some blindfolded hide and seek game. Bizarre. Fun though.
I haven’t felt like putting in the effort to write any quality entries lately. It’s largely due to my job. I’m really tired of teaching kids and doing all these holiday-themed activities. Fortunately, my job will change at the end of January. Whether or not I’ll stay at the same company is still uncertain at this point, but if I do stay I’ll no longer be teaching kids. I think I’ve done enough teaching kids for a while. It’s experience I wanted, but it’s certainly not my calling.
2005 will see the following changes to Sinosplice:
- A cool Flash menu at www.sinosplice.com/ which highlights all the non-blog features of my site. I’ve always intended my site to be much more than a blog, but blogging is by far the easiest way to add content.
- New random Flash Sinosplice banners at the top of the blog.
- New learning Chinese resources created by me (as sort of a warm-up for my career in Applied Linguistics, applied to Mandarin Chinese).
- Revamp of the Chinese Study Book Reviews, plus more reviews.
- Extensive revision of my Pronunciation of Mandarin Chinese: Setting the Record Straight to reflect what I’ve learned in my Chinese linguistics studies as preparation for graduate school in fall of this year.
- More photo albums (I need to get my camera fixed, but I also have a bunch of old pics on my computer waiting to go online).
- Other random projects that I’m not ready to reveal yet.
Make it a good year.
First post and–
Happy New Years to you too. I’m currently in Shanghai visiting; did you hear the fireworks last night?
Happy New Year 🙂
No longer providing chinese fonts for download? 🙁
You know you could just post any old thing up there and people would come and talk about it. So thanks for consistently coming up with good, interesting posts. That you constantly update doesn’t hurt, either.
Happy New Year!
aline,
I do plan to put the fonts back up, but in such a way that they won’t kill my bandwidth like they did before. I’ll probably put one online a month or something like that.
Another problem is that not all of them work in Windows XP English edition. I need to figure out which ones don’t work, but it’s kind of confusing to do when you have as many fonts installed as I do. Can anyone recommend a good font manager?
zhwj,
Thanks for the encouragement, but obviously certain kinds of posts do not generate the same kind of response as others. Just look at the number of comments for this post and the previous one.
john, your blog is one of my favorite ones and i visit here quite often. the posts that discuss the cross-cultural issues attract me most and the following comments are also very interesting. i hope to read more great and interesting stuff here. thanks for your hard work and wish all the best this year!
Your blog has quickly become my most regularly read blog… because of its interesting content (both commentable and uncommentable it still gets read!) and the great community you have going here. It’s also a huge bonus that you update at least once every two days, that keeps us all coming back!
HAPPY NEW YEAR!!
so is jan. 1 new year in china celebrated as loudly and heavily as chinese new year? i can’t imagine that it would be — that would give it equal significance, i would think.
it was such an honor and privilege to get to experience chinese new year as the year of the monkey was ushered in. the firecrackers here at home (tampa, fl, usa) seem so lame after such a display!
i just find the readership of my blog rise a lot today, and many come from john’s blog, and i come here and find that my blog is listed in the “new blogs on the CBL”.
seems john’s blog is also a great promotion tool for other blogs.
thanks john.
btw, is there any criteria you select china blogs?
I can relate to your kids’ teaching comment – I’m very happy I did my 6 months teaching of the little ones in Japan, but I was also profoundly happy to finish it and I can’t see myself ever returning to it – great life skills but as you said, not my calling.
On a side note, got any Japanese fonts or know where I can get em?