Chinese Input

The other day, I stumbled across this guy's blog. He's Chiang Kai-Shek's great-grandson, and about the same age as I. I don't agree with everything he says, but I was impressed with his language skills. Considering he moved to Canada when he was 12 and basically grew up in North America, we're pretty equal in terms of Mandarin background. Granted the guy returned to Taiwan after college, but I'm still impressed with his level of writing. Meanwhile, I can't even type.

I've thought about learning how to type in Chinese for a long time. I would really like to learn Boshiamy just because of its sheer coolness, but the software is proprietary and I couldn't bring myself to pay for an input method software. I poked around online today looking for other options.

I downloaded NJStar trial (so much for not paying for input software... this one would cost money too.) The input methods that require the least amount of training are Bopomofo and Pinyin. I know Bopomofo well, but it requires a Chinese keyboard. To try this input method, I had to bring up a keyboard map on the screen and follow along. I get better precision because I know exactly how to spell in Bopomofo but the process of finding the symbols on the keyboard was slow. My experience trying Pinyin was the exact opposite. I don't know how to spell in Pinyin so I relied on the wikipedia Bopomofo to Pinyin phonetic map. It was slow figuring out how to spell, but once I knew how to spell, typing was very fast.

Overall I had an easier time with Pinyin because it was easier to guess the sound->Latin alphabet mapping than the symbol->key mapping. This is the fruit of my labor. Anyone who can read Chinese can attest to the disparity in the aforementioned blogger's writing skill and mine.

你好﹐ 我的名字是呂悅純 。我住在舊金山附近。 我以經結婚了。 我在一家軟體公司上班。我今天在學中文打字﹐ 可是學得很慢。 尤其我沒有注音符號的鍵盤﹐ 而且也不會拼音﹐ 所以特別難。

Maybe I should blog in Chinese every once in a while to help improve my Chinese writing.

On a separate note, now that I know I have to pay for an input method anyway, I think I'll try Boshiamy next.

AT&T

We're remodeling, so the house doesn't need phone service for a few months. I emailed AT&T to see what our options are in terms of suspending the service. Here is their response:

"AT&T offers three types of Temporary Suspension for your telephone service. You may choose to suspend incoming calls, outgoing calls, or both incoming and outgoing calls. All monthly charges, including taxes and surcharges, will still be applicable while the service is suspended. There is currently a one-time charge of $19.00 to make this change."

In other words, I pay a $19 to "suspend" my service, then every month during the suspension I continue to pay my monthly phone bill. Essentially I have to pay them to not service me.