Without a doubt the most important aspect of learning how to ride a bike is balance. If you can’t balance you can’t ride a bicycle! Initially when learning to ride you want to be able to build up confidence in balancing whilst riding at a slow speed in a straight line. If you start off [...]

The notion of using advertising to recoup the costs of offering a service ‘free’ to internet users is definitely not a new one. Infact some would argue it’s practically as old as the web itself. I’d even go one step further and suggest that the majority of the internet (OzSoapbox included) supports itself in some [...]

For the majority of the population in Taiwan road rules are something that are adhered to. The understanding that if ‘I follow the rules others will to and traffic will subsequently flow more freely’ seems to have been wholeheartedly adopted. There is however a noticeable minority who just don’t give a rats arse. Unfortunately ignoring [...]

The absurdity of the blanket acknowledgement of traditional Aboriginal land owners first hit me back in high school. I was in year seven from memory and it was an assembly marking the establishment of the school. To kick start the assembly an acknowledgement was made to the traditional Aboriginal land owners of the area. As [...]

A few months ago now I began to write about teaching adults how to ride a bicycle. Due to moving to Taiwan and being overwhelmed with material to write about I’ve inadvertently put off continuing the topic. In my first post I outlined some initial considerations for people to take into account in either learning [...]

Nothing much is sacred these days. By sacred I don’t mean sitting in a church praying about it but rather that there isn’t a lot of ideas we as a society won’t entertain. One of them that sticks out in my mind is the idea of designer babies. Currently a fledgling technology, we’re still obviously [...]

Forget temples, praying to Buddha, burning money paper for good fortune and the whole other host of ways that exist to connect to the celestial world. In Taiwan, a girl’s parents are god. Going against one’s parents is unheard of, no matter how absurd or selfish the request. For this reason when it comes to [...]

There are many beautiful mountains across Taiwan. With 70% of the island covered in mountains there by far just too many to visit. Most of them pass you by as you whizz by them either in a car or train. One of the more accessible Taiwanese mountains to those travelling through central Taiwan is Lion’s [...]

In our free society, we actually allow people to hold silly, bizarre and even dangerous views. -Liberal Senator, Eric Abetz So…anyone tried going public in our free society with any dangerous terrorist’esue views they might harbor lately? How’d that work out for you? It was always going to be a difficult task, getting the parliament [...]

When researching software programs to learn Chinese Mandarin with it’s pretty hard to go past Rosetta Stone. The United States Army, Airforce, Marine Corps and Department of State are all Rosetta Stone customers. For some that might be a reason to skip over the software but I figured if it was good enough for the [...]