Sometime, about two months ago, I sent a link out to a couple of people whose opinions I value highly when it comes to design and interaction.

I had asked them for feedback on a nearly complete website. It was so nearly complete that it was perhaps just a click or two away from going live.

That website was my new company portfolio, on which I had been working heavily upon for perhaps four months, through the dark nights of autumn and winter. A huge amount of time had been invested to produce the site that would eventually replace the one I had built in 2006, a site which I had constructed six months before I even decided that web design was going to be my full time career.

I received two emails back. I deliberately had asked my confidants to be blunt and honest (the only worthwhile feedback) and within 12 hours, the entire site was consigned to the trash can.

This should have been traumatic. I had sweated detail after detail. I had included references so subtle that not even a super sleuth could have deciphered all the little tics and nods. The man hours lost, coffees quaffed and headaches endured all suddenly had been worthless. The fact was that the website on the end of that link was bad. Very, very bad.

That’s not to say the site I completed in January didn’t have considerable merits. The code was all HTML5, the CSS was packed full of ‘3’. There were embedded fonts when embedded fonts were still a mystery to most of us, and it was all sitting atop a frothy-light PHP framework that I’d handcoded from scratch. The underlying quality couldn’t have been higher.

About six or seven days ago I launched HiggsDesign.com. I didn’t really tell anyone; it sort of leaked out a few days after, and once a few people knew about it and had said nice things, it seemed the right time to acknowledge it. In fact the whole process of making it public was quite cathartic; like a weight lifting off my shoulders, after perhaps the longest, least pleasant web-design journey I have ever embarked upon.

To put this into context, I realised I needed a new portfolio a very long while ago. I started as a sole trader immediately after I graduated in 2006, then in 2008 the business became limited, and in 2009 I VAT registered the company. Still the website remained identical, and rarely updated.

Ever since I began trading, I’ve used my own name, my own domain and the old website that I knocked together at around the same time I wrote my dissertation.

But for a long time I had yearned for a better representation online. I wanted to drop the ‘Andy’ bit from my monikor for a long while, as I felt it limited what work the company could attract. Not that getting work through the door has been a problem - in fact probably my biggest issue over the past two years has been finding the time to work on personal projects for lack of time to myself. I’ve worked pretty hard, but it’s mainly through personal recommendations that I’ve earned my salt, rarely through freak visitations to my website.

I started the redesign around this time last year. A full 12 months ago now. I iterated quite a bit, but the same core elements remained. I struggled a lot to understand what I wanted, and spent much time debating very minute little details, putting off the big choices. When I think about it now, I was treading water furiously.

The thing is that I’ve since realised is that I was a terrible, terrible client. Of course, I’d read all those articles about making your own website being the hardest thing to do, but surely it wasn’t this difficult last time around?

I genuinely grew more and more frustrated with the project. I’d spend my weekends sat in my favourite coffee shop knocking back mochas and trying to hammer out something that would soothe this itch for resolve. It seemed like the project would never end.

I had quickly formed-up the most important pages in my mind, or at least the most interesting ones. The homepage, the folio and the contact page were all done, one by one they appeared in my browser window.

By the time I had weened myself off perfecting silly little details and moving onto the other serious pages like the about page, those other pages had stood stagnant for what seemed like months.

I struggled to get the tone right. Was this my portfolio, or the business’ portfolio? We, or I?

The battle continued.

In January I went away for a week to Austria with Tim and Stacey for some time snowboarding. The macbook came with me too, and I felt I finally had reached a stage where I was polishing the brass tacks. A good 10 months in the making, here was the final, glorious result. I was pretty much ready to launch, I thought.

When I received the first of the two replies to the emails I had sent, I wasn’t surprised. There seemed to be a lot of criticism. I took it pretty well I thought. Perhaps even a little too easily. I mean, I often challenge my clients when they request changes to the work I present to them (it improves the end result by a mile), and often defend my corner. With this, I didn’t feel like I could argue back. I agreed with everything that was said.

The observations were all true. The navigation was muddled. The copy was repetitive and inconsistent. The styling was over the top, and what was meant to be elegant had become kitsch. I’d really screwed up.

I felt nothing. By all accounts I should have had my heckles up, been annoyed, upset, angry, or at least felt something. But I realised by the time that I had read the second email, that this was a profound mistake with the project . It took a few hours to digest my emotionless stage and why I wasn’t surprised or angry, but I quickly realised that I had simply deluded myself that spending time on it meant that the end result would be good. By this stage, in my heart of hearts, I now knew that the whole thing needed to be reset.

I will say, I don’t believe this was in anyway ordinary. I had commissioned myself to work on a hyper-personal project that needed to resolve a number of incredibly complex business issues I had accrued over a four year period.

My mistake most likely had been working in pure isolation. Bar the odd look-in, I was the only person who had ever seen the site, and perhaps those who had seen it hadn’t had the heart to criticise earlier when they saw I had been working so vigourously at it.

The thing is, I have built up fantastic methods for working with my clients over the years. It allows me to get inside their business or organisation and produce website that they are truly pleased with. I work with them closely and we plan, iterate and resolve. But here, I had used none of these tools. I don’t think I planned anything really.

The whole thing had formed like some organic mutant. The core had been fired months ago, but some of the most important elements had been relegated to final-minute half-assed compromises in order to get the thing complete before I lost the remainder of my sanity.

So after thinking about my lack of emotional attachment (and taking that as a warning sign that something was totally awry) I consigned it all to the trash and started over.

That was two months ago. I quickly started over, and this time I took input from day one. My coffee people have still been doing a roaring trade, but for the past eight weeks or so my vigour has been tempered by planning the whole thing out before I moved to code.

Some things have changed since then - of course they have - but that initial plan, plus the assistance of some trusted council, really focussed the objectives of the project and I progressed quickly and efficiently.

Of course things could always do with improvement. Before I launched the new site, I felt the thing lacked the beauty and complexity of the original version, but I don’t have to dwell long to think of every mistake and wrong turn that made up that last attempt. This is so much better.

Perhaps the most salient of all lessons learned from this experience was that I shall never attempt my own projects again without taking feedback and criticism from the start. Where in my professional relationships with clients I actively consult anyone and everyone, I managed to isolate myself here in some trance-like way, and it proves that that method had nothing but a detrimental effect on the project.

I am not dispondant about the time i spent working on the dead site, nor do I regret building it. Of any project I have worked on in the past four years, it is the single greatest leap forward in my knowledge of the use of the technologies we work with. The underlying framework of that site became the underlying framework of the new site. The HTML5 and structure have become foundation stones for a whole construct of new techniques that I have become expert in. It has had a truly profound impact on all my work over the past two months.

Today marks the 6th year since I posted the first message on this blog. Since then my career has progressed a long way, and oddly enough, this project has taken up a large part of that time. But I’m so pleased with the result, and the affirmation I have had has only strengthened my resolve to continue building websites and improving my techniques.

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A couple of days ago Si (@Si) and I spent a few hours in a mobile workshop with Dan Rubin (@danrubin).

During the break Si and I discussed a few updates we’d like to make on our Formula One season calendar, F1Calendar.com, and try out some of the new stuff we’d learnt. Over the past day or so, I’ve spent a little time making some minor (purely iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad) improvements for those who want to use them.

However we struck a problem when saving the site to the homescreen. I’d noticed that by default, Apple handhelds use the full page title to label the icon it creates - very good for search engines, bad for users of the iPhone. As a user, it can be very fiddly to shorten it down.

I couldn’t find anything on Google (though I didn’t look too hard), but it occurred to me that back in the bad old days, it was entirely normal to see horrific animations going on in the title bar, and wondered if a bit of JS couldn’t do the job of shortening it down for mobile users - and indeed it can.

One line of code that sniffs the user agent can alter the page title. It doesn’t affect desktop browsing users or people on other mobile devices, but just is a nice touch for the users of Apple touch devices.

<script type="text/javascript">
  if( navigator.userAgent.match(/iPhone/i) || 
      navigator.userAgent.match(/iPod/i) || 
      navigator.userAgent.match(/iPad/i)
    ) {
         document.title = "F1 Calendar";
      }
</script>

Schimples. (There was an earlier error in this code - some extra parenthesis - this has now been rectified.)

I’ve guessed the iPad string there; if that’s wrong let me know, but the other two will work for sure. A nice touch for any site you imagine will be used this way.

And so now, when you visit F1 Calendar on your iPhone, not only will you get a better handheld experience than before, you’ll also have a nice, short title to use immediately, whilst it won’t compromise the search engine performance.

Try adding F1Calendar.com to your homescreen and see the result.

Update: You might want to use this alternative version for a more robust future-proof version (basing the search on the browser rather than the device). It depends on your application. (Thanks Edd)

<script type="text/javascript">
  if( navigator.userAgent.match(/Mobile/i) && 
      navigator.userAgent.match(/Safari/i)
    ) {
         document.title = "F1 Calendar";
      }
</script>

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Apple unveiled the iPad, and like the gratuitous, grovelling, subservient little MacBoy I am, here is my dribble-fest of a blog post about it.

I’m hopefully adding something to the conversation by not tackling obvious things here. Obvious things like whether it works as a concept, or whether it will be massively successful, or whether Apple has launched it at such a competitive price that they are clearly aiming to stake out the marketplace for the next 10 years ahead of anyone else.

I’m not even going to mention that this device has the ability to actually do what computers have so far failed to grasp which is that they are far too complex for the vast majority of people outside of work hours and that this singlehandedly will be the benchmark format for the home computer in the next few years. I won’t even discuss how there are a load of big manufacturers now all scrambling to rearrange their current offerings and hardware to create a similar product that delivers their own format (because that really reminds me of how quickly you saw lots of touchscreen devices within months of iPhone announcement).

I insist that I will not speak of the enormous bevel which clearly set some designers’ teeth on edge, but is incredibly necessary considering how you will grasp this item, or even hint in this article about the insanely beautiful way you will be able to interact with a computer like you never have with any device before.

No, I just refuse to stoop so low as to mention any of that stuff.

What I’d like to discuss instead is the potential applications of the iPad. The bigger screen is the key here. Even if you argue it’s just a bigger iPhone, that’s actually probably the most critical observation you can make, because the thing that limits the iPhone clearly is the size of the screen.

Something you can cradle in the crook of your arm sort of starts to get all sci-fi; just like when someone introduced a touch screen phone a few years back. You can monitor stuff from a screen that is that big. The mail app they’ve created, makes the most of all that real-estate and you can look at multiple items and information displays on a single screen. I’m going to throw out some ideas of ways I think we could see this being used, even by us tech-types.

1. The Web Designer/Developer

Many have dismissed the iPad because of the limited specs and abilities. Clearly this isn’t a machine designed for you. Or is it? The fact is you’ll never be able to edit video like a pro on this, but if your a coding sort of person, you probably could work from this device.

I’ve done basic emergency web stuff from my iPhone. I’ve connected to RDC in a pub to run a script on a server at 9pm on a Friday night (cool eh? No? What do you mean?). I’ve used SSH to reboot a machine. I’ve edited HTML documents on the fly. Dropbox, FTP, SSH apps - they already make this possible, but only for minor jobs. The limitation as a workstation is screen size. You just can’t physically interact with it fast enough because switching between tools is a mission.

But I can see space for a Dreamweaver-esque app (or Coda, or whatever) that simply takes all the good bits about the iPad, either utilises the cloud or whatever storage techniques it permits, and you can then manage and edit web content. The fact they demoed Keynote/Pages illustrates that this device allows more serious applications that simply cannot be delivered on a phone platform.

We’re not talking here about running big function server sites, but certainly initial layups, markup and the like is going to be possible. Custom tag keyboards could make it like coding by numbers. With integrated Safari rendering direct in the app too, previewing your work isn’t a problem and all from the comfort of your seat as you whizz down to London on the Cosmic Teleport Train (because that’s coming the in the future too).

I mean, there have even been working demos of developer tools that work straight in the browser as web apps too (I seem to remember something by the chaps at Mozilla a while back). And so all sorts of clever things now become possible.

I think in a way we are a little blinded by the applications of such a tablet when we fail to understand a large number of new bespoke applications will be what bring out the best of it. After all, you could run old DOS games on Windows 95, but without installing some applications on your OS, you simply will get bored with using the bundled Calculator and Minesweeper all day long. I think that’s a pretty good analogy.

2. Server Admin

Okay, okay - yes another very techy one, but imagine not having to have a damn full sized fixed computer terminal to do basic admin tasks on your server. The tools will be made (to make the most of the screen size) and you will be able to glide around the office as freely as a 21st century hostess trolly - bringing all the tools you need to wherever is easiest for you to work from. That is it’s useful until you need to replace a big chunk of server hardware. The beauty of the concept sort of crashes into a wall on that point, although you could use it to beat the server tower as a way to vent your frustration. Always a silver lining.

3. Data Collection

The fact is that I’ve already pimped the idea of data collection via iPhones to some of my clients (do you know you can actually take credit card payments using certain keypad-based applications too?) and they seem pretty positive about the idea seems like this might be a really nifty application. But what if you can scale that up to taking surveys and other data collection activities with in-built validation and ultimate portability (remember this thing weights just a quarter of a normal 13 inch Macbook)? One of the biggest problems my clients face is the accuracy of paper-caught information - firstly in it’s validity and secondly in having to re-enter it into a database. This solves that, and where the iPhone fails to provide a big enough input - this would allow enough space to demonstrate additional content and allow the people being surveyed to provide their own response. Much like handing them the clipboard and pen.

Of course there are implications - cost, theft etc, but in certain environments this could replace traditional techniques and look damned impressive to your audience at the same time.

4. Controlling Your Environment

I have an app called Rowmote Pro on my iPhone which is excellent. It allows me to control applications on my Mac remotely, and if I was mad enough to buy an Apple TV, I could interact with that too.

The fact is the phone’s screen limits you to something similar to that of a trackpad. It would be lovely to VNC in at the same time and fiddle with the applications properly (without some of the restrictions of trying to control an entire iMac, blind, using just a Apple Remote). You then start getting all James Bond with your applications. Things like that car control in Tomorrow Never Dies is theoretically possible using an iPhone, but would be damned fiddly. However, on a bigger screen?

Okay, so now your driving your Aston Martin (which we all will own in the future anyway) using your iPad - but that’s perhaps not it’s real benefit. Having control panel like access to the media devices, perhaps audio, perhaps mechanical aspects of your house (blinds, garage doors, cooker, fridge) isn’t some kind of fantasy. These technologies exist already and can be found in tech-savvy luxury builds. However, the iPad opens things up a little more. The console for these types of systems probably cost thousands and have to be installed at great cost too. What if you could offer products that integrated with this as the core console and provided the same functionality, plus a (what-I-would-guess) as a much better interface, plus all the other benefits too.

I really was half expecting Jobs to wheel out a device that made the Apple TV a more useful product, but I think that will come with time as they move closer into the home/lifestyle market still.

To Wrap Up This Tosh…

I’ve only discussed a smattering of potential ways the iPad platform will allow things that the iPhone never could deliver satisfactorily, but I’ve not even spent time thinking about these. They just are sort of ‘missing links’ - I think they are things that we probably already crave.

I believe there are going to be some very compelling reasons to own an iPad, and I think those reasons are going to be almost entirely down to the software, and I think those pieces of software haven’t even been thought of yet.

Oh, and now you’ve read all that, have a look at the blog post I made about the iPhone in January 2007 after that was unveiled. It’s quite fun this nail-your-colours-to-the-mast type of guess work.

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Si and I have been working away to update F1Calendar.com with the the recently confirmed dates and times for the 2010 Formula One season. It’s now back online and up-to-date, so go ahead and update your calendar now :)

Whether you want to download the ICS file for Google Calendar, iCal, iPhone (, iPad!) or Outlook; it’s there and free for the taking. The calendar includes all Grands Prix, practice and qualifying sessions, so you can’t miss any of the action in what is set to be the most spectacular season in recent years (you can customise it to remove the practice sessions and qualifying if you’re not a complete F1 obsessive).

Schumacher’s return, two back-to-back British world champions at McLaren, three brand new teams on the grid with Mercedes Silver Arrows racing for the first time since the mid-1950s, no refuelling and the biggest driver shake-up in years - it’s set to be one of the best seasons in recent history.

Get your updated 2010 Formula 1 calendar here, from F1Calendar.com.

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As Ant asked me this week, and I was going to tell him how I did it, I will share here the trick to getting a T-Mobile 3G broadband single to work on Snow Leopard.

Note, I can only vouch for the E180 model of modem. and though it shouldn’t really matter, a 2006 MacBook.

Since Snow Leopard came out, people have been struggling to get a working Internet connection. T-Mobile have not (as of October) updated their Web’n'Walk software, so it’s a case of a hack for the timebeing. Thankfully it’s incredibley simple.

You probably have already discovered that the minute you plug in the dongle, the software attempts to loads then just quits and claims it’s hit an error and crashed.

In fact, this isn’t a problem with the connection software at all, it’s just the auto-launcher software which is failing and you’ll hopefully discover that if you ignore this and simply delve into your Applications folder, find the T-Mobile software folder, you will happily be able to launch and connect as you had been able to before.

It’s not particularly obvious because it’s very hard to tell that there is this intermediate auto-launch software managing the main application and it took me a while to figure that out.

However, there is one caveat. This worked for me because I upgraded from Leopard - the drivers were already installed. I cannot vouch for this technique if you did a clean install of Snow Leopard or are working with a brand new Mac

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Late on Friday evening I was waiting in the beach house for Nick and Maxine to return, and after a week in pretty much pure isolation, was surprised to see someone appear in the doorway of the house.

On the weekends, most of the english teachers from Jungli travel out to the coast for weekend BBQs, surfing and beach time, and with them come a total of 10 dogs. So in addition to Nick and Maxine’s
‘Coffee’, there was Chris’ ‘Lunar’, two golden retrievers, two more daschunds, a tugo (native Taiwanese breed) puppy ‘Tequila’, a husky called ‘Geisha’, a black and white border collie and another one I couldn’t identify called ‘Caeser’. It was pretty crowded in the beach house living room.

Needless to say there was beer, sand, hats and a late night.

Despite this, we had to be up early in the morning and had been feverishly hoping for good weather. Alas no. Nick, Maxine and I took a four hour road trip down to Taroko Gorge - a massive mountainous region further south east. It’s a national park, and usually packed, but we ended up with the place to ourselves - the rain was torrential and the closer we got the the park, less and less of coastal road was left standing.

Trying to describe the toll typhoon rains take on roads is hard, but if you can imagine a single lane road that winds it’s way around the headland, directly above the Pacific Ocean - that was our route. The rain swells the existing waterfalls that naturally form in the steep gullies at each bend in the road, and these often overshoot their normal path under the strain of the flow, so that pretty much a fifth of the time you are on the road, you are driving under pounding water from the streams above falling onto the road itself. The water then runs down the road, and as it flows off into the ocean below, it wears away at the edges of the tarmac and takes off great chunks of the surface with it - including crash barriers, houses and trees.

As the remainder of the water passes down the road like a river, it erodes the soft earth from under the surface, and the pressure of the flow underneath punches holes up through it, through which hundreds of gushing springs appear across the entire width of the thoroughfare.

It’s pretty spectacular, and that’s even before you contemplate the landslides which pepper the road every few kilometres - piles of rock washed down the steep faces of the mountains that litter the road and often limit passage to a single lane. Rock sizes vary from the size of your fist, the the size of three or four cars - thankfully we were on the receiving end of none of these dangerous hailstones.

By the time we made it to the hostel where we were staying, visibility was very low, and the road immediately past our stopping point was closed. We heard there had been a massive landslide around the corner and it had been sealed off completely. The inclement weather didn’t stop it still being a pretty spectacular spot - perched high up in valley that rises higher than the Grand Canyon in places, our accommodation was a simple hostel with a roofed but open eating area that doubled up as a car park overlooking the surrounding mountains.

We’d planned a BBQ, and Maxine prepared traditional Taiwanese skewers - bundles of spring onion wrapped in pork which we had alongside torn chicken breast and a healthy three bottles of red. Next door to our building, a large hotel was being renovated, and the only other people staying at our hostel were a group of Taiwanese plumbers who plied us with fruit (like a grapefruit, but less sour), beer, horsenuts, unshelled peanuts and a type of local and sweet Red Bull and coke (though it includes neither) that they knock back as though it wasn’t incredibly alcoholic.

As I speak no Mandarin (or for that matter, native Taiwanese) we decided cards would be a good option and played out until the early hours. We finished the evening solving matchstick riddles (like the ones you get in crackers at Christmas) but of course this is a general pastime in China, not some novelty plastic trick.

The next morning was no better weather wise, and Nick and I couldn’t find anywhere open serving breakfast, so we took a wander up past the sealed road block to have a look at the landslide. You could hear and see it still going even though it had started two or three days earlier - and we stood and watched from about 200 yards as huge chunks of rock cracked and smashed their way down the rock face into a shale pile that ran into the river below. It was incredible. All the trees around were stacked high and drooping under the weight of the rock dust which looked like thick ash - and on the road the rain water had congealed it into a thick clay-like paste several centimetres thick. You could taste the minerals in the air; it did choke and cloud up at each new rush of the rock fall, despite the persistent rain.

The road had been completely cut off by the rock pile - it had consumed the one end of a tunnel that started not very far ahead of us, and the failing rock face above was several hundred feet high - about half of which was unstable and still breaking away sporadically. With each audible ‘crack’ came a flurry of more large rocks which thudded down the cliff face then into the shale pile below with a puff of dust - then this was followed by a stream of loose grit and gravel for fifteen seconds to a minute after. This in turn would set off another rock fall and so it would continue.

We quickly discovered we were trapped in the valley as the road on which we had come was also now closed some miles behind us - so we drove to the train station in the nearest town, abandoned the car and took to the tracks. They are a bit funny about animals on public transport, so Coffee was consigned to a shoulder bag for the journey.

By the time we had arrived back in Jungli the rain had subsided, but it remained overcast. Being Sunday, Nick had Kung Fu in Taipei again, so until he returned for another jamming session with the band, I had a few beers with Rick who lives in the house opposite and had arrived here just a matter of weeks after I first visited Taiwan just over five years ago.

The practice room this week was much bigger, and there was a bigger audience this week too. Rob and Bear’s girlfriends came by, and Maxine also stayed. Afterwards we headed back to the same ‘breakfast shop’ we had been to last week for more hot sauce and savoury pastries. It really is fantastic food there.

Monday morning usually means work for all, but after breakfast (we have the same thing every day - a thin egg pastry cooked with onions and pork, washed down with orange juice and green tea - pretty goddamn tasty) Rick and Marcus came over and suggested as I had nothing better to do (which I didn’t) that we should take the motorbikes out to the next city to watch some baseball at TGI Fridays. So perhaps not the most cultural thing, but after persuading the barman to make happy hour start a couple of hours early and getting in a platter lunch; it turned out that didn’t matter too much anyway!

We got back to Jungli and met Nick at a bar not too far from home, and deciding to leave Marcus and Rick to their own fate there, Nick and I went and got teppenyaki. If you were wondering - yes, it was great.

And that brings us to today - my penultimate day in Taiwan on this trip. Finally the clouds parted and Nick, Coffee and I took the motorbike up into the mountains to a secluded watering hole tucked away and off the main routes. If you’ve ever seen The Beach, it’s a bit like that - a circular pool of clear water with a waterfall that plunges down ten meters on the one side. You can then float down a small outlet into the lower pool where the water is much more still and lagoon like. The water wasn’t too cold, but the river had clearly been swelled by the rain and trying to swim against the flow of the waterfall ahead was almost impossible. Even Coffee couldn’t resist joining us in the water, but it completely tired him out after a few minutes and he just sat on Nick’s back while we swam to shore.

One of the things I remember vividly about my first visit here was bin lan, or betal nut. It’s a type of nut the size of a grape, wrapped in it’s own leaf and chewed like a chewing tobacco. It quickly bleeds to produce a fiborous husk which you chew, and a bright red liquid which you have to graciously spit out at fairly regular intervals. This can be amusing when done badly - or from the back of a bike - but the net effect of chewing this stuff is a warming like natural high - and the locals can’t get enough of the stuff - partially because it’s quite addictive. You pick up the small bags from scantily clad bin lan girls, who sit in small glass and neon kiosks every few hundred metres down all major roads. It’s surreal and the whole experience is very much one that defines Taiwan to me. Anyway, getting back on the bikes allowed for more than my fair share of betal nut chewing.

So tomorrow evening I fly - another 16 hour adventure or so. I think we go for food again tonight. Looking forward to it already…

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Taiwan isn’t really a place where you can afford to allow things like natures bad side stop you. Case in point, since I got to Fuhlong - a beach on the east coast of the island I’ve had to deal with some pretty big spiders, some pretty enormous cockroaches, and a very small leech.

I won’t tell you I’m brave about this stuff - cockroaches especially are a bit freaky (especially when they decide to make a beeline for the inside of the fridge when you open the door) but when you combine it with the remnants of a typhoon, leaky beach houses, hungry bedbugs, stray dogs and completely unusual food, you realise it’s all just part of the experience. I quite like it actually.

This is the first time I’ve been near a computer since I got here four days ago (Chris, who lives next door and speaks fluent mandarin, has been kind enough to let me use his mac) and quite happily I’ve discovered the world is not falling apart. This time up here alone in the beach house has allowed me time to read a couple of books (J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and Michael Crichton’s Sphere), take it easy, do some hiking, do some mountain biking and explore the coast line.

No one here really speaks any English, so getting by can be pretty funny. My manderin is limited to saying hello, asking for chicken or pork meat and thanking people (or thanking them a lot). I’ve also learnt about five chinese characters, but it’s not particularly useful unless I something is big, in the middle and I want to go in to it or exit it.

This doesn’t stop people trying to talk to you. Usually the westerners who are here during the summer weekends do speak some (it’s a necessity if you are here for any period of time) but I think the locals expect that. One lady appeared at the back door of the house and spoke to me for a least five minutes after collecting the contents of my bin. I have no idea what she was going on about.

Nick stayed the first night we arrived here but as he had to work he headed back to Jungli on Tuesday, but not until we’d taken out a tandem bike. It wasn’t exactly the most masculine thing to do - two lads, riding a tandem, carrying a small sausage dog in the front basket while riding through the countryside. Thankfully, I’ve seen much stranger things here, so I can’t say I was that bothered. Chris thought it was funny though.

The weather has been steady - we’ve had a couple of bursts of rain overnight, but on the whole the days have been clear, and the last bits of the typhoon have fizzled out. It’s not exactly clear skies, but it gave me an opportunity yesterday to hike up to a monastery in the mountains behind the beach.

The place was pretty deserted, and the final ascent demanded some pretty ‘rural’ travel - through quite a lot of overgrown greenery. Flip flops were never the explorer’s footwear of choice, so it wasn’t entirely a surprise that I discovered that a leech had attached itself to my ankle.

From my experience in Nepal (where I had seen a guide remove one by ripping it from between his toes) I decided against that bloody course of action. With a bit of boy scout ingenuity, I headed into the Buddhist monastery and lit an incense stick and tried to burn the thing off (pretty much the only option unless you’re prepared to wait for it to get its fill and drop off naturally). Thankfully no one was around to witness the thing - it doesn’t hurt - that is the leech bite doesn’t. But what does hurt is if you manage to burn yourself with the end of the incense. Turns out it works like a dream, but it took three separate attempts to get the bastard, who initially recoiled, but then bit again. Twice. Eventually it worked though and I went on my way, burn marks, leech marks and all.

I’ve drunk more beer and played more chess than I’ve had in a longwhile, and it’s quite refreshing being in a place so deserted and empty. The Chinese who do live here don’t really venture outside at this time of year, and with no westerners around (because it’s not the weekend) I’ve pretty much had the place to myself.

Nick’s back tonight and we’re going to make a decision about what we will do over the weekend - either stay or head south to Taroko Gorge. Anyway, time to take the bike out…

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