6.0 at least

The other night at around 2:17 am or so, I was awoken to my room being shaken side to side vigorously. Lying in bed, I realized, "Hey! This is an earthquake!"

I've experienced earthquakes in California so no big deal, right? The hit for a few seconds then dissipate. After about 10 seconds this sucker wasn't letting up. And this sucker was big. It ended up lasting almost 30 seconds!!!

The next day I was told it was around a 3.something. I've felt a lot of minor quakes in Los Angeles and this wasn't a minor quake. This one had to be around 6.0. Turns out it was something like 6.7. Yeah.

No damage or anything. Interesting though, I've lived in California for most of my life and I've felt more earthquakes in Taipei in 3 months than I have in both San Francisco and Los Angeles combined for the past 5 years. Yeah, Taiwan has the most fault lines compared to anyplace in the world!

We have it all wrong!

Dear readers, I've reached a conclusion...in US we need to do away with the current form of currency. Sad, I know, but it's true. The system in Taiwan is pretty great. Their lowest coin is $1 NT, and goes up to $5 NT, $10 NT, and $50 NT. Then it jumps to the bills: $100 NT, $500 NT, and $1000 NT. Everything here costs a nice round dollar amount. No cents to deal with!!!

It hit me the other day when I was teaching my G4 kids about long vowel sounds (specifically /i/). The example in the book was "dime".

"Teacher, what is 'dime'?"

I proceeded to explain to them that you have a dollar, THEN you have cents -- less than a dollar. A dime is worth 10 cents. If you have ten dimes, you have a dollar.

The look in their eyes was something along the lines, "That's the stupidest thing we've ever heard. Silly round-eye."

For anyone who's been to another country that has a currency system that the lowest unit is a dollar (not fractions of), you understand what I'm saying.