The Secret to Cleaning Your Toilet

Now that I’ve shared with you all how I clean my bathtub, I thought it only fair if I share with you how I clean that other bathroom appliance we all hate to clean: the toilet.

Here it is, in 3 easy steps!

1. Promise your wife you will clean the toilet.
2. Don’t clean the toilet.
3. Repeat Steps 1 and 2 until your wife gets so fed up that she cleans the toilet.

Obviously, this only works if you are happily married. If you’re not married, or if you are unhappily married, then this probably won’t work for you very well.

The Secret to Cleaning Your Bathtub

What does a bathtub look like if you don’t clean it for a year? Hopefully you will never have to find out! Unfortunately for me, I found out.

One day, I decided it was about time to restore order in my bathroom universe, and resolved to tackle the bathtub scum. What is that stuff anyway? A nasty mixture of body oils, dead skin, and soap scum — itself a mysterious substance – ironic that soap itself has to be cleaned. Multi-coloured molds. Yucky.

The real question is how do you get rid of it?

Centime Story

I was looking through my old papers and came across this little story I wrote 10 years ago. I hope you enjoy it!

Centime Story
by Eugene Huang

Centimes never really gave me a problem until Andi went away and left behind a bag full of them. I swear, they multiply when you’re not looking. I thought I knew how to handle centimes; I thought I knew how to control them: I get some from the store, and use them back in the store. Simple. Boy, was I wrong. I need to take a course in Centime Management. Perhaps they even have a degree program. I could become a Certified Centime Consultant.

One day, I had had enough, and went on a mission to get rid of the centimes.

My biggest pet peeve ever

Ok, I’ve had it. I have many pet peeves but this one takes the pet peeve cake! From time to time, as consumers in society, we need to buy things. We go to the store and we buy something. Or we go to a website and we buy something online. And how do we decide which thing to buy, when there are many options to choose from? We do some research. We do a feature comparison. We do a price/feature/value comparison. We read reviews. Finally we buy the thing, and we take it home and we are so happy with our purchase. Until we smell it. Yes, smell it. And it smells deadly!

I hate hate hate buying smelly products, and I never never never remember to think about smell as a factor in my purchases.

The four roles of the creative process

Welcome to a first in a series of “categorizations” articles where I briefly summarize all the ways people have devised to classify themselves.

I really like these categories. I really like categories, period. Did you know there are two types of people in the world? Those who think there are two types of people in the world, and those who know there are a lot more than two types of people in the world. Anyway, I still like categories.

These categories are from a book by Roger Von Oech, The Four Roles of the Creative Process.

Principles for an uncluttered living space

Much has been written about having an uncluttered living space. A lot of it, in my humble opinion, is not very good – they may sound good in principle but are just impractical. This article is a distillation of my best practices – tried and true.

One of my obsessions is with deriving things from first principles. So, presenting: principles for uncluttered living, explained from the ground up, in sequence and in order of priority. If you are struggling with messiness in your living space, this article may help you. I recently went to the library and found books about how to declutter your life. Who has time to read those?

Crosses and Diamonds

Aeroplan drives me crazy – Part 2

I decided to do some due diligence and crunch some numbers for the benefit of my readers.

To reiterate, I found it quite frustrating to get any straight answers out of the Aeroplan website. I will, therefore, attempt to answer a few basic questions myself. (Note: I’ve used the term “points” instead of “miles”. In my mind, using miles adds even more confusion.)

How many points do I get for my purchase?

There are many, ways to get points. They are all calculated differently. It’s terribly complicated. I’ll do a basic point calculation on a “standard” airfare purchase. So, here we go. I purchased an Air Canada ticket (Economy) for $926, which resulted in my accumulation of 8800 points. This means one dollar earns 9.5 points, or 10.5 cents per point.

How much are points worth in real dollars?

Aeroplan drives me crazy – Part 1

I have a problem with Aeroplan. Actually, several problems. My experience with this rewards program is only as a customer, and let me tell you, I’m not a happy camper. How so?

• Aeroplan seems to make it fairly easy to collect points, but difficult to redeem them. Tangible evidence, I have none, but it’s just a feeling I get when using the Aeroplan website.
• If there’s no activity in your Aeroplan account for one year, then Poof! all your points disappear. This has happened to many people, and it’s just very customer unfriendly. Perhaps there’s a good reason for this, but no matter, it’s just not very nice.

Taiwan’s weird economy

When we travel to another part of the world, we tend to notice many little things, and we can’t help but to compare things with “the way it is back home”.

I’d like to share some random weird things I’ve seen in Taiwan. (Weird to me, at least.) Most of them relate to the Taiwan economy, which is an aspect of Taiwanese culture which is easily visible.

• Stores really want your business. Everywhere you go, store owners actively greet you, invite you to enter the store, and show you their products. Business is very competitive. Even store personnel who are obviously not owners are enthusiastic. They probably get commission. It means that shopping in Taiwan is excellent, but it also means people end up often buying things they don’t really need. How very different than the typical Toronto store staff, with a buy-it-if-you-want-to-but-it-doesn’t-matter-to-me attitude.
• As part of actively pursuing the customer, it seems that every store has their own points collection system. The idea is that you collect points and redeem them for products. Imagine that, collecting points at the gas station, points at the mall (each mall seems to have its own points system), points everywhere. Coupled with the Taiwanese obsession with being frugal, it means that practically every Taiwanese household is filled with clutter they don’t need. Talk about being buried under materialism!
• The restaurants located in shopping malls are decent and inexpensive. A far cry from crappy food courts in Toronto malls, including the Chinese malls. Now, this is progress!
• There seems to be way too many employees paid to do menial tasks like greeting you, pushing buttons on an elevator, cleaning the bathroom. I swear that every time I have gone into a washroom in a mall, there would be a cleaning lady, cleaning away. I mean, how much cleaning is there to do? What a waste of human resources.
• You can’t get a table for 4. It’s a table for 3 + 1, since the number 4 is bad luck. (In Chinese it is pronounced the same as the word for “death”). There are many such superstitions, which is so weird given the technological progress Taiwan has seen in recent decades. Taiwan is both cutting-edge as well as awkwardly stuck in time.

Taiwan, marvelously weird and wacky!