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Alright guys hope everyone's well, time for more idiocy possibly that you can all laugh at later When Miss Facepalm and I first moved in we got the internet speed upgraded from service plan A. 'Up to 5Mb/s' to service plan B. 'Up to 20Mb/s'. Since 'upgrading' it it I've seen no improvement in the internet speed as the guy came and went whilst her parents were in and we were out so I have no idea if the guy actually did anything which I strongly doubt as the same router was still here after he left. I did speed tests and every time it peaks between 3.5-5Mb/s on average so, I thought it could be because the router is so old, so we bought a new router and speeds are still the same, so I'm a bit annoyed that I've splashed out on a new router with no effect thus far. Now, we have two routers in the house, one for internet services and one for TV service which is pointless as we don't really watch TV broadcasts and only gets used once every fortnight when her parents visit. (I don't understand why the TV couldn't be hooked up to the original router). so, to break it down. 1. Supposedly got internet service (ISP is Guanchungchiangdie(?))upgraded to up to 20Mb/s but, speed tests show it averages the same speed before the upgrade. 2. New router is set up but despite being connected and that I can browse websites, the network settings in the router's show that there's no internet connection??? Not really an issue just weird and could relate to something? 3. There are two routers in the house one for TV and one for internet services and currently the TV one is more stable/quicker. (TV's ISP is different from internet) 4. Whilst I wasn't expecting 20Mb/s I was hoping for more than 5Mb/s as it shouldn't take 16 minutes to download a 3MB file. 5. I'm aware this is a loving connection cluster gently caress but hey!  !I know this more of a tech question but, since it's a tech question in I thought maybe someone would have experience with this.
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Mar 16, 2014 14:13
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| # ? May 28, 2024 18:00 |
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Bloodnose posted:Rationalizing is a fun thing for cool people to do. If you come to China to make money, then you're not ending up with that kind of salary. If you scrape together a couple of part time jobs, then you can easily make more than double that in a first tier city.
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Mar 16, 2014 14:14
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Facepalm Ranger posted:Alright guys hope everyone's well, time for more idiocy possibly that you can all laugh at later 
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Mar 16, 2014 14:20
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Facepalm Ranger posted:Alright guys hope everyone's well, time for more idiocy possibly that you can all laugh at later Who the gently caress cares?
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Mar 16, 2014 14:24
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Those TV over IP things can apparently suck up all your bandwidth even when not in use. Much like your mom's posting? (Is this trolling enough?)
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Mar 16, 2014 14:29
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In China, talk poo poo and yell until you get your way.
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Mar 16, 2014 14:30
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The answer is: return to "Service Plan A".
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Mar 16, 2014 14:34
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caberham posted:I have been egging you about getting a HK job for ages I will totally apply for that...after I get a teaching cert. You know if they're looking for special ed teachers? My interest was piqued by a couple of woefully underserved Chinese sperglords/ladies.
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Mar 16, 2014 14:42
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You can try our version of EPIK.
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Arglebargle III posted:Those TV over IP things can apparently suck up all your bandwidth even when not in use. Much like your mom's posting? (Is this trolling enough?) I remember you saying last Sunday, like even when all tv related things are turned off?
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Mar 16, 2014 14:54
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VideoTapir posted:I will totally apply for that...after I get a teaching cert. You know if they're looking for special ed teachers? My interest was piqued by a couple of woefully underserved Chinese sperglords/ladies. Special ed is big money and hard to get. Even if you don't have a teaching cert it won't hurt if you have experience because the hiring board can still fast track you on a lower but still decent grade. If you do have a teaching cert then go apply for international schools and make even more money.
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Mar 16, 2014 15:15
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I assume he means the CELTA or TEFL or whatever they accept thing. If you had real full certification you'd be a fool to go for anything other than international schools. I wonder if they'll consider applications without it. I don't have one but I have multiple years' experience.
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Mar 16, 2014 15:19
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That was MK saying that.
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Mar 16, 2014 15:50
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It kind of goes like this for HK: 1) Don't be a fuckwit or arsehole 2) Be allowed to work legally 3) Don't mind teaching kids 3b) Don't have any sexual convictions in HK 4) Have a Trinity Cert. TESOL or Cambridge CELTA 5) Be a bit willing to commute on laughably cheap public transport and then I'll get you a job straight off the boat. edit: Number 2 is the most important thing. Small and private language schools generally don't tend to sponsor a visa here. The other option is to be Actually A Teacher meaning you have a PGCE/PGDE/whatever the hell the US has, and then apply to the ESF, or even some other places I could point you towards. They would be willing to sponsor a visa, but you must be properly qualified and not just a teacher for the sake of travel. simplefish fucked around with this message at 15:54 on Mar 16, 2014 |
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Mar 16, 2014 15:51
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Bloodnose posted:Rationalizing is a fun thing for cool people to do. If you save 15k in a year you're doing better than 75% (actually probably more like 90% but I'm too lazy to find the right statistics) of Americans. How far removed are you from how people actually live that you think coming away with 15k after expenses is low? Arakan fucked around with this message at 18:54 on Mar 16, 2014 |
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Mar 16, 2014 18:09
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Arakan posted:If you save 15k in a year you're doing better than 75% (actually probably more like 90% but I'm too lazy to find the right statistics) of Americans. How far removed are you from how people actually live that you think coming away with 15k after expenses is low? Yeah, I was a little unclear on this as well...
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Mar 16, 2014 19:38
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GuestBob posted:Yes. There are two major ones in Henan - SIAS and a branch of a larger group of eleven which is, in this case, named Chenggong University of Finance & Economics.
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Mar 16, 2014 20:38
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Arakan posted:If you save 15k in a year you're doing better than 75% (actually probably more like 90% but I'm too lazy to find the right statistics) of Americans. How far removed are you from how people actually live that you think coming away with 15k after expenses is low? Yeah, and imagine if you make even more than this by doing side-work or having multiple incomes? You CAN come out of China with a nice nest egg AND with a lot accomplished, even if you do a lower paying but lower hour affair like Guestbob's school is offering. Also to elaborate on Guestbob's "type of program" post--never forget the unloved but legitimate international studies department.  Where students are accepted to university with the understanding that they'll be doing a 3-2 or a 1-3-1 program, provided they stay within good standing with their major. In Beijing Blinky and I mostly dealt with the chemistry and English kids, which is a very, very weird class mix. Other foreigners handled other majors--the biology guy, for example, was a weirdo. When we left the university proper we started with a 3-2 program with kids from a variety of majors, but the class sizes are smaller and the kids seem happier. Kids have a list of about 40 sister schools they can choose to attend; they still have to apply, however, and I have seen kids get turned down. They can also choose to do a full program overseas and only get a US diploma. I've seen our department get reorganized, shifted, and moved at least four times already; Chinese schools want to make money, and they want to guarantee to parents that their special snowflake can totally go to MIT. A legitimate department can't promise that. Our US school is separating from our program at the end of this academic year, and it would not surprise me if the University chose to go private with it's international program afterwards.
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Mar 16, 2014 22:31
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Arakan posted:If you save 15k in a year you're doing better than 75% (actually probably more like 90% but I'm too lazy to find the right statistics) of Americans. How far removed are you from how people actually live that you think coming away with 15k after expenses is low? Apparently too far removed, sorry about that. The important thing is that people who take poverty-level wages are actually able to get good work on the side. I saw a goon take a gig tutoring like four kids that paid 150 yuan an hour and it made my heart hurt. That kind of devaluation of your own labor hurts the whole market and you guys are all worth more than that.
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Mar 16, 2014 22:33
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Bloodnose posted:
this I agree with. I get 900rmb for "teaching" two six year olds (three times a week at an hour each time). This "teaching" is actually just babysitting, which means I play a lot of card games/watch Ben10/play with playdoh then go home. In addition to the money I also have a portfolio of drawings--Fearcotton as an automan! As a character from Frozen! As a weird blue swirl thing! Sometimes when I get there though it's nap time, so I get paid to sit and read. Other times the mom asks me to go to dinner/the movies/the arcade with them, and I get paid for the extra time. Goons, charge more! You can!
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Mar 17, 2014 00:05
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FearCotton posted:this I agree with. I get 900rmb for "teaching" two six year olds (three times a week at an hour each time). This "teaching" is actually just babysitting, which means I play a lot of card games/watch Ben10/play with playdoh then go home. In addition to the money I also have a portfolio of drawings--Fearcotton as an automan! As a character from Frozen! As a weird blue swirl thing! Sometimes when I get there though it's nap time, so I get paid to sit and read. Other times the mom asks me to go to dinner/the movies/the arcade with them, and I get paid for the extra time. Yeah, but don't undervalue what you do with those kids. They've made a lot of progress since you started basically playing with them -- and they enjoy the hell out of it. I think it's great that the mothers really want their kids to enjoy learning another language instead of having it forced upon them. That said, I also think it's great that they pay you $50 an hour to doodle and frig around with Play-Doh.
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Mar 17, 2014 00:13
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Tom Smykowski posted:What's their general reputation like? Are they all rather expensive? The one I visited in Nanchong was pricey and (according to the students) not very good at educating. Their reputation is growing actually. Established private universities are now coming to be seen as being on a par with runt-departments of third tier places. You can tell that they are becoming more important because the CCP has, since 2008, increased the number and significance of party representation at these institutions. Newly set-up private concerns tend to be terrible - because this is China and people will "open" a business the moment the concrete foundation has dried. For established places, competition with the various "international" things operating in the state sector has spurred these places on to perform better though and the teaching they do is often okay. This is mostly dependent on how smart they are at hiring people and how many greybeards they are able to tempt from public institutions. There isn't much tertiary teacher training in China and historically, instruction on teaching practices and suchlike has been passed down through the departmental danwei in public institutions. There can be problems if you don't have any "ethos" to fall back on. They are expensive - with most places charging between 15k and 20k per year. This is actually less than a public institution can make from an "international" full cost because although their fees are lower, they will often receive MoE disbursement as well. Private institutions do no research. SIAS is mental, they have almost two hundred foreign staff working on a range of things from 3-year sub bachelor programs to fully articulated x+y programs with Fort Hayes. They are totally insulated from the whole country and live in a massive foreigner bubble. Which is also probably why they are happy to get paid Y3.5k/month with no side work.
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Mar 17, 2014 01:13
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I am pretty familiar with SIAS and I would steer well clear for a variety of reasons, some mentioned.
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Mar 17, 2014 01:16
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SIAS isn't like a real school though, it's a bunch of religious nutjobs living in their commune near the airport preachin about Jesus
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Mar 17, 2014 01:23
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What does it stand for?
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Mar 17, 2014 01:29
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Sogol posted:I am pretty familiar with SIAS and I would steer well clear for a variety of reasons, some mentioned. Dish girl.
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Mar 17, 2014 01:40
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GuestBob posted:Dish girl. Seconded. Is it mostly crazy!Mormons*? *not all Mormons are crazy, of course. But I've heard of people being sent on mission trips to "schools" in the mainland.
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Mar 17, 2014 01:51
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Real LDS missionaries can't work, but I've heard Chinese-speaking ex-missionaries (Taiwan mission) might get recruited to a Mormon-heavy company with a churchy social atmosphere. LDS missionaries in Japan teach some English lessons for FREE so people aren't scared of them, and also because they have too much free time because Japan is super unlikely to convert to a religion that bans tea and spending money on Sundays.
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Mar 17, 2014 04:59
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GuestBob posted:Dish girl. What is this?
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Mar 17, 2014 05:13
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Missionaries are weird.GuestBob posted:infobomb
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Mar 17, 2014 05:43
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sexy stuff posted:Do you love to connect with people, are you confident in speaking English, do you have a gift of showing compassion and reaching out to people in China with the love of Christ? Join this mission trip together with other people from Crossroads in an unique experience to help teach the English language to Chinese students from the poorer areas from China. I've never met a Mormon missionary in China, but the Christian ones are pretty memorable.
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Mar 17, 2014 05:44
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My university has some sort of partnership with Bring em Young so we always have 4 mormon teachers, they seem nice enough.
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Mar 17, 2014 06:23
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I've met numerous Chinese Christians who try to bully me in to going to bible studies with them. Mormons are p nice though, my cohort had a couple and they never really pushed anything or insulted anyone so I like Mormons a lot. One Chinese guy told me that my parents raised me wrong because I stopped going to church/etc and that made me angry.
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Mar 17, 2014 06:30
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Well you know what they say: there's no rear end in a top hat like a convert.
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Mar 17, 2014 06:35
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Arglebargle III posted:Well you know what they say: there's no rear end in a top hat like a convert. So sad but true. My sister was a Protestant zealot but thankfully she's a lot more mellow now.
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Mar 17, 2014 06:41
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Tom Smykowski posted:Dang, I see. Do most of them aim for students who can pay but also did poorly on their entrance exams? Yes. There's not really a market for anything else - you might get a few who have come from three year vocationals and want to "top-up" into a degree, but local xueyuans tend to have a monopoly on that kind of provision. GuestBob fucked around with this message at 07:00 on Mar 17, 2014 |
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Mar 17, 2014 06:53
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Mormons don't believe in hell so they're pretty chill  Ex-missionaries have already been sent to strange places they didn't choose doing an unpopular job so teaching English in Henan is easy.
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Mar 17, 2014 06:57
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Christians I've met here are way more annoying and evangelical than anyone I met in the southern US.
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Mar 17, 2014 07:04
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 Spooky, the Provost of SIAS has just replied to comment I made on LinkedIn.
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Mar 17, 2014 07:05
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Does anyone have any good Chongqing hostel recommendations? I just need to spend one night as I transfer trainz on my 2 week jungle/plateau excursion.
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Mar 17, 2014 07:14
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There is religiosity, but not Mormon specific as far as I know. The place struck me as crazy not because of that, but because of the westernization that has been mentioned. They have spent a lot of money on what is essentially an Epcot center type of street scene, a kind of massive water cascade and when last I heard a golf course. The rhetoric is about being a private school in China and their might be something to that, but what's the creepiest to me is the money. They are US backed by private investors. I have met the backers and found them pretty wack. Zero understanding of China. A complete neoliberal sort of agenda, at best. As I recall one of them told me something to the effect that if all the resources in the world were evenly distributed that the same few people would have control of them again within a few months. I could not quite determine if he believed this was god or Darwin at work, but he believed it. I think the investors basically believe they are acting charitably to bring some form of enlightenment to the benighted. Most of this is the vision of the president of the university who is on the one hand some sort of genius to be getting it done, but also some kind of madman to be getting it done. He himself lives a very luxurious and strange sort of existence. It's a little kingdom and he is the king, I think. There are some good seeming things they are wanting to accomplish. They hosted some sort of international water conference. The basis for these things, whether ostensibly good or not, is incredibly suspect. As far as I could tell many of the western teachers were evangelistic, though it is not exactly explicit. I think there living conditions and such were probably alright, but again there was little or no cultural savvy as far as I could tell. Bubbles are kind of passive and this was not passive. At one point some of my friends were trying to create a permaculture center there and I went at their invitation to give several speeches along with some Yellow Hat Tibetan monks (who I know and like very much). The entire experience, the speeches, meeting with the board, meeting investors was entirely surreal. I later read some translations into English of some of the talks I gave and they had almost not resemblance to what I was actually saying. They were full of a very strange mix of nationalistic and free market sorts of rhetoric. It was strange since mostly what I was talking about were things like the anthropic effect of the industrial era and climate change, etc. I got such a bad feeling from what had been wrapped in good looking paper that I have never gone back and encouraged my friends to invest their attention elsewhere, which they seem to have done. The Yellow Hat Buddhists on the other hand have an amazing school in Tibet.
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Mar 17, 2014 07:18
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