Ms. International

Nope, not joining and the nerve of me to think myself qualified. I'd long accepted the fact that I'm better off being a geek. Why then the title to this new post?

Je suis francophone; French is the language with which I earn my daily bread. Once upon a time, I also spoke Italian with my batchmates in college to gossip about those Filipina version of the "Plastics" in Lindsay Lohan's Mean Girls. And before you click on that red orb (if you're on a Mac or hackintosh) or red x (if you're on, may the forces of mother nature forbid, Windoze), I'm now reluctantly learning Mandarin. Reluctant because I'd never intended to learn that language because of the complexity of Chinese characters and the tone system they use - I'm tone deaf so good luck to me. But because of a certain Taiwanovela, I got the fever and now I'm officially crazed addicted to everything Taiwanese so watching fresh video uploads on youtube.com which are neither subbed nor dubbed in the lingua franca, I'm forced to learn some Chinese and as good fortune could have it (oh my, is that feng shui/Chinese idiom related there?), my brain has actually absorbed the language.

I now recognize a number of Chinese characters and I need a tool to be able to write in Chinese in forums. At work, where we're all on black IBM boxes, I use NJStar text editor which is a pretty neat app in that it functions as a dictionary as well. At home, I'm a Mac girl - make that a Hackintosh girl - and as literate as I might seem on Mac OS X with all my blabbing about kexts and kernels and bootloaders and HFS Journaled Extended partition what-not, I'm still in awe at the discovery that Mac OS X actually supports Chinese input natively! No need to hunt down a Mac version of that NJStar text editor cause TextEdit does it brilliantly!

All I need to do is go to System Preferences > International > Input Method tab, and select Traditional Chinese (cause it's what they use in Taiwan instead of Mainland's simplified), Pinyin.

Then in the Menulet that will appear, after I'd opened up TextEdit, I just select Chinese from the dropdown menu. . .

And voilà!

A toast with my mugfull of Apple fangirl Kool-Aid: Isn't Mac OS X just totally awesome? :D