Sticking my eyes to the desktop eight hours per day has been thickening my glasses year by year. My flat-mate, who is working for an E-commerce company, is also in the same situation but his currently overjoyed laugh and cheerful voice in front of the PC usually awake me at midnight when I am still in the mist of my dreams. Surprisingly because he is not an “easy to hit it off” type among my pals and hard to believe a young guy with the motto “24 hours are not enough for a day” can be addicted to online game or chit-chat. So what has oddly been happening to him really inspired me to find out the reasons.

Going beyond all my expectations, it turned out that he has been using Paltalk, a pretty popular online chat tool, to find some friends in Asia to have an overview of this emergent mecca before his adventurous trip to Japan, Korea and South East Asian region. All of that information seemed not transparent enough for a doubtful mind, I decided to install this chat tool and explore by myself.

Visiting some forums of languages learning was an eye-opener for me when I noticed that many people use Paltalk, Skype, Yahoo messenger or AOL not only for fun but also for teaching and learning. An English speaking room in Paltalk impressed me much as the admin, a retired Australian teacher, volunteered to teach English for some 10 people who are mostly from Asian countries. When typing is as old as hills, talking over a microphone in this kind of voice conference can help those “students” listen and imitate the native accent. This teacher asked everybody to browse a website, read an article, pick up the microphone and raise hand to share ideas in the conference. I also joined another one as the topic was about movies – my favorite. When I was still wavering about going to see “The memoirs of a Geisha” because I had never had a profound interest in any Asian movie without Jackie Chan, one Japanese woman helped me summarize its content from the Japanese original book. From her talk, many splendid types of kimono and the ups and downs in geishas' life really encouraged me to spend one night at the cinema and helped me know that Zhang Zi Yi, Wanatabe Ken, Gong Li, etc. are also brilliant stars. We exchanged countless thank you's as I had a lesson about Japanese culture and she could practice to brush up her English. I am not totally into the definition of E-learning and its advantages because you can search a huge mountain of information about this aspect on the Internet. However, what I have told you is also called E-learning, isn't it? My eyes would be a little tired but that is worthwhile because I have received many useful lessons.

Oops, probably you are complaining of my verbosity and the irrelevance to the title of this writing. Anyway, making money is not like a knife through butter.

I read some very interesting news yesterday that a ninth-grade Indian teaches Mathematics for a younger one in the U.S. This talented tutor can earn 10 bucks for every hour, which sounds very impressive. Here, long distance does not matter when they can send word files by email or Instant messenger and do exercises by talking in a voice chat conference. The interesting thing is this Indian has to use a voice changer software to enhance his voice quality as you know, Indian accent and dialect are not so easy for everyone in the world to understand. That is what we usually say “necessity is the mother of invention” and earning cash is not something out of reach.

Definitely I will tell my flat-mate about those. A cool idea of making money would pop into his mind, legally, why not?