I know, I know. It's been very long since my last post (nobody reads? who cares?). Believe me, I tried to keep this blog away from dust. Just too many things occupying my life recently: job hunting, resume, workshop, experiments, paper rewriting, cycling, running, you name it. My last year in school as a student does not turn out to be an easy one. However, we are all surviving, aren't we?

We've got to give ourselves some sense of accomplishment from time to time to keep us going. I submitted my Dawes to fixedgeargallery.com. Still not published yet, but, just let the world know that I am a bicycle enthusiast. The bike rides quite perfectly, makes some noise occasionally. That's OK. It's still my first bike project anyway.

Here I am

It's been a while since the last time I posted here. Yeah, I know, sometime you just want to slack off a little. My parents came all the way from china to visit me. We visited a lot of places and had a very wonderful time. Photos will be followed up.

Hey, I stumbled on this wonderful picture on the web. It's for propaganda of the Beijing olympics in 2008. In the picture, an iron soldier is doing horseback gymnastic rotation on a horseback! If you know a little bit about Chinese history, this soldier belong to the tribute for one of the emperors, "Qin Chi King", and is known as "Bing Ma Yong".

Dishes for the people I love

I wanna start this thread today. How many times when you see or taste a gourmet dish you really want to share that with the people you love: your the other half, your families and your friends. You wish them can be as lucky as you do. This simple joy of sharing and contributing can be extraordinarily encouraging in our life, and sometimes it's wordless. So from now on, I will start a list, called "Dishes for the people I love", to document my little impulse of sharing. Dishes will be added one at a time, and of course, starting from naive ones to complex ones. The key is to bear in mind those people you are cooking for. Think of what they will say and feel when try the dishes out. Yeah, a good life is that simple.

Starting from today, I am gonna give myself a hard time. The picture below shows a baked salmon covered with cheese and ranch. My version of salmon is based on this recipe.



I don't have a camera right now, so, unfortunately you can't see my salmon. But here is how I did it:

1. Fresh salmon from Shnucks, washed and evenly covered with some salt and garlic pepper. 10-15 mins.
2. Put the salmon into the oven; use broil. 10 mins
4. Chop garlic into tiny cubes, mixed with cheddar cheese.
5. Take the salmon out, disperse the garlic cheese mixture on the surface of the fish.
6. Put it back to the oven, continue to broil for 5 mins.
7. Remove from the oven, disperse Italian herds on top. Done.

A Sip By the Dragon

Today, a giant water pillar was observed in the offshore of Singapore. In the whole 15 minute period, 3-4 such pillars appeared. The average diameter of the pillar is 50 meter, and they can move on the ocean surface at 150 km/hr. According to meteorologist, sever weather condition usually follows the appearance of these kind of pillars.

There is an interesting story behind this natural phenomenon in my childhood. When I was a kid (8~10), my aunt told me that she had experienced a miracle at a beach nearby her house. She was a teenage girl back then. One day, when collecting fish and shrimp at the beach, she saw a similar water pillar erected right in front of her eye. My poor aunt was scared to death, dropping all her collections and running straight back to home. Later some senior members in out family explained that was the dragon drinking water from the sky, and it was really her luck to witness this process. The senior even teasing my aunt that she is gonna have good luck all year round. Convinced by the senior's story, my aunt was relieved and started to feel good about the incident.

Years after that, the water pillar in my aunt's memory might still because of the dragon living in the heaven. To her, what matters is there is an unanswered myth living inside her heart, which keeps her wondering about the nature and lives of others. It's not a bad thing to believe in a myth or two. After all, we can't answer all the questions we have about the universe. Just don't give up wondering because you don't know. Often times it's the unknown elements in your mind that bears miracles in your life.

Garlic Ribs

Saw this one on Plum Cafe, the recipe does not look very tedious. Only 3 steps needed:

1. Mix the ribs with oil, sugar, soy sauce and rice wine, preserve for 10 mins.
2. Put Dou Chi, garlic and oil in a glass plate, and heat up the glass plate for 3 mins, high.
3. Put the ribs into the plate, heat up for 3-4 mins, high.
Mission accomplished! See? Isn't that easy?

A corner of real shanghai

Not everywhere in Shanghai is as glamorous as the Pudong district. There are many corners like this in the dynamic city in China. New buildings are being erected, but old faces are dying slowly.

Pick one book and bring to prison with you

This thread is inspired by the famous novel, The Royal Game, by Stephan Zweig. The story is about a prisoner jailed by Germany police for more than 10 years. In the prison, with almost nothing to do, the prisoner found a chess book left by other prisoners. With no better choice around, he started to read the book secretly even though he's not a big fan of chess at the moment. Remember the setting is in a prison, where your mind is basically empty and has no input. A book can be boring and it might not be the best pastime one would like to spend time on, but it's definitely not a bad choice to keep one's mind alive, in a prison.

So here comes the question: think of a highly imaginary situation, we are all going to a miserable jail. No TV, no communication with outside (no networks, phone calls or even letters) are allowed. You don't know for how long you are going to be jailed. The only thing you know is that, you can bring one book with you and read it in the prison. Which book you want to pick? It's not like picking a book in a bookstore or a library. You can always pick another one when you find it's not interesting as you thought. Now you only have one choice, a choice might be accompanying you for a lifetime. Think about it.

I will post my answer when I figure out my choice.

Quote of the Day

Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft, addressed the 356th commencement of Harvard graduates. On
the recently event that he was granted an honory Harvard Law degree 35 years after he dropped
out, and in next year or so he would quit the chairman post of microsoft to full time participate
in philantrophic organization, he said:

I'll be changing my job next year … and it will be nice to finally have a college degree on my resume… I applaud the graduates today for taking a much more direct route to your degrees."

A Web 2.0 company just costs $12,000

Guy Kawasaki, a silicon valley venture capitalist, former Apple marketing fellow, recently launched his company based on user-submitted content, citizen-journalism, social media, or in brief, a Web 2.0 site. What's amazing is that, it only costs him $12,000 to launch the dot com, which when in the heyday can be burning multimillion dollars just to get the same thing done. Among the $12,000, he spent $4800 for legal service, $4500 for software development, and $400 for the logo design!! It's not hard to understand the last expense considering he was the marketing guy in Apple selling Machintosh back in the 1980s.

Two things I found his story inspiring are: the attitude of saying "life is good when one can open a company with only credit card level of debt", and there are technical teams out there you can actually work with. Just tell them what kind of platform you want to build, and they will build it for you. So you job is mainly to think of a platform of a business, like what kind of service your website can provide (at this point, don't worry about the technical details about how to build such a platform first) and how many people want to use this service.

I also learned that Word Press is quite a nice thing to create a user-generated content weblog. Thanks to open source.

Liquid Sculptures

Liquid has no form, how can one make sculpture out of it? Well, this is no longer true when one view the liquid in a tiny fraction of a second with an ultrafast camera. When such a short moment is captured, the liquid can exhibit splendid structures and morphologies, which can be sculpted by changing the fraction of time of the capturing, or by splashing different liquid onto another. The following link provides some more spectacular pictures of the frozen moments of liquid splashes.

Fake kidney donor

Television reality shows are not necessarily real. A dutch reality show features a dying lady who would donate her healthy kidney and 3 patients competing for the kidney for transplantation (BBC News). At the season finale of the show (would they make another season?), the allegedly dying woman turned out to be actually a healthy person, in contrast to the three patients in bad need of an external kidney. It isn't hard to guess that what will come next: yes, ethics debate. Critics said that the show are immorally making profit out of people who are really in need of help. The producers think differently. According to their rebuttal, the hoax of the show was designed in the way it was, and the purpose was to raise the attention to the scarcity of organ donors and the growing number of patients in need of one. Supporters commented on the outcome of the show, "although not true, it achieved its goal of raising attention to the issues".

I am not a big fan of reality show. To me, there is no point bringing reality onto the silver screen. If there are not one watching reality show, there will be no market. Maybe audiences are getting bored by the acting of real actors who wear make-up and recite screenplay, and thus turn to the emerging reality show for the "realness". The curiosity to peak into others life, in my opinion, is the real drive behind to watch reality show, which can summarized simply as "see if they are just like us".

Regardless of my attitude towards reality shows in general, I am on the side of the hoaxing show producer. That does not mean that I agree with their raise-attention-by-design explanation. TV show producers are profitable organizations. They won't do a thing without profitability. That's the bottomline. It's the after effect of the show that I think might worth a stay. Think of what is left over and will be discussed by folks after the show? They will be aware of the fact that patients are so desperate about an organ to transplant that even a fake donor can drive a competition. We all know that spare organs are not stuff that can be acquired easily in a supermarket. What we might not understand is the state of mind of a receptor to-be before they are assigned with a donor. After all, there are not many dying people around who would like to donate, but there are indeed far more people in the waiting list of spare parts, which would simply degrade when go underground. The show would reignites a second thought about the idea of preserving an intact body in afterlife. People might argue what a disappointment it is to the three participants in the show, knowing that none of them will be getting an organ no matter how hard they are competing. But as a patient waiting for organ, this is only a small challenge faced by many others everyday.

My Page project relaunched

First of all, GO CAVERLIERS! GO JAMES!

I started a project moving my not-so-much-exposed personal page to Google Pages. The idea is that, with google pages, I get edit my pages everywhere I want. Furthermore, I don't want to worry about all those HTML tags and managing numerous of .html files and pictures. With google pages, all I need to do is to write stuff. Balancing the easy-to-use factor and the degree of fanciness I want for my pages, I choose the Google Pages.

Google is becoming more and more a way a life to many of us. By moving a large part of our digital lives onto the web, we feel less dependent on the hardware that we are using, the operation systems, and more importantly, the softwares that we could not move everywhere with us without a laptop. With one account, anything including your emails, calendars, bookmarks, personal homepages, favorite movie listing even purchase record! It's not hard to imagine sooner or later, the philosophy of google is going to conquer more aspects in our daily life. How about google TV, google Bank, google hospital, or google parliament?

Anyway, here is a link to my baby version homepage .

Mindset

This is the second time I started reading crime and punishment, a representative novel from Dostoevsky. Out of hurry, I just picked up from where I left last time (about two years ago?), that is the beginning of story. Rodya just finished the crime.
Interesting thing is that, no one in the beginning suspected Rodya, a sick college student (or dropout). Many suspects were examined by the authorities and the community. I saw this as the mind set for people when something comes up, they have a pre-determined candidate about who did it.
Figuring out how to make use of the mindset can lead to a perfect crime.