Installing Awstats was the worst experience in my blogging practice [but I have to admit awstats is really cool. That's why I still want it despite the pain ]. I can never get any clues from its official documentation, nor from any abstruse tutorials on the Internet. I don’t know where to start. Anybody can give me a hand? If possible, I’ll write a hands-on tutorial myself as long as I figure it out.

1. Only in America……can a pizza get to your house faster than an ambulance.

2. Only in America……are there handicap parking places in front of a skating rink.

3. Only in America……do drugstores make the sick walk all the way to the back of the store to get their prescriptions while healthy people can buy cigarettes at the front.

4. Only in America……do people order double cheeseburgers, large fries, and a diet coke.

5. Only in America……do banks leave both doors open and then chain the pens to the counters.

6. Only in America……do we leave cars worth thousands of dollars in the driveway and put our useless junk in the garage.

7. Only in America……do we use answering machines to screen calls and then have call waiting so we won’t miss a call from someone we didn’t want to talk to in the first place.

8. Only in America……do we buy hot dogs in packages of ten and buns in packages of eight.

9. Only in America……do we use the word ‘politics’ to describe the process so well: ‘Poli’ in Latin meaning ‘many’ and ‘tics’ meaning ‘bloodsucking creatures’.

10. Only in America……do they have drive-up ATM machines with Braille lettering.

This is my presentation material in last semester for JOUR 152 Online Editing and Design taught by Dr. Webb. It is a brief review of blogs. Hopefully it will help you somewhat if blog is still a new concept to you.

I’ve added it to the Help section and more help information will be added soon.

This is a series concerning the relationships between China and her five neighbors produced by National Public Radio. I will offer the transcripts when I am free to transcribe them. Anyway, you can follow the links below to listen to the programs yourself.

Part 1: Japan Feb. 16, 2004

We begin a series on how China is viewed by its neighbors: Japan sees both opportunity and threat in the rapidly growing Chinese economy. It’s a huge market for Japanese goods, but it is also taking away Japanese jobs. For most of the Cold War, Japan could concentrate on its own economic development and ignore China, but no more. One analyst says some Japanese feel a kind of jealousy toward China and a desire to see the country fail. NPR’s Rob Gifford reports.

Part 2: Vietnam Feb. 17, 2004

Twenty-five years ago this week, China invaded Vietnam. The invasion came after months of tension between the two communist neighbors. The Chinese attack was prompted by Vietnam’s decision to invade Cambodia and remove the Chinese-backed Khmer Rouge. The 1979 border war between China and Vietnam was over quickly, with the Chinese retreating after heavy losses.

But as NPR’s Michael Sullivan reports in the second part of a series examining how China is viewed by its neighbors, relations between the two countries have improved significantly since then. The two countries are bound by culture — and increasingly by economics. Trade is growing rapidly and Vietnam has become a popular vacation spot for Chinese tourists. And the Vietnamese Communist Party looks to the Chinese Communist Party as a model for opening up its economy while maintaining tight control over politics.

Part 3: India Feb. 18, 2004

In October 1962, Americans were glued to their TVs and radios as the Cuban missile crisis unfolded, worried about the prospect of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. But halfway across the world, high in the Himalayas, India and China were at war over a disputed border region. The war ended with a large swath of the area under China’s control, and thousands of Indian troops dead. China’s unexpected aggression had a profound psychological effect on the Indian political and military establishment for several decades, but today, the war is all but forgotten by many Indians.

As the 21st century opens, tensions seem to be subsiding between the two Asian giants as both countries devote their energy to economic development. In the third part of a series examining China’s relationship with its neighbors, NPR’s Michael Sullivan reports on the view from India.

Part 4: South Korea Feb. 19, 2004

South Korea’s links with China go back centuries, but in the 1950s the two were on opposite sides in the Korean War. Today, China is starting to have increasingly more in common with South Korea than its communist neighbor in the North. In the fourth part of a series examining China’s relationship with its neighbors, NPR’s Rob Gifford reports on a China craze that’s going on in Seoul. China’s economy is one of the fastest growing in the world. And with that prosperity comes power. Some in Asia are calling China the new America. But others worry that South Korea’s economic infatuation with China has blinded Koreans to Beijing’s longterm strategic aims.

Part 5: Russia Feb. 20, 2004

Russia, the world’s biggest country, and China, the world’s most populous, frequently clashed during the Cold War. The two giants spent decades engaged in an ideological rivalry and border skirmishes, but have since put much of that open hostility behind them.
Russia and China now officially call their relationship a “strategic partnership.” But many Russians retain a mistrust of China, especially in light of its increasing economic and political might. NPR’s Lawrence Sheets reports from the Far Eastern Russian city of Khabarovsk.

Hooper, S. (2004). Mobile Phones Face ‘Spam Epidemic’. CNN, February 19, 2004.

A new global survey, conducted by British mobile data technology company Empower Interactive, reveals the second tide of “spam” has now spread to cell phone networks. Quite similar with its twin “junk mail”, cell phone spam aims at vulnerable users and annoys them with unsolicited text, what’s more, “missed call” messages.

Phone spam also brings about a new marketing strategy (or we may say, scam) named “missed call marketing”. According to this week’s UK Guardian newspaper, “computer-generated calls ring just once to leave a ‘missed call’ message on a phone user’s handset. If they then returned the call they were transferred to a premium rate number, offering a cash prize but more regularly leaving victims with a hefty charge on their phone bill.”

The development of science and technology causes some unexpected problems in terms of ethics and legislations. As Johannesen states in the beginning Chapter 10 (p. 181), controversies on the Internet illustrates pressures for legalistic approaches to ethics and for the formation of formal codes of ethics. Nevertheless, it is a pity that I failed to find any revision either for the American Association of Advertising Agencies code of ethics or The Advertising Principles of American Business. It’s noticeable that the two codes were adopted in 1990 and 1984 respectively, when the Internet hasn’t reached its golden time nowadays.

Customers of Information Age are more vulnerable and passive compared with their predecessors due to the growing omnipotence and ubiquity of modern advertising. In old days, people still possessed the rights to ‘receive or not” when confronted with advertisements. Nowadays, their options have been eliminated to “delete or not”. Having read through the codes of ethics adopted by the two organizations, I find that what the codes intent to protect is not actually the rights of customers, though it seems so. If you go deep into the lines to examine the hidden words, it is evident that the real purpose is to set the rule for the game and make it a “fair play” of advertising agencies and, more importantly, the companies who write checks to advertising agencies.

I personally doubt about the advertising effects of those spam, no matter on Internet or cell phone. Will people buy the stuff whose producer bombed their cell phones with junk information? It is quite possible that people even don’t read the junk messages before deleting them. So, what causes those companies take the risk of irritating their potential customers to employ the underhand means to promote their product sales? It could be the cost. Spam might be the cheapest advertising method. The price for a collection of 1 million email addresses is only a few dollars. A large portion of spam is from those small companies. Unlike those reputable big companies who spend billions of dollars on advertising “wisely and ethically”, those small companies have to worry about how to make more people know about their products. But the problem is, the more people they want to reach by cheap spam, the quicker they get kicked out of the game. Who will benefit from this? It is not hard to tell.

Q: How are any two individuals on the earth connected to each other?

Vijay [ Delhi, India ] worked at an engineering firm with Sameer [ Kolkata, India ] whose daughter Prema [ Berkeley, USA ] goes to school in California and plays soccer with Christie [Berkeley, USA] whose best friend from high school William [New York, NY] is studying medicine with Alice [New York, USA].

This is a fictive case of the SMALL WORLD project conducted by Columbia University. You might have your own stories as better examples of Six Degrees of Separation. Don’t get frightened by the name of the theory. It means that two randomly chosen persons in the world are connected by a chain of at most 6 acquaintances. You might be wondering “why six?” Jon Kleinberg, an associate professor of Computer Science at Cornell University tried to explain this phenomenon from an algorithmic perspective. He’s done a lot of other works on this issue.

Hey, six degrees of separation doesn’t exist only in human world. Check this out and you will find the power of it!

Happy V-day to all you guys!

Enjoy the days with those you love and those loving you. Remember, every day can be a V-day by being in the mood of love!!!

This is my favorite card on Apple’s iCards. Pick one or handmake one for your beloved!

Just installed MT-Blacklist 1.62. Pretty easy — a matter of a few clicks only. So don’t panic when you are gonna hack your MT. Follow the install instruction in user guide and you cannot get it wrong.

It’s sort of early to de-spam comments on my blog. Anyway, there are only 7 comments on it so far [and four were posted by myself]. Yet, keep it in mind — the best treatment is prevention.

Higgins, M. (2004). Delaware Reports Second Avian Flu. The Washington Times. February 10, 2004.

A second case of avian influenza was found at a commercial farm in northern Sussex County, Delaware. It has been clarified that the H7-type strain is not harmful to humans and is not the same as the highly pathogenic bird flu that is crippling the Asian poultry industry. Yet, like many other serious health issues, the epidemic disease has been tracked closely by news media all over the world since it spread from Asia. Based on the frequencies and quantities of the news coverage of avian flu in media, it can be stated that the roles of mass media in public health crisis are significantly intensified, especially after the worldwide spread of SARS that broke out from Guangdong, China in May, 2003.

What responsibilities should mass media take in such health crises is a problem confronted both by communication scholars and media workers. As Jorgen Westerstahl (p. 121) advocates, “a view of objectivity that encompasses factuality, including truthfulness and relevance, and impartiality, including balance/nonpartisanship and neutral presentation” should be practiced in news reporting. In the process of news reporting, what reporters ought to always keep in mind is to completely respect the public rights of knowing what is happening. Put briefly, the lofty idea of journalism is to make public know the truth.
The functions of mass media in public health issues can be conducted in the following aspects. Firstly, mass media should work as instructors to convey health information, common sense about keeping health and latest development in health science both included, to the public. The best treatment of diseases is prevention. In this case, mass media take the responsibility of public education. Secondly, mass media should be the watchtower to keep an eye on potential dangers in public hygiene. They should examine the status of public health from time to time and publish a sign of warning whenever there is any serious threaten towards public health. If any epidemic disease is ensured to be spreading, mass media should inform public of the breakout in the first place. Thirdly, mass media should provide correct directions on public perceptions towards health crises. They should locate the balance point of telling the public truth as much as possible and avoiding unreasonable public panic. The intentional disguise of breakout of SARS in southern China is a lively example of the neglect of ethical responsibilities of mass media under the pressure of governmental control. Fourthly, mass media should comfort public and help people get back to the normal lives after health crises.

Nevertheless, in practical journalism are there always negative factors impeding the conduction of mass media’s public responsibilities. Most of those hindrances root in the conflicts of specific interest groups. The most prominent one is government. In purpose of maintaining the social stabilization, at least the stabilization on the surface, government might impose pressures on mass media to keep the warnings of serious epidemic diseases reaching audience. The other interest group is business. To maximize the economic benefits, powerful corporations, in this case, corporations in health care area might take measures to impede the publication of reports which might infringe their interests.

Another happy Saturday night. It was my very first time to hang out with friends at Rock Bottom. Being a home animal, I can never figure out what to order and always feel like a loser when facing a menu. Following Tianyi’s advice, the girl I trust so much, I just said “same here” when she told the overly-tanned waitress “root beer”.

A guy sniffed at our choices, “That sucks! It tastes like cough syrup!” Wait wait wait… isn’t it a beer? How come a beer has a flavor of cough syrup? This was later proven the silliest question I asked that night.
Root beer is not really a beer. Indeed, it is “a sweetened, carbonated beverage originally made using the root of a sassafras plant (or the bark of a sassafras tree), with sassafras as the primary flavor.” In short, root beer is a kind of soft drink brewed from plants. Well, about its flavor… You can have a try yourself if possible.

It’s hard to believe that there are 2,260 brands of such a kind of yucky beverage. If you are curious about root beer, check this out: root beer world. Good place where you can learn about the history of root beer. If interested, you can follow the recipes to get some home-made. Good luck!!!

Oh…almost forgot…want to play a game in which working as a cool bartender serving never-give-tip customers with root beer? Have fun with the Root Beer Tapper!