The pumpkin was carved by my roommate.
This halloween is not as crazy as the one I had last year. Hmmm…no costume so far. Even no idea about it yet. How about yours? Tell me something about it, okay?
Enjoy your spooky Halloween! Have fun!!!
BTW, daylight saving time is over at 2 am. You’ll have one more hour to cheer for the Halloween! It’s ironic that I save one more hour for sleeping when daylight saving time ends. LOL!

Steve Jobs at the California Theatre in San Jose, CA: [watch the event here]

Video may be the wrong direction to go… Video is the wrong place… What’s the right place…Digital photos… Everybody is having a digital camera now…Photos are the next big thing…No copyright issue with photos…

I don’t know if photos are the right direction. I really don’t know. We can’t depute this at this point but we’ll get the answer in a quarter. Numbers can tell us everything.

I have thousands of photos on my hard drive. Some of them are fantastic, some are dull. I seldom touch them even if they are only a click away. Why not? Coz I don’t need! I spent most of my time before the computer reading, writing, and chatting with my friend. I do occasionally view my photos for beautiful memory, but that’s not a routine of my life. I will not spend extra $100 to buy an ipod with a color screen to view my photos. I prefer watching people come and go to watching my own slideshow! I’ve got a big screen at home why bother to stare at the 2 inch one?
I think the idea of walkman or any portable music player is great in that you can listen to music while still concentrating on doing something else at the same time. I enjoy listening to music while doing my assignment or waiting in queue. I see so many students with white ear buds in ears walking school. That’s how people enjoy ipod. Put it in pocket and listen to music whenever possible. Do you think it’s fun to watch your photos in public while waiting for a talk with your advisor? Not me.
Yes, now you own the photos and no copyright issue. But how about privacy issue? People might not hear what you are listening to, so you can build your music kingdom freely. However, how about if people peek at your photos? How about if you lost your ipod and someone else sees all your private photos? Disaster.
I’m not a bitter commentator and I do come up with my own suggestion. What’s the next direction? As for me, I prefer to play flash movies which are everywhere on the Internet and new ones keep coming out everyday. They are short, they are fun, and they need sounds!!!

I bombed an assignment which I didn’t expect to ace but didn’t think of bombing either.
Nothing can be more frustrating than having spent more than 15 hours on an assignment just to get a grade that sucks.
I’m not grade oriented but I do feel so BAD!!!

“She didn’t expose a boob, she wasn’t doing drugs, she isn’t anorexic and she didn’t get married in Vegas”, Joe Simpson, father and manager of recording artists Jessica and Ashlee Simpson, said Tuesday.
Yes! She just lip-synced! In China almost every singer does that. What’s the big deal?
But Ashlee Simpson does need to practise her dancing. Was that a dance?

From vnunet.com,
A fairly interesting poll concerning gender difference in search pattern. Half of men surveyed would turn to search engines when they seek advice, while the proportion of women is not revealed but can be estimated no more than one third because “one in three rating family as their number one choice for help and information”. IMHO, men’s preference on search engines may be in part due to the social expectation on male. That is, men are supposed to know more and if they can’t, they should get the answer from reliable sources independently. In this sense, search engines are the best gifts granted to men.
The social expectation on female in this aspect is obviously much more loose. Women are supposed to be dependent and thus it’s not a shame for them to ask for help from others. Women are more comfortable with interpersonal communication than with the cold screen.
The poll attributes searching one’s own name online to search vanity. I can’t totally agree with this because people might search for their own name on the Internet out of curiosity. I don’t expect people would find out how popular by searching themselves because most information might be about someone else who shares the same name with the searcher. However, it’s still surprising to learn that only one out of five women have ever done that before.
I think men’s searching habit might cause their impatience with the search results. On average two words as keyword would bring up a lot of unrelated or even distracting information. In this case, women’s carefulness does pay back.
I want to know more about the poll. What are the sample size? Composition of the investigated? Did those MSN guys t-test or ANOVA???

Via del.icio.us / popular [330 websites have bookmarked it]:

Dropload is a place for you to drop your files off and have them picked up by someone else at a later time. Recipients you specify are sent an email with instructions on how to download the file. Files are removed from the system after 7 days, regardless if they have been picked up or not. You can upload any type of file, mp3, movies, docs, pdfs, up to 100MB each! Recipients can be anyone with an email address

I tried it with a 5 MB mp3 file by uploading it and then sending the pick-up notification to myself. Very fast uploading speed and the download flied! An excellent place to swap files with friends!

Finally our long-held dream comes true — now start to search your own computer with Google’s quietly launched Goole Desktop Search beta. Having achieved great success on the Internet and marketplace, Google has set off to encroach our local files now. Will this bother Microsoft for Desktop Search might be threatening to Windows’ built-in search feature? No doubt the new pace will arouse a new round of debates on Google’s privacy issue, with which the public has expressed tremendous concerns since the introduction of Gmail.

So far the file types Google Desktop Search beta can work with are limited to:
Web pages previously seen in Internet Explorer [ bad news for Firefox supporters ];
Emails sent or received via Outlook or Outlook Express [ sad news for Eudora users ];
IM chat logs with AOL Instant Messenger [ don't be upset if you use MSN messenger. Desktop Search works perfectly with chat logs created by MSN messenger ];
Files in Microsoft Word, Excel, or PowerPoint as well as plain text [ so Microsoft feels a bit better now huh? ].
Support for more file types will be improved in the coming version. Tell Google what you want more, what problems you run into or just send a big THANKS!
The Desktop Search will scan files on the computer, build an index for all the files it skims over and creat a cache for all the files you open [make sure you have more than 500 MB free space on your hardisk]. The indexing job will be conducted whenever the computer is idle, which means when you are working on your computer, you won’t be annoyed by the noise usually heard when antivirus software scans your hardisk. The trade-off is that in the first begining this program won’t work as well as it is expected to be — it takes time to set up index for files and you will see the power gradually.
I found the text search in Microsoft Office files are gorgeous. The in-text searching feature was not originally created by Google but obviously Google is the one who intergrates the feature into simplicity and efficiency. I once was astonished by the magic of “velocity search” which will be built in Apple’s tiger, but now I don’t want MAC Os X badly coz I can do that on PC too! Oh another thing to mention, there is no MAC version for Desktop Search yet.

…I was taking part in a “stair climbing competition”…
Q: I’m not interested in any sports game like this. How can I join it?
A: The only exception is that it is not a real sport game. It’s more an everyday activity. Maybe in the subconscious I want to compete, but not in a formal way.
…Quite different from the popular ones, this one I was in required competitors to climb downstairs…
A: The same reason as the afore one. I want a competition, but in a pleasant way. Going downstairs is much easier.
…I was in the lead—be exactly, the second place. A Germany was ahead of me…
A: Maybe I want to win by all means. But I don’t want to push myself to the edge and that’s why I always try to be the top one. Why a Germany? Maybe because Janet mentioned a Germany girl in her group to me yesterday.
…In the final stage of the game, I caught up with the lead and rushed out of the building before him with my hands raised high above head in joy of victory. To my surprise, there was no exciting crowd waiting out there. I felt so awkward and confused. All of a sudden, I saw my parents there, but obviously not paying attention to my arrival…
Q: I can’t find any reasonable explanations for this scene.
…Then the angle of view turned from the first person to the third person. About thousands of competitors flooded out of the exit at the same time. It’s like a bottle of wine placed upside down. The capsule was pulled out and all the wine flew out…

… I went back to Wuhan to spend my four-day-long vacation there …
Q: how can I stand a 24-hours air travel just to spend four days back home?
A: I’m a little homesick these days, partly due to the great pressure I’ve been facing since the start of the semester. I ever thought about coming back home for winter break and discussed it with Tianyi a lot recently. But for some reason I can’t make it. This occasion indicates my wish and my concerns.
…Having nothing special to do, I went shopping with my parents in a sportswear store…
Q: Never happened in real life before. I never bought sports stuff with parents because of the taste differences. Does it imply my wish that Dad and Mom would take care of themselves and do more sports?
…Then we stopped before something like a canoe and Mom decided to buy it as a gift for Nanna…
Q: Literally it is very absurd coz Nanna is in her 80s. Hard to imagine what good a canoe will do to her. However, since she is in bad health these days, dose this mean something?

In memory:
Christopher Reeve
1952 - 2004

So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem improbable, and then when we summon the will, they soon become inevitable.