HAPPY NEW YEAR!!! The year of the dog!!!
祝大家身体健康，狗年吉祥！汪汪汪！

[ Courtesy of Oui-Blog 当我们Blog在一起 ]
Beautiful China by Mr. Feng Jiang [ via Antipixel via the Iconfactory the Iconfactory]

Via Lifehacker via Phone Phun

Tell Me at (800) 555-TELL delivers all sorts of useful information rolled up into a nifty voice-recognition system. Say “news center” for business or sports news, “weather” for your local weather and forecast, or “entertainment” for soap opera updates, horoscopes, and a blackjack game. The service is particularly useful for a quick fix of regional information such as movie times and traffic reports. The call is free, and the amount of advertising is minimal.

Excellent voice recognition [ you know I am not a native English speaker ]. Easy to navigate. The only flaw is it can’t locate Evanston for weather forecast but Chicago works. Movie times are my favorite and Century 12 is well covered. Great service for cell phone users–you know I can never use up all my 450 mins anytime every month.

No wonder my Greasemonkey Gmail Delete Button for Firefox stopped working yesterday. Now Gmail has its official delete button right on top. Just wondering why it takes such a long time.

Reading a bad paper assigned by your professor is like going through the second stunt in Fear Factor: it totally sucks and you’ve got to take it all.
Curiosity killed the cat [ subscription required ].

Read the rest of the entry…

When I was a kid, mom told me a story of The King’s Got Donkey Ears. For those who have never heard of it, it is an Irish folklore about a king who had a pair of donkey ears and a barber who happened to find out the secret. The barber couldn’t keep the secret, so he revealed it in a bizarre way by telling it to a tree. The tree was later chopped down to make a harp by the king’s harpist. When the harpist played the harp, the only sound it could make was like “The king has donkey ears! The king has donkey ears!” So everybody knew the king’s secret. Fortunately, the king got relieved from the fact that everybody didn’t mind his donkey ears and lived happily ever after.

Hmmm… it sounds like the prototype of blogs or podcasts. If the barber lived in the Internet age, I bet he would blog about it and have the post password protected [ and be sure of keeping Google from crawling it! ]. People of today still get relieved from confessing annoymously to others and they do it online. From Postsecret to Sinbox, people enjoy confessing their dark inside and enjoy overhearing others’ penitence. Resonance among readers might be the most fascinating part of the whole thing; when I read something, I thought “that’s what I had wanted to do” but didn’t have the guts to say it out…

Two months ago I asked for help to get Zoundry work for my blog. A guy from Zoundry team responded to the post and offered some solutions [ thanks a lot! ] though none worked. I started to think it was the problem of my Movabletype system because Zoundry was not the only desktop client failing to run on my system. Today I finally got the guts to reinstall my Movabletype and the setup went smoothly. The efforts are worthwhile: the size of MySQL database was dramatically reduced by over 1,000% and what’s better, my Zoundry can work now!

This is a test post for Zoundry.

Technorati : Zoundry

Rateyourstudents vs. Ratemyprofessors.
Rateyourstudents is way more than a vent for frustrated professors. Students can also learn a lot here. Your professor is HUMAN. Treat them fair. It’s not obedience but knowing what s/he expects from students is extremly helpful.

What characteristic do those folks have in common?
Jackie Chan, Scarlett Johansson, Katie Holmes, Cate Blanchett, Shirley Temple, Meg Ryan, Carie-Anne Moss, Jodie Foster, Jeanne Moreau, and Nigel Short.
The answer is… they all look like Dan Li [ blush ].

I didn’t make this up, MyHeritage.com says so. According to MyHeritage, Jackies Chan looks like me most [ AHHHHHHH ]. What comforts me is Shirley Temple, Meg Ryan, and Jodie Foster resemble me, too. Who is the guy named Nigel Short? Errrr…never mind. At least this guy is smart enough.
Go here to find which celebrity looks like you and if possible, let me know.

It was a warehouse-like room. There was no furniture and the room was poorly decorated. Everything was in the crudest style. I was sitting in the center of the room with my back toward the viewers. Yeah, this dream was more like watching a movie instead of playing a first-person-shooting [FPS] game. I SAW myself sitting there, facing a huge window on the wall. Deadly silence.
Then I heard a train siren on the right side. The noise tore open the silence and I can feel the train was approaching. My nerves tightened and I couldn’t help holding my breath. All of a sudden, the train rushed past the window. Oddly, despite the light-like speed of the train, I can still see clearly what the cars were like. They reminded me of World War II. However, the passengers were turkeys. A whole train of uneasy turkeys. I was seated, my jaw falling on the floor.