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31 dicembre New Year EveI can get a used tux in 50$, but I don't want to go to new year party that much. So I decided to do something else, to climb a small mount near my place.
It is not a good day. But it is the best I can have. Victoria's winter is rainy season.
I am interested in photography recently. After all, it's the easiest kind of art that everybody can do. I'm thinking about to get a tripod.
Sunglow.
A closer look.
Roseal sky.
Another side of the mount.
The year of 2007 is going to end. It was a long year for me, and many things happened. I will miss it. The year of 2008 is about to come. Many things will happen. China will host Olympic Game. I will keep guesting in Canada. I am looking forward to it. 30 dicembre IndicationBlowing wind foreshows the coming storm. (3:00 PM)
It could also indicate a beautiful sunset. (3:30 PM)
Shot in my office. 29 dicembre Look At Him!He needs haircut.
He needs shaving.
He needs to clean his desk.
He needs a tux to go to new year party.
He needs to finish boss' assignments during vacation.
After all, he needs to get ready for the coming new term and the entire new year.
Come on, on your feet!
PS: The picture was shot in my office 26 dicembre I Like LooniesLoonie is the name Canadians gave the gold-coloured, bronze-plated, one-dollar coin shortly after its introduction in 1987. It bears images of a common loon, a well-known Canadian bird, on the reverse, and of Queen Elizabeth II on the obverse.[1] I like them because they look like gold, which gives me a fake rich feeling. These coins are for laundry.
I often try to image they are made of gold. I am greedy. 25 dicembre European Languages, Chinese LanguagesMy friend Mora, he is trilingual. He is capable of Japanese, English and Chinese, in which Japanese is mother tongue. We speak Chinese while hanging out. It is interesting experience. For that in Victoria, usually, I am the foreign language speaker. It is a fresh new point of view to be the native one in a conversation.
Mora has been learning English for only 1 year. I think his Chinese is better than my English. That's quite amazing. I have been working on English for like 15 years, and by no means I can speak Japanese like this after 1 year study.
But he says his English is not good too.
Romance languages, like English or Spanish, are way different from Chinese speakers. It is said that people actually use different part of brain when they read Chinese or Romance. "Dyslexia is a common developmental disorder in which people of normal intelligence have difficulty learning to read, spell and master other language skills."[1] According to the MRI result in [1], Dyslexia of Chinese speakers and English speakers is not the same problem because they use different area of brain. Now you can see how different languages are.
In some ways, ancient China is like ancient Europe with a longer history. We have art, architecture, techology, economics, and Empires as great as ancient Rome, if not better. The different part is, China appears as one united country while Europe is many small ones.
Sometimes, I feel it is funny when European people talk about culture difference. They say like: "Oh, I know it. I've been to Spain and France, and they are different." Come on, you really call that culture difference? The difference between 2 Chinese provinces might be bigger than that. When it comes to languages, they call people who speak Spanish and English "bilingual". If so, most of my friends from south China are born bilinguist. "Chinese isn't really a language. It's a group of languages with Mandarin being the most widely used."[2] "Chinese is classified as a macrolanguage with 13 sub-languages."[5] Experts assess that the differences between some of them are even bigger than English and Swedish.[4] Shame on me, I only speak Mandarin.
Well, a survey from American students supports the same idea.[3] Conversely, Chinese is considered as the most difficult language to English speakers.
Unfortunately, once you start working on Chinese or European language, you are not able to use another part of your brain to study another one. People study second language by using the first part. "It does not mean Chinese dyslexics might be able to use different portions of their brain and learn to read English signs and instructions more easily. Once a person learns to read they tend to use the same circuitry regardless of the second language and its alphabet."[1]
It seems that I have good excuse for not speaking good English now.
24 dicembre It's X'MAS Eve!The band in church.
Christmas claw.
Big pizza. (Maybe too big)
Sparkling coach.
The moon.
We share the only moon, as well as the same time.
We live in one planet, but on different sides.
23 dicembre VocabularyFrom an online test, I found my vocabulary is 7,200 ~ 8,800 words. The URL is as following:
The website says 7,000 words is the bottom line to understand courses in college, and I am close to fail it. It's shame. I thought I would be better. It is said that educated native speakers know 20,000 words on average. In China, CET-4 requires 4,000 words, and 6,000 words for CET-6. (CET: College English Test) I am just a bit better than those Chinese college students who never have opportunity to go aboard.
It seems that I should restart to work on my vocabulary.
But you know, as an engineering student, vocabulary is not that important. Academic papers are written in inornate style, and I can easily cover them with my 7,000 words. I don't read any English literatures except several online newspapers. And the newspapers are easy, too.
Well, maybe they are not that easy. There are some words I don't know in each article. So I guess I really should restart to work on my vocabulary now.
I believe vocabulary is paramount to English study, especially when you want to work at higher level. Some students in China, they like ascribing their failure to the environment. They say study English by memorizing words is wrong because "American farmers only know 1,000 words." This statement is a fact, but it doesn't mean anything. I want to tell those cynics that, you, are not a farmer.
22 dicembre True HappinessToday, when I was waiting for bus, it started to rain. It is vacation, so there was only one guy around me, an idiot. Somehow, the rain inspired him someway, and he started to dance.
When I say "idiot", I mean no insult. This guy does have some sort of psychal disorder or mental retardation. I can tell it from the way he looks like.
He tripped the light fantastic with his passion. He waved hands and twisted waist. Apparently, he was fascinated by the master piece created by himself. Actually, he was too passionate so that after a while, he had to take a break to catch his breath. Then he found me.
I was watching him, but unconsciously. In fact I was running a stupid math problem in my head. The dancer saw I was looking at him, and he saw my puzzled face. He thought this poor foreigner might be not smart enough to understand what just had happened. He is kind-hearted and responsible, so he decided to help.
"I am dancing." He explained seriously.
"I know," Waking up from contemplation, I showed my encouraging smile. "thank you."
He seemed to be satisfied with this answer. He skipped back to rain and started to dance again, joyfully. I am jealous. True happiness only belongs to idiots, that is the way the world is. 20 dicembre Hong LaowaiHong Laowai, literally red foreigner (simplified Chinese: 红老外) is a recent celebrity on Chinese internet. Unlike others, he is an American white man, and he is highly praised by Netizen. He is a New Yorker, having a decent job in Wall Street, "from 8:00am to 8:00pm". He has been learning Chinese from internet for 2 years. He has sung many Chinese traditional communism songs, which made him popular in the first time. Unexpectedly, his latest work is a pop song from Taiwanese pop star Jay Zhou (simplifed Chinese: 周杰伦).
The song is anti-war. In the video, he shows the Zero Zone, the site of World Trade Center. And he added a piece of English rap to the song. The English part is as following: "Tanks, cannons, planes, Second Armored Brigade, crushed the famers' hope and left children afraid." "Ashes and dust abound, sandy wind is only sound. " "Freezing in the rubble this torture's medieval. But how could this have happenned this preventable evil?" In the end, he speaks in Chinese: "战争没有赢家" (English: No winner in a war.) And the subtitle says both in English and Chinese: "Save Taiwan from war. Oppose 'creeping independence.'" Maybe he doesn't know, but I say he is challenging the bottom line of Chinese government. I bet some meetings have been held to discuss the validity this video in Board of Censors. The government is very serious about Taiwan problem. If he wants to keep being popular, I suggest him get away from politics. 15 dicembre DiscriminationAs what I stated before, discrimination is a very reasonable thing of human being. Actually, it is for all intelligent creatures. As long as a species wants to survive in the epic of evolution, it has to be protective of its own kind and be against to others. For human being, it's more complicated. You should not only protect your DNA, but also your beliefs, your ideology and your social group.
Some people always talk about the vanity of nations. They say there should be no wall between us. What's it called? Oh yes, internationalism. And they also claim that men and women should be treated equally. They are really big fans of equality, aren't they?
I say they are cheating themselves. It's difference which leads discrimination. Since differences always exist among people, there is no way to diminish the discrimination.
I tried to find a new apartment lately, but I can not get one. It doesn't matter actually. I've already made the decision to stay. I'm not going to talk about housing. The thing is, when I was browsing advertisements, I found something interesting frustrated me: All the landlords are prefer female tenants.
It's nothing new. This phenomenon exists in China as well, and it is understandable. Females want female roommates for safety concern, males want female roommates for romantic concern and landlords want female roommates for sanitary concern. So everybody wants female and nobody wants male. Wait a minute, choosing one gender over another, it sounds so familiar... um, may I call it sexual discrimination?
And the racial discrimination appears on the advertisement too. However, in this time, I am the one who benefits. A large amount of advertisements say they prefer "Asian students". Oh no, the racism, call the police! hurry up!
Occupational discrimination is also worth mentioning. Again, the advertisements are prefer engineering students. Another type of discriminations? Gosh, what terrible advertisements they are!
You can see it clearly that why the landlords are doing this. I mean, who doesn't want a good tenant? Asian are quiet and have less parties. Engineers are too busy to be trouble makers. Not to mention the females, the favorite of the entire world. Landlords are innocent. If there is any evil, that will be the essence of life itself. Being a self-organization system, the soul of life is prefering similarity and discriminating difference.
As what you have seen, the discrimination on different people is reasonable, both logically and anthropologically. Men are different from women. Asian are different from North American, and engineers are different from ... what's the opposite of engineers? I want to say artists. The funny thing is, some people try to eliminate the diversity by simply applying ostrich policy. Those moralists, they just bury their heads in sand and pretend the problem doesn't exist. They couldn't be more wrong. I'm sorry but it's not a perfect world, and it can not be that harmonic, forever. 13 dicembre How To Add A Cluster MapIt's quite simple. Just go to the website and register, then put the code into your webpage. The website is as following:
This snapshot is the cluster map of clustrmaps.com itself. It's interesting because you can tell the development of different countries. West Europe and United States are the most developed area. China still has a long way to go. Of course, it's also because this is an English website. If it's a cluster map of QQ, that will be another story.
Note that the map is not 100% accurate. I know some of my friends visited me from Japan and Australia, somehow, they didn't show up on the map. 08 dicembre The City Of BeijingThe street you're walking on,
a thousand houses long.
Well that's where I belong,
and you belong with me.
07 dicembre A Couse Is DoneQuestion: When will Chinese and Taiwanese be united as one?
Answer: In the due day.
I'm kidding. Politics is not a good choice to joke with, so it's another foolish joke I made.
Today is the last due day for a course. We've worked together for the course during the whole day. After this, the course is done. I am not a big fan of this course, not only for it is hard, but also because it's too theoretical. Unlike my another couse, which is more practical, so ... but ... I don't like it neither. Maybe I just don't like courses.
Yes, hating courses but being a student for the past 18 years, that's me. 04 dicembre Being A White MouseI took a part in a psychological experiment today. I don't know why I did this. It's the end of the term, time is limited and everything goes crazy. Well, it's me. I always do things don't make any sense. Sometimes weird thoughts just come off the top of my head, then I say: OK, why don't I just ... (some stupid ideas).
For this time, I think it's because I am always curious about the psychological studies in Scientific American. Plus, I can get 10$ easy money for 1 hour work.
The psychology lab is in a basement. When I came, another volunteer was already there. We exchanged some words:
"What's your major?"
"Computer science"
"I'm general science." (....What's general science?)
"Are you a resident?"
"No, I've been here only 3 month. And you?"
"I live here for 20 years."
...
blah, blah, blah.
It turns out that they are taking some classes, so they do the experiment for bonus marks. I wish I could do experiments for marks. Let me think, what kind of computer science experiments need volunteers ....
Before I got an answer, a researcher came to us. "Pick a number from 1 to 10." She said.
Another guy said: "7."
I said: "Is it a part of the experiment?"
The researcher and the volunteer: -_-|||.
Then I found out this's like a coin flipping. For example, the researcher keeps a number in her mind first, and whose number we tell her is closer to hers, wins. Then she can assign us to different groups in the experiment.
After this, the experiment began and it lasted for one hour. It's a role playing, quite fun. I'm sorry I can not reveal more details since it's secured. Anyway, it's an interesting experience and very neat ten dollars. 03 dicembre When Dream Comes TrueI had a terrible dream last night. It was cold and wet, just like the weather. I woke up in the middle of the night. Guess what? The dream had reasons. My roof was leaking, and the water was droping down to my bed. My blanket was all wet. That's why.
The worst nightmare is when you wake up you find out it's not a dream.
I knew this is not a nice house and I accepted it. But I didn't see this coming. It's just perfect. In end of the term, everything comes up together, exams, dues, mental pressure, physical ailment, and now, my roof is leaking. Could it be worse?
Don't answer this question please.
From my experience, things always can be worse. All I need to do is thinking positive ....OK, although it's a leaking roof, at least I still have a roof. That's much better than .... Anyway, I moved my bed away, hung the blanket to dry, and put a bowl under the leaking place.
Then I felt asleep again. 02 dicembre Bad WeatherThanks to the storm, it has been raining for 2 days, and it will be rainy for a whole week. The weather is wet and cold, which is representative Victoria winter.
I went shopping 10 minutes ago, but the supermarket is closed, for the staff are going to party. Canadian ... they have way too much leisure time. Thank god I still have some vegetables in the fridge, otherwise, I have to eat nothing but rice. |
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