A Sentimental Lotus (莲的心事)

The photo album, A Sentimental Lotus (莲的心事), has been released at my website EggheadLabs.com.

The Longwood Gardens, Pennsylvania, has such natural photographic scenes and variety of flowers. It is the lotus, however, amazed me the most and struck my memory of the famous poem by Xi Muring (席慕容 - 莲的心事).

Job Security or Insecurity?

It is bad that job insecurity could cause one’s loss of steady income for living; It is even worse that a secure job could destroy one’s otherwise a creative career in lifetime!

Thanks to the Armageddon

If asteroids had ever hit the Earth before and caused dinosaurs deracinated, we would have the reason to be scared should those deadly objects hit the Earth again. But we human beings should first thank asteroids for having wiped out all dinosaurs, or otherwise there would have been no chance for human development under the dinosaurs dominance.

The next hit by asteroids, or some other forms of extraterrestrial objects or even Gamma-burst radiation, could then become our Armageddon being deracinated. The future beings whoever will be developed after it would really thank this round of Armageddon by having destroyed us, the dominant and insane human beings. I suppose that such future beings do consider themselves being better evolved, more intelligent, nicer, … … and happier.

There will be the time, however, when the future beings are puzzled by examining our human being fossils together with those of dinosaurs which will be found in a museum remnant of human civilization, I will be surely snickering under the surface of the Earth or above the heaven!

The Universe

The universe does not seem to exist without a perceiver of that universe.

Mist over the West Lake

The Photo Album, Mist over the West Lake, has been just released at my website EggheadLabs.com.

I had enjoyed a couple of trips to Hangzhou, China, during the spring time in 2008. As planned, I did bring my DSLR with me but end up I only took a few shots with average scenes, while competing the shooting opportunities with the crowd tourists who were in front of your camera all the time.

It was in one particular rainy day I’d finally found what I was looking for in QuYuanFengHe (曲院风荷). The reason was simple, the tourist groups were absent due to the rain, which created a great opportunity for me to capture the misty scenes which would have been blocked by the crowd in any normal day. Unfortunately, I suddenly realized that I did not bring my DSLR with me, while only having my Cybershot in my pocket.

Hey, nothing to be complained. I then wasted no time and shot as many as possible. Certain shots did perfectly match the obsessive complex that I have been carried inside of me for decades towards my hometown.

Transfer Apps from iPhone to a New PC

If you’ve ever tried to synch up your iPhone to iTune on a new PC, you could end up lose all apps that you installed in your iPhone.

Before you decide to synch your iPhone with a new PC, make sure to perform the following steps to ensure all apps can be safely transferred to and preserved on your new PC.

0. Connect iPhone to the new PC. DO NOT SYNCH at this moment.

1. In the iTune of the new PC, authorize this PC to take apps. Note that you only have up to 5 PCs for apps transferring.

2. Right click your iPhone under the DEVICES at the left explore list and then select “Transfer Purchase”.

3. Then iTuen starts transferring all the apps from your iPhone to the new PC.

Shrink Hard Drive Partition

How to shrink a large sized partition is a bit tricky.

Here is the use case. When you bought a new PC with just a single partition as Drive C: with the Vista OS installed, you may want to shrink it down and leave extra space to another partition (say D: for your personal files).

If you try to directly shrink the C partition, it is often found that you could not shrink it as much as you wanted. This is because that some files are located nearly at the end of the partition that needs to be shrunk.

You can use PerfectDisk 8.0 to defrag those files and move them to be more compact in chunks near the beginning location of the partition. Even so, the 30-day free trail version of PerfectDisk isn’t that perfect as some system files are so persistent to be moved around.

Here is the tricks:

1. run PerfectDisk to defrag and clean up more free space first. Chances are that not much available space can be freed up.

2. try moving system files with PerfectDisk. It requires rebooting the system and perform such moving operation at the very beginning of next bootup. The consequence may improve a little free space, but still not enough to be shrunk as you needed.

3. At this moment, go ahead to use Vista Storage Management to shrink this partition to gain whatever available space for new partition.

4. Then repeat steps 1-2, amazingly you can further defrag and clean up more free space right after shrinking operation at step 3.

5. Repeat step 3 to shrink this partition further to whatever the Storage Management would allow you to gain.

After a few tries, you will be able to get enough size for the new partition as you desire so. Then you can format the new partition (say Drive D:) and start using it.

Got my new Intel Core i7 PC

Newly ordered a Dell Studio XPS with Intel Core 7i inside. This baby has 4 cores, which are showing 8 threads in the Task Manager.

I’ll benchmark it later until I get an Mac Leopard running on it.

Here are the names I gave to my recently owned computers:

• Egghead (a generic one I built by myself)
• Poet (Dell XPS 9150 Dual Core)
• Pundit (Dell M1330 laptop Core 2 Due)
• Swami (Dell Studio XPS Core i7 quad)

I just wonder what the next PC’s name will be.

Gone Too Soon

What we are memorizing after Michael is his legacy which will never be gone.

[on my exit row seat right before the flight took off at SAN heading to DFW]

The Capitalist Manifesto

"Sell a man a fish, he eats for a day. Teach a man how to fish, you ruin a wonderful business opportunity. "      - Karl Marx

"What we are experiencing is not a crisis of capitalism. It is a crisis of finance, of democracy, of globalization and ultimately of
ethics."      - Fraeed Zakaria (2009)

At this crisis of economy, government is not the solution to the problem. Government is the problem!

It Is Europeans Who Are Mostly In Debt

If you think it is Americans who are to blame as having borrowed too much more than they could afford, then think twice!

Take a look at the top external debt (in US dollars) per capita data by countries, these data apparently show that many European countries are in ridiculously deeper debt.

Among these 18 countries, Monaco and Ireland are more than 10 times of their GDP could produce. Only three non-European countries are on the list, those are Qatar, Australia and the USA.

People in rich country do have more purchasing  power to leverage their debt. For such fair comparison, I took their high GDP per capita to normalize their high debt. So here is the list of Debt per capita as percentage of GDP per capita (the debt-to-GDP ratio).

Again, after the normalization, these Europeans are still on the top of the list. Taking Monaco as example, people in Monaco share the average debt as high as over 18 times as their GDP contribution. As I expected, two poor countries, Zimbabwe and Liberia, are also borrowing money around as twice what they could produce.

With such per-capita GDP normalization, it is equally fair to judge the debt of each country, no matter they are poor or rich. So I plot a scatter chart of all countries in the whole world to examine their normalized per-capita debt in relate to their GDP contribution. If every country borrows money at the same level as the same ratio to their GDP contribution, the fit line should be flat.

However, the figure turns out to be upper bend to many rich countries. It is obvious that many rich countries, especially those in Europe, are responsible for their deeper debt as over borrowing money externally.

In a huge contrast, Asian countries, such as Japan, South Korea, Singapore, China as well as India only show their small fraction of debt (under 30%) in comparison to their GDP.

Poor Countries, High Birth Rate

Poor countries tend to have high birth rate. I use the available data for over 225 countries around the world to plot the following scatter chart.

The correlation coefficient of –0.54 shows such an inverse relation statistically.

Why human laugh? What is laugh for?

Infants laugh, with no consciousness of showing their expression. It is then more spontaneous.

Adults laugh, though taking certain consciousness of showing their expression, sometimes so intensive often as it is getting out of control to the level of choking. It is then also quite spontaneous.

Job vs. Career

If you are looking for a job that you need, you’d rather try to create a career that needs you!

I Envy Their Smiles

Right before the door of an elevator was opening, a wave of loud laugh inside the elevator chamber approached to my ears. Then I saw two hotel janitors were walking out, carrying cleaning cart with room supplies, still with huge smiles on their faces, though they lowered their volume having realized a dressed-up solemn guest awaiting right outside of the elevator.

My first impression was in regard of the discipline of hotel staffs as I chose this inexpensive lodging place. A moment later just as I was stepping in the elevator I noticed their unrestrained smile still on their faces through the half-closed door, my second thought then came cross my mind as what the priceless smiles... ...

Traveling down to San Diego for a customer meeting, as always I prepared presentation late night and was still bearing the pressure of how to advocate my solution in the meeting. Comparing with the simple life of the two janitors, I may have a lot that they have ever dreamed of, however, what I missed is such kind of unrestrained smiles on my own face. I couldn't help envying their simple life and dropping whatever on my shoulder willingly in this plain early morning!

为政

子曰：

道之以政，齐之以刑，民免而无耻。
道之以德，齐之以礼，有耻且格。

知之，好之，乐之

知之不如好之；好之不如乐之。

Bow Down to Yourself

Practicing Yoga, we know we would surrender ourselves and let everything go. To make peace to others, one should be able to make peace to himself first without forcing himself to gain nor worrying about himself being lost. So bow down to your internal downward dog pose.

When Brand-Name Quality Meets Low Price

I did some searches on Sony LCD TV and was surprised that most it's LCD TV products appeared consistently cheaper than Samsung's. I would applaud for Samsung's recent branding achievement with its new thin LED screen which allures a colorful hummingbird in their TV commercial. However when Sony price goes under Samsung's, my decision on buying a TV becomes a no-brainer.

So I had just ordered a SONY KDL40V4100, at an absurd tag $775 (in total)!

First Golf

I did my first golf, 9-hole at Sherrill Park Golf Course, scored 64 (+28). Should reconsider choosing it to be a future hobby :-)