The streets are shrouded in rain mists.

HP makes quite decent consumer products. I suppose it tries its deep best at every price point at which it meets consumers.

That's goodwill.

I like the feel of the overcast weather in this fall which has been appearing often lately and which is slightly bright due to the sun behind the clouds.

有些人，永遠不會說 “對不起” 的。他們的心胸寬廣程度，大概是一輩子永遠不成長的。

希望我的心胸不是那樣地不成長。

I'm not sure if the genre of biz news mags can stand up to the justification of its existence in this era. For instances, Forbes' website appears horrendously cluttered and ugly, Fortune isn't quite deep, and The Economist doesn't feel as sharp as it should.

By contrast, it seems that The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Wall Street Journal can bring better information and news than the above mentioned biz mags. In my current perception, these three news media from New York City are authoritative and interesting.

A lot of things are amiss in life. You've got to right the wrongs or tolerate them.

The soft pads of cat's feet feel pretty likable. :-)

Some Chinese people tend to base their thoughts on conjectures instead of on facts.

I'm against that attitude.

The St. Lawrence river was the transportation highway of the fur traders in the early New France. They strewed their footprint from there.

Many years ago, for multiple months, I had my hair frizzled. And I looked better wearing that hair than wearing my natural hair.

Perhaps I'll get my hair frizzled again and just have a change.

Why do Americans importune women public figures to be relatively good-looking?

It seems that women who aren't as good-looking as Hilary Clinton, Sarah Palin, Meg Whitman and so on don't stand a chance to establish themselves in public arenas.

On the other hand, Angela Merkel, the current Chancellor of Germany, wouldn't be a successful politician if she were an American who wants to pursue politics, I guess.

There lies the difference of attitudes toward women public figures between the U.S. and Germany.

Video - Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1, by Elgar

The companies which make writing pads and the like must be seeing their significant decline coming, thanks to the popularity of tablet computing devices such as iPad.

I increasingly feel that Google botched up the Google Reader thing. Many people must have been seeking a viable and reliable way out like I do.

One tends to form a lot of unshaped ideas during interactions with others. But he can only make them clear in alone moments.

Is every Chinese immigrant in Canada working as a software developer a journeyman developer?

也許對世上的某些人物來說，華麗的過往是營造出的、亮麗的 resume 是造作過的。人，不如抱殘守缺，虔肅示真。

Just a small piece of my writing about a trivial event in life

J parked the baby cart with his baby in it on the pavement between D's door and the public pavement. Then he rushed to the basement window of D's house to get the baby's shoes which D was holding out through the window. D's telling J about the cart, "it's rolling. It's rolling." J ran back with a few steps, with the shoes in his hands.

In the "Arial" font, it's virtually impossible to distinguish the capital "I" (as in "Ink") from the lower-case "l" (as in "letter").

Tokens of goodwill and friendship tend to be always cherished.

J made slight mouths when the dentist was working at his teeth and gum.

I was a rank beginner in cooking about eight months ago. Now I create delicious Chinese dishes.

As a consumer, I tend to be chary of signing contracts, forms, and so on without first having perused them. Oh, the fine print just gets me. I give up in the face of it, like everyone else, and just trust the perusal to the government's regulations which are supposed to protect consumers.

You've got to be capable of discerning and appreciating people's scruples.

The winter's first snow. In the white, easy winds blow.

I'm not sure if the "Robinhood" Quick Oats are actually a type of oatmeal. By the way, the taste of them is not bad at all if you add a little honey into your bowl after the heating.

Update: No, they are not the same thing, although very closely related. The oats are the raw food packed in the bag, while the oatmeal is the food you get after having boiled the oats in milk or water and you eat it hot.

Most people buy residential houses by the means of mortgage of twenty years or so. Is it provident? Maybe not.

The Boston Marathon is the oldest annual marathon in the world, also one of the best known ones. It's said it's the hardest one too.

Well, doesn't Boston host the two hardest universities too? Harvard and MIT; especially MIT.

Z cravenly or selfishly refused her husband's request to ask her to tell her relatives that they would not visit them because her husband felt tired.

It seems that too many teachers/staff at 7-dollar daycare facilities in Montreal are too authoritarian towards kids. The don't respect the children enough.

Apple has swept the world with its iPod, iPhone, and iPad, back to back.

Now, outside Apple, there are iRobot, iCoffee, iCar, and so on. Will there be iMat, iBed, iMattress, and iWall?

Gee. I just want to live in the world. I don't want to live in an iWorld.

Samuel de Champlain is called the "Father of New France", which means father of the French Canada.

For now, two aspects, or events, in his life intrigue me. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_de_Champlain#Murder_of_the_King
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_de_Champlain#Marriage .

I don't know if the depiction of "cosmopolitan Germans and mostly avaricious, bestial Czechs" is somewhat true as cited in the below NYT movie review.

See To the Victors, Vengeance.

Entrepreneurship exacts risk tolerance and patience.

Did the ancestors of black people get their hair frizzled under the African sun thousands of years ago? Maybe.

Sometime I'm driven crazy by our baby daughter's importunate whining and crying.

I can only hope she grows up quickly.

Much of the software technology is about the portage of information.

Some people can remember what happened when they were three years old. Compared with them, I just have oblivion.

All the cordless home phones sold at Jean Cotu are made in China. Even Siemens phones.

I've been making friends with Chinese cooking. Man, what a delicious world if you can do it properly.

Personally I think that the nouns/adjectives with an "ese" at the end feel pretty if we only consider their sounds. For instances, "Viennese", "Vietnamese", "Chinese", and "Lebanese".

Abraham Lincoln lives posthumously in people's minds.

People say he's a great man.

I'm currently reading the poem O Captain! My Captain! by Walt Whitman, which was published in his Leaves of Grass.

When one's stressful, he sometimes has one or more abscesses on his gum or the skin area a trifle above his lip.

Apple's biggest enemy probably is its very own authoritarianism over outside software developers.

It's not quite good that the West garrison Iraq, Afghanistan, Lybia and so on, which are crucial oil countries on the Earth.

But it's not quite bad that the West eventually withdraw their military and establish the so-called "free trade" with those countries.

My wife and I have fatted our baby daughter. How much striving, coping, and devising it has taken.

I feel more simpatico with open software systems.

As a consumer, I don't feel that I'm on top of Google's services any more, no matter whether they're free or not. Google can change the ways they are however it likes.

I think that in terms of the amount of care our baby daughter needs, 5, 15, and 20 months of age mark the turning points. After each of those points, the amount of care she demands decreases significantly than before.

Now she's about 21 months old, and she still commands lots of being taken care of. Now you know the first 5 months following her birth were hell for my wife and me. But I've never regretted it.

Libraries in Montreal need to be repurposed.

People read far less physical books now.

Some young men panhandle unapologetically in public places. Are they mentally ill or something?

European manor houses look really historical.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manor_house .

I feel Facebook is a little too authoritative. I mean it's a little overbearing.

Rank seems to be the percentage of Canadians who live pay cheque by pay cheque.

The "O" glyph of the Opera browser feels quite sleek.

Maybe melancholy is too depressive. Maybe only love can make one overcome it.

As more and more private, both domestic and foreigner-owned, factories move from coastal China to the main of China, finally, market economy begins to develop in the latter.

我走在陽光楓樹微風秋意裡。

深秋的聲音光色一路輕輕響亮著。

I attended G's Spring Convocation of Concordia University in 2004. An old Hong Kong businessman, who presumably sponsored the university, burst into tears when he spoke about how he even hadn't been able to complete his elementary school because of the invasion of the Japanese military during the WWII.

It's Okay for him to burst into tears in front of thousands of people. But it's not very fine for him not to restrain his private emotions at all. Nonetheless, it's sorry for us to know he had lost his childhood and formal education to the war.

The notions of 'general Providence' and 'special Providence', as in Christianity and Judaism, are too profound to be ignored.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_providence .

Eventually, I'll return to Asia if opportunities present themselves, I think.

I don't know what's the magic with the direction of west.

You know, the old Europe went west and found the American continent, Japan and Asia have sought to learn from the West, and in the modern history of the U.S. and Canada, going west seems to always look appealing.

It's apparent that the Conservative government of Canada purposes to establish Canadian power in the northern territory.

How will the U.S. behave in that vast area?

For aught I know, almost all progresses in one's competence are done in his own private thinking and practicing.

Personally I'm fond of the atmosphere of the Starbucks and Second Cup rendezvous.

Video - The Thatcher years

I came across this excellent video piece.




On the other hand, some of her naysayers called Mrs. Margaret Thatcher "the scourge of the (19)80s". (See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcU5E3Ym7og .)

I don't know much about British politics. But Thatcher intrigues me.

Personally I think the writing by The New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell looks authoritative.

Does every standing tree have at least one cicatrix?

Does every standing man have at least one scar?

It seems that a free society like Canada sanctions many advantages in life, along the way, for individuals with critical thinking and sound judgement. On the other hand, it gives those without them only mediocre rewards.

Grizzly bears, most of which reside in Alaska and Canada, are such gigantic dangerous beasts.

'Most adult female grizzlies weigh 130–200 kilograms (290–440 lb), while adult males weigh on average 180–360 kilograms (400–790 lb). The average total length in this subspecies is 198 centimetres (6.50 ft)'.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grizzly_bear#Description

And grizzly bears would be named 'grisly bears', if a historical mistake didn't happen. And that name would be an excellently descriptive one. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grizzly_bear#Name .

The move proposed in the below NYT op-ed will be a provident one for the U.S., if it gets adopted by the country's politicians.

See To Save Our Economy, Ditch Taiwan.

Babies are less intelligent, so they are more importunate.

It seems that in ancient Western mythologies, cherubs never grow up and they stay to be children forever, if there is a time dimension at all in the mythical world.

I feel that the normal usage, which is normally imprudent, of Facebook, Twitter, and the like encroaches on our time.

We should be abnormal in how much time we spend on them.

I'm afraid that however high the turnout of the Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Toronto, Occupy Vancouver, and Occupy Wherever is, there won't be much change in the way in which the economies of Anglo-Saxon countries is run and in the way in which the finance industry controls the economy in these countries.

The importance of finance is very deep-rooted in Anglo-Saxon societies.

I've been quite amused to find out that Shania Twain, a contemporary Canadian country singer, has got a step brother named 'Mark Twain'.

I'm not sure if the fat cats' life has been inspected and tried to elevate, by themselves.

Canadian hockey stars have got a long-standing image of bruisers. That's right. Northern bruisers.

An inconvenient contraption is any website which doesn't automatically put the cursor in the input box for you as soon as your browser opens it, I think.

Zucchini tastes mild.

The darkness of night is already descended at 5:15pm on this late fall day.

Those yellow luminous street lamps make you feel freshly warm.

When the British parliament is convoked, man, all those voices and noises.

Is being provident an indicator of being wiser?

Johnson & Johnson had been quite politic in the marketing of its products to people. But no more will many consumers trust it.

See 'Make safer baby shampoo,' groups tell J&J.

And, by the way, Johnson & Johnson and SC Johnson & Son seem to be two unrelated companies. The former is a public company, and the latter is a private one and much smaller.

Looking back at my life path, I came to Canada opportunely, without wasting my time in China.

I have no regret over that decision.

Just now, I glanced at the computer timer, and it showed '2:14 AM', which was the time after the Daylight Saving Time end adjustment had automatically taken place on my computer moments before.

I realized I gained one hour, then interestingly, a slight shiver of excitement ran through my body.

Information overload is a scourge. Information abundance is a bless.

I felt poignant when I opened my Google Reader just now.

I suspect that the mobile multitude loves iPhone and iPad because those two products bring them even sleeker entertainment. Entertainment, unfortunately, is eating up people's precious spare time.

I for one have been jaded by the importunity of the ongoing back-to-back economic crises.

Well, maybe I shouldn't expect peace of mind to be the norm of economic life. Instead, I must expect chaos and disasters to be it.

Where potatoes are sold loose, the price of each is much higher than their counterparts in bags.

Does the same thing apply to the labor market? No, it doesn't add up.

How much has China been defined and shaped by the grisly 'Cultural Revolution' between the 1960s and 1970s in the country?

I believe the good social fabrics had been largely broken and then wild Capitalist social fabrics and values sprung up and filled the places left by those broken ones.

Some people say that Germany helps Greece and the like with their sovereign debt problems because it just wants to be a Good Samaritan. Does that saying add up?

Are dentists knavish?

Hummer, the discontinued luxury SUV, probably will have some value for collection.

Here goes an interesting kind of copyright infringement which runs deep in Chinese tradition.

See Yes, He Sold Fakes. They Are Supposed to Be Fake.

One probable replication by the consumers to Google's imposing change that the Google Reader won't support the 'Share' and 'Share with note' functionality any more is to flee to other service providers and not to trust the new products which Google will roll out in the future very much.

In the Chrome browser, for my most often used web apps, I prefer them to be bookmarklets than to be Chrome extensions or Chrome apps.

Many people tend to think theories are irrelevant to the real world and never the twain shall meet. Should I beg to differ?