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?

Importune seems to be the fear of not being in the know in this era of information overload.

The pith of Harvard U. seems to be the Harvard Yard.

But maybe it's not. The pith of it is lonely strenuous academic life.

Sometime I see women with bruises on their faces walking out of a car or in a shopping center or whatever, I naturally suspect they're in the situations of domestic violence.

In today's world, getting an academic degree is more and more like a CYA, not like real education.

In terms of providence, maybe people who majored in arts in university have less of it than people who majored in science and engineering. I meant after graduation.

It can be unnatural for an atheist Chinese to completely understand the concept of 'divine jealousy' in Christianity and Judaism.

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

Moreover, I'm also intrigued by the Christian perspective on human jealousy.

Our baby daughter was annoying during last night's dinner. But I shouldn't have lashed at the table.

I signed up Facebook years ago. Then I've stayed out of circulation in that sphere since. Facebook is just not my cup of tea yet.

I used to haunt coffee shops.

It's been bruited about that the eventual actual procurement cost for F-35 jet fighters, which are a seemingly important sort of 5th-generation jet fighter made by Lockheed Martin, has soared to an estimated US$156 million each, from the earliest projection of US$50.2 million each.

See the 3rd paragraph of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-35_Lightning_II
and
http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/03/12/lockheed-fighter-idUSN1123180820100312 .

I guess Canada will beef up its mettle and buy those F-35 air fighters anyway, largely due to its escalating concerns over the northern territory.

It looks probable that there will be a sea change in worldwide attitudes towards studying in a university in the U.S, whose cost has been soaring and soaring in the past decade or so and can hardly be justified for its intrinsic value in terms of education.

For one thing, see this: Should College Grads Get a Break on Their Loans? - Room for Debate - NYTimes.com .

Marriage is a work. I've worked hand in glove with my wife for the development of our life and family.

I'm happy that the internet technologies have broken the monopoly of the dissemination of knowledge by universities and publishing companies.

Unlike some others, Y offered me opportune help. So I respect him relatively deeply.

Until now, our baby daughter seems to be a bit brainish.

Personally I wouldn't like to see the Occupy Wall Street to fizzle out.

I grew up in a small town by the Yangtze river in China.

Maybe, it would be even better to grow up by sea, which constantly makes heave.

The consumerist values are so dominant in the mainstream Canadian society. I'm not sure if I completely agree with that particular inclination.

Across the world, will China see the ever growing influences of consumerism in its society?

Is there a slight possibility that the claim of Gaddafi's death is a knavery set up by him?

RBC importunes their customers to set up a line of credit with them or buy their so-called 'Talk & Save' long distance plan. Who needs those two products?

Sometimes it's boring to watch government finance officials prate about economic prospects, in their typically dull and measured words.

I am going to become old. My hair will grizzle, my motion will slow down, and my body will be feeble.

Will my lived life feel like vapor at that time?

There's a fine line to differentiate among service providers.

One group is those providers who reasonably fairly offer services with the reasonable expectation to gain income; the other is those who are somewhat schematically after people's money and should be hoist with their own petard or somehow punished, ideally.

The azure gets bruised by the weather and presents a darkish grey cloudy sky.

The editors at The New York Times love to opine. That's fine. But, shouldn't they strive to be more objective, comprehensive, or inclined towards being value-free in their editorials?

See this NYT editorial: It’s What They Asked For.