Such an apt expression by Margaret Thatcher

Margaret Thatcher once said:

To those waiting with bated breath for that favourite media catchphrase, the 'U-turn', I have only one thing to say: "You turn if you want to. The lady's not for turning."

Wow.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_lady's_not_for_turning .

I like the general quietness of Canadians. That lets everyone do his own thing and keeps him free from intrusions of noises.

Sourcing and procuring popular products is definitely a business competitive advantage.

对于有销路或畅销的产品，就每一笔消费者的交易来说，有库存现货的商家可以增加营收、扩大市占率。

而没有现货的商家会 suffer 一系列的后果。

Heineken made my night.

Some people expend a lot of their off-work hours and their money on speculating (albeit they call it 'investing') in the stock market, you know, buying and selling.

Essentially, they are spendthrifts, with a pipe dream of getting significantly richer by speculating, which has proven to be just a pipe dream, perennially, in the society.

I've been comparing many ebook reader apps for Android.

I like the Aldiko one.

My Android phone is the Motorola Milestone, so there's not a lot of memory available for me now. Otherwise, I'd also go with Kindle for Android by Amazon, which is apparently a sleek ebook reader app and whose feature set looks excellent.

Many of the jobs in big companies are cut-and-dried. And they are far removed from the real market.

The abatement of Kodak is so tragic.

See http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-17/kodak-and-the-brutal-difficulty-of-transformation.html .

实际上，很多创业的男人，午夜低回的时候，总有一些伤不起的感慨。

多年以前，有部日本电影，叫做《伤痕累累的勋章》。多好的名字。

Having to deal with constant snow and freezing rains is a pleurisy of living in Montreal.

If you cook Chinese dishes, more often than not, you need to cut vegetables more or less obliquely in order to let them absorb tastes more fully in the frying pan.

Chivas Regal 的广告词：“患难见真情”。

多么的有力量。

We've got a Whirlpool fridge at home. And it's not up to snuff.

Maybe the company will meet big troubles ahead if it doesn't take care of its product quality very seriously. You know, pretty many companies in the developing countries can make the same products cheaper and better, e.g. Haier.

I hadn't expected to see that so many Canadian university students work wholeheartedly with the goal of attaining almost immaculate transcripts without deep confusion about life when they still have the luxury of time to ponder about life.

Well, people are born different.

There seem to be perennial rebates going on in fashion brands stores in Montreal. You can always find some handsome rebates here or there.

When the big companies began to put the shareholders' value as their utmost priority, their attractiveness to ambitious young workers started to abate.

As a matter of fact, many Arab people have been having a hard time in the U.S. and Canada since the 9/11. The society shouldn't envenom them.

Appropriate tolerance should be kept in civilized societies.

Many daycare centres in Montreal tend to be a little too scholastic. Kids need to play more and imagine more.

Once upon a time, I was fond of having a place with a hearth.

At twilight, home life begins with our daughter.

J used to be constantly serious but not grave.

The images of Archangel Michael are so handsome and picturesque in general, especially those present in Kiev, the capital and the largest city of Ukraine.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_(archangel) and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiev .

Fancy looks the livery of the Swiss Guard in Vatican.

I still think Google should have been more courteous to its existing users. It knows how to lose users' hearts.

It seems Microsoft has done significantly better in that aspect than Google.

Unoccupied are most of the cubbyholes in the hallway of our toddler daughter's daycare centre. It's reasonable to expect that it'll change relatively soon.

Roughly speaking, it seems that these three tiers exist.

One is those people who know whom they are but have little marketable skills, so their money-earning capacities are limited for the time being. One example is those newly minted university grads who have majored in Arts.

Another tier is those people who sort of don't know whom they really are but have marketable skills, so their income-earning capacities are near the average.

The last is those people who both know whom they are and have marketable skills, so their earning power is at least somewhat above the average level.

The above is my guess. I might be wrong, and certainly I'm imprecise.

If you look along a certain dimension or perspective, many people want money because they need to solve their own problems.

At the same time, if you look along another dimension or perspective, many of those problems of them stem from their imprudent desires.

Facebook is filled to the brim with trivial information.

Socrates had been born roughly 40 years earlier than Plato was.

And the latter was a student of the former.

For English learning, efforts and time spent on it are apt tools.

Promo video - Mr. D - CBC TV series

Mr. D is an ultimately efficient teacher. And he plays by the rules, that is, by his own rules.

Wanting to do important things conscientiously is a first-rate trait, I think.

If one doesn't have it, well, the top tier probably isn't for him.

Some Chinese elderly regard themselves to be omniscient about life and so they become hardheaded. No, myriad of things in life are beyond their imagination.

I hope I won't become like that when I grow old.

Time is everyone's gyve. Successful are those who make the most splendid dance with it.

Are there too many oblique remarks in the world?

Now my life is emblematic of what a struggling entrepreneur has to go through.

The conjunctive metro station of Berri UQAM is a good place.

After several scattered rounds of controversy between G and me, the realization finally dawned on G that the give and take of obligations between her and her employer company is the annual working hours she must fulfill for the company, even if her job is an annually salaried one and not a part-time one.

Eventually Julian Assange, the founder of Wiki Leaks, will get his acquittance from the British court.

Otherwise people's trust of the British legal system will be shaken.

The keypad, integrated into a whole keyboard, on a desktop computer is much easier to be found and used by your fingers than the one on a laptop computer.

Interestingly, I've found that while schools in China are apt to be quite authoritarian and exam-oriented, their counterparts in Canada also are much exam-oriented, although not authoritarian.

Sometime I feel like my thoughts and enjoyment are intruded by the noises on the road when I take a walk outside or anything.

In the future, if I get relatively rich and everything, I'd like to buy a house in the woods or something, then I'll go and spend some time over there now and then.

One should celebrate food. And one should celebrate sports.

A great many things in life aren't black or white.

For instance, I'm not very satisfied with some aspects of Montreal. However, Montreal has done me quite a good turn.

學歷不代表貢獻，更不代表經濟貢獻。

Everyone will encounter his or her own fair share of jerks and bitches in life.

Sorry for the offensive "b..." word. I don't know yet if there's a good substitute word for that meaning.

J wants to keep clear of unpromising companies when he considers which one to work for.

Clearly, if a company employs lots of middle-class people in Canada, then it will receive subvention from the government when time is very difficult for it.

Politics always intervene with business somehow.

Should Canada make the hearse and coffin for its dead soldiers look more stately?

E is in his fifties. He looks like a businessman or something. Actually he's a veteran software dev.

It seems he doesn't know about sales. He doesn't know the life cycle of a biz deal, so to speak.

In terms of sales, he's just an order taker. Well, maybe that's what the employees of big companies are like.

It seems that many Western countries have wariness of China, more than ever.

If one asks himself at dusk, "what have I done in today's work to benefit the society, however tiny?", then he won't turn to speculation in the financial market.

But it seems that my above logic isn't sound. Anyways, you get what I meant.

I still don't quite understand this commonplace arrangement in Canada. Public hospitals are run by their angels of mercy, and the doctors just work there like medical consultants or something, hired from outside, if my impression isn't too far from the truth.

So essentially, nurses are civil servants, but doctors are not. Doctors are much more of private practitioners of medicine.

Think about that.

Typically, significantly more courtesy can be expected in the city life in Canada than in its Chinese counterpart.

That's one sort of social capital which differentiates.

Shanghai, the mega city in Asia, maybe always tends to have a thread of ostentation.

Are those students who're apt in the classroom actually deep?

Forbidding and deterring has been the coldness of these two days.

I always think that China should hold more rites for veterans of its wars.

Ancient hatchments look beautiful.

See http://www.google.ca/search?q=hatchment&hl=en&safe=off&qscrl=1&prmd=imvns&source=lnms&tbm=isch&ei=zZoCT_K5M8fu0gGtrayxBQ&sa=X&oi=mode_link&ct=mode&cd=2&ved=0CA8Q_AUoAQ&biw=1280&bih=675
.

Is it the right balance for a good life?

In life, it happens that a certain thing is encouraged at an earlier stage yet is sort of discouraged at a later stage.

Take the example of artistic endeavors.

When one is a child, his artistic activities are generally encouraged. For one thing, you can sense the positive tone in the words "artistic" and "art" in the merchandise names "artistic smock" and "art smock" which are actually painting smocks hanging in stores for children.

However, once the child grows up to become an adult, his artistic endeavors are no longer encouraged in general, if he pursues them wholeheartedly, because everyone knows that most full-time artists starve or are very poor. It's not the right balance for a good life.

You see, the same activity, different attitudes by one's surrounding, just because he's at different life stages.

No more whistling in the dark. Please admit failure, RIM's two infamous Co-CEOs.

Without people communing with each other, a group is not a community.

We're all familiar with Facebook and Twitter. Now the emergence of Path seems to be the dawn of sensible social networking.

In addition, some people say Path provides very good user experience.

See https://path.com/
and
http://service.path.com/customer/portal/articles/257552-why-can-i-only-share-with-150-people .

The shoulder pads which football (I don't mean "soccer" here) players wear make them appear very strong and good-looking.

Our toddler daughter governs the rhythm of our life authoritatively. We just hope that the young governor gradually grows wiser. :-)

Some companies had started out with benevolent intent. Then they got listed in the stock market. Then their initial intent got smirched under the high pressure of earnings growth of year by year.

There are two sorts of kisses: the chaste ones, and the sexual ones.

Even 40 years ago, the Mainland Chinese still thought all kisses, between a man and a woman, in the whole world belong to the latter.

It seems that the NYC remains to be a hearth of economic vigor in the U.S despite its high costs.

If you look up the synonyms of "prostitute" in a dictionary, you'll find there are so many. "Hooker", "hustler", "harlot", "courtesan", "whore", and so on.

Well, the above example may not be a very decent one. Anyways, my point is that the great number of synonyms of many words is one of the difficulties we have to overcome when we read material in English from different eras.

Some Montrealers say that Torontonians aren't as courteous as people in Montreal.

I use my old feature cell phone sheerly as a reliable alarm clock. But I do it warily.

I put it into the Airplane Mode each time when I turn it on. A mobile phone in the Airplane Mode is supposed to emit no radiation at all.

The updating of software developers' skills is constant and perennial.

On every single day, from dusk to almost midnight, the time of my wife and me is completely occupied by taking care of our toddler daughter. Yes, having a demanding baby is that tough, if you are reasonably enough careful with her.

When a woman cuckolds her husband before they get divorced, that speaks something about her.

December 27th. The day following the Boxing Day. Still in the Boxing Week.

The downtown part of the St-Catherine street. A great many people are proceeding through the street and the malls on it.

This area delivers a great amount of business value in the Boxing Week period.

Wintry breezes at -2 degrees Celsius

This winter isn't too cold
-2 degrees Celsius is the best winter temperature
It doesn't freeze you a great deal
While it can give you the Northern flair

White snow, dark road, small hours in the night,
The yellow light from a height in the 4th floor apartment,
And the pink and blue drapes covering its windows,
In the high-rise building standing at the intersection of two thoroughfares

I think that arts are the form and container which captures human experience the best.

Maybe from around a decade ago, in terms of career prospect, a higher education had become to be no longer a ticket to good jobs and to be just a way to avoid and escape vile employments, for newly minted university graduates in Canada, whether they recognize that or not.

The counter side of polluted food is not organic food. It is clean food.

Freezing coldness and crushing loneliness are two biggest enemies for some people in Montreal

Just now, around the midnight, I went to a nearby Tim Horton's outlet to grab a coffee. A guy around 19 years old appeared to be drunk and was talking to everyone, one by one, over there, all of whom were strangers to him. He's a student who went to Dawson College, and he'd been from Hungary. "I'm alone. I can only hug trees," he said, "morning after morning".

He's crushed by loneliness. And he burst on Christmas Eve.

Who didn't see trees or plant leaves with one sort of canker or another?

Diseases do exist in nature. Nature isn't all good.

There are always some jerks in retail stores. They can't be liked after they offended you one way or another.

Do the rabbles in the Arab Spring realize that they probably won't see prosperity in their own lifetime?

The procedure of democracy leading to prosperity mostly takes a very long time to complete.

自由給予浮躁之人的，是絕望。

What can the gigantic mat of workers of China achieve in the future?

It's interesting that so many Americans and Canadians worship the late Steve Jobs, who seems to be authoritarian without traces of being democratic in his management of virtually everything.

It seems that there's no much difference at all among the three adjectives -- 'green', 'greeny', and 'greenish'.

It seems that the number of people without long-term vision overbears that of people with it.

You want to strike a fine balance of paid attention between parochial concerns and global ones.

When our toddler daughter will be wearing a painting smock and painting, she'll be happy.

It's said that people who don't exercise and eat healthy food are more likely to become cancerous sooner or later.

Being a family man doesn't equal to being mostly for hearth and home.

The French president Nicolas Sarkozy has been described as "impetuous, disloyal, and un-French".

See http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/impetuous-disloyal-and-unfrench-chirac-attempts-coup-de-grace-on-sarkozy-2294940.html .

Well, that doesn't make the leadership of Sarkozy and Merkel, which is supposed to drag Europe out of the mess it's currently in, look hopeful.

Among the Christmas wreaths on the market, there's one kind which have a Christmas bow attached inside the ring. That's a selling point.

For the time being, I'm chary of having a second child.

Music video - Alexander Borodin - Prince Igor - Polovtsian Dances

About the author (composer) Alexander Borodin:
He's a Russian. His main vocation was a professor of Chemistry at the Academy of Medicine in Russia. "Between 1859 and 1862 Borodin held a postdoctorate in (University of) Heidelberg", which is a world renowned university in Germany. Borodin "suffered poor health, having overcome cholera and several minor heart attacks. He died suddenly during a ball at the Academy, and was interred in Tikhvin Cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, in Saint Petersburg." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Borodin )

The dentist gave me an extra shot for freezing. Then my lips and chin began to go numb and tingling in a brief while.

On another note, usually the dentist smiles quite courteously, which impresses me. I'm not sure if that kind of smile is a Waspy thing.

Will Alberta's oil sand industry be arraigned for its environmental impact by future generations?

I always prefer coffee or anything over tea.