In news TV and videos, I'm used to seeing provincial premiers in China hold meetings with their guests in photogenic halls apt to be decked in golden color.

By contrast, I'm also used to seeing Stephen Harper, the Canadian Prime Minister, hold meetings with his colleagues, rivals, and underlings in plain halls and common rooms.

Well, that says something, considering that the GDP (PPP) of Canada is about triple the average self-styled GDP (PPP) of a Chinese province.

The tremendously cold wintry air always is capable of making up a streak of desolation for the night streets littered with yellowish lights emitted from the lofty street lamps.

We use Infants' Tylenol to try to relieve our toddler daughter from the fevers caused by her current Hand, foot, and mouth disease, which is a human illness and not to be confused with the infamous Foot-and-mouth disease, an animal illness.

Tylenol doesn't contain aspirins. It seems that Tylenol is more popular than aspirins in treating fevers because the latter tend to irritate the stomach while the former doesn't. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tylenol#History.

I don't have any knowledge about the following topic.

But my guess is that the most essential distinction between enterprises and public interest groups is not about for profit or not for profit. It's that the individual clients of enterprises pay at least the total costs of the consumed products and services to enterprises, while the individual clients of public interest groups do NOT pay them at least the total costs.

Throughout the outbreaks of labor disputes in Canada during this recession, we see that unions have been greatly hampered and weakened by the ever relatively increasing bargaining power and freedom businesses and organizations possess, in both the private and the public sector.

It seems now marks the beginning of the end of labor unions as we know them.

Can you hear the deep howls of grief and regret in people's hearts? Can you see those via their behaviors?

I think the font of Georgia Italic looks elegant.

Music video -【掌聲響起】- 鳳飛飛

Oftentimes, a software developer's hobby of speculating in the stock market blocks his way to enhance his own professional skills in his off-hours. I've seen it on quite a few people, both young and old.

Everyone only has 24 hours in a day, 365 days in a year, and 45 or so years in his career(s).

No matter how other people treat one, he shouldn't be churlish. No, he shouldn't.

At the end of the day, how some others treat you reflects what sort of people they are, and how you treat them reflects what sort of person you are.

象我目前这种极微小企业，产能不足，令人扼腕叹息。

I saw a Rolls Royce dealership. Man, how their cars look like antiques.

Let the will push through the pain points and do not allow anything to hinder the progress, however slow and gradual.

Brahms has a piece of requiem music which lasts 1 hour and 15 minutes long. Gee.

See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAnUk6MxXQ0 .

It's disappointing to see friendship and goodwill get profaned time and time again in this world.

But there are always people worth their salt in that regard. And they are the ones who shine and stand out.

The national motto of France is "Liberty, equality, fraternity", which is thought-provoking.

By contrast, its Canadian counterpart is "From sea to sea" (see http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/articles/a-mari-usque-ad-mare), which is, well, not quite thought-provoking.

China has been such a hot market pursued by many foreign companies.

However, as one who was born and grew up there, I'm not sure if some sorts of bringing home of the inherent inefficiencies and risks of its economic and political systems will happen in the future.

Personally I think the late Aveos bankruptcy case is a pendent one, waiting for the federal government's cash insertion into Air Canada and telling it what it should do and precisely which suppliers it must choose.

See http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Aveos+blames+Canada+financial+ills/6323534/story.html .

Once you have a baby, you feel powerless in front of the strewment of your twenty-four hours, no matter how hard you try and scramble.

Feeding her, bathing her and dressing her, so on and so forth, each of them all takes a good chunk of your time. It's bittersweet in that sense.

Nonetheless, don't get discouraged by my whining here. A kid is a must-have for anyone who doesn't want to risk miserable old-age life and who wants to experience a full family life and its sweetness. Highly recommended.

I don't know if I should completely like the typographical design of NewYorker.com .

Being unaffiliated with any particular religion, I'm used to unconsciously linking "freedom" to secular freedom. You know, freedom of speech, freedom of choice, things like that.

However, I stumbled upon the Wikipedia entry on Yonsei University (延世大學), one of the prestigious SKY universities in South Korea. And the web page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yonsei_University#Christianity) states:

Yonsei University is a school founded on Christian principles and purporting to "produce Christian leaders with the spirits of freedom and truth".

Well, what do "the spirits of freedom" mean in Christianity?

The gradual ageing of the Canadian and Chinese societies impending, I guess I'm not sure what will happen 20 years down the road.

U. Q.'s original intentions of joining J's startup were doubtful, or even evidently dubious.

All the same, if we objectively evaluate the case, U.Q. isn't suitable for a tech startup, furthermore, he's likely not suitable for a startup in any business field at all. Because, he's gotten no growth during the past five years or so, and it's probable that he's got no growth potential in him for the future.

Besides, maybe even more pivotally, things which U.Q. had done and hadn't done brought home to J what sort of person U.Q. is.

Can you believe that around half of Americans and Canadians who married have gone, are going, or will go through divorcement, which is naturally traumatic for most people, at least once in their lifetime?

But it is a fact.

I don't know how fastidious French people are with what they wear on them. But I know they look elegant.

Sometime when I watch public interments for Canadian soldiers in news videos, I have a strange thought that the cold fact is those obsequies are for the alive to observe, not for the fallen to, and the dead is dead.

Very subtle feelings and threads of thoughts are amenable to being aroused by reading literature.

From a point of view of personal and familial gains, Bill Clinton hadn't been born as a person of social standing, but he made the Clintons a family of some estate. He's a remarkable man.

Personally I don't think the Verdana typeface looks good.

A calm lake surface doesn't betoken all the currents and sways underneath. A calm life doesn't betoken all the activities busily happening in one's mind and intellectual world.

Making Chinese dishes at home is finicky, hence time-consuming. It's true at least in a Canadian kitchen.

Some of RIM's ads displayed on mobile phones seem to be inept.

For instance, one small ad in an Android app reads "Introducing the Playbook OS 2" close to a text icon of "Blackberry Playbook". Period. Well, that one is almost like an antic. What are the product's benefits to consumers, which is supposed to be the message the ad should convey? Gee.

Oscar Wilde wrote the following in his "A Florentine Tragedy": "And the dumb river shall receive your corse and wash it all unheeded to the sea."

I'm not very sure if the adverb "all" describes "wash" or "unheeded".

Reflecting on U. Q., now I know he's not diffident at all.

Many established business people only gave snatches of their time to D, an entrepreneur, who had had a pipe dream. And maybe most importantly, there was only himself in that pipe dream, other flaws of D aside.

One of my acquaintances once told me that all WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment) wrestling matches, which mostly look antic, are fake and prearranged.

It's said that the famous The Devil's Brigade, the very first modern official special force which was a joint unit of American and Canadian military, fordid many German forces in their covert attacks during WWII.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil's_Brigade.

Usually it's the very deep and subtle personal thoughts and preferences which make one travel along a certain line of life journey or another.

For instance, assume one can really freely choose, if he prefers equality to equity, then he goes with Communism or something alike; if his preference is the other way around, then Capitalism is his cup of tea.

So in that aspect, every individual should consider very deeply about his own intellectual system, so to speak. Put it another way:

"The unexamined life is not worth living."
-Socrates

:-)

D and E are difficult to play ball with. That's their own choices and their own fates.

Sigh. RIM has been forced to compete against Apple, Google, and Microsoft. RIM is out of its league.

When you see maimed and killed American and Canadian soldiers, you wonder for exactly what those troopers fight, and for exactly what the democracies they represent fight.

Here goes a short video about the famous The Bunghole liquor store in Salem, MA, U.S.A.

The guy cheesily said that the T-shirt No. 5 is the most popular with ladies. :-)

Traditional publishing has transitioned to web publishing. Traditional typography has to web typography.

If base motives are what's driving the Wall Street, then the society and government should reign it by all means and don't give it even one chance to become a monster.

It seems so to me for now. After the Europeans landed onto the continent of North America, the trauma for First Nations people has lasted till this day, because the cultures of the First Nations were sort of too primitive to accommodate or blend with the then European cultures.

Of course, that thought of mine is too naive and primitive for the matter which must be quite complex. Nonetheless, I write it down.

Under the current education system of China, there are a lot of essential elements missing.

For one thing, young students don't get to consider death the leveller, which is among the few ultimate things. Entering a university as elite as possible and gaining a job as high-pay as possible seem to be the only things which the system fosters on students' minds.

Some Chinese people are apt to be perennially amenable to speculation trends in the society. That's playing with fire, as well as not being constructive, I'm afraid.

When I was very young and in China, my gorge rose when I thought that my entire life would be expended in a very confining system which belittles personal choice and personal efforts.

Of course, China has changed dramatically. But that was my youth and my then potential life.

I don't know why all the fashion models walking on T-platforms keep that universal glassy look on their faces. There must be some deep reasons for that in the fashion trade.

I've done things which I'd wanted to do, thanks to the societal environment by courtesy of the Quebec province.

The Arial typeface seems to be becoming the de facto font of websites.

I've never seen a pretty cooking oil flagon. Should oil makers make it look more appealing?

You pick any established entrepreneur, and I can tell you that he's gone through many purgatories yet he's carried on, bearing his persistence and vision.

For some years, I had been snatching at almost every moment to enhance my English proficiency.

Now that activity can abate since my English has reached a certain level and I can treat it as a side project. It had been an outland journey.

Java used to be my favorite runtime, when I was in school. No more.

And the acquisition of it by Oracle didn't help it in my eyes.

One of the worst scenarios for this world in the coming years would be that an international war between or among major countries breaks out.

If that really happens, the world economy which has been sluggishly climbing out of the mess of the Late-2000s Financial Crisis will be traumatized again, deeper in troubles.

Let's wish it won't happen. Knock the wood.

Sarah Palin published a memoir titled "Going Rogue" in 2009. What did she mean by that book title? Gee.

I've stumbled on a 2010 movie which intrigues me.

"A fanatically devout knight and his small band of church-hired mercenaries" went "to a remote, pestilence-free village" to find out why the black death plague didn't affect them at all.

Here goes a well written flick review on NYT: Black Death (2010).

In a biz deal, the two parties involved are the supplier and the procurer. From the supplier's perspective, it wants the deal to be fair, but it may not really care very much whether the deal is truly equitable or not.

I never thought that the modern flush toilet was invented as early as in the 16th century.

There are two interesting tifles about it.

One is that the forerunner of it was called Ajax. Web developers beware, Ajax is something like toilet. :-)

1596: Sir John Harington (born 1561) published A New Discourse of a Stale Subject, Called the Metamorphosis of Ajax, describing a forerunner to the modern flush toilet installed at his house at Kelston.[7] The design had a flush valve to let water out of the tank, and a wash-down design to empty the bowl. He installed one for his godmother Elizabeth I of England at Richmond Palace, although she refused to use it because it made too much noise.[citation needed] The Ajax was not taken up on a wide scale in England, but was adopted in France under the name Angrez. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flush_toilet#History

The other piece is that in the era in which it was invented by Sir John Harington, "life in England during the 16th century continued to be distinguished by a stench no modern nose could easily sustain."

“Even in the goodliest and stateliest palaces of our realm,” John Harington wrote in 1596 about his invention of an early flush toilet, “still this same whoreson saucy stink.” 

http://tv.nytimes.com/2008/03/28/arts/television/28tudo.html

By the way, it seems that on the other hand, the traditional Chinese society and mentality have quenched technological inventions and advancements so much. One example is that it seems no ancient Chinese had been involved in the evolution of the inventions of flush toilets.

There are many weapons which root from very ancient times. Cudgel is one of them. Baton (a.k.a. truncheon and nightstick) is a similar one. Specifically, cudgel has got more military war flair with it.

Search for "cudgel" on:

http://www.ehow.com/list_7320442_weapons-used-egyptian-wars.html

and

http://www.hinduwisdom.info/War_in_Ancient_India.htm

and

http://rtw.heavengames.com/history/civs/ancient_africa/armiesancientafrica/ .

And then see the images at http://www.google.ca/search?q=cudgel&hl=en&safe=off&prmd=imvns&source=lnms&tbm=isch&ei=8M1JT-CSDcHu0gH_u-SuDg&sa=X&oi=mode_link&ct=mode&cd=2&ved=0CA8Q_AUoAQ&biw=1280&bih=675&qscrl=1 .

Here goes a pic in which there are batons hidden in the back:

(From http://goo.gl/bZxKb)

It's so hard to locate the complete changelogs of some open source software projects, if they exist at all. What boo-boos for the projects.

Sexton is such a popular last name that I begin to marvel if sexton was among the top occupations in the ancient times in the West.

I wonder whether there are profound effects left on people's mentality about and perception of the stock market by the trauma of this Late-2000s financial crisis.

Canada's economic prospect, particularly that of Alberta, is galled by the potential irreversible damages to the environment by the production of tar sands (a.k.a. oil sands) in the province.

See this piece of news: Oilsands pose 'significant environmental and financial risk' to Alberta, says PCO.

It may be more common than one thinks that a person appears easy-going but he's actually not amenable at all.

E's ignorance and self-centeredness, or selfishness, stir arrantly, time and time again.

Dictionary.com claims that "people who can define Kibe may know 45,520 words".

(See http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/kibe.)

It knows how to flatter me. But I refuse to accept the compliment.

If you think about an area's functionality, you get impressed by its complexity. For instances, the unphysical arrangements of snow removal and the physical sewer system. It's a lot of work.

Montreal's Mount Royal is actually only a hill called "Mount" by courtesy.

I used to think Google is nearly perfect.

Not any more, since it cancelled the "Shared items" thing in Google Reader and supplanted it with Google+.

But Google has retained some classiness here and there, still.

I think Motorola makes picked phones.

風雪連路，街燈暗淡。蒙特婁，朔方之地。

Enthusiasts across the world have been snapping up any new product which Apple rolls out. Such a phenomenon.

There are two sorts of entrepreneurs. One sort are in purgatory, the other in limbo.

The former will eventually go to heaven, and the latter will perennially stay in oblivion.

A plate is twice as big as a stoup. :-)

See Cambridge Ale - NYT.

"If a stoup of ale were ordered, a quart pot would be sent; if a plate, a great tankard containing two quarts."

Cambridge culture. "...those still, book-lined chambers, the very air of which seemed saturated with the aroma of elegant scholarship".

It seems good that Quebec possesses an egalitarian streak.

I've seen many Chinese immigrants in Montreal whose English needs to get mended. But they put no efforts in it.

I'm afraid by that, they've drastically narrowed down their future career choices and flexibility.

Anyways, they made that choice. Who am I to insist they should enhance their English? Moreover, it's really very painstaking and time-consuming (been there, done that), as a matter of fact which most of native speakers of Western languages never have seemed to comprehend, by the way.

The word "publican" feels remote and intimately mysterious.

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

What sort of equity would you most like to own? Equity in your own business, equity in your mortgaged house, or equity in the public stock market?

How does it feel in public houses in Europe these days which are immersed in the steep economic recession?

I suspect that some failed entrepreneurs have cudgeled their brains about why they failed and probably they will never find it.

It's just in their blind spot, and it is that they don't know how to be a good man. As simple as that, and as profound as that.

Time is my enemy everyday. Time is my friend in the long term.

Is goodman Stephen Harper all about the economy of Canada?

The seventy-ish billionaire businessman Richard Elman 'started career as a "coolie in a scrap yard" after quitting school at age 15'.

See http://www.forbes.com/profile/richard-elman/ .

How grieved he must feel when he looks back to his puzzled scrapyard "coolie" years, I guess.

Many software developers have flocked to mobile dev in good faith. Is there a bubble in that industry?

I don't know how well Panasonic cherishes its own brand name. It would probably do well if it managed the quality of its products, many of which are made in China, BETTER.

If a Japanese major brand loses its quality appeal, it loses its way in this world, which is overflowed with commodity product suppliers with relatively shoddy workmanship.

By the way, the above thought of mine about Panasonic products' deteriorating quality can be accompanied by this piece of news: Sony, Panasonic Forecast Deeper Losses as Samsung Dominates.

Are the occurrences of poorer product workmanship and historical corporate loss just a coincidence for Panasonic? Probably not.

For a biz, amenability to market demands and customer demands are crucial. But for life, maybe unamenability to them are.

Many people think Groupon has done errantly with the investors' money it raised.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupon#Initial_public_offering_filing .

Life and competition is less equitable in China than in the U.S. and Canada. Why do some Chinese return to the former from the latter and try to snatch opportunities over there? What advantages do they have there? Or they mainly just wanna make a quick buck?

This is a tough era for the rulers in Arab countries. They must be afraid to be sent to the gallows by the mass one day.

Arab people's world is no longer the same as before, profoundly.

Should e-commerce websites call their free shipping, which typically happens when your purchase order reaches a certain amount of dollars, "courtesy shipping" instead?

When J was in his teens and twenties, he had never thought he would want to become a classy guy when he grew mature. That is called enlightenment.

Due to modern standards, the old-fashioned English word "heathen" is indeed an offensive one which has a rather ancient beginning of existence.

In the Merriam-Webster's 11th Collegiate Dictionary, its noun form has got two meanings:

1: an unconverted member of a people or nation that does not acknowledge the God of the Bible
2: an uncivilized or irreligious person

Essentially, the doctrine reflected in the word dictates that the civilization and education of a person equals to the enlightenment of him about the great existence, authority, and love of God. Well, that had been true in Western history when education and civilization had been mainly conducted in and through Christian churches and their affiliated facilities.

It seems that the hoariness of the BBQ chicken restaurant industry doesn't prevent new eateries of its sort from perennially popping up.

There seems to be some sort of start-up boom in the U.S., Canada, and China. Do you want to snatch the opportunity? Do you dare to? :-)

Social media marketing aside, I don't find Facebook an apt tool to be used among most average Joes.

Facebooking is overly time-consuming, overly vain, and overly addictive.

我喜歡陽光。今天 Montreal 的陽光好。

古時的游牧民族『逐水草而居』。我這種人最理想的遷徙方式應該是逐春日秋陽而居吧。

不知道對於人類的身體來說，歷經春秋卻不經冬夏的身體是什麼狀態。

Why do opportunities slide askance? Because one hasn't prepared very well for them.

So from now on, don't waste an hour of your time. Instead, put it to good use in order to prepare for future opportunities :-)

It's very apparent that the beleaguered and plagued ship of RIM will sink further, willy-nilly.

An acquaintance of mine, who switched from Blackberry to iPhone, just now said to me that the latter is A LOT better than the former. For one thing, the Blackberry Messenger, which is even one of the flagship features of Blackberry products, constantly freezes, while iPhone offers many excellent features and apps which easily win over those of Blackberry.

All in all, now seems to be the time to count the months to the end of RIM known as an independent company in existence, given the fleetingly changing competitive landscape of the smart phone and tablet industry (read: Apple, Android, Samsung, HTC, Amazon's Kindle Fire), combined with the relatively weak leadership in the RIM corporation and the relatively slow speed of innovation and improvement of RIM's products.

All the above remarks of mine are as-objective-as-possible evaluation of the situation, from my perspective.