Once upon a time, Microsoft far exceeded Apple. Nowadays, it's the opposite.

The inversion of their relative competitive positions makes me astonished by showing what time can change.

E. X. is cranky. Anyways.

The new generation of websites usually have simple web page layout, but not all instances of it are pleasant.

To a certain degree, many free websites supported by ads are in the experience business, I think.

For instance, when I look up the definition of "bilbo" at dictionary.com on my Android phone, the website presents several ads of cruise trips in front of me, alongside the word's definition. So by injecting semantically relevant ads into my browsing experience in which I look up a word, it remakes and tries to maneuver my online experience and tries to automatically generate sales leads for advertisers.

In this world, many business negotiations are greatly encumbered by the lack of trust and creditability. One option is to just let them go.

I'm completely untrained in music. But I'm curious about why a galopp (the German word for "galop") is a Polka.

I found that while googling about the Chineser Galopp by Johann Strauss I. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Strauss_I#Polkas.

Shipboard mutinies are especially harmful for a country's military actions.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutiny#Famous_mutinies.

Do the recent labor strikes at Air Canada, both legal and illegal, resemble them?  :-)

It seems that when a sales agent finds out that a competing supplier has a much lower price, then how his current supplier treats him becomes questionable in his own mind.

《春雨》

悵臥新春自祫衣 

白門寥落意多違 

紅樓隔雨相望冷 

珠箔飄燈獨自歸 

遠路應悲春晼晚 

殘宵猶得夢依稀 

玉璫緘札何由達  

萬里雲羅一雁飛

--李商隱之《春雨》

Music video - 江南 - 林俊杰

四月二十二日。Montreal。小雨雪。

我喜歡看晚春斜雨細雪裡，方形路燈側畔的綠楓樹、綠楓樹側畔的方形路燈。

Video - Erzberg Rodeo 2009

The hill climbing in the first minute is sick! Those motorcycle rodeos rock.

The chalices of spring flowers in Jiangnan must be filled with rainwater now.

The faces of some Caucasians are so palish white that there would be no rosiness at all on their cheeks if they didn't rouge them.

I look forward to the day when our toddler daughter will begin to eat her dinners completely by herself. On that day, my wife would happily quit waiting on her and save a little more time.

Before our daughter was born, I'd never realized that it takes so much time and energy to take care of an individual without self-care abilities. Even the smallest things which hadn't previously passed my mind add up to take a good chunk of time.

Throughout the years, I've been doubling down on building my life and career based in Canada. I'm not sure if my parting with China was a river of no return.

My wife and I used to buy instant miso soup paste made in Japan.

No more since the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster broke out in Japan in March 2011. Because we became afraid of potential radiation pollution of foodstuff made in Japan.

In any area, even for those in the U.S., which used to boast "American dream" for individuals, many average Joes and average Janes are apt to be dubious about local biz tycoons, or even harbor spleen against them, especially during economically difficult years. That's my impression.

And I suspect that's what drives some wealthy people to do philanthropic work and donations in order for them to contain and stave off that dubiousness and spleen.

Cats mew. Dogs bark. People speak. There is a two-way communication sphere around each individual.

The thing is, how do you manage that sphere?

In this world, it happens a lot that the rift between or among people causes them to drift apart.

Well, I'm glad that Montreal is among the top 50 cities worldwide, in terms of livability, according to a 2011 report by Mercer.

See http://www.mercer.com/qualityoflivingpr#city-rankings.

Everyday, as the HOURS go by silently, my heart droops. But it doesn't droop as the DAYS go by, because I know I've been making efforts day after day, everyday.

How vivid the word "bounce", as in "bouncer", is.

Both the biz owner and the customers know the moments of truth. But the biz owner may not care very much.

J always keeps a far-flung outlook for his life since his salad days.

Most of ancient Chinese poems make use of many rhyming couplets. That phenomenon seems not to be as pervasive in ancient English poems. No, not at all.

You know, chicks like to chill together. But each of them will learn how to fly only in her or its own way. :-)

Wow, the above line is my first pun in 2012. Not bad, huh? :-)

Pivotal is a company's texture and culture. I wonder how many companies have robust and good ones in presence and in formation.

Better than three of the most famous electronics multinationals have been in red in their respective latest fiscal years, i.e. either 2011 or 2010. And they are Philips (HQ in Netherlands), Sony (HQ in Japan), Panasonic (HQ in Japan), and JVC Kenwood (HQ in Japan), to my incomplete knowledge.

The electronics industry has been a tough one to be in since the early 2000s, my impression tells me.

Uncontrolled and unmanaged, information overload is a major impediment to productivity.

To quit Facebooking and Twittering, after careful evaluation and consideration, can be the first step towards managing info. overload.

Personally, I've abandoned them around two years ago.

Standing at the dawn of digital economy, I think the current biz models of many Montreal retail stores look problematic.

I don't know how quickly they will be able to adjust themselves and adapt when the tides come.

I don't know. The words "dove" and "pigeon" mean precisely the same thing. However, it seems that "dove" has a more beautiful and lovable flair associated with it.

有時候，你在掌勺時，看見炒鍋中的紅燒茄塊在『明油亮芡』這最後一道工序中明亮起來，感覺有點像在昏暗悶熱的夜裡驀然看見清風明月拂楊柳一樣，小驚喜的心情變得輕快明亮了起來。

When coffee house owners talk about "sensory triggers", you know they are talking about an experience business.

It's so incredulously hot today. It's still April, not June!

Sigh. RIM may have very well missed another opportunity to save itself. It was a huge mistake. The company's end will present itself anon.

See Exclusive: Former RIM boss sought strategy shift before he quit | Business | Reuters.

Here goes an essay over egalitarianism which is difficult to read for my completely untrained eyes.

See EQUALITY -- WHAT IT IS, by Prof. Ted Honderich who had worked at and had been educated at UCL. The essay tries to explain the core of the ideology of the Left, I suppose. The drift must be he's with the Left, I guess?

The HTML5 localStorage and sessionStorage thing is interesting.

Many Chinese immigrants in Canada are hindered, by their inadequate or outright limited English, when they face career choices. That's a moment of truth.

They lack the required cultural capital and it's likely no one had told them that before they boarded on an airplane and flew out of the Chinese border. The thing is, not only they lack it, but also they don't have time or aren't willing to remedy it.

It's said that in Canada, many people in traditional service trades have questionable honesty. For instances, car mechanics, building repair people, and financial advisers (read, financial salesmen).

And we often hear journalists cry out "buyers beware".

But, it still may be the case that the numbers of good people in those trades far exceed that of their corrupt peers.

Any biz deal is an exchange of biz values and economic values. You've got to accept it, warts and all.

It seems that there are all kinds of rodeos taking place in this world.

We have the traditional rodeos, we have the motorcycle rodeos, we have the auto ones, and now we have the browsing rodeo. Yes, browsing is becoming a rodeo, you know, riding a wildly capable browser till you're dizzy. See Chrome Multitask Mode.

I think it's not my cup of tea, well, yet?

Are we gonna see Oracle's crumbling down the road?

New technologies which can make themselves popular are always the hit squad of their older counterparts.

And welcome to the lifelong learning software industry.

You've got to enjoy life, warts and all.

For every entrepreneur at the beginning, it's natural for him to be doubtful.

But after having chased and researched about the market and potential customers, it's then natural for him to be more confident and productive.

The spinach I used to eat in China is quite different than the one I see in local commonplace grocery stores in Montreal such as IGA.

To cook the spinach available over here, frying with oil doesn't do well. Instead, sautéing the spinach with butter produces a smoothly delicious green veggie dish.

Seriously, I do think that French sounds prettier and more elegant than English does.

For instance, the English word "pate" sounds O.K., but, the French word "paté" appears more pleasant in ear, and, the French term "paté de foie gras" is most pleasing and stimulates rich imagination in one's mind for the gourmet little thing!

In an open society like Canada, it's impossible to entirely bar the flow and residence of foreign spies through and in its territories. But I guess that CSIS wants to monitor and control those particular flow and residence.

See http://www.cbc.ca/news/interactives/spies-canada/.

One's got to singe his own ignorant imagination and pipe dreams by constant reality checks.

Just now I pried a fact out of the long history of computing. Apple had been developing and selling the Newton PDA by its 1998 end, which people say is the very first handheld PDA.

See http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/PDA.

I wonder how much of that legacy has been used to prop up their roll-out of iPhone.

Perhaps I prate about English too much.

I'm not sure what the future holds for the Calgary Stampede.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calgary_Stampede#Animal_welfare.

It's improbable that unions are able to outface the employers. Time has changed.

IMO, Java will be largely out of mode.

The realization of F. R.'s business vision will encounter and get impeded by dozens of obstacles. But good luck. Achievement in life is never easy.

I think the word "swound" sounds a little prettier than "swoon".

J's become apt to treat everyone equitably. And interestingly, everyone has gotten himself gauged, day in and day out, with his own behaviors.

For companies in China, the so-called "Sina structure" is an inconvenient entresol to reach overseas capital markets which is a sad consequence of some imposed closed economic policies.

See "Structuring Private Equity Investments in China: The Need For Flexibility," Private Equity Focus.

I don't think many small biz owners have time and the know-how to curate their existing websites by themselves, currently.

1,200 days of study make up the amount of efforts that a native Chinese, who already has an overall understanding of English grammar but not much vocabulary, needs to cross the chasm to true English proficiency.

Ah, that complies with the well known "10000-hour Rule".

好笑的是，有些沒什麼成就的人，有一種『順我者昌，逆我者亡』的心態和氣勢（當然，這種氣勢是虛弱、沒有力量和實力的）；而有些有極大成就的人，反而有一種仁慈的心態。

想想也是，本來，成就就是指對社會的貢獻度。

Fortune and misfortune cannot be plucked asunder.

Either one can bring forth the other. Because the possibilities of choices are still apt to be numerous after the happening of either of them, in a typical modern democratic capitalist society.

Memory from that era

I was greatly influenced by the traumatization of Xia Gang (see https://www.google.ca/search?ix=aca&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=xia+gang) upon individual Chinese workers which took place massively in the 1990s and 2000s. I'm not saying that fate fell onto me personally, but that great phenomenon in China had ever since altered many things in my mentality, greatly.

Looking back, it was wise for EU to try to bar Microsoft's packaging the Internet Explorer browser into its Windows OS.

It's reasonable for people to hate the extension of any monopoly or quasi-monopoly into another area, which looks however small initially.

But, the question still remains: was Microsoft a monopoly? After all, it had gained market dominance through fair competition in the market.

The "comment token" thing in the C# programming language should be renamed as "token comment", which would make the term more natural and easier to understand and remember.

Wiseness tells us to know our customers.

I've seen a few people slightly vent spleen against the richest people in their regions.

Well, "many honours I want not, nor great treasures: they excite the spleen," Nietzsche wrote in his philosophical fiction Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book For All And None. How prudent that is. And how complicated life is.

Web typographers' tastes are very detailed and hard to understand, for my untrained eyes.

I still can't see why Facebook has conjured so myriad people and make them waste tons of time in that labyrinth.

What's the point of mapping your offline relationships with people onto an online platform which keeps bombarding you with trivial information? For that matter, we need something deeper than the current form of Facebook.

If you just like to share and see interesting pictures on social media, maybe you would just go to http://pinterest.com/ and get visual there instead of on Facebook?

I saw a software program spit out a string "hello master", and I considered that antic and smiled.

Looking at the Incoterms (i.e. International Commercial terms, which are defined by the International Chamber of Commerce), you know, CIF, FOB, things like those, I wonder that if something similar will emerge in the web world in the future. Just some outlandish thought of mine.

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

It appears that there is more and more important emergent stuff which is not covered in the skyish Wikipedia.org. I guess people just don't bother to edit an entry over there.

Canada's pending big oil pipeline projects have been clogged by some disagreements with the U.S., to my vague knowledge.

What clogs the economy? Politics. On the other hand, what facilitates the economy? Politics again.

Looking back, we now know that RIM's launch of Playbook tablets was just piling Pelion on Ossa.

RIM has just recorded its first quarterly loss since its fiscal year 2006 or so. (See http://www.moneycontrol.com/news/wire-news/analysts-cut-rim-price-targets-after-qtly-loss_687013.html .) For a big company of that size, having a quarterly loss isn't a big problem in itself. But it's a tremendous problem for it to lose more and more of its competitiveness quarter after quarter for multiple straight years, as well as slide from being profitable to losing money, while its successful competitors, i.e. Apple, Samsung, etc., have been getting higher and higher profits during the same multiple straight years.

People would think, if RIM doesn't sell itself as soon as it can while there's still a narrow window open for it to do so, then the guys who actually run it must have lost their senses.

To empower is the opposite of to hamper. A capitalist country, coupled with the social fabric of democracy, is apt to be a case of the former.

Intrinsically, Canada is an equal society. At least, money is equal here, with whoever holds it.

The problem for small businesses is that their owners see many impending opportunities, but they don't have enough resources to be involved. At least that's the case with me.

I lean to my computer on the desk. Hour after hour. Day after day.

How many hours of mine have been leaned into the screens? That's my life and my world.

"Not only you have a good memory of faces, but also you have a good memory of voices," J said to the smiling owner of the little Greek restaurant.

Some people working in the Wall Street are quick dead in the moral world.

With more and more Chinese entering the league of finance, there will be more quick dead in the moral world. That's a sure thing.

Just some gibber jabber of mine.

Vintage music video - 大地（粵語） - Beyond

下面是我在 YouTube 上面能找到的 3 個最好的完整版本。
















我在網上粗略地搜索了一下這首歌的創作背景。貌似其創作於 1987 - 1988 年，發佈於 1988 年。

歌詞：

大地
填詞：劉卓輝
作曲：黃家駒
（演唱：黃貫中） 

在那些蒼翠的路上
歷遍了多少創傷
在那張蒼老的面上
亦記載了風霜
秋風秋雨的度日
是青春少年時
迫不得意的話別
沒說再見 

回望昨日在異鄉那門前
唏噓的感慨一年年
但日落日出永沒變遷
這刻在望著父親笑容時
竟不知不覺的無言
讓日落暮色滲滿淚眼 

在那些開放的路上
踏碎過多少理想
在那張高掛的面上
被引證了幾多
千秋不變的日月
在相識裡共存
姑息分割的大地
劃了界線 

回望昨日在異鄉那門前
唏噓的感慨一年年
但日落日出永沒變遷
這刻在望著父親笑容時
竟不知不覺的無言
讓日落暮色滲滿淚眼 

回望昨日在異鄉那門前
唏噓的感慨一年年
但日落日出永沒變遷
這刻在望著父親笑容時
竟不知不覺的無言
讓日落暮色滲滿淚眼 

回望昨日在異鄉那門前
唏噓的感慨一年年
但日落日出永沒變遷
這刻在望著父親笑容時
竟不知不覺的無言
讓日落暮色滲滿淚眼

至於歌詞的含義，我粗略地搜索了一下，不管別人怎麼說，我沒有任何依據、獨立地猜測作者意指香港將於 1997 年回歸中國大陸。『日落暮色』意指英國，這個曾經的『日不落帝國』。

另外，我深深嘆服於在這首歌裡黃家駒、劉卓輝的創作，實在是光芒四射。紀念黃家駒。

Currently I have treble roles: web development, sales, and marketing of my itsy-bitsy biz.

When in a sleeping bag after being bathed and in her crib, our toddler daughter often still wants to stand up and walk up and down. However, she's impeded. Man, but she tries hard. :-)

Many Californians must have gotten traumatized by the fact their towns and boroughs had gone bankrupt. My goodness. How many people think governments are not trustworthy?

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.