I love the effervescent sunshine.

The historic thread of thought that one's life is ordained by the God or fate has never really disappeared.

But I've rarely heard that sort of thinking from native Americans and Canadians. It's got something to do with the influences of the American Puritanism, I just guess.

The combination of chicken and onions make relatively good toppings for pizza.

Antsy for the summer, the sun hangs out in the sky.

The historic sinking of the legendary Tudor warship Mary Rose is sort of reminiscent of how complexities encumber and even fail the continuous operation and deployment of large software systems.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Rose#Causes_of_sinking .

By the way, the Mary Rose warship of Tudor has a romantic name, doesn't it?

Which lingua franca will the increasing internationalization of Montreal lead to?

Some of China's politicians are good at putting out flowery speeches. But I guess Chinese people care more and more about facts.

We can see many Asian companies commit to buying energy in the forms of crude oil, natural gas, and so on, from Western energy companies.

And we can see how energy-hungry Asian countries and industries are.

Ideas have been percolating in my mind. And I've been gradually executing and evolving them.

The true power only comes from the above second sentence, not the first one.

Historically, Russia sent tributary wealth twice to the Qing Dynasty, the then China. How history turned drastically afterwards, regarding the relative levels of power of the two countries.

Besides, one thing I don't quite understand is why Great Britain sent tributes to China for four times between 1793 and 1816, given that Great Britain must have become one of the super powers in the world back then.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tributaries_of_Imperial_China#Qing_Dynasty.

Among the most crucial tasks which higher education needs to accomplish are to develop in students a knack of thinking deeply and to pass on to students the value system which regards intellectualism highly.

Nevertheless, the two above tasks often fail. We can see the traces of that failure in some people who hold university degrees.

Ice isn't a traditional foodstuff. But if you can find a machine to mash it nicely and then infuse some delicious cold drink into it, then you've made a good potential drink for hot sale.

And that's how fast food chain restaurants and coffee houses serve their customers in the summertime.

Iced cappuccino is an example of such at Tim Horton's.

An excellent quote

"Mock not my senseless conjuration, lords."
--King Richard, as in King Richard II by Shakespeare

"Couscous" is a unique name, I think.

I don't know how much trepidation China actually holds for the following mounting problem. But I think it should hold some.

The increasing aging demographic is a global phenomenon. For countries like the U.S. and Canada, it's not really that threatening, I guess. After all, developed countries which are not very crowded, which the U.S. and Canada are, can always just loosen their immigration threshold a little bit, and more young immigrants, potentially from all corners of the world, will just file in due to the attractiveness of many aspects of building a life in those rich countries.

But China playing the immigration card? Isn't the Middle Kingdom already quite crowded? Can it really attract many young immigrants from abroad?

And, with the ubiquitous domestic feeling that the living costs in China have climbed so high and to almost unbearable levels, coupled with the lack of good social welfare programs targeting to help families raise their children, can China spawn enough young people by itself?

HP computers have done me a yeoman's service these years. I like them.

But I should've bought models equipped with larger memories. For that matter, I mean memories twice as large as in mainstream models at any given time.

I think the word "impediment" is one of the words which sound the most crispest among those ones ending with the suffix "-ment".

Blessed are those who deserve implicit trust.

Theoretically, there are many rogues and jerks in this world. One has his share of meeting them.

Also theoretically, there are many good people in the world. One also has his fair share of meeting them.

I think it's almost impossible for people who hadn't experienced being attacked severely during the Cultural Revolution to really understand the baseness of it.