Excerpt from the poem "The Ballad Of Reading Gaol" by Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde "is also well known for his humorous and intelligent remarks, and for being homosexual. In 1895 he was sent to prison for his homosexuality, which was illegal at the time. He described his prison experience in the poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol. After he was released he lived the rest of his life in France and Italy."
http://oald8.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/dictionary/oscar-wilde


"This long ballad poem published in 1898 was Wilde's last artistic effort. The poem is a social commentary against the deplorable and inhuman conditions existing in Reading jail."
http://www.worldwideschool.org/library/books/lit/poetry/PoemsbyOscarWilde/chap84.html



An excerpt of the long poem:
"
V


I know not whether Laws be right,
Or whether Laws be wrong;
All that we know who lie in gaol
Is that the wall is strong;
And that each day is like a year,
A year whose days are long.


But this I know, that every Law
That men have made for Man,
Since first Man took his brother's life,
And the sad world began,
But straws the wheat and saves the chaff
With a most evil fan.


This too I know - and wise it were
If each could know the same -
That every prison that men build
Is built with bricks of shame,
And bound with bars lest Christ should see
How men their brothers maim.


With bars they blur the gracious moon,
And blind the goodly sun:
And they do well to hide their Hell,
For in it things are done
That Son of God nor son of Man
Ever should look upon!

...


For they starve the little frightened child
Till it weeps both night and day:
And they scourge the weak, and flog the fool,
And gibe the old and grey,
And some grow mad, and all grow bad,
And none a word may say.


Each narrow cell in which we dwell
Is a foul and dark latrine,
And the fetid breath of living Death
Chokes up each grated screen,
And all, but Lust, is turned to dust
In Humanity's machine.


The brackish water that we drink
Creeps with a loathsome slime,
And the bitter bread they weigh in scales
Is full of chalk and lime,
And Sleep will not lie down, but walks
Wild-eyed, and cries to Time.

...
"

http://www.worldwideschool.org/library/books/lit/poetry/PoemsbyOscarWilde/chap84.html



Personally I think it's a first-rate poem which sounds pretty. Well, "pretty" isn't the most suitable word here. My words fail me.

A company's baseline output is different than its final output.

How to create best values during the process between, so to speak, them? (Although the development of them may very well be somewhat parallel and intertwined, so to speak.)

Always attractive is the towering passion for entrepreneurship in the Silicon Valley. Its environment, its surrounding, its silo, its atmosphere...

Three Bs in classic music: Bach, Bethoven, and Brahms.

In the interim between two consecutive successes, however small they seem to be, there lie trials and errors for one to work through and see through.

Huawei isn't helped by the portraiture and perception of it as a telecom technology giant from a country where the authoritarian government can exert any influence and force upon any business identity.

See http://business.financialpost.com/2012/04/18/boosting-foreign-ownership-in-telecoms-threatens-national-security-ottawa-warned-in-secret-letter/ .

It appears that one of the advantages of SSD over traditional HDD is that the latter has a mandatory requirement of persisting data from memory into HDD where the former doesn't need that step at all.

For instance, on my Windows 7 computer, if I shut down the computer without saving my data in my open applications, that data will be lost. By contrast, on my Android phone, I just need to simply turn off the phone without having to save my data in my open apps, and that data will remain intact in my phone.

I am not sure if the sorts of financial speculation activities should be called cankers.

And, how can financial speculation be distinguished from financial hedging? For instance, you are a producer, and you want to hedge against the potential price increase of one of your key raw material inputs and to control the risks of costs. Or, you are an exporter, and you want to hedge against the potential rise of your domestic currency.

To kowtow to pressures is not good. But to compromise with them is.

Everyday, cars crash. But people still drive.

Everyday, companies go bankrupt. But aspiring entrepreneurs still start up.

The cozenage of the so-called MLM (i.e. Multi-level Marketing) is still well alive in the U.S. and Canada. And I suspect it's apt to get stronger in economically difficult times.

Yesterday I was approached by a woman in her fifties or so and she tried to lure me into one seemingly popular MLM scheme. And that left me a strange and bizarre feeling for the day. What a world this one is.

Only after about 10 years of living in Canada, we began to use a masher and make mashed potatoes.

And I expect it will take at least another 10 years for me to begin to like mashed potatoes. I inherited a Chinese stomach, and I suspect that's in my genes. :-)

A designer coffee drink is at its best when you are sitting inside or outside a designer coffee house and experiencing it.

English appreciation - a quote

He has wronged me and deceived me enough, he shall not cozen me further; let him go his own way, for Jove has robbed him of his reason.

- The Iliad by Homer

Modern Chinese is apt to be less subtle than its English counterpart.

For example, there's a distinction between "slander" and "libel" in modern English, where there's no such thing in today's Chinese.

J's proper life is busy and full of efforts for trying to achieve higher. It's kind of sad his father doesn't understand that.

Completed - Ancient emperors, kings, and state heads with a knack of literature, music, or both

Part 1:

I would say that the Tudor Dynasty of Welsh origin which had ruled the Kingdom of England has begun to intrigue me more and more.

And in that particular House of Tudor, Henry VIII, who was the 2nd king, is definitely a spectacular figure. He romantically, well, at least I guess, named one of his then very powerful warships as Mary Rose. And

Henry cultivated the image of a Renaissance Man and his court was a centre of scholarly and artistic innovation and glamorous excess, epitomised by the Field of the Cloth of Gold. He was an accomplished musician, author, and poet. His best known musical composition is "Pastime with Good Company" or "The Kynges Ballade". He was an avid gambler and dice player, and excelled at sports, especially jousting, hunting, and real tennis. He was known for his strong defence of conventional Christian piety. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_VIII_of_England#Early_reign:_1509.E2.80.931525

Furthermore, he's often been reputed to be the author of the ever popular English folk song Greensleeves. And he married six times in his lifetime, while he also beheaded a couple of his legal wives.

What a figure he is.



Part 2:

In the same year in which Henry VIII of England died, in the far-flung and cold Russia, Ivan the Terrible, for whom "Ivan the Fearsome" might be a more suitable nickname (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_the_Terrible#Sobriquet ), officially crowned as the Tsar of All Russia.

"Ivan was a poet, a composer of considerable talent". (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_the_Terrible#Arts )

By the way, the grandfather of Ivan the Terrible is, er, Ivan the Great.



Part 3:

Alfonso the Wise, an ancient king in Spain, also had a knack of literature and other intellectual activities.

Alfonso established Spanish as a language of higher learning,

and was a prolific author of Galician poetry, such as the Cantigas de Santa Maria, which are equally notable for their musical notation as for their literary merit. Alfonso's scientific interests—he is sometimes nicknamed "the Astrologer" (el Astrólogo)—led him to sponsor the creation of the Alfonsine tables, and the Alphonsus crater on the moon is named after him. As a legislator he introduced the first vernacular law code in Spain, the Siete Partidas. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfonso_X_of_Castile

Part 4:

Frederick the Great, a King of Prussia, was quite fond of music and philosophy. He's a very intriguing historical figure, I think.

Interested primarily in music and philosophy and not the arts of war during his youth, Frederick unsuccessfully attempted to flee from his authoritarian father, Frederick William I, with childhood friend Hans Hermann von Katte, whose execution he was forced to watch after they were captured. Upon ascending to the Prussian throne, he attacked Austria and claimed Silesia during the Silesian Wars, winning military acclaim for himself and Prussia. Near the end of his life, Frederick physically connected most of his realm by conquering Polish territories in the First Partition of Poland. 

Frederick was a proponent of enlightened absolutism. For years he was a correspondent of Voltaire, with whom the king had an intimate, if turbulent, friendship. He modernized the Prussian bureaucracy and civil service and promoted religious tolerance throughout his realm. Frederick patronized the arts and philosophers, and wrote flute music. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_the_Great

He's a "gifted musician" and composer. He wanted to be a philosopher king. And, he speaks at least six languages.

Frederick was a gifted musician who played the transverse flute. He composed 100 sonatas for the flute as well as four symphonies. The Hohenfriedberger Marsch, a military march, was supposedly written by Frederick to commemorate his victory in the Battle of Hohenfriedberg during the Second Silesian War. His court musicians included C. P. E. Bach, Johann Joachim Quantz, Carl Heinrich Graun and Franz Benda. A meeting with Johann Sebastian Bach in 1747 in Potsdam led to Bach's writing The Musical Offering. 

Frederick also aspired to be a Platonic philosopher king like the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. The king joined the Freemasons in 1738 and stood close to the French Enlightenment, admiring above all its greatest thinker, Voltaire, with whom he corresponded frequently. The personal friendship of Frederick and Voltaire came to an unpleasant end after Voltaire's visit to Berlin and Potsdam in 1750–1753, although they reconciled from afar in later years. 

In addition to his native language, German, Frederick spoke French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian; he also understood Latin, ancient and modern Greek, and Hebrew. Preferring instead French culture, Frederick disliked the German language, literature, and culture, explaining that German authors "pile parenthesis upon parenthesis, and often you find only at the end of an entire page the verb on which depends the meaning of the whole sentence".[45] His criticism led many German writers to attempt to impress Frederick with their writings in the German language and thus prove its worthiness. Many statesmen, including Baron vom und zum Stein, were also inspired by Frederick's statesmanship. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_the_Great#Music.2C_arts_and_learning

He's also very talented in the art of war.

Frederick frequently led his military forces personally and had six horses shot from under him during battle. Frederick is often admired as one of the greatest tactical geniuses of all time, especially for his usage of the oblique order of battle. Even more important were his operational successes, especially preventing the unification of numerically superior opposing armies and being at the right place at the right time to keep enemy armies out of Prussian core territory. In a letter to his mother Maria Theresa, the Austrian co-ruler Emperor Joseph II wrote, 

"When the King of Prussia speaks on problems connected with the art of war, which he has studied intensively and on which he has read every conceivable book, then everything is taut, solid and uncommonly instructive. There are no circumlocutions, he gives factual and historical proof of the assertions he makes, for he is well versed in history... A genius and a man who talks admirably. But everything he says betrays the knave.[14] "

An example of the place that Frederick holds in history as a ruler is seen in Napoleon Bonaparte, who saw the Prussian king as the greatest tactical genius of all time;[15] after Napoleon's victory of the Fourth Coalition in 1807, he visited Frederick's tomb in Potsdam and remarked to his officers, "Gentlemen, if this man were still alive I would not be here".[16] Frederick and Napoleon are perhaps the most admiringly quoted military leaders in Clausewitz' On War. More than Frederick's use of the oblique order, Clausewitz praised particularly the quick and skillful movement of his troops.[17] 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_the_Great#Warfare

Part 5:

In Chinese history, somewhat similarly, there have been 曹丕, 后主李煜, and 毛泽东, to my knowledge.

Personally I think that Arabia is honored by the higher quality that the term "arabica" stands for, while the word "robust", which means all good things in software development, is kind of smeared by the lower quality that "robusta", which is a word related to coffee, implies.

I've only popped in and seen friends once or few times since our toddler daughter was born. Combined with my trying to establish an itsy bitsy biz of my own, yes, I've been that busy.

O.K., nowadays there's a little more time at my hand. My social life will be easier.

In Canada, if a young individual doesn't have at least a CEGEP or an undergraduate education, it's nearly certain that his future career prospect will be wrecked by the lacking, unless he runs his own business or he's a tradesman or something like that.

It's not discrimination or something, but it's just the damn competition in the market.

Where there always tend to be some, if not many, young people with Arts degrees making a living close to minimum wage, potential employers have many choices. Then why would he choose one mentioned above instead of another with an Arts degree? At least the latter writes and speaks better, if not much better, than the former, most likely.

On the other hand, my above words are not to say that the person without a higher education can't manage to get one in the future, near or far. After all, this is Canada. It shouldn't be too hard to attain, if one puts his mind to it, reasonably, before his fifties.