Seattle is a quiet place, it rains a lot. At least rains a lot during the week I was there. Below is the hotel I live.

There are Microsoft buildings everywhere including this one:

Athenian Seafood, the place they shot “Sleepless in Seattle”:

Me in front of the poster:

We had dinner there

The famous space needle:

The complete set can be found here

Update (21/04/2009): I don’t believe that it took this long (5 months) to upload the photos. Well, all I can say is better very late than never ever…

My work station:

My ID:

Me:

There is also one site that is special for the 2009 Chinese New Year, looks quite good. It also shows the traffic information for annual “Chun Yun” (春运). Please follow this link (http://2009.cj.live.com/), if you’re interested

Below is a screen shot of the Chinese New Year themed Live search.

当夕阳斜下，大雁南飞，炊烟袅袅，宠物奔袭，清风拂面，似乎这一切让人觉得生机勃勃的景象都被蒙上死一般的灰色的时候。这个疯狂的世界让冬天变得更加麻木，让秋天变得死气沉沉，让夏天变的让人窒息，让春天变得毫无意义。这是一个不可理喻却又让人无可奈何的世界。

我们不想被某些东西支配，却又逃脱不了魔掌。我们去寻找开心，可笑容里总是伴着苦涩。当大笑声被寂静掩埋的时候，空虚便开始侵占一切。忙碌完了停下来的时候，很多东西都变得没有意义。这是一个不可理喻却又让人无可奈何的世界。

当只有逃避却无路可逃的时候，I find it kind of funny, I find it kind of sad…
当睡着了脑子还是清醒的时候，I find it kind of funny, I find it kind of sad…
当梦想死去的那一刻，I find it kind of funny, I find it kind of sad…

Mad world, mad world…

Mad World - Gary Jules

还记得小时候在呼和浩特市鼓楼长大的我却从来不知道鼓楼是什么样的，妈妈说曾经为了解决交通问题被拆掉了。我想想很气愤，但却可以理解，毕竟发生在中国那个特殊的时期“破四旧”等我们不太熟悉的日子里，加上还没有改革开放，人们思想相对落后，又是少数民族地区。如今，同样的事情居然又发生在南京。难怪“台湾”都会说他们比祖国“大陆”还中国，我们的文化遗产还剩下些什么呢？我们还有什么是值得骄傲的呢？

南大师生是不是应该发扬一下钉子户们的精神呢？我不敢妄加定论，但至少有一点，如今祖国所剩下的文化遗产已经濒临绝种了，请不要为了那点小恩小惠和眼前的利益去扼杀和摧毁了。当你走在澳大利亚的悉尼，这个只有200多年历史的城市的街上，却感觉到他的文化和历史气息比很多中国古老城市的文化气息还要浓重的时候，作为四大文明古国之一，我们应该作何感想？

Basically, there are two ways of learning a foreign language. One way is you map all aspects of the foreign language into you own native language, letters, words, grammar, even pronunciation. By learning the language this way, you do not need to change the way you’re thinking. You can still use the same process you’re most comfortably with within your head, how well you can master this foreign language depends on how the mapping and translation process within your brain. Inside your brain, you simply build a virtual machine that took the input of the foreign language, translate into your own native language, process them using your own native language, translate it back to the foreign language, then give the output. The other way is you can first learn it by translating and mapping, to help you understand that foreign language. Then you simply build another system in your brain that uses this foreign language for processing. So later on, you have two separate systems that process different languages, natively. Well, I am the later one. I process English natively, that’s why the translation seems so hard to me.

I call the first learning method “Learning by mapping”, and the other one “Learning by Understanding”. There are so many applications in the computer world that adopts those two strategies. One example of “learning by mapping” is the WINE project, that intend to let Windows applications run on windows. WINE takes the windows API and translate them into calls on the Linux API. “Learning by Understanding” is like you have two systems, Windows and Linux at the same time, if one call is on Windows API then, throw them to Windows system, if the call is to Linux API, then throw them to Linux system.

Well, both of the approaches have their pros and cons. The learning speed of learning by mapping can be quite fast, since you only need to construct an intermediate layer tha mapps the foreign language to your familiar thinking language. The drawback of this approach is that the processing speed of this foreign language can be slower, since another translation layer is added. In addition, not everything can be mapped. The learning by understanding can be quite fast in the sense of processing speed, because you built a native system use this new language. However, construct this native system can be very hard. Well, you guys can decide which one suits you best.

Apparently, I am overwhelmed by research work, and start to talking stuff that’s a bit wierd. I knew it…

Well, my first time listening the song was about 5 or 6 years ago. Played by Paul Gilbert, the former lead guitar from Mr. Big. Though it wasn’t the original version, and at that time I cannot even figure out the what the lyrics was (my English at that time was pretty poor). I was totally attracted by the melody from his guitar. I listened the song from the low quality video clip again and again, and can’t wait to try it on my Ibanez RG270 guitar, but failed at the end because I could not find a nice guitar tab on the web that I like at that time. Below is the Paul Gilbert version I was listening to, I found it on youtube:

Paul Gilbert - Fly Me To The Moon

Today, when I was listening to last.fm radio, I found a song from an artist called Frank Sinatra was pretty good, so I checked out his profile. Guess what? He was the original singer who song “Fly Me to The Moon”. What a coincidence!!! After so many years, the song was still very tasteful. Sinatra’s version feels even more mellow like a glass of nice wine. With more understanding of the lyrics, it got me deeply touched. Wow, this is the song, the one song I feel I would like to say so much about it, but their is no such words to describe that feeling, neither in English or Chinese. Below is the original version:

Frank Sinatra - Fly Me to the Moon Lyrics

Another live version:

Frank Sinatra - Fly Me To The Moon

There are other people played this song on youtube, I have listed a few of the good ones below. Please do check out if you like me does not know the song but loves this song

Fly Me to the Moon - Zack Kim

Fly Me To The Moon - llanbradach

Not much to do on the first day, the orientation starts tomorrow, hopefully I would have some more idea of what I supposed to do and get familiar with the working environment around after the orientation.

First of all, you need to sign up for a Google Reader account here if you does not have one. After you have the Google Reader account and signed in, you will see an interface similar to the one below.

If you are a firefox user, subscribing to any site that enables rss can be extremely easy. When you enters the website that has rss enabled, you can see a little icon on the address bar as follow:

After you click on the little subscribe button and choose “subscribe to …”. You’ll see the interface that ask you to choose what application you want to use for the subscription, choose “Google” in this case, and then the site is automatically added to your Google Reader subscription.

If you do not use firefox, you may need to find out the subscription page yourself, look for the rss button on the website. The rss icon on my blog site is located here:

Click on this link and then copy the url in the address bar, which in this case will be “http://www.realstraw.com/blog/feed/atom”. Go to your Google Reader page, log in and click the add subscription button on the left side, and paste the rss feed address you just copied and click “Add”. Ok, you are done, now you could just tracking the updates using just Google Reader now. You can also do this for your favourite websites and tracking their updates.

Hope you will find this guide useful