Photo Shows

It's a photo from CNN showing Lebanon fighting with a military group in a refuge camp. It reminds me of common scenes in Chinese Civil War.

About Windows Me

Opinion from PC World toward Windows Me:
"Installation was difficult, hardware driver support was sketchy, and system crashes were routine."

Invention and Innovation

Google bought DoubleClick at 3.1 billion dollars after another early purchase of YouTube. These small companies suddenly became rich over night. The point is how to be ahead of the majority and start up a business that can earn money later. We need good ideas that can meet the need of part of online users, like sharing Video clips as in YouTube, sharing PDF files, sharing photos, sharing anything.

What can we do? We've been educated for so many years and eager to apply our knowledge to something. Why not come up with some idea that can better serve people? Keep thinking...

More Death

Virginia Tech has become a place of death when a gunman began slaughtering on its campus. The latest CNN news reported 22 were killed in two shooting incidents, one in dorm the other in classroom. What a bloody day!

The school is in a small town like College Station, TX. No one can imagine things like shooting happen in that boring place. So when some students were interviewed on the scene, they appeared excited, instead of being scared. The shooting has set a record for the highest death toll for school shooting, the closest is 12 students and a teacher, in Colorado.

School shooting has becoming more and more frequent in these two years. There should be something wrong with the society. Owing private guns cannot be the cause because it's been a long history of the legislation. It should be some change in the recent years that caused the increase in school shooting. It must be something else.

[Update] The shooter has been identified as a student from South Korea. It is reported that each victim got at least three shots. It was a bloody day.

What Do I Want

When being asked about it, I got into silence for a while. A decent job? a nice house? Never worried about money? But what's my purpose? Those are not deep-rooted goal, but superficial belongings. What do I want eventually and mentally? Peacefulness? Joy of achievement? Desire of being recognized and respected? Actually I'm not sure.

Car Crash

On April 11th, 2007, there was a head-on collision on Highway 6 that killed 2 Korean Aggies. A truck tried to pull into the line in the opposite direction to pass a vehicle in front of it, but ended with colliding with a car with four Korean from that direction. One of the killed Korean students is graduating this year and was returning from Career Fair in Dallas.

It's a tragedy for their families and themselves. After several years of Ph.D. study, they are at the gate to the bright future. But the door shut before they can get in within a split of a second. When the truck driver made a decision to pass, just as a very normal one we could make everyday on road, he never realized he will regret for doing it forever.

There were so many occasions when we made reckless decisions like that but survived luckily. We never realized that death is just a step away and we are blessed not seeing it. Now, I feel it's so close to us, and I even can feel how dreadful it is. I'm a little scared since I remember how my car ran fast on the narrow part of Highway 6 with only two lanes and headlights from the opposite direction were so bright and blinded my eyes. I even can feel my car was trembling when the vehicles in the opposite lane passing me.

It's an unpleasant news. So, let's drive safe anytime.

My Elevator Pitch

I'm working on modeling the Internet topology. The Internet consists of thousands of interconnected Autonomous Systems. The connectivity structure of these systems determines the overall performance of the Internet.

However, there is no direct way of knowing such structure due to the distributed nature of the Internet. Therefore, indirect measurement and mathematical modeling of the Internet topology become very important for traffic engineering and network optimization. My work is to design a proper model that can track the evolution of the structure.

Hate Mail

What's a hate mail? It's a form of harassment, usually consisting of offensive or threatening comments towards recipients. A hate mail usually contains abusive, foul or otherwise hurtful language.

It's also called a negative mail. The opposite side is a positive/wonderful mail.

Expressive Sentences

Sometimes, I feel it's really painful to find a proper English expression for a thing on mind, which is in Chinese. Of course, it's OK to put some simple sentence to describe it, but that's just like scratch upon the rain coat. So I decide to keep looking for the sentences that do a good job in expressing ideas when reading something. Here're some examples:

Although the marriage looked sunny to outsiders, a huge cloud loomed over that household.
This expression is really good in that it relates the marriage relationship to weather, very vivid. In the sentence, "loom" is the key word that depicts the tense relationship among family members. In Chinese, 阴云密布.

She lived a life where she walked on eggshells.
Eggshell is very fragile and it's difficult to walk on it without breaking the shell. The expression describes how difficult life she lived. In Chinese, it's 如履薄冰.

These two sentences were quoted from the presentation of a defense lawyer. I feel that all lawyers should be able to use words to convince their audience, judge and jury. To them, language is the vital weapon.

Ph.D. Study

Just got back from a talk with a faculty candidate from Purdue. Of course, I don't care about if the candidate likes Texas, when she arrived here, how many other places she's interviewed, you know, those kinda plain questions that are used to kill time. In fact, my interested questions includes how she feels about her Ph.D. study, what's the difficulties in the time span of doing research, and how she deals with these stuff.

Those questions also apply to me, and sometimes bother me when I feel confused about the future. What's my vision about my future? That's a question that has been standing right there at the corner and I will sooner or later confront it. I have no confident answer at this time. And I want to know how others see through it.

Anyhow, I feel today's candidate is talktive, but her confidence is low. She said here is the biggest school she's hit. Well, I wonder how well she can do for her presentation.

Let's end this post with a comic about Ph.D. study: the lab food chain.

Don Imus

Today's top news is Don Imus, who insulted Rutgers women's basketball team on NBC radio and was criticized for racial comments. People, critics, his colleagues, African American association, coach, team members, all urge firing him. Two advertiser have announced to end their relationship with Don. According to CNN, he has a long history of offending and racialism. This time is just a trigger and detonates the bomb.

Racism is a very sensitive topic in nowadays America, deeply rooted into the whole society, and puts the nation on a volcano that erupts now and then, anywhere. Just last several weeks, a white teacher seduced and had sex with several black high school teenagers. The racial hatred feelings were spreading among local communities.

Just Confused

This blog space is not stable: I created a blog, which just disappeared from my account after I switch from IE to Firefox (logging out and then signing in). Just weird. So I had to build another new one. But the freaking thing is I can't use my desired url for my new blog, which has been occupied by the old one that has disappeared. That's really funny.

Anyways, it took me several hours to nail down the blog thing. Hope I can keep writing for a long time to make the wasted time worthy.

About Elevator Pitch

I just ran through several articles about how important an elevator pitch could be and how one can form a good and effective elevator pitch. I learned this term when I was reading an article about tips for social networking. One of these is how to introduce about yourself within 2 minutes. It makes difference in being remembered and being forgotten. The origin of the term is to refer to an enterprenur selling his/her idea to venture capitalists in the time span of an elevator ride.

One suggested way to improve your elevator pitch is to write it down, practice it in front of a mirror, then rewrite it and practice again. In fact, it reminds me that for anything to be expressed fluently and confidently, I should think it over and over.

Therefore, to write it down is the first step to train my mind, which motivates me to open this blog and write as much as I can about entertainment, politics, and social events. It is not important that these opinions are correct or not. The important thing is, these are my opinions and I get them after thinking and concluding. Even they are totally nonsense, and maybe some time later, I check back with them and feel ridiculous about it. But that doesn't matter at all. I get my mind trained and my thought formed. That's all what I want.

First Post

What to say in the very first post? OK, let's talk about news. Just read the news about Anna Smith's daughter. Her kin father was just identified to be Larry Birkhead, a Hollywood photographer. He was smiling and excited about the result when he got the news. According to CNN, he's able to share Smith's heritage of several millions.


Look, his smile looks disgusting to me. Is it a triumph? His hands are throwing into the air. What a pathetic image! I can't image what life the baby could live with him if he gets the custody. Maybe I'm wrong with it, but this man definitely doesn't look good.

Throughout the whole event, the law suites surrounding who's the father of the infant and who'll finally get custody, looks like a TV show, just like the life of Anna Smith, ironic and tragic. I think it's all about money. Suppose the baby has no heritage. I bet no one will be interested getting involved with it. No one!!! But the sad thing is, the innocent baby was born to be the center of the whole ugly play. Her life will be of no easy way.