Tao’s Blog

It may sounds silly. I just realized that my last blog entry is dated on November 1, 2004 and now it is the evening of November 30, 2004. A whole month, where have I been? Actually, if you speak Chinese, you will see I recently posted a lot Chinese blog entries over there.

When I first set up these two blogs, one English, one Chinese, I was considering to more or less synchronize the two blogs, making them the corresponding translation of each other. However, later on, I found that rather difficult.

First, blogging is not like ordinary writing. I just jot down whatever catch my thought and attention then. When I finish, I finish. I usually never go back to have a second though, and most of the time, I have rather silly thoughts. So it never seems worthwhile to translate one blog entry from one blog to the other. When I finished writing, my desire to write just dissipated, so there is no motivation left for me to write another almost identical entry in another language, and somethimes it is very hard to express one thing in both languages, as you know, Chinese and English are quite different, culturally and technically.

oops, I just lost everything I just typed for the last ten minutes. It is obvious that Mac OS 9 and Mozilla 1.2.1 is not a very robust combination. Anyway, here I tried to re-write what has been lost due to the crash of the old version of the Mozilla software.

Actually, I was writing about my gadgets of the month, and while checking some other urls, the Mozilla crashed. I was talking about my newly installed wireless web. Actually, that’s the topic of the gadgets of the month.

Maybe I just need to start another entry, “Gadgets of the month”.

Sometimes I tried to keep my English and Chinese blogs in sync, keeping them more or less describing the same content, at least expression the same impression I perceived. Obviously, I did not try very hard. My Chinese and English blogs hardly describe the same thing or same impression. That maybe due to the fact when I write, I just let my mind take a leave. Anything piqued my interested during the moment will become the entry, and it seldom come back when I write in another language. I seldom apply discipline when I write, I just type away whatever come into my mind, and they come as suddenly as they go, if I happened to be writing, they will become immobilized by my keyboard, and in rare occasions, by my pen. Sometimes I wonder these days there are still people writing with pen and paper instead of a keyboard, maybe they write high quality prose, I don’t know. I was said that Neal Stephenson writes with pen and paper, and it is a fountain pen. The Baroque Cycle, the three volumes big book, more than 3000+ pages, where literally penned with a fountain pen. According to himself, it helps him to write good prose. Anyway, maybe that’s the case.

In those rare occasions I write with a pen and paper, I rarely take time to type up those handwritten drafts, I tend to forget or hate to read what I wrote, it is highly probably that I wrote badly, and I hate to re-examine those bad prose. It is likely that I need to force myself to re-read what I have written, and do some correction and revision so to show some respect to my reader, however, I seriously doubt that if out there, if there is someone is actually reading my words. The good thing about write a diary in a blog is that I can always do full-text search in case I want to recall what I have done or what I was thinking back then during a specific time period and place. However, if you happen to stumble into my blog, and managed to read those babbling, thank you very much. I promise that I will show more respect to my readers, suppose you are really there.

This evening, I watched the movie “Henry VIII” on PBS 13, WNET. I think it is the part one of the whole movie, maybe the conclusion will be shown next Sunday. I watched the “Henry VIII” documentary several months ago, maybe that’s half a year ago, I don’t remember clearly. The most interesting part is that in one episode of the Simpsons, Homer acted as Henry VIII, that’s a wonderful satire. I love the Simpsons!

I bought a USB 2.0 7-in-1 memory card reader, CompactFlash, SmartMedia, Secure Digital, MultiMedia, Memory Stick, etc. Actually, what I need is only SD and SM. I paid $10 for the card reader, free shipping, that’s a nice deal, and I don’t need to worry about the rebates.

Talking about rebate, I need to deal with them next week. I ordered an 802.11b Netgear wireless router, $40 with $30 rebate, actually, that’s two rebates. But it may worth the trouble.

I also ordered an Airport Extreme card for my 12″ PowerBook G4 notebook computer. I am going to be getting un-plugged somewhere next week. I am eager to receive the shipments.

About to begin to read the book “Patrick O’Brian: A life revealed” by Dean King. I borrowed the book from New York Public Library, ISBN is 0-8050-5976-8.

It was a wonderful Sunday, albeit a terrible headache I was having the whole afternoon, and I was suffering it ignorantly until finally I figured out what’s wrong: I am addicted to caffeine, and I didn’t have my usual morning coffee today, that’s the cause of all the troubles.

As I said, though I suffered a lot, it is still a wonderful Halloween Sunday. It is the day we leave behind the EDT and returned to the wintry EST. As always, one hour sleeping time is bestowed to us all. That makes me feels good, at least.

The sunshine is terrific. Temperature is amenable, broadband Internet was restored yesterday–as the case of caffeine, I am also addicted to fast Internet–so that’s a big relieve. I have four Galaxy tickets would expire tomorrow (November 1st), so I’d better use them today, the last day of October. What we chose is “Shark Tale” and “Taxi”. Between the two shows, wife and I managed a hasty afternoon visit to Central Park. The sun was beginning to set, golden tint gilded the skyline, everything looked peaceful, serene and sweet. The kids all dressed up in cute Halloween costumes, even dogs did the same. Model boats were plying the pond, bird watchers were observing with a huge Meade telescope. With my hoary FinePix 4700 digital camera, I was able to catch some of the happy moments, as they say, a picture can speaks a thousand words.

My caffeine-dependence caused me a great deal of torment, especially when we were watching the movie “Taxi”. Nice comedy, I like it. On our way back home, some cute kids with nice costumes were quite spunky, one boy with a blinking teeth, in a Dracula costume. I used to read e-books on my Palm Tungsten T2, but today the headache precludes me any brain activity on the train. Fortunately, after arriving home, a shot of Gevalia coffee relieved my headache like miracle. I was disconcerted about my dependence on coffee, and usually I do not drink a lot of it, two cups a day most of the time. That’s a weird situation, or maybe not, I am not a doctor, anyway. I hope a cup or two will not do much damage to my nerve system.

I lost broadband Internet service for most of last week. I spent a whole Saturday waiting for the CableVision guy to show up to fix the cable. The appointment was 8 am to 6 pm, it reminded me an episode of the TV show “Seinfeld", in which Kramer had some interesting encounter with the cable guy. That’s a nice one.

11/1/04 12:33 am