Tao’s Blog

Internal Combustion and consipiracy theory

Came across the book Internal Combusion by Edwin Black.

A fantasitc read, but the conspiracy theory just shook me off the hook. Make it less credible.

The family that couldn’t sleep

A medical msystery about A rare prion disease. The family that could’t sleep by D. T. Max is a very enjoyable read, at least for me.

First day of the new year. Rainy outside, and I am sitting in front of the battered dinner table, with a half cup of cold coffee, pondering so many unanswerable questions that my brain begins to get clogged, and begins to lose coherence. It’s a good thing that Microsoft Word can automatically correct many of my typos, although at times it can be quite annoying, but in general, I am rather satisfied with the software. Interestingly, I spent more time fudging with the word processor than writing with it. Somehow I strongly suspect that I am not the only one spend more time fudging the word processor than actually writing with it. Last year, and the year before that, I spent quite some serious hours comparing the difference between the Mac and PC versions of the MS Office suite. There are quite some differences, especially keyboard shortcuts.

Since it’s a new year, it is a good time to think about the year past, and make plans for the coming new year. Let me try:

Important event of year 2007:

1. Read many new books and tons of magazine articles, although I failed to keep my promise to write my blog entries more diligently
2. Visited Atlanta, GA
3. By reading David Allen’s Getting Things Done, learned how to organize my time more efficiently, and worked out a system to organize my time, projects, and documents
4. Learned more about automobiles, its principle parts and operations, hopefully I am a better driver now
5. Learned to type Chinese faster on my PC and Mac, and began to use Google Chinese IME on PC computers. It seems Google IME is faster than the Mac OS Chinese IME. So now I pretty much write all my Chinese documents on PCs.
6. Began to use Google Documents and Spreadsheets systematically. Since I am using at least five computers all the time (two Macs, three PCs), it is tremendously helpful to have a central depository for all my documents and spreadsheets. Although using Google Docs is not as fast as editing locally, with my current hardware, it’s fast enough.

Things to do in year 2008:

Don’t make new years resolutions any more. Although I need a better backing up scheme to keep my digital documents and files in good and usable shape.