看了一段电影《不能说的秘密》预告篇，对其中两个男生在钢琴前比斗的场景印象很深刻。相比之下我们上学那会儿，看谁不顺眼就拳脚相加的作风实在是太不优雅了。都是敲 keyboard 的人，为什么人家就耍的那么帅。我们搞电脑的，手指头灵活度真低不到哪去的。写了一天的代码了，要不我也扭过头去敲一段 Hello, World 给大家看？大不了加点节奏就是了。
其实，隔行如隔山。否则怎么会有“专业”这样极其简单而又深刻的称赞呢？叫丫来给你在电脑上打26个字母丫照样也得废掉食指以外的四个指头趴在键盘上先找 “a”。
三百六十行，行行出状元。自己做不到，别人却做到的事情，就应该佩服！就应该给丫竖个指头！（哎哎，你竖错了！应该竖大拇指。）刚才喝了一罐百事，盯着易拉罐愣了半天。你说百事、可口两家做糖水的公司同一个味儿坚持不变 N 年，可换壳不换汤的生意照样做的是红红火火。要我说，他们的营销团队才是最专业的。怎么能不佩服呢？
某些年轻人，太急于表现自己。往往在还没有想清楚自己的下一句话的时候，就上升到了珠穆朗玛的高度。然后就会因为海拔太高，而迷失了自己原本想表达的方向。就好像坐着无敌海景缆车上山的人一样，永远也别想在他们脸上找到那种登山者的沧桑。
——读 N 年前自己的文字有感
最近突然找到一个老同学的博客，一个很老很老的老同学。这哥们儿上学的时候贼NB，学习成绩贼好，然后整个学校也都知道他，特别是女生。看了几篇和几张，发现他变化很大。主要是人精神多了，挺好。
昨天看新闻，说张柏芝要生小孩了，孩子他爸是谢霆锋。据说小孩名字起的好，叫“谢皇上”。挺欣赏他们的，要不是看到新闻可能还会继续把他们放在放荡不羁的一代。主要是人成熟多了，挺好。
生小孩的新闻下面，说中国互联网络信息中心刚刚发布《第 n 次中国互联网络发展状况统计报告》。报告显示，截止2007年6月30日，我国常驻网民总人数达到1.62亿。也就是说差不多至少九个厮中间有一厮知道什么是浏览器。主要是人无聊多了，挺好。
这个世界，一眨眼，你就不认识它了。
没事儿的时候想起来在 Wonderland 做过一次过山车，有些想法。刚开始进入轨道加速的时候，非常害怕。感觉一切都不受控制，只有在物理上跟着前进的速度，心却一直跟在后面。过了一会却好了很多，不再害怕了。恐惧，其实很好定义。用我的理解，就是说一般人的心理上对任何事物的不同属性都会有一个期望值。之所以恐惧，是因为实际发生的情况和这个期望值之间的差距。差距越大，恐惧感越大。当心理所能承受的速度远远达不到实际的速度，就会害怕。后来试着把心放开，去想象着更快的速度。每次俯冲的时候，心早早地跑在前面，相对来说对过山车本身的速度来说，过山车开始缓慢了，紧接着就是恐惧的消失。《蝙蝠侠开始》里男主角伟恩曾经因为童年的阴影一度非常害怕蝙蝠。后来他告诉自己，想要消灭对一个事物的恐惧，就要变成这个事物的一部分。从我的理解上讲，等于说把期望值和事物本身相吻合，从而消除差距。这种想法成就了后来的蝙蝠侠。照男主角的话说，坐过山车惧怕速度的话，就应该变成速度的一部分。
说起来好像很简单，但是一个人所惧怕的东西还是很多。有些甚至可能从来没有发生过，但却深深地藏在心里。想一个一个去缩短期望和实际的距离，甚难。
我可能是圈子里面仅有的一个在临近年中盛夏的时候晚上还开暖气盖双层被子的人吧。Redmond 这个地方住起来冬冷夏也冷，更加衬托了一人在家坐在电脑前一坐就是一天的气氛。温度奇怪，但窗外刺眼的碧绿还是提醒了我。转眼就到了五月，时间像扎了屁股的驴一样，一边嚎叫，一边飞快地奔跑。而我，就正坐在这头驴的背上。
貌似威猛，却一刻也不敢放手。
I’ve just heard another friend complaining that he is unhappy about his current life. He said it’s just too boring, although he plays basketball every week and does a great job in his research. He asked me, what makes you happy?
I don’t have a complete set of answers to this question yet. But for sure I know one of them. I think part of happiness comes from the fact how many people you’ve influenced. The definition of influence is quite broad here. In general, it is that someone makes a decision because of you. Tomas Edison must be happy, as everyone is using light bulbs originally invented by him. Charlie Chaplin must be happy, as his comedies made everyone laugh. Or it doesn’t has to be a large group of people to be influenced; maybe just one or two. For instance, sing a stupid song to someone sad; or write blogs someone reads every other day. Take few seconds to count the number, you will feel better.
I read news everyday, mostly from online. News are not limited to just news websites, but also various blogs. I use live.com as my aggregator and let me take a look what I have there. OK, for English I have MSDN Blogs, MSN Auto News and /.. I also have non-web-based way to get news. P-I Reader from Seattle Post-Intelligencer is such a great application for me to know what is happening around the world and local.
Beside getting to know what’s new, I read news also for learning more vocabularies, since English is just my second language. Whenever I see some word never seen, I just shoot it to en-cn@hotmail.com in my Live Messenger for translation. This dictionary bot is convenient. However, it is not efficient for learning new words particularly. (I just typed the word ‘particularly’ in the wrong chat window. I’m sorry! :P ) And just now, an idea came out of my mind.
Alright, here is the scenario. When a web browser or some other reader-like application is first brought up, it automatically highlights all the words shown in the screen. When user reads the page, he/she clicks on the word he/she already know, so the highlight of that word dismisses. This could be annoying at early stage, since not many words have been clicked. But once a word is clicked, it will never be highlighted again. So after a while, there is going to be only those vocabularies this user doesn’t know highlighted in the screen.
Of course, to do this there has to be backend database to store all the words that have been clicked. And it only applies to languages whose phrases are delimited by spaces. A counter example is Chinese. It doesn’t matter to me, since I am learning English only. A difficulty of designing this tool is how to integrate the word highlighting and clicking into the existing applications. Maybe just do it on HTML-engine based applications? I don’t know.
I just played a first person shooting game. I came across its website, download it and played on several servers set up by users. It was not new for this kind of games. I guess there are hundreds of first shooting games like this all over the Internet. So the name of the game is not important. It’s just the virtual world experience important. I logged on one server which has not only human players, but also bot players. You know what, these bots are so fast, that you can’t catch them at all. They are always chasing you and picking up the nearby weapons.
It just reminds me of one of my favorite movie, The Matrix. It’s just like you are in a world that software are human shaped, you are your-digital-self. How is it possible to fight against a piece of code that is designed to play with you, or kill you in its world I should say. I always imagine myself as Neo in the movie and used to set the screen saver to be those falling characters shamelessly. Apparently I’m not, unless I know the bug of the code and find a way to hack it somehow. Human beings have defects. That are why there are bugs in the software designed by human. If we think about it further that the code is designed by code, then it’s really hard to imagine what will happen if the story of Matrix comes true. How are we gonna win in the machine’s world? A world designed by machines, where the designer machines were designed their parent machines and so on?
Fortunately these haven’t come true yet. It requires hard mathematical proves to show a code designing its child code is possible. For now, it only proves that Neo is not human being in the film. That’s my understanding of the story, that Neo is actually another piece of code to balance the machine world. That gives us the new hope. We are not fast; we are not accurate. How are we going to fight against those bots in the game? One thing and the only thing we can do to win the game, is to design another bot using the so called SDK. We can make it with more robust algorithms, so it’s even faster than the enemies. Hey, we are human, we are famous of making tools, to compensate what we are naturally lacking of.
Actually this is already happening. Think about computer virus and anti-virus software. How are we supposed read the binaries byte by byte to find out which one is bad? Of course not. I am less worry now, even I am not Neo. Here comes my favorite picture of the movie.
一篇话题很简单的日志，老中看不懂，老洋读不通，你丫中英混着写就高档次了么？要时刻自我批评，警惕浮华主义的滋生。
例子：
一篇话题很简单的日志（Blog），老中看不懂，老洋读不通，你丫中英混着写就高档次（Modern）了么？要时刻自我批评（Self-Criticizing），警惕浮华主义（Ostentationism）的滋生。
This is either a big or a small problem. But it is no problem to understand that confidence is important for one to survive in its group, its industry and even in its life. Some people finds itself lack of confidence but others are not. I am for sure not the latter case. So I want to put myself a little note here to summarize what I brainstormed. and get ready for other suggestions.
So, it all comes to 3 simple questions as follows.
Without directly looking into my good old Oxford dictionary, the first interpretation of confidence that comes out of my head is that you believe in yourself when you speak and behave. You know what you are doing is right and what you are saying is correct. Lacking of confidence, in this case, is that you are afraid to talk and act because the uncertainty exists in your mind. It can be that you are involved in a challenging workplace and everyone seems to be smarter than you. So you are more convinced by others instead of convincing others. I guess this is my current situation.
You want to grow. Growing needs confidence. With confidence you can ask questions in depth, do certain give-it-a-try works and eventually gain knowledge on what you have heard and seen. Meanwhile, growing means getting familiar with the area you are in, so you will be convincing others more often. The biggest side effect of this is that you get to be even more confident, so the question becomes an answer to itself. It’s like investment that you invest your current amount of money to earn more.
One often finds itself confidence in particular area after some milestone it reached in its past. Such milestone can be a diplomas, a certificate or any remarkable award. It proves the skills the holder had in some ways. But that’s not always really true. I just had my road test for driving license last month, but now I am still not sure if I can take a car and give a ride on the express way. It seems like experience plays a more important role in establishing the confidence. Alrite, you take a deep breath and get your feet wet. That’s where experience starts from. Once you are comfortable with it, which means you have a minimum confidence, then invest it. Keep growing it until someone tells you you are over confident. Well, that’s another issue.
