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Tired of “history | more“? After you’ve type a bunch of commands under PowerShell window, simply press [F7] to trigger the history window. Never thought this thing can be so interactive. =)

喝了几口凉稀饭，开始不停地打嗝。打得不是那种饱嗝，是那种停不下来的嗝。连续了一个多小时，十秒钟一次，打得很郁闷。ZJP 说有一个解决办法是：站起来，弯腰，抬头，喝水。电光石火一瞬间，一个 S 造型的芙蓉动作出现在我的脑海。我甩！

基于对事实的尊重，我打开“录音机”想把打嗝的声音录下来，然后统计一下打嗝的间隔时间。左顾右盼放下手头的活等着，结果录了三、四分钟竟然一个嗝都没打出来。关了录音机之后到现在的半个多小时也没打过一个出来。神奇的录音机竟然治好了这“千古年来的疑难杂症”！不信？你也试试。

Looking for something cool? SoundPRT has proposed a new campus transit system for Microsoft called Personal Rapid Transit. Don’t get confused. It is not a skytrail in some theme park. It is to replace current shuttle service and tries to reduce the driving time on the road, to allow employees get to their meeting locations faster.

I’ve got another request to be added as a friend on Facebook. I joined Facebook last year. Now I have 66 friends so far. I do couple of checks everyday on Facebook and even get updated through SMS on my cellphone. According to the website itself,

Facebook launched in February of 2004 and the website now has over 19 million active users across over 47,000 regional, work-related, collegiate and high school networks

Here are few things I like about this social network website:

1. People are real.
   Everyone on Facebook has to get either a college email or a work email in order to register, where obtaining the college or work email is already an identification process per se. Therefore people to be added are not just a ID or nickname. This is very much different from forum like communities.
2. Efficient user classification.
   There are two types of classifications on Facebook, which are networks and groups. The concept of network is pretty much like community in expo.live.com, that only people with specific email can be in the network defined by the domain of that email. Whereas for groups, which are less formal than networks, people can join together by interests or purely no topic.
3. Extensibility
   Facebook provides a light library of APIs for developers to re-use the existing information. Any Facebook application redirect the user to the authentication gateway on the official site. After user is identified, the application runs on the third-party website or client computer can obtain necessary information of that user, such as friends list, to do something like Friends Visualizer .

But, Facebook does not really rock. It just manages the friend list in an interesting way. What I can’t imagine, is that if someone can come up with a combination of all three websites: Facebook, Douban (see previous post) and expo.live.com. That will be interesting.

BTW, the support of international characters in Facebook takes points off a lot.

最近老是不务正业，稀罕上了 PowerShell。随便打了几个脚本来耍耍，结果无心插柳柳成荫，发现可以用来简化工作中的一些问题。Lead 很高兴，问我有没有空把这个东西走一个小讲座，给团队的人上上课。小的一新人，受宠若惊。三人行必有我师，公司在这方面做的很好。只消能够提高工作效率，便可拿来提倡和传播。然后，Lead 说让我去跟团队里面的几位长老跑跑腿，精进一下测试构架方面的东西，自然是让洒家满心欢喜地给答应了。喝了两口小水，回办公室就把几个小虫给则个了，得意洋洋的表情很遭人呼哧。听说大老板最近在清华整了个名誉学位，还打算在国内扎几个营。小王同志，好好整。改明咱也混个小 Lead 当当，弄辆小车开开，还必须得是 ABS 防暴死的。

嘿，瞧这小算盘打的，噼里啪啦乱响。天黑了，白日梦也该醒了。去公司厨房寻摸几听百事可乐，回家炒菜吃米饭去……

It’s such a romantic place.

 

A little story from one of my friends about the front door of his home.

Day 1:

It is very annoying that every time I go back home, I have to insert the key into the door lock in order to get in. How come it doesn’t know that I am the person who lives here? I will get into my home anyway, so the step of opening the door by the key is really unnecessary. No, I don’t like the smartcard and fingerprint neither. I just want to do nothing. OK, I’m going to disable this feature, so It should be always open to me.

Day 2:

I just got everything in my home stolen! How come my front door let others to get in? It is so insecure! It should know I am the only person who lives here! No one should be allowed to be here. What? I need to turn on the feature I just disabled? But I don’t like that feature. It’s annoying. OK, I hope the company making that damn door hear what I am saying. If they are not going to improve this door, I am going to switch to another door product that doesn’t require any authentication to get in and also disables others from getting in.

Sigh…

之前删了下面的一些话，是因为想到 Seven 曾经评价我是自卑与自信并重，生怕贴出来再有人跳出来给我扣一个自恋的帽子。后来想想，打自己的字，让别人说去吧。

十几年前养过一只很小的小狗，叫多多。我很喜欢跟多多玩。有一次它想爬到沙发上，可是沙发太高，它爬不上来。每次都在快到达上面的时候掉下去。多多很沮丧，不过它还是决定做最后一次尝试。在它马上又要滑下去的时候，我用手推它——朝它滑下去的方向。多多很着急，就更加用力。结果我一松手，它就冲到了沙发上。人也一样，经常都要去攀爬新的高点。我相信，挫折和打击比鼓励可以更加促进一个人的成长。我明白，并不是什么时候都会有鼓励这种东西存在。人生苦短，我们没有时间去感慨去追忆然后前进。只有更快地赶超自我，因为自我才是最大的敌人，其它一切如空气。

遇到新的阻力，有些人兴奋，有些人沮丧。世界其实就是由这两种人组成。属于哪一种人，完全取决于自己。我有一些很有想法的朋友，我看得出来他们是今后的精英。遇到这样的朋友，从某些角度来说我会很害怕，因为我看到的是竞争力。但我很庆幸我能看到这样实力的人群存在，而有这样的朋友确实很让人开心。每天早晨醒来，想到有这样一批未来精英的存在，都会无比兴奋。安排好时间，仔细策划每一步，然后解决每一步遇到的问题，他们步步为赢。起点在哪里并不重要，重要的事速度和质量。有了速度和质量，就可以达到既定的目标。

还有一批人，他们看不到时间的存在。这些人绝大部分属于消费者。这是好事，有这些人存在才会有庞大的市场。他们会很感兴趣什么手机最“In”，什么相机最“Out”，还有最新的软件和其它数码产品。他们趋向于拥有最新产品的那种短暂快乐。而精英的任务，就是赶在他们的兴趣消逝之前推出更好的产品，然后再促进新一轮的消费。当我看到铺天盖地的数码产品的广告，我看到的是一个个工程师、项目管理者、市场策划、销售，还有售后服务的精英们，很让人恐惧，然后转为兴奋。这些市场的主导者们每天都会精神充沛，获得最新的市场情报，发布新的产品，制定新的价格。这是商业的战争，这是战争的艺术；我喜欢这样的战争，我喜欢这样的艺术。

如果你还没有开始准备加入这场战争的话，请开始认真准备一下。如果你不知道如何开始的话，风险投资家盖 川崎（Guy Kawasaki）有一些答案：

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! 😛 ) 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.