The Ji Village News

季庄新闻–Haidong Ji’s Blog

So far, my fledging consulting/training business is running well, dear reader. I did a lot of travel in the last month or so: San Jose, CA, Rockville, MD, and San Antonio, TX, respectively. Travel will be part of my work, so I need to manage it well. I really appreciate the support from my better half. As far as I am concerned, she simply is THE best woman in the world.

When I was a white collar salary man, as far back as one month ago, I felt like I was a little hamster in a big spinning wheel: the faster you move, the faster it spins, and there is no ending in sight. As an independent for more than a month, once again, I was very busy: it is a bit like the game of whack-a-mole. As soon as one thing is done (or half-done), the other pops up. But overall, it is quite different from working in corporate world: I feel more real, and I became more aware of my state of mind and my surroundings.

This is my limited impression of course, since I just got started. It is hard to say which way is better, and different people have different needs and perspectives. If things do not work out, I fully expect myself going back to re-join the corporate rat race.

I meant to write something about my Chinese New Year, but never got the time to do it. Instead, I will share some pictures of the dumplings I made. This was the first time I made them on my own. They were quite good, if I do say so myself. I think my son enjoyed it. For whatever reason, there is a special satisfaction when your child tells you that s/he likes the food you enjoyed when you were little. I have to remember not to add too much soy sauce next time. The filling was a bit too salty, fairly typical of my cooking.

Wrapping and filling

Before they were boiled. The ones I made were ugly, the ones mommy made looked nice

Finished product with raw garlic sauce. Yay!

I made some meatballs with the leftover filling

Finally, my son enjoys the food daddy made!

Sometimes you want to know how long you Sql Server has been running. There are a number of ways to find that out.

You can start from Sql Server error log. Go all the way to the beginning of your currect error log, assuming you have not recycled the error log manually, and look at the time stamp there. That is the time when Sql Server was last started. Note that Sql Server start time may not necessarily be consistent with server start time. There is the lag, of course, since Sql Server has to wait until the operating system is up first, assuming it is set as auto start. More importantly, it is possible to restart Sql Server service without rebooting the system.

To get it programmatically, you can run this script. It checks the creation time of your tempdb, since tempdb gets reinitialized every time Sql Server is started.

-- Sql Server 2000 and Sql Server 2005
select crdate from sysdatabases where name = 'tempdb'
-- Sql Server 2005
select create_date from sys.databases where name = 'tempdb'

To make it more intuitive, you can run the script below, which will tell you how many days and hours Sql Server has been running. Minutes and seconds information will be truncated. If you need that, modify the script to get it yourself.

-- Sql Server 2000 and Sql Server 2005
select 'Sql Server Service has been running for about '
+ cast((datediff(hh, crdate, getdate()))/24 as varchar(3)) + ' days and '
+ cast((datediff(hh, crdate, getdate())) % 24 as varchar(2)) + ' hours'
from sysdatabases where name = 'tempdb'

-- Sql Server 2005
select 'Sql Server Service has been running for about '
+ cast((datediff(hh, create_date, getdate()))/24 as varchar(3)) + ' days and '
+ cast((datediff(hh, create_date, getdate())) % 24 as varchar(2)) + ' hours'
from sys.databases where name = 'tempdb'

In this post, I mentioned that you can restore a Sql Server backup file to a Sql Server 2005 server.

You cannot do it the other way, though. A backup taken on Sql Server 2005 cannot be restored on a Sql Server 2000 server. If you try, this is the likely message you will get:

Msg 3169, Level 16, State 1, Line 1
The backed-up database has on-disk structure version 611. The server supports version 539 and cannot restore or upgrade this database.

时间过得真快，转眼间儿子的中文一年级就要结束了。今天下午，经过软硬兼施，甚至不惜动用金钱和玩具的诱惑之后，终于又把儿子拖到了中文学校。忙里偷闲，我就在学校走廊里给儿子所”憎恶”的学校写感谢信。

我们住在橡树公园，以我们的了解，周围没有好的中文学校。去年夏天，经过一个熟人的介绍，我们参加了瑞华中文学校的野餐活动。郭伯秋校长和韩晶老师给了我们很好的学校介绍。我们就决定让我们在公立学校读二年级的儿子来上中文一年级的周末学校。

一年下来，我感觉儿子的中文进步不小，虽然想教他中文并不容易，有时也会没有时间。我本人很欣赏教科书作者马立平的方法：先教识字，后学拼音，以及强调多读多认等。希望儿子在成年之前能掌握中文，听说读写都会。当然我明白如果我不帮他的话，这个希望是不会实现的。我的教学要注意潜移默化，寓教于乐，使他学得有兴趣，不至于枯燥无味。在这方面我要下大力气。

非常感谢校长、校委会、义工、和老师的辛勤、爱心和奉献。我基本上每周都会来，目睹了学校的许多工作，如教学、管理、监督、社区活动安排等。我知道这一切都需要很多的时间和精力，并且很多人都是在做义工或只有不多的报酬，所以我非常感激。我感觉我们的社区活动也做得有声有色，我们全家都很欣赏去年秋天的中秋晚会。前几个星期学校又代理家长办护照和签证，我本人虽然没用上，但我知道这给很多家长帮了不少忙。

我也要感谢一年级的刘雁老师。刘老师的细心、耐心和鼓励给我们留下了很深的印象。总之，非常感谢瑞华学校的校委会、校长、老师和工作人员，谢谢！

Above is a thank-you letter I wrote yesterday to my son’s weekend Chinese school. We felt that the board, principal, teachers, and volunteers worked so hard and contributed so much to the communities here. They did an absolutely fantastic job. We are very much grateful to their work.