1. I am disappointed that we couldn’t go back to China this year. I had hoped that I could bring Benjamin and Maria there for the first time, and have some quality time with my family;
2. After work, on my way to the train station today, there were kids giving out fortune cookies to commuters. They were hired by American Airline. The message inside the cookie says American Airline offers direct flight from O’Hare to Shanghai now. Fortune cookie is considered a Chinese thing here in the US. But I personally never heard of it before I left China and came to the US in 1995;
3. Fast Food Nation is great reading so far. Well written, well researched, and thought-provoking;
4. WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySql, and PHP) with WordPress didn’t work very well. I tested PHP 5.1.2, PHP 4.4.2, Apache 1.3, MySql 5.0, and MySql 4.1 on Windows XP SP2. And I could not make PHP and MySql talk to each other;
5. I learned today that DotNetNuke (DNN) is originally based on IBuySpy. That’s interesting because I used IBuySpy as a base for an ASP.Net web application I wrote for training management in 2003;
6. Fedora Core 2 with Chinese interface is interesting. If I remember correctly, Ctrl – Space Bar toggles between Chinese and English entry systems. It has Pinyin support. I haven’t figured out how to enter punctuation marks for the Chinese entry system yet;
7. VIM is great. Yeah, I am a VI / VIM bigot. I love VIM because of the productivity increase, the feeling of you are in control, the joy of actually looking forward to typing, the smart search, the powerful commands, and so much more. I use VIM most of the time, except when I am on Solaris. I confess I don’t know Emacs. And I’ve seen people devote the same kind of passion to it. That makes me want to try it. But I don’t know how much time I want to invest on learning Emacs. Like VI, I suspect one has to be at a certain skill level with Emacs to appreciate its beauty;
8. Got to organize my digital pictures better: proper titles, good descriptions and comments, tags, and albums, so I don’t forget what the pictures are about 5, 10, or 20 years from now;
9. I’ve never tried IRC Chat. Did I miss out a lot? Alas, it may not be a bad thing. I’ve spent way too much time with my computer already;
10. I will mail out the books to my readers soon, hopefully this weekend.