Tibet Fest的偶遇

今天Seattle Center有Tibet Fest, 我看了关于藏民去 Nepal 避难的纪录电影 “The Refugee”, 很沉重，因为我在拉萨，并没有察觉藏民其实是生活在被占领的状态。这也许就像是以色列人，认为他们住在巴勒斯坦，是理所当然的。或者美国白人，认为留给印第安人一小块保留区，已经是很大的恩典了。

 然后又看了比较light-hearted 电影<The Cup>, 讲在Northern India 避难的小藏民，剃度为小喇嘛。又通过看世界杯的趣事，讲他们的日常生活。

出来之后，偶然结识一对年轻的夫妇，女方是第二代的韩国移民，男方是西藏出生，十九岁时徒步翻越喜马拉雅山，去Nepal 避难，然后辗转来到美国。碰巧的是，他就曾在电影《The Refugee》中提到的Tibetan Refugee School学习英语。

他很想回西藏看看，但是必须先获得美国绿卡，否则会被中国政府扣留。本来和Gene结婚后，他可以获得亲属绿卡，但是他两年前申请时，一个华裔的INS官员，拒绝了他的申请，还弄丢了他的所有材料。
他们夫妻用了两年时间重新搜集所有的材料，最近又再次递交绿卡申请。

终于理解了所谓的“无敌“

今天worship的时候，从kenya 来的Minister James讲的是Samuel 17:49-50, 大意是说，大卫用一块石头，就战胜了Philistine的巨人Goliath。
然后James问大家，谁是你的敌人？
我发现没有任何可以算做敌人。我认识的人，都是朋友，即使对那些我不赞同他的做法的人，我也从未视为敌人。因为从很小的时候，我就相信世上没有绝对的真理，每个人都有自己的行事准则。道不同不相为谋而已。

下午看《The Cup》, 其中讲经书的一段，Abbot说，“地面凸凹不平，会伤到脚，但是你不可能把皮革贴满地面；那么你怎么做呢，就是用皮革包裹自己的脚。
同样的，世界上有无数仇视你的人，你无力控制的事，你所能做的，只是忘记他们的存在，让心中没有一丝仇恨。”

正像James在worship结束前所说的，“ 我们信神，不能只为了开出充满各种愿望的shopping list, 也要主动的去听从神的话语。”也许神真的是要通过这两种不同的事件，来教导我。

最后说到真正的敌人，找来找去，其实是自己内心的Satan。 如何制止他打扰我心灵的平静？就是时刻提醒自己，神赐与我的生命，自有他的用意。我的一生，不是为了追求物质的诱惑，而是为了完成神的原意。

sincerity

今天在Timothy的fellowship查经，查到“马太福音（二一28～32）:两个儿子的比喻”, 比喻是说一个人有两个儿子。他叫他们到葡萄园里去作工。大儿子口头拒绝，后来又改变主意，就去了；小儿子口头答应去，却始终没去。

Sincerity，即言行一致，是做人最基本的信条，人在上帝面前，应当对自己的一切都坦白, 因为他已经知道一切, 有什么必要去欺骗神呢?
Sincerity也是最难达到的信条。一个人只有敢于承认自己的所有弱点，才能真正做到sincerity.

Siggraph is still cool

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Nikon D3 preview posted

Nikon has finally unveiled its first Full frame D-SLR, Nikon D3.
Here is a preview of the camera.
http://www.dpreview.com/previews/nikond3/

The most striking feature in the spec is "ISO 200 - 6400 (with boost up to ISO 25,600)".

Pity I have got rid of all my Nikon gears.

Kia SilverBrook

A patent search brought me to a list of over 20 patents, and 5 of them says Assignee: Silverbrook Research Pty Ltd. 
It makes me wonder what is Silverbrook Research. And here is what I found:

SilverBrook is a Sydney-based company that filed (and got granted) the most patents in Australia in 2006, although they have never disclosed how much licensing revenue they are getting. It's a start-up company in stealth mode for 10 years.
The founder Kia SilverBrook is a serial inventor that is good at coming up with new idea but not as good at bringing his ideas into reality. In the end, most of his inventions failed the market because of slow development or unfeasible economics.

Maybe someday, we will see SilverBrook's name on the cover of Fortune magazine.

For more information, because refer to this article.

Why I Have A Crush On You, UPS Man

you bring me all the
things I order
are never in a bad mood
always have a jaunty wave as you
drive away
look good in your brown shorts
we have an ideal uncomplicated
relationship
you're like a cute boyfriend with great legs
who always
brings the perfect present
(why, it's just what I've always wanted!)
and
then is considerate enough to go away
oh, UPS Man, let's hop in your clean
brown truck and elope !
ditch your job, I'll ditch mine
let's hit the road
for Brownsville
and tempt each other
with all the luscious brown foods —

roast beef, dark chocolate,
brownies, Guinness, homemade pumpernickel,
molasses cookies
I'll make you my mama's bourbon pecan pie
we'll give all
the packages to kind looking strangers
live in a cozy wood cabin
with a
brown dog or two
and a black and brown tabby
I'm serious, UPS Man. Let's
do it.
Where do I sign?


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"Why I Have A Crush On You, UPS Man" by Alice N. Persons, from Don't Be A
Stranger.

I have found the killer app

After a long and hard search, I have finally found the killer application that will transform the book publishing business.
All my efforts in this field will be seamed the together to achieve their full potential.

The world. Wait and SEE.

future of eBook? IPhone! but not in the US

After observing the new tide of cell phone novel (in case you haven't heard of the term, please read this wired article).

Similar trend is catching up in Finland and other European countries. So the natural guess is, IPhone is gonna be the next generation of media for novels, and ebook in general.

It will happen almost all around the world, except US.

Why no US, the birth country of IPhone? Because majority people in US still prefer driving in their daily commute, while people in other parts of the world uses public transportation.

That's why satellite radio thrives in US, but video broadcasting over 3G cell phone network will never become mainstream.

So unless the giant oil companies and automobile companies stop lobbying against public transportation, we will never see an IPhone novelist award in US.

The Chinese Novels Finds New Life Online

 

By Aventurina King 08.17.07 | 2:00 AM

Magic Sword's CEO, Kong Yi, stands behind an unreleased batch of internet novels.
Photo: Aventurina King

Zhang Muye is a thirty-something office worker who shows up to his Chinese investment company on time. Yet to millions of Chinese fans, he is the author of Ghost Blows Out the Light, an internet novel viewed more than 6 million times online. It has sold 600,000 copies in print.

"It's only when I am at work that I can write; when I'm at home, I can't," says Zhang. His novel, which narrates the travails of a gravedigger plagued by ghosts, has been acclaimed across China for its creativity, if not for its critical value. Zhang began writing Ghost to relax and kill time during slow mornings at his office. "I don't think of it as literature," Zhang says. "For me it's just a game."

It's a particularly lucrative game. Zhang is far from unique in China, where writing and reading novels online has become the hobby of an estimated 10 million youth. Yet unlike the music world, where MP3s are threatening to kill off CDs, online novels in China are helping physical books fly off the shelves. Print versions of popular online works sell by the millions and publishers, as well as authors, are cashing in.

"Novel," the top search term on China's biggest search engine, Baidu, yields thousands of Chinese literature websites. More than 100,000 amateurs shirk mundane duties to publish their tales of fantasy and love in installments on these platforms. A handful of anonymous web authors have seen their pageviews soar into the upper seven digits. When that happens, print publishers come knocking.

And it's not just print. Companies from almost every entertainment field, including films and video games, are joining forces, heralding the next generation of Chinese entertainment empires. The creative content of one internet novel can be sold to various national entertainment companies up to five times. A film version of Ghost Blows Out the Light is in pre-production and many popular internet novels have spawned TV series and online games.

"The multi-dimensional utilization of copyright in China has just begun," says Kong Yi, the CEO of Magic Sword, a literary website whose hit series, Killing Immortals, has sold over a million copies. Yi and a few friends first hoisted Magic Sword onto the web in 2001 as a literary hobby, using a few shaky borrowed servers. By 2002, it was ranked in the top 100 websites worldwide on Alexa.com. The borrowed servers threatened to keel over under the weight of the traffic.

In 2003, Magic Sword became a commercial endeavor. It raised $10,000 from investors, got new servers and finally became its creators' day job. Then the leading Chinese portal Tom.com bought Magic Sword, making Yi a millionaire. Magic Sword now has its own halogen-lit offices in a sprawling forest of glassed buildings just outside Beijing.

Magic Sword is now losing a few thousand dollars every year. Confident of future success, Kong Yi compensates for this loss with the money from the acquisition by Tom.com, supplemented by income from ads, fees paid by readers and a string of copyright sales. (As with other Chinese literature sites, anyone can publish stories and most of the content is free, but there is a fee to read the most popular novels.)

Yi's ambitions don't stop there. "I would like to make the company into an entertainment corporation, one that would include a publishing, movie production and video game company," with internet novels at its nucleus, Kong Yi says.

In a virtual world where a company's profit rests on easily reproducible text, the scramble for control over creative content is fierce. Copy protection is almost irrelevant: No matter what technology protects an online novel, pirates looking to siphon traffic to their own site will simply type the content into another document and upload it.

To keep afloat, companies indulge in their share of borderline activities. One regular task of novel website employees is stealing the authors and the staff of other novel websites, according to an industry insider. Last year, Magic Sword sued website Source of Chinese for posting a free link to Killing Immortals. In an interview, the defendant denied knowing at the time that it was infringing copyright. The court case was settled privately.

The website Source of Chinese is the online platform for the success of Zhang's Ghost Blows Out the Light. It is known within the Chinese publishing industry for its financial muscle and commercial aggressiveness, and commands 80 percent of the market, with more than 80,000 authors, according to Luo Li, the company's business and publishing manager.

Seated before a venti-size Starbucks coffee cup in Shanghai's shiny and bustling Ruggles Mall, Li laid out the workings of his company's success.

From the thousands of novel blogs on Source of Chinese, the site's editors select a few that are good enough to sell in the VIP section.

In the print world, book length is limited by the cost of paper, printing and distribution. On the internet, where production costs are close to zero, length equals profit. VIP readers pay a couple of cents for every thousand characters (a print novel generally has 250,000 characters). Contracted authors are paid seven to 12 dollars per thousand characters, depending on their clout. Zhang Muye gets 12 dollars per thousand.

"Some writers can write 20,000 to 30,000 characters (20 to 30 A4-size pages) in two to three hours per day," says Li. "In three months, if they go fast, they can write more than a million characters. The model is very simple: The more you write, the more money you make."

Consequently, more and more internet authors now prefer web to print publishing. To promote sales, publishing companies often require the author to keep a novel's ending exclusive to its print version. In the past, this had resulted in the online organized demonstrations of angry readers who felt cheated into spending money on the print version. Now, according to Li, the web gives online authors enough confidence and financial support to refuse print-exclusive endings.

Within China's communist dictatorship, this gradual slide of the publishing and entertainment industries toward the web clearly carries political implications. The internet offers a boundless space, relatively sheltered from the rigid control of government censors. The question is whether this degree of expressive freedom will penetrate into the real world.

For the moment, it seems not. Owing to the official ban on superstition, before Ghost Blows Out the Light could be sold in print, Zhang had to go back and erase every single appearance of a supernatural being in his novel.

Limitation can be a good thing

I always find the most productive period of my time was on a coast-to-coast flight, where I am locked up in my seat for 5 hours, and there is no Internet or phone calls.

I have no choice but to work on my laptop before it ran out of battery.

 

Then I had to retreat to a notebook (paper notebook), where the only thing I can do is writing. That opens up all the free thought in my mind, because I won't be distracted by spell checkers, don't have to waste my brain cell choosing which file to open or what font to use to write down my ideas.

 

I only wish my flight is not emitting so much greenhouse gas.    

关于信仰

I recently realize that the world is wide open and there are essentially infinitely number of choices that I can make. I need to look for a guidance for what to do. And I have found the answer in God.

 

神是宽容的，他不会拒绝任何人，哪怕是那些曾经被推到地狱的边缘，甚至被它的火焰灼伤的人。 

上帝在我最困难的时候，在我人生的谷底，帮助和解救了我。并赐予我一生最为宝贵的财富。我没有理由再怀疑他的存在。既然可以对流星许愿，为什么要拒绝神的好意？这个世界有太多无法控制的事情，相信神，把自己交付给他，才能得到心灵的宁静。

 

 一个没有信仰的世界，是荒芜的。在那个荒芜的世界里，素不相识的人，永远都躲在怀疑甚至敌意的面具之后。在神面前，向善的愿望才能跨越一切人性的壁垒。

以前我看到硬币上写的"In God we trust." 就理解成"We trust in God"的倒装。但其实，这句话或许也蕴含着另一层意义，就是在神的面前，我们因为共同的信仰，而达到相互的信任。

 

在神的启示下，我终于找到的生命的意义：用有生之年的每一天报答神的恩典。

 

最后要说明的，是我所说的信仰，并非Bush为到达他的政治目的而preach的信仰。 我所说的信仰，就像其他许多事情一样，是一件完全属于拥有信仰的那个人的事。神不属于任何组织，不用世俗的权威去推行它的道路。所以相信神和相信教会（或者其他任何世俗的权威）是截然不同的事。如果神看到凡间无数的教派，甚至同一个教派的不同教会之间的利益冲突，一定会很遗憾的说，“他们没有得到我的本意。”

 

关于死亡

人的根本问题，在于对死亡的恐惧。
你知道它就在终点那里，但是不知道终点会在什么时候，以何种方式突然来到。这种等待让人焦躁不安，而做出非理性的事情： 比如官员腐败，学者造假，无止境的消耗自然资源，战争（离婚是一场小规模的战争），选Bush上台，选Bush连任。

人的根本动力，也来自于对死亡的恐惧。
无论你多么长寿，生命这场游戏终会结束。正因为这样，每个人都想在死之前在这个世界上留下一点什么。于是要生孩子，创造戏剧，文学，音乐，探索自然。

一半结冰的灌头装泰山鲜草蜜

大华减价的时候，我从那里买了一箱泰山鲜草蜜，放在冰箱里。可冰箱的储藏室温度太低了，一不小心，有一半已经冻成了冰块。

喝这样冻了一半的罐装饮料，就像人生的很多事情一样，是一种考验：
你没办法一口把它全倒进嘴里，也不知道它什么时候才会融化。只能时不时的拿起来倒一下，才知道冰块融化了多少，自己能喝到多少。


正好像热恋中的人，要不时问问对方的心意，才知道何时能结婚，
又好像结了婚，但是两地分居的人，要不时问问对方的毕业论文做的怎样了，才知道何时才能重新团聚，
还好像办离婚的人，要不时的催一催律师，才知道何时可以不用再付赡养费。


对于俺这个急性子的人，要活在这个充满长度未知的等待的世界里，只能试着学会从积极的角度来看这类事情: 说到底，生命就是每天醒来，查看一下自己离死亡还有多远。所以急于知道一个对自己不利的结果，是没有什么好处的。

最后回到泰山鲜草蜜，无论你等多久，拿起来喝多少次，它的结局都是一样：回收箱里的一个空罐。

The powerless words

To balance what I just said about the power of words, I need to point out when words become so weak that nobody will pay attention to it.
There is saying from someone: "You can get by on charm for the first 5 minutes, then you'd better know something."

So knowledge is what gives words power. If I didn't know what we can do, and how we do them, no one would listen to me, no matter how good my communication skills are.

The power of words

Watching the heated debates between Democratic candidates, I found it's very crucial to say the right words at the right time.
A minute of hesitation will cause one to lose moment and even cost him/her the entire battle.

This morning's conference call, I find myself steering the meeting and eventually getting the results we wanted. During that process, I realize how easy it is to fail a meeting if the moderator is not deliberately focusing on the final goal. Again, words played an important role. I had to steer the course without making other attendees feel uncomfortable.