Here’s a couple recent good ones. Be sure to read the comments, which are especially thoughtful.

Bad Habits:
http://www.lostlaowai.com/blog/general/the-seven-habits/

Good Habits:
http://womenlearnthai.com/index.php/the-habits-of-highly-effective-expats/

And another interesting one on learning languages:
http://womenlearnthai.com/index.php/let%E2%80%99s-talk-thai-how-the-brain-learns/

Anyone have a post about 7 ways to avoid doing homework?

Part of the assignment (I think) was to find out about the poem, so I found a web site (in Chinese), with a brief article, etc. For fun, I also ran the page through Google Translate. It’s really funny. (I hope the link works). It seemingly turns it into a modern "news" article with the impression of terrorists, and depression affecting the economy, etc.

Here’s the poem in Chinese and pinyin:

宿建德江  孟浩然

Sù Jiàndé Jiāng    Mèng Hàorán

移舟泊烟渚, 日暮客愁新。
yí zhōu bó yān zhǔ, rìmù kè chóu xīn.

野旷天低树, 江清月近人。
yě kuàng tiān dī shù, jiāng qīng yuè jìnrén.

Maybe I’ll attempt a translation if I get feedback from people

I have no relationship with them whatsoever and receive nothing from mentioning their site.

http://www.spacejock.com/yWriter5.html

There’s a much better write up of the software, and how it helps organize your writing along many dimensions at the same time here:
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/ywriter-word-processor-for-creative-writing/

午 饭 （lunch）

Afternoon on Tuesday:

While rice was cooking, I sliced up a large potato and a large onion and steamed them for a bit. Also added a medium carrot and green pepper.

I used a 50g package of powdered coconut milk and water, together with a package of curry. Directions said to mix curry and coconut milk, then boil the vegetables, but I didn’t trust that, so I steamed them for about 10 minutes before putting them into the curry sauce to finish boiling/cooking together.

I also added cranberries (they go great with curry!), and a sliced apple.

Well, the result was fairly good, but overall the meal was a little sweet. Also, I couldn’t really taste the cranberry, the raisins were overpowering, even though it was about equal mixes of the two berries. So, next time only one or the other. Perhaps the apple contributed too, but it was a subtle taste, so I don’t think that was the major problem.

We’ll see how it tastes as a leftover tomorrow.

So, I’ve scanned the first two pages of my upcoming semester book. You can read the Chinese here:

http://china.panlogicsoftware.com/ocr/Chapter16.pdf

Hopefully in a few days, Google will have scanned and OCR’ed it. Will let you know!

This guy works at Google (near the top, btw) and normally writes about optimization, but this small blog entry deals with the OLPC XO program, so I thought it would be interesting regardless.

Of course, if you’re into fast browsers <smile> then perhaps all of the other blog entries are interesting too.

http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2008/12/26/sharing-olpc-xo/

Please let me know.

I started by dry roasting a single layer of large pine nuts in a 14” pan. That usually leaves enough to put away in the fridge, and still have some for the current dish. You have to watch this carefully, as the nuts will go from white to “burnt-through” black very quickly, and taking away from the flame (I use gas here) doesn’t help because the pan is hot!  Fortunately, they start to glisten early on, and you can stir and scoop and flip them over repeatedly to keep from scorching them. It usually takes a couple minutes for this.

At the same time, I usually start the water heating, although with gas, it heats quickly, and one could wait until the nuts were finished to start it.

I peeled about 6 pieces of garlic (about 1/3 head) and sliced into thick slices. Thin slices burn, and also loose flavor, I think. I wiped out the pan from the pine nuts, to remove little bits of nut (so it wouldn’t have a burnt taste), and then added some olive oil, and the garlic slices. I washed up about 4 green onion stalks, breaking then in to pieces by hand (not cut). This leaves both small and larger “tubes” of onion, giving a good range of taste in my opinion.

When I started cooking the garlic, I also had the water boiling already (so, I guess start it with the roasting … you can always turn it down), and I added enough elbow macaroni for a couple meals. I’m using a small jar of coriander pesto, and I decided to use the whole jar, hence the extra noodles. It makes two meals, and I don’t have to cook up noodles, etc. for the second meal this way.

After onion and garlic have cooked to a nice brown garlic and somewhat clear onions (translucent I guess), then I added the pesto to cook a bit. I also added a small handful of the pine nuts, and a little extra “spaghetti spice” from a jar, since I like to improvise. I learned THAT from my wife! It’s a good way to learn what spices will do to the food, as long as you don’t add too much!  (Been there, done that! 8^) )

When the noodles are finished, drain in a colander and shake to get out extra water. Wash the colander immediately, because the starch from the noodles is hard to clean off if not done right away!

Put the noodles in the large pan with the pesto, garlic, onions, nuts, etc. and stir it up until all the noodles are well coated. You could add a little butter and a little milk but I didn’t do that this time.

Oh! almost forgot the cranberries!  I added them before the pesto, and let them simmer with the garlic and onion.

Finally, I cut up some small squares of a soft creamy cheese (don’t know the name since I threw the outside package away a week ago). That turned out to be a welcome surprise. It gave unexpected creamy and a little sweetness to the taste at times. The cranberries also gave occasional tastes of, well, cranberry. I learned that trick in a restaurant (that I was eating at) about 20 years ago. They really add taste to both pesto and curried dishes.

The dish was exceptionally good. Comments?

The second is the “famous” Google Adsense ones. Hopefully the two can both be used at the same time… Again, an experiment for now. Let me know in the comment section.

Lastly, regarding comments. I get a number of spam link attempts every day. I also get new user registrations. I tend to send out an email to any newly registered person within a week or two to see if they are “real”, and not just looking for ad links. I don’t generally allow any links in comments, in case the people placing these comments actually read this, and want to save themselves some time. Judging from the “names”, etc. I’m guessing they don’t read too much English.

I’ve been having more dreams where I will be using Chinese, etc. I can feel the difference in my thinking (even in dreaming) when switching to Chinese, etc. It’s rather interesting.

One movie I watched recently was an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie about cloning. They had something (I forget the exact name) called something like “c-Pet”, etc. which stood for a cloned pet. The idea was that you could take a sample from your pet, and with their “patented” brain scan and transfer technology, have a “new” version of the pet within a couple hours.

Today, I noticed this picture about a real cloned puppy (cost $155,000) (yes, US Dollars), here: http://abcnews.go.com/Business/popup?id=2165602 .

Boca Raton, Fla., couple are the proud owners of a cloned puppy, The Associated Press reports. Nina and Edgar Otto paid $155,000 to have a San Francisco biotech firm create a clone from the DNA of their dog, Lancelot, who died last year. The new dog has been named Lancelot Encore.
(ABC)

I hope someone i nthe news follows the story a few years. I’ll be interested to see if they’ve gotten past the problem with premature aging in clones (since you often start with a mature source, already aged). Of course, I don’t actually know what I’m talking about, so feel free to tell me that in the comments!

What other movie strategies can people suggest for language study?

However, as you can see, the writing isn’t nearly as good as on the tablet. The resolution isn’t as good (using the small 4”x6” tablet that I picked up in the US last summer), so it’s hard to write smoothly and legibly. Ask my daughter what the Chinese says

This also tests out setting categories and tags, with a future posting date and time. I don’t know if it will be my local time (UTC+8 China) or server local time.

The first site migration failed to migrate any of the email aliases (names), so I wasn’t getting any email to panlogicsoftware.com that originated from outside of the box.

To make it a little less obvious, I did get emails that the new hardware box sends out by itself. Since it controls emails, I guess it has a “special” status for these things!  haha

It’s been working for a couple hours now, so hopefully within 48 hours (max time for DNS record propogation), it will be acessable by everyone.

Let me know if you have any problems.

Thanks!