Haven't updated my blog for a while, make a small bubble here.

The Connecticut landscape in late spring is green, with sporadical decorations of flowers in various color. It's truly beautiful. In this sense, California is left behind.

Mozart Symphony No. 40 is very good, I listened it for a while today.

I met with different kinds of people here, these people make this world versatile. In most characters, I am mediocre compared to these exceptional people, with only very few exceptions. I am grateful to know them.

 

 

People may wonder, the story has finished, why here is another (3)?

Well, the story hasn't finished, actually.

I was glad when I submited my proposal for a chair, with a chlorine icon fabric in the seating, three unique choices for the system/trim, hand rest and the back.

And they started to make such a chair.

After three weeks, the dealer left a voice message to me, saying that the chair is ready for delivery. However, after 2 hours he told me that the manufacturer actually made a mistake! They mistakenly put another icon fabric "Zinc", rather than chlorine icon fabric I have submitted for.

So, everyone can see that this complicated pattern choice even puzzled the manufacturer themselves.

For me there is truly no difference between these two colors, so enjoying another 10% off, I finally accepted this chair.

And, the story ends NOW.

 

Last time we talked about the choices of office chair. For the first time in my life, I know the composition of a chair can be so versatile. The manufacturer provides over 10 chair lines, and the dealer recommended 2 lines. That's great as it reduced 5 fold.

 

However, within one line there are so many other choices. Following the dealer's definition, a chair consists of four major components: the seating, the system/trim, the hand rest and the back. Each components have many choices. For example, the manufacturer provides seating choices such as: icon fabric (a fabric with some abstract symbols on it), cashmere vinyl (artificial leather like), esoteria fabric (a fabric with many random crossing lines), interval fabric (some cluster like patterns), tellure fabric (only one pattern). To make things worse, each fabric category has many subchoices. For example, icon fabric has Chlorine (blue), Fluorine (light yellow), Sulfur (dark yellow), Phosphorus (yellow green), Helium (purple), Copper (red + yellow), Mercury (light blue), Wolfram (blue + green), Zinc (not very much black), Iodine (red), Argon (not much black), Carbon (black, very black), Cobalt (black between Zinc and Carbon).

 

Anyway, the good news is that the company simply adapted their choices to elements. Fortunately I work in an industry related to drug development, where people who invent drugs will typically give a very strange name for each chemical or biological components, and one or more marketing names. These names, well, sometimes I do think they are arbitrarily made or rather, via a voting system.

 

So is it good or bad to have so many choices? In order to choose the right color pattern, I became panic, and hesitated for several days until I had any idea of what shall I start to look for. Many colors or patterns doesn't matter to me, as they are all ok for me. But, so many patterns/combinations are just there to offer, so that I must decide what to choose combination from many candidates, while fundamentally they don't seemingly have much difference.

 

Finally I was able to choose one combination, not by random but by my logic + gut. And this story ends temporarily.

 

We all know that one critical factor to determine our future, in addition to butterfly/random effects, is the choice. In our personal life, we choose who to be a partner and marry, we choose whether or not to give birth to a child, we choose for whom to work or how to start our own business, we choose when and where to complete our education, etc. In our business life, choice plays an even bigger role to determine the consequences. Presidents and policy makers choose what is the rule of governing the country. Justices choose whether or not this rule comply with the constitution. Professors choose who to be given tenure, choose what topic to apply for funding. Businessmen choose the company's strategy and what to go to the market. Etc. etc. etc. All these choices make a complicated network, one affects the other. And last, in the movie "the Matrix", what Neo chose will ultimately determine the entire human race.

 

It's obvious that the number of choices cannot be too small. If no choice or only one choice, this article will be nullified. If given only one choice, people simply go. However, the problem here is: what will happen if we have too many choices? In the following entries I will use an example of chair purchasing to illustrate the "problem" of too many choices and discuss the implication of this phenomena.

We need communication to satisfy our desires, different layers of communication can be found from intimate relationship, family, working, social to general public, etc.

Intimate relationship forms the inner most cycle. If managed well, this relationship will give us the utmost happiness. Yet there are a large portion of people remain single even in their 30s, men and women. Hereby I define single as not having a long and stable partnership, though in common law, they are still single.

 

Here I would like to explore one reason why people don't feel lonely enough to fasten establishing a relationship no matter at any cost.

Most people devote their efforts between work and family life, an ordinary job allows people to work during weekdays business hour and return home at night and weekends. So basically there are two places: work and family. If a people is single, they tend to remain oneself at home. So how can they satisfy their social needs? One outlet is at working place. If the nature of their job is communicating with people, such as a sales or managerial person, they will have plenty of chances to talk and communicate with various customers or clients. One recruiter even told me that she feels talking too much during the work and while returning at home, she doesn't even like to talk to her husband at more.

 

Others may argue that working communications are far different than intimate relationship, one cannot substitute with another. I would agree this argument. Besides sexual life, communication quality is unmatchable compared with one and another. However, one point is: healthy communications somehow depend on a business flavor to make everyone happy, rather than relying on our inner desire to abusing our ego. It is called "delayed pleasure", and is achieved by delaying our immediate desire. If delaying this pulse for a while, one will gain greater pleasure at a later point. For example, consider such a rewarding system like giving one candy to a hungry person, if he can withstand his desire to consume it after an hour, he will be rewarded another candy.

 

I was astonished about the parking fee here, it's even higher than USC in downtown Los Angeles. Americans like driving one car alone for commuting. Although not fuel efficient and environmentally friendly, it symbolizes independence and freedom. This topic has been subject to some debate on how to improve this situation via developing a well maintained public transportation system. The underlying rationale is the fact that dealistically everyone has his/her own schedule and perhaps people feel happier to drive according to their own schedules.

 

However, here I try to write something beyond freedom, that is realistic. The city where I am living now is a small town, so many trees are nearby. Everyday most people drive to downtown, they pay very high parking costs. If their status is married couple with a stable job, they tend to live in a single family house. However, because single family houses are usually located in surburbs and disbersed in a very broad range, it seems not economically efficient to build a public transportation service extending to most houes. As an extreme case, some colleagues even live in the place where there is no snow plowing service on major public road, or their household water directly comes from local underground water. The reason is that the place is considered to be "unincorporated" to one city range.

 

It seems unimaginable to typical city dwellers, as we assume that cities cover everywhere and utility services are universal. However, with the development of urban sprawl starting at 1970's, thanks to the car system, it's practically hard for buses to pick up people from "remote" areas. Therefore, one solution might be to construct more environmentally friendly cars, rather than expanding the buses system.

 

People may argue that a combination of using the car to travel from home to a public station, and then use the buses to work. At first glance, it's working. However, with today's busy schedule and again the issue of parking, it is less practical to drive directly to working places. In summary, unlike large cities like New York, east Asian cities such as Shanghai, Hong Kong, Toyko etc., cars are essential in American's everyday life.

 

 

Arrived in Conneticut for over one week. Many people say that there are tremendous difference between California and New England, but why I don't feel any significant difference? I even feel better coz there are many people, cars and buildings in the downtown.

I don't think there is much difference at least between east coast and west coast, somehow Texas might be different.

 

Tired to settle down, but also excited.

 

High school is a very important era so far, many people become very good friends later on. Even after over 10 years, we still keep contacting with each other.

We have a lot of pressure on competitions, math, physics and chemistry. Somehow I do remember that I spent a lot of time on chemistry.

But we do have a lot of fun together!

 

 

Recently I visited American Northeast, for example, a small town 2hrs away from NYC. What does 2hrs mean? It's the driving distance from SD to LA. In my opinion, SD is a quiet place for retirement. I apologize that I may be too extreme.

 

Nothing there, only some traditional architectures illustrating its 300 yrs history. Ironically, from some resources did I learn that compared to those buildings symbolized as roots of higher education in England 800 yrs ago, they imitated but unsuccessfully.

 

Yet, it's a great place! Touring around the central quad reminded me about the central quad in a Univ. in Boston. The cold atmosphere made me feel like in Shanghai, activated my neurons otherwise would be drowsy. Hanging around the streets, I saw some diligent young men and women were jogging and running, it's a sign of youth. If walking, girls and ladies were wearing boots, while gentlemen were wearing a big coat. Some sceneries never seen in Southern California.

 

While transferring flights in Chicago and Philly, I saw the snow. Other than news media, the snow never came into my eyes for years.

 

Looks I haven't updated my blog for a while.

 

Anything new:

Two or three weeks ago I predict the equity market is going to recover, in short term.

3D game is better than 2D game, I spent several hours playing a game called Lineage II, it's for teenagers. Will be busy soon.

After not travelling for 2 months, there are some recent travels. But still continue to travel. American northeast is cold.

 

Sometimes I am puzzled that I didn't pay close attention to Rachmaninov's piano concerto No. 2 earlier.

 

 

I predict here that Barack Obama will win the 2008 presidential election.

 

Presidential election is very interesting. These politicians are so amazing!

We are widely believed that Hong Lou Meng is the pinnacle of Chinese classic novel. It presents a comprehensive paranomic view of what Chinese society looked like 300 years ago. Human development accelerated afterwards. Today we see a vastly different life.

 

Here is an interesting hypothesis from another resource. Consider an alien intelligent species 300 light years away from us. 300 light years is only a tiny fraction of the 100,000 light years diameter of our milky way; so it is relatively close to us.

 

If they invented an extremely powerful telescope which penetrates our earth atmosphere and discovered what we looks like, at this time, they will discover life 300 years ago. What will they think?

 

And if this alien species is 10,000 light years away, still within our milky way? They will think: human is so primitive.

 

Summer is travel time. Recently I have visited some places in the American east coast, as well as midwest. It seems that all places are the same, except the weather.

 

From this experience I admire the greatness of human in conquering the nature. Human transformed the entire nature to be suitable for their common living conditions.

 

The opening ceremony has been broadcasted to the American audience in NBC yesterday night; 19 hours after the live performance.

 

I will never forget this moment, when the glorious China history was presented in such an artistic way. Thank you, for the team who designed this project, I really admire your creativity. Thank you, for all the people who contributed to this performance, I could imagine how much efforts you have been devoted; and thank you, for all the people who are celebriting the Beijing Olympic game, let's enjoy this game in the next a few weeks.

 

I am so proud of being a Chinese, being one of the 1.3 billion people, as well as many other ethnic Chinese distributed all over the world.

 

I predict here that in this game, the gold medal count achieved by the China national team will exceed the American team. And it is possible that the total medal count might be the highest. Let the future prove my prediction.

 

One of the two most famous Chinese concertos, I love the second movement Ode to the Yellow River.

 

 

I have never seen such a message appeared on the Google home page, at this particular moment (July 25 2008). It said that "In Memoriam: Randy Pausch (1960-2008)".

An intelligent and inspirational person finally passed away, after combating with one of the most dangerous cancer - pancreatic cancer - for around two years.

 

The fifth movement is my favorite. The context of the fifth movement is:

After a heavy storm and carnival, the nature returned to sun shine. The sky suddenly become clear again.