I'm So Busy

Just can't tell how busy I am. My busyness comes half from my routine work and half from house decoration. Let me be clear - buying a house is not an end, and it is just the beginning of another severe ordeal! However, I'm really looking forward to the new house, which is being decorated by two worn-out souls. I just believe all our efforts will finally pay off! Let's walk through these two gloomy months with full energy and passion!

Posted via email from Dennis & Zoe

Learned Vocabularies

1. Towards the end of the evening, a group of about 30 protesters were preparing to spend the night in the centre, apparently with the blessing of security guards.

2. In the main hall, meanwhile, a succession of presidents and prime ministers made set-piece speeches.

3. took the dress on approval.

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Billboard Recruitment Ad

What an ingenious way to recruit dream engineers. I have to bow to Google for its all-mighty creativity. Though I know for sure I will never get a chance to work this out, it's still inspiring to see this kind of fresh idea coming out from the IT giant. Thanks Google, you make our lives way better.

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The Veil of BTChina's "Licenseless" Shut Down

It's a mourning day.

BTChina (btchina.net), one of the most famous BT sharing sites, is totally put to death. The rumour that its webmaster has been detained was once spread like wildfire over the internet, though yesterday, the webmaster of BTChina left a very brief message at the webpage to clarify the case.

Not merely BTChina, many other well-known websites sharing  BT seeds are shut down since last week. It is apparently that a campaign of cracking down online piracy has been kicked off by some Chinese central government officers, coordinating another campaign of shutting down pornographic wap sites for mobile phones.

Now, if we read the above story from a new perspective, we can get something very useful out of these cases.

On the surface, the campaigns are aiming at piracy. But the reason of shutting down those websites is not that they don't have copyright license, but that they don't have an administrative license of online dissemination of audio-visual programs issued by the government. Interesting enough?

In a nutshell, we learnt from these stories that proving a website "has no administrative license" in China is far easier than proving the content of that website "has no copyright license"

In this circumstance, the copyright owners' best strategy of fighting piracy may not be filing the case to court, but reporting the authority that the targeted website does not obtain the license of disseminating Audio-Visual programs (or license of disseminating other contents).

These cases, it seems to me, herald a fresh way of fighting privacy.

Posted via email from Dennis & Zoe

A Tough Job Ahead

Well, the decoration battle has just started. It is really a big headache for both me and Zoe. I believe there will be lots of troubles ahead waiting for us. The buying part has come to an end. We have got our dream house for an affordable price and were soon into a debt hole. We will be in an in-debt status for five consecutive years, but that's not something fearful to us. The thing that haunts us the most is the decoration part - getting people to tear down the unwanted walls, finding the suitable decorative bits for our home, keeping an eye on the whole decorating process. There's a hell lot to do. Now we need to juggle a full-time job and home decorating. It's tough. I hope that months later, I would write on my blog something like "we managed to juggle a full-time job and home decorating."

Cross fingers and say amen.

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The Rising of 杯具

It's time for us to look at an old word from a new perspective. The word 杯具(originally meaning cup in Chinese) has recently got a whole new meaning -- tragedy. For example, we now say 我的人生就像茶几，上面摆满了杯具 (My life is an end table, on which there are a lot of tragedies.) Furthermore, 杯具 is not alone, it has a long tail of siblings -- 洗具(喜剧)、餐具(惨剧)、茶具(差距)...etc.

Web language is influencing our life, whether you know it or not. Just brace for the coming web culture wave.

Posted via email from Dennis & Zoe