Weekly Knowledge Gains

Entry level opp @comScore for bilingual or trilingual (German, French, English) marcom person, London.

Marcom is short for Marketing Communications. Those who practice advertising, branding, direct marketing, graphic design, marketing, packaging, promotion, publicity, sponsorship, public relations, sales, sales promotion and online marketing are termed marketing communicators, marketing communication managers, or more briefly as marcom managers.

One of my friends asked me about what 人生不如意十常八九 should be in English, I replied, shit (always) happens.

English phrase - more than you can shake a stick at

The modern use of the phrase always exists as part of the extended and fixed phrase "more than you can shake a stick at", meaning an abundance, plenty.

What's zip ties, see the pic below.

Events that challenge our attention. Here challenge = call for.

Silly or wise, terrible or delightful, it is a further helping of experience, an additional joy after dark, another slice of life cut differently for which, it seems to me, we are never sufficiently grateful.

192.168.1.1 is the way to set router. Learned it today from one of Zoe's elder roommates.

Road to Matureness

We sorted out all the messes in a single night. In my last day as a 26, my sky was encroached by pitch darkness; my mind was covered by complete sadness. We were in a fearful storm characterized by grief, dismay and remorse.

It was bitter, but we managed to ride out the storm and came out more united and trusted.

Our binding was consolidated, in an unprecedented scenario that beyond our wildest expectation. But fortunately, the premarital disaster didn't overturn our relationship thanks to two sincere hearts towards each other.

I don't mind whether it's a bumpy road ahead, as long as I will be down the road along with my darling Zoe.

Thanks to Google Crackdown in China, OpenDNS is Now Serving 14b Daily

Google services are completely down in China. Many Chinese netizens are trying to detour the crackdown by using OpenDNS. So here comes a very interesting piece of news on its official blog Now serving: 14 billion requests daily..

My First Blog Post @ Posterous

This is a testing post to see whether the post-by-Gmail function @ Posterous works or not.

Update: Great! Posterous is amazing! The post-by-gmail function works perfectly, and the "import feature" is outstanding no matter how you slice it! Thanks god for this great place to continue my blogging life! Well.... no, all credits should go to the owners of Posterous, who have collectively made the world much much brighter!

Cya GWF. =)

Revive My Writing Hands

My darling Zoe is a wordsmith on Chinese words, though she reiterated on various occasions that her prowess in Chinese was knowingly overrated and flattered by me.

In stark contrast, I was a wordmonger who used Chinese pretentiously and carelessly, and no wonder I was dwafted whenever we were engaged in activities involving Chinese.

However, to make things worst, I've recently noticed that my English supremacy was starting to lose stream. This finding appalled me to half death as I realized my holy grail would soon go into thin air, if the situation keeps worsening.

At this remarkable point when I would soon turn 27, I'd like to make yet another resolution - to revive my writing passion that withered day by day in an inconspicuous way.

I will hold my battleground, at all costs.

cross myself.

Creative Ad by Durex

Very impressive advert!

Mocks to China's Digital Censorship

Click to enlarge

How to Slice Watermelon?

My darling threw me a math question one night. (suited for student in elementary school! )

The question: how to cut watermelon 4 times, leaving 9 pieces and 10 watermelon rinds?

The solution: see the pic below.

Done!

Daily Recap

They want to luxuriate in the experience of a stress-free journey, not rush to a destination.

Impunity = Exemption from punishment, penalty, or harm.

Found a new site Farkie, which is described ambitiously on its site as an ultimate online application for downloading youtube videos, myspace playlists, movies, audio, images, javascript, ajax, objects, applications, flash, links and many other things.

Typify - to serve as a typical example of; embody the essential characteristics of; a painting that typifies the artist's work.

网友成为天涯商业化的桎梏? (zhì gù) = fetters, handcuffs or shackle.

哈喇子 (hā lá・zi) = 涎水 =口水 = saliva

舞文弄墨 ( wǔ wén nòng mò )

What Is Life

Far from my darling, I miss her so much with every minute ticking away. I think now I'm in what they called "menstrual flow," but instead of being uneasy, I feel kinda depressed. I know clearly that my depression came mainly from a sense of self-criticism.

I criticized myself for not living up to some promises.

I criticized myself for not keeping some resolutions up.

I criticized myself for not being truly a man, even at the age of 27.

I criticized myself for not having a cozy home to house my darling.

I criticized myself for not working hard enough to study, especially the math

I criticized myself for induging in some meaningless web games, like Kaixin001.com.

I criticized myself for not being able to recognize the threat ahead.

I criticized myself for not addressing some issues in proper ways.

I criticized myself for knowing only ways to complain but not ways to solve.

I criticized myself.

I confessed.

I repented.

But

I've stopped complaining, criticizing and repenting, once and for all.

With my darling deep in my heart, I'm now a man fearing nothing.

Take a deep breath.

And say,

I come, I conquer.

Weekly Recap

Twitter is back on June 9, after several days's man-made downtime!

The 9 City is planning something big, as today it announced that one of its blockbusters 卓越之剑 would be completely free starting on June 18.

Two type of Chinese street snacks: 粥 = rice congee, 油炸鬼 = fried dough stick, 豆酱 = bean paste.

Great Firewall Version 2.0

China will soon require that all computers sold in the country include software that blocks access to certain "harmful" Web sites, a move that could give the government a powerful new tool in its censorship arsenal. I feel blessed as a Chinese, for our government has planned so well for us. We are blocked from "harmful" materials both online and offline. But do you know how they define "harmful?" Not vulgarity and sex, but political dissent and democracy.

How Film Is Made

Don't blink your eyes. This clip is truly amazing. It shows you how to make a blockbuster, in this case Saving Private Ryan, with limited resources and manpower.

Daily Recap

Zoe sent her CV to Tianya yesterday night, and hope she would land a job there! Let's pray!

嗦泡 = prattle, prate, chew the fat, shoot the breeze. ( Bonus language point: 哆嗦, duō suo = shiver )

得瑟 = 东北方言，意为："过分的炫耀、招摇。"，多含贬义。例句："不就偷我几个何首乌嘛，有什么了不起的，瞧把你得瑟的！"

I gained this formula from one of Zoe's roommates =ROUND(Sheet1!B4/1000,0), which helped me a real lot. Now I believe what Bill Gate once declared: you are using only 5% of the power of our Office softs.

Daily Recap

Done with the reviewing of the Microsft Office toolkit! Learned a great deal from the video tutorials today. Though I have to say I'm still a rookie on it, Office is no longer a dread to me. Important updated: I learned a few Excel tips from Zoe's roommate tonight and felt I was so little in front of Excel. =(

Do you climb the Great Firewall today? This is a question I ask myself every day during these tightened period.

Daily Recap

Inferno on rush hour Chengdu bus killed 25. Here is a true record of the gruesome scene that please view with caution!

Zoe was enchanted by Kaixin001's web-based game Happy Farming, and spent her life on it day and night with her roommates!

knockoff - n. an unauthorized copy or imitation; a thing made to be similar or identical to another thing.

Daily Recap

Zoe somehow learned a new martial art out of nowhere, 葵花点穴手, and exerted all her power on me last night. Though I was played around the whole night, I was very happy to see she laughed her delight at the victory.

NBA Finals kicks off today! Los Angeles Lakers vs Orlando Magic! I'm a fan of Magic, period! (updated: Magic has been brutally beaten by Lakers in game one. )

Gotta review Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint systematically this weekend to further strengthen my office skills.

顾此失彼 - gù cǐ shī bǐ - 顾了这个，丢了那个。形容忙乱或慌张的情景。

The debris of the missing French airliner has yet to be found as of today.

Four prominent C2C shopping sites in China, 淘宝网, 拍拍网, 易趣网, 有阿网.

Why Happy Farm Addictive?

No matter how you slice it, a simple game, known as Happy Farm, which simulates the whole process of running a farm, has quickly taken hold on many SNS(Social Networking Services) sites. Since its debut, the game has effectively absorbed a group of loyal gamers who tirelessly visited and took care of "their farms" on a regular basis. Most of the gamers even paid visits to their virtual farms more frequently than to loo. In fact, to some gaming loyalists, they were engaging in some kind of business instead of simply playing an online Flash game.

I think one feature of the game could help explain the absorption, which I personally call "limited playability". Online games with this feature don't offer you an unlimited satisfaction, instead, your content is accomplished piecemeal. You are not supposed to play the game through at one go but required to come back every so often in order to continue your game play.

I found recently many games had started to tap into this characteristic and had surprisingly scored well. Spending a lot of time at one go on any given game would bore even a hardcore player quickly, however, spending like 5%-10% of your time every day on a game is traditionally defined as fun!

It is not hard to guess that limited playability, a new big idea from the game industry, would soon serve as powerful ammunition to gamers across the globe. Just brace yourself.

Kaixin001 & Kaixin Meets in Court

Something big is going on...

The operator of one of China's most popular social network, Kaixin001.com, has just filed a lawsuit against Oak Pacific Interactive, which started a competing service in Oct. under the domain of Kaixin.com. In the suit, Kaixin001.com has asked Oak Pacific Interactive stop using the Kaixin.com name.

Kaixin001.com is best known for its addictive online games. But the rapid growth of Kaixin001.com posed a direct challenge to Xiaonei.com, which also happens to be owned by Oak Pacific Interactive. When Oak Pacific Interactive launched Kaixin.com, it also adopted a layout and game options that looked akin to Kaixin001.com. The new Kaixin.com soon became popular, perhaps in part because some users thought they were logging onto Kaixin001.com, which accused Kaixin.com of unfair competition.

Now, just sit back and wait a little bit to see where the lawsuit is heading for.

Trade Your Twitter for Real Buck!

Are you still trying to sell domain name? Keep up the date! Now the buzzword is trading Twitter accounts!And just don't be surprised to know that among the first batch of Twitter buyers is CNN, see details here. One on-sale Twitter account "custom_t_shirts" is currently priced at $1,500,000. (there is a Recently Exchanged Names list on the bottom of the site) This is truly amazing! Thanks to Twitter, we see some peripheral services are burgeoning day by day, like the URL shortening service - bit.ly - and now the Twitter account trading platform.

Zemanta Enriches Your Blogging

Zemanta is, in general, a blogging enrichment tool. I tried this firefox addon a few times and thought it was not at its perfect stage right now. It claimed to suggest proper tags, links, photos and related articles on any blog entry but in fact it had repeatedly failed to present me the right photos for my blog piece. Inarguably, the whole idea behind Zemanta was great, saving your time on blogging while enriching your blog content as you type. I hope the author will keep improve on this extension and one day become a powerful widget for bloggers.
But just don't be so ecstatic since for now Zemanta offers little, if any, support to Chinese. We may have to wait a wee bit before a Chinese simulator coming out.

Damn IE and Firefox Incompatibility

No joke! My torturing first-hand experience of IE and Firefox incompatibility.

I put some songs on my blog today, and just didn't want the musics to autostart so I dictated autostart="false" in the script. Things should have been all done, I thought! However, while it worked fine in Internet Explorer, it did not be so in Mozilla Firefox. The default setting for IE is "false" which means the music will not play automatically. But the default setting for Firefox is "true". Hell with them!

A google search revealed thousands of complaints about this incompatibility, but few solutions available.

Countless painful drills into this shit eventually unearthed the treasurable solution - autostart="0".

It REALLY sucks... But at least I know how to disable autostart with Firefox now. Thanks incompatibility!

SkipScreen Firefox Add-on

If you are a Firefox user, you should plug SkipScreen into your browser. What kind of screens do this freebie help you skip? Unexaggeratedly speaking, all the clicking and waiting on sites like RapidShare, Zshare, MegaUpload... and the like will be a thing of the past... Your downloads shall start instantly without any boring countdown from this day forth.

Still not satisfied? Come on man! It's free!

Check Backlink at Your Pleasure

The buzzword now is SEO(Search Engine Optimization), and one of the conventionally believed method out there is called Link Building.

Most of the SEOers start their link building project by doing backlink research. There are plenty of paid services out there helping you map out link portfolio, be it yours or anyone else, but most of them are not on the cheap side.

Below are two handy tools enough to get you started on your backlink research.

If you want to get a picture of your own link portfolio, Google Webmaster Tools is your friend.

If your target is someone else, Yahoo's Site Explorer is definitely a good starting point.

Sometimes the quality-cost trade-off theory doe NOT work in cyberspace. As a marketer, don't forget to make good use of what is available FREE. =)

Real-Life Testimonials

Now customers are way sharper and cannier than years ago. You can no longer fool them by some fake or informal testimonial like before, as they have outgrown all of those tricks.

So it's now time to come to realize that textual testimonial couldn't make it anymore. However, this Pennsylvania-based lawn care company has displayed a juicy real-life testimonial panel in an impressive way. Now close your eyes, and take a few minutes to think of real-life testimonials in your business, and leverage them cordially to fascinate your potential prospects.

Music with Impulsive and Contemplative Buyer

More psychology is going on. I stumbled upon a study related to purchasing impulse while on the job. Though the study was kinda old, published in Nov. 2005, it didn't dampen the significant result of the psychological work, which pointed to people being affected when shopping with the background music on. The study was hosted in a brick-and-mortar store, however, the upshot has meaningful indication for online businesses alike. Background music, according to the 2005 study, enhanced buying impulse of impulsive buyers, but was effectless to contemplative shoppers.

As a webmaster, I will never stop peeking into behaviors of online customers in different age grounps. It's high time to test the music idea. Whether a snatch of slow-tempo pop music will really do the trick, the a/b test system will soon tell!

How to Display (Neatly) HTML/Javascript Source Code on Your Blog

Well, if you are a lazy bug and don't want to spend time on configuring your blogsphere, resort to HTML Encoder to save you the hard labor of encoding. The encoder can help you achieve that in a split second!

But, HTML Encoder is not the protagonist today. We want something advanced, don't we? I assume your answer is a definite YES. So today I'm going to introduce you SyntaxHighlighter, which makes posting code snippets online easier and also have all the codes look pretty and tidy. It's a big helper to developer/coder, if not to an amateurish blogger.

To use SyntaxHighlighter, however, you need to do some configuration first... I'm not going to spend my time further down the road, click HERE for a thorough usage tutorial.

Gmail Lab Feature - Undo Send

Oops, hitting the "Send" button too soon? Give yourself a grace period of a few seconds to cancel sending, then edit your message before sending again.

This is a new feature available in Gmail Labs, a small leap forward, so to speak. I found it functioning very well based on some preliminary tests. Now we are granted the power to virtually "eat words" by undoing rash messages. Nice move!

Available门

Available门事件声明：在本人开心网个人资料里出现的 emotionally unavailable, physically available 字样，纯粹是因身体缺乏营养导致肌肉神经抽搐，被动随意敲击键盘所致，并不意味本人同意、支持、赞成或首肯个中观点。本人过去、现在以及将来都不会接纳文 中所述的哲学。因修改不及时导致触犯的任何法律（包括宪法，民法，刑法，书法，基本法，劳动法，婚姻法，国际法，加减法，输入法，没办法，著作权法，知法犯法，放射疗法，惯用语法，绳之于法，占宇吸星大法，口对口人工呼吸法，及文中涉及或可能涉及以及未涉及之法）纠纷或责任本人全盘负责。并在此说明，绝对不会再有第1.5次发生。

Daily Recap

Learn a new idiom - in a manner of speaking

This is one way to say it, so to speak "She was, in a manner of speaking, not at her best, in fact, she was exhausted and had the flu."

信安易卫士 is Ring's firewall, which he uses to intercept unwanted calls from... bosses. XD

Most of the Chinese social networking sites are in maintenance till 6th June. Do we need to set up an International Maintenance Day? Chinese netizens are conditioned to keep silent at this very moment, but I want to have my voice heard.

Adblock Plus rules! It guarantees me an advertisement-free surfing.

胡椒蓓蓓 is a site with a very good commercial idea. It currently offers customers discounts and coupons for food and haircut in three major Chinese cities, and has gained some popularity among netizens.

Daily Recap

You gotta check this out, a dance group named Diversity, the champion of Britain's Got Talent 2009. Yeah, they are simply amazing!

Twitter, Flickr and Hotmail are being headlessly blocked by China now ahead of 20th anniversary of the crackdown on democracy protests in Tiananmen Square. See the report from Guardian.

Zoe was crazy about Kaixin001.com and fiddled with her digital house till midnight.

The debris of the missing France jet was found, a grim confirmation of a terrible airline disaster.

Learned a terminology in today's meeting:

Queries-per-second (QPS) is a measure of how much traffic a particular query server is handling at a given time.

Learn a new word - true to form/type

Exactly as expected; following the usual pattern. "True to form, she turned up an hour later than we'd arranged." "True to type, Mary left before the meeting was adjourned."

Daily Recap

Spent a few hours yesterday night to set up Almetl. It's harder to open an online store now than years ago since you have to get through some barriers set by Chinese governments before seeing your website up and running. Is it a sign that China is trying to increasingly regulate Internet? Hope it's not just an empty gesture.

China beat Iran last night by 1 - 0 to end a 14-year embarrassment of no victory over its Asian partner. China national football team has disappointed us in no less than one thousand cases, but from this match we see something different - a team full of passion and aggressiveness.

Car giant General Motors (GM) entered bankruptcy protection yesterday. Hope to see this iconic American company rise again someday in the future with the help of US government.

Learned a new word - mothball

vt. to defer indefinitely; shelve;
 n. a condition of long storage for possible future use.

1. "put the battleship into mothballs."

2. "decided to put the plan into mothballs."
3. "mothball a project."

Quoting president Obama: "I know you've already seen more than your fair share of hard times, I want you to know that what you're doing is making a sacrifice for the next generation - a sacrifice you may not have chose to make, but a sacrifice that you are nevertheless called to make so that your children and all of our children can grow up in an America that still makes things."

Decided to set aside some time to review Google trends, to better understand the new features it offers.

天下网 is currently the largest WAP SNS site in China, boasting over 40 millions users.

若邻网 is the Chinese counterpart of Linkedin.

Completed a research on Chinese WAP SNS sites and the report is now available as one of my Google Docs share files.

Damn it! Google Docs is not able to hold the format of any doc file. Uploaded a doc file to Google Docs today but it returned me a jumbled one.

Microsoft's new search engine - Bing (in Chinese, 必应), which evolved from its predecessor Live Search - has gone online. The launch of Bing is a strong indicator that the next search engine battle is officially on.

OMG, I'd found something new and completely weird! You can actually buy traffic for your 51.com, Xiaonei, QQ or even Sina blog on Taobao! Unbelievable! Am I too outdated on this?

Daily Recap

There is an old saying "远在天边, 近在眼前." Now I fully understand this wisdom. After testing a great lot of proxy tools, both client-based and web-based, I'm here to announce that the best proxy tool on earth is Gladder, which I have been using since Dark Age. Just forget about the Hotspot Shield that I found a week ago and dump away all web-based proxy toolkits. But Gladder still has a clear defect, it cannot view large graphic files and is not able to log in Blogger. So, there's still no elixir right now to address the problem of GFW. How to detour GFW would be a topic of enduring interest as long as the digital wall is in effect, or as long as you are a Chinese netizen.

Kaixin001.com is now shot through with in-site advertisements. Is this the right way to make profits for SNS sites? Let's wait and see.

Taobao.im, a link shortening service for Taobao shops, but lacking the statistic reporting function which tells how many people actually click the modified links. Still not up to par, and should further learn from Bit.ly.

淘宝客 is a site being hotly discussed recently. With the help of 淘宝客, now you can promote Taobao shops or products in whatever ways possible, while earning a few bucks along the way for each of your successful promotion. One of my former colleagues Joe is a big fan of 淘宝客 and I think he has reaped a full fishnet of money from this rising service.

Bumped into a casual game named Post-it, a very funny word game by 3M. The game is largely twofold since you can enjoy have fun while reviewing English vocabulary as a sideline throughout your gameplay. Last but not least, it's register-free.

Photoxpress, where you can download real high-resolution photos. A handy site for graphic designer and you should bookmark it just in case.

What's 快速消费品? Time to learn!

Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG), are products that are sold quickly at relatively low cost. Though the absolute profit made on FMCG products is relatively small, they generally sell in large quantities, so the cumulative profit on such products can be large. Examples of FMCG generally include a wide range of frequently purchased consumer products such as toiletries, soap, cosmetics, teeth cleaning products, shaving products and detergents, as well as other non-durables such as glassware, light bulbs, batteries, paper products and plastic goods.

See how Windows 7, the next version of Windows, makes your PC simpler and easier to use every day. Yep, remember this name - Win 7.

This is the official site of 火星文. Well, reading those characters from Mars would really make me retarded.

Registered at Linkedin today to build my professional network of trusted contacts.