故宮, 大英博物館 250 年收藏展

Dad and I went to 故宮 again today and tried to go see the popular 大英博物館 250 年收藏展. We got up early and went there earlier this time. There will still queues for ticket sales and entry. But the lines were much shorter compared with last time. However, we still lined up for about 40 mintes before we actually entered the exhibition area. It was just about the time for the 10:30 guided tour.

The guided tour had a large crowd. The guide was an art student from a university in Tainan. She volunteered to do this work in the museum. Man, this is far away from Tainan. She took us to several areas and explained the exhibits. We got to know about the Greek and Rome statues, the chess pieces made of ivories, a sketch by Da Vinci, a Buddha statue that is a mixture of Eastern and Western style, an African wooden carving, Native American leather clothes, and a modern Maori wooden carving, and some others along the way. That took an hour already. Then, she went on to explain the remaining exhibits without taking us to those areas because those areas were too crowded. Afterwards, dad and I went to cover those areas, which included a mummy, a major attraction of this exhibition.

Judging from this visit and a previous exhibition last year, "One Day in Bombay", I found the guided tours are quite interesting and useful. The exhibitions may not have a lot of exhibits that made me go "wow" when I first saw it. However, with the explanations given by the guide, I could appreciate them more and have better understandings about how these things related to people's lives at that time.

There was such a crowd. In the museum, there were many people in front of the exhibits. Sometimes you have to line up and wait to be able to see some of them. It was quite noisy in some areas too. However, I guess it's a good thing that people are interested in these events. Even though most people, like me, probably don't understand and appreciate the exhibits as much as the artists or historians, we can still learn a bit about different people's lives in different times and places.

Thank Jenny for recommending this exhibition.

"加油"努力的英文

同事問我"加油"的英文怎麼說，是要更努力加油認真唸書的"加油".
一時我直覺回答 "go hard". 感覺這是比較口語的說法就是了。(而且字典好像查不到，這個說法是我的幻覺嗎?)
查了一下網路上的字典，感覺 "go at" 和 "push on" 這兩個算是順眼。
偶而會被問到一些自己也不知道的英文，就跟著學吧。
上次有人問我約會的"電燈泡"的英文，查了之後才知道 "third wheel" 這個說法。
嗯，還滿該學這個字的，以前學生時滿常當 third wheel 這角色 :P

Condom with Happy Meal

I came across this news article when I read Taiwanese news:
紐西蘭麥當勞快樂兒童餐禮物竟送保險套

Then I found the article by NZ Herald:
Child's McDonald's meal comes with condom

In the NZ Herald one it says the grandparents found the condom first and the Taiwanese one says the 7-year-old girl actually saw it.
This tells us, don't believe everything in the news. It might not tell the whole truth.
It also tells us that Happy Meals do wish you a happy day, or night. :P

桌曆, 不低調

剛好好幾個 team member 都去開會，想說就跟 team leader 訂個時間吧。拿個桌曆就跟老闆在會議室坐著聊。沒想到又講了好久，開會的人後來回來了，看到我、老闆加桌曆。唉，又不低調了。

結果，講那麼久，時間還是要我自己安排一個出來... 也對啦，自己的事自己負責。

Upaper 五分埔達人, 莎莎

ND 今天叫我看 Upaper，有我會有興趣的事. 我是不看捷運站內報紙 Upaper 的，這次特地跑去它的網站看一下，喔，原來是莎莎呀。
【達人帶路】五分埔招牌美味 莎莎推薦
ND說今天有三張都是她。嗯，我也不知道為什麼她是五分埔達人？一張介紹美食，兩張介紹變裝。也許是她之前當外景主持人有去那邊採訪過？所以對五分埔熟？
天哪，看來我身邊的人都被我弄到知道莎莎了，不知何時更多人會知道，而且不只是看過她是房屋仲介電視廣告女主角。不過那房屋仲介廣告還增加曝光滿多的。每個分店都也貼那份廣告。也有看到公車側面也有貼那個廣告。如果能看到自己的臉被公車載著跑，應該滿奇特的吧！

辦公室十災

鼠災
蚤災
蟑螂災
霉味災
跳電災
馬桶堵塞災
網路斷線災
冷氣停轉災
伺服器當災
長子加班災

前一陣子電影 The Reaping 一直在廣告，重複播那十災。原本我只是模仿寫下辦公室裡發生過的"災害"。過了一陣子發覺，發生的頻率比我想的還頻繁 @@

ZM Sealed Section

I listened to a NZ radio station ZM today (over the Internet) and they were having this Sealed Section thing. The callers call the radio station to ask questions about sex and the "experts" will answer. The questions and discussion I heard were quite explicit. (which is why I don't give examples here :P) At first I was surprised that they could discuss such issues so openly on radio. But after a while I realized that those are common issues that people face and they are not taboo topics.

I guess I've watched too much Taiwanese news. They dramatize, and ridule with every bit they can dig up and try to use private issues of public figures to scandalize the audience. I got used to thinking of those issues as scandalous. That's just not healthy @@
OK. Less stupid news. More books and ZM :)

貴子坑親山步道

還是記錄一下好了，我又跟爸去走了一個台北市的親山步道，貴子坑。
還是沒什麼好講的，感覺又是莫名奇妙。
一直走樓梯往上會很累。
貴子坑那邊有個露營區(跟步道無關)，有興趣的人可以去查詢一下。
報告完畢。

下下步是什麼

今天跟大老闆聊了，大老闆講的幾個重點是，要知道自己要什麼，要去想下下步做什麼。
就像下棋一樣，要想下下步做什麼，選擇下一步時才能往那個方向去。
當然，人生不想下棋一樣都在你的掌握之中，能想到的就想，其他的就 have faith 加隨緣囉。

因為 team leader 把我帶去堵大老闆，在會議室談，太不低調，team member 發覺了就來問我怎麼了... aiya...

No compilation error

It's kind of weird that I got very few compilation errors for the whole day today. I worked on a small program that modifies our test data to add some extra information in it. I didn't code it quickly but it was surprisingly smooth. There were a few times that I had been coding for half an hour or even an hour. Then I compiled the code after so many code changes, and it compiled successfully! And many times, the code ran properly too!

Hm, maybe my SCJP study does help me to write Java programs more carefully. I remembered to add to catch exceptions on the PrintWriter before I compiled it today. I used to have the compiler complaining about it all the time.

Notes to self: It helps to first know what's the expected program behaviour, then think through and design it, then start coding. When coding, take the time to ensure a part is correct before moving on to the next part.

Meetings and more meetings

I was in meetings and discussions one after the other today. In total, I probably spent about 5 hours in those.
Some were useful for sorting things out. Some were possibly too slow and unnecessarily involved too many people.

Dehydrated again.

紐西蘭雪梨橋歡度75歲??

I post this rather late. Anyway, here it is.


紐西蘭, 澳洲給他傻傻分不清楚...
All "紐西蘭" in this article were replaced by "澳洲" a few hours after I captured this image, though.

週六晚上十點的捷運

補上班 + 加班. 週六晚上十點才坐上捷運回家. 明顯感覺人多又吵，自己在聽的隨身聽的聲音都被蓋過去了，此起彼落的談話聲混在一起，也聽不清一段對話。

是否要去搭另一班生活列車？這期間應該也會聽到許多人的不同聲音，甚至會把自己心中的聲音混淆或蓋過。無論如何，列車的行進不會因誰的聲音而改變，我只希望自己不會被影響而在車門前卻步。

Time for a decision, and execution

This is about the time to finalize a decision and start doing it.
Wish me luck. More importantly, wish me courage.

IKEA, dehydration

Don't know if there's anyone like me who goes to IKEA without the intention to buy any furniture. I just went there because I heard about it occassionally but I had never been there. And because my dad and I were looking for a place to go that rainy afternoon after we visited the museum in the morning.

In a way, IKEA is like a museum too. The goods are displayed to create a cozy or stylish feel to them. Different types of goods are placed in different zones, with a carefully designed path to lead the customers to go through one zone after another, after another, after another...
It took a long while to go through them. By the time we reached the exit, we were tired and thirsty. Dehydration, that's the impression IKEA has left on me.

故宮, 翠玉白菜

Dad and I intended to go to the 大英博物館250年收藏展 in 故宮博物院. As we approached the museum, we found that more and more people were heading for the museum. The traffic was jammed around the museum. When we got there, we saw long lines of people. One winding line was for entering the British Museum Exhibition. Another line was for buying the tickets. Both lines were really long. One museum worker announced that it will take 20 minutes to buy the tickets then line up for 60 minutes before entering the museum.

We tried to figure out how to get into the queue for the tickets. There were lines of people everywhere but we could see the end of the line. After tracing the line for a while. We finally saw the end of it. No, it definitely will not take only 20 minutes.

In the end, we decided to go to see the regular museum exhibition instead. The long queues were discouraging. I was more concerned that we wouldn't be able to comfortably see the items if it was too crowded inside, though.

There were many people at the regular museum exhibition too, but much less than the other one. The museum had been reburbished. It just re-opened recently. It looked more modern. We felt that there were less items on display, though. Many exhibition rooms were closed.

Due to the recent appearances on TV news, many visitors were interested in seeing 翠玉白菜. While we were in the museum, we could here somebody mention 翠玉白菜 every 2 minutes or so. There were actually signs at various spots that says 翠玉白菜 is in Room 30x. Many people did gather in that room. A crowd flocked around 翠玉白菜. I guess that's kind of a must-do for the tourists.
Although we had seen it before, I was still awed by the creativity and craft when I saw it.

It's interesting to go to a musuem to brush up my Chinese history once in a while. Hope there will be less people next time so we can easily go to the British Museum Exhibition.

Firefox 學長

我大多是用 Firefox, 而不是 Internet Explorer.
不知為何，逛到中文 Wikipedia 的 "Mozilla Firefox" 的描述, 發覺 0.7 版到 1.0 版的 code names 都是一些熟悉的地名，接著讀到這句:
Three Kings, Royal Oak, One Tree Hill, Mission Bay 和 Greenlane 都是紐西蘭奥克兰市内的地名；Whangamata 是紐西蘭科羅曼德半島一個靠海的城鎮。這些名字是由在奧克蘭長大的古德杰所命名的

難道, Firefox 開發團隊中有個主要的工程師是紐西蘭人嗎? 趕快搜尋一下 Ben Goodger 這號人物. 發現他不但是奧克蘭人，還是我同科系早一年的學長。我也沒看仔細，至少知道他有帶領 Firefox 的 project. 現在他是 Google 的僱員。

原來，我們這個科系的畢業生有在軟體產業這麼有成就的呀。也覺得有趣，讀這個科目感覺該去做 IC 設計, 微處理器, 嵌入式系統 etc. 我聽到滿多人是去做軟體的. Me too.

嗯, 要和學長看齊 :P


Wikipedia (Chinese) - Mozilla Firefox
Wikipedia (English) - Ben Goodger
Ben Goodger's blog: millenium | ten