R Todd King: China Photos 2005 - Harbin Winter

R Todd King: China Photos 2005 - Harbin Winter

Joke by Builder, Vacuum Cleaner

A little old lady answered a knock on the door one day, only to beconfronted by a well-dressed young man carrying a vacuum cleaner."Good morning," said the young man. "If I could take a couple ofminutes of your time, I would like to demonstrate the very latestin high-powered vacuum cleaners."Go away!" said the old lady. "I haven't got any money!" and sheproceeded to close the door.Quick as a flash, the young man wedged his foot in the door andpushed it wide open. "Don't be too hasty!" he said. "Not until youhave at least seen my demonstration."With that, he emptied a bucket of horse manure onto her hallwaycarpet. "If this vacuum cleaner does not remove all traces of thishorse manure from your carpet, Madam, I will personally eat theremainder."The old lady stepped back and said, "Well I hope you've got a darnedgood appetite, because they cut off my electricity this morning.

Isn't it amazing that people could foresee the size of today's computer. I am especially impressed by the printer and keyboard. Try reading age of spritual intelligence by Ray Kurzweil. It has predictions for till 2099. Do you know what type of work will most people be engaged in 2025 ? :) Updating their knowledge !! Yeah, Yeah, Yeah !! Back to school. 

Thought for today

Calamities are of two kinds: misfortunes to ourselves, and good fortune to others.
Ambrose Bierce, author & satirist (1842 - 1914)

I know the first reaction of anybody reading this will be a hearty laugh. But isn't this thought beautifully capture our greatest problem ? I bet you agree.

The Mahajong game. Ayako representing our team !! Well i didn't participate in this round, I thought there will be another round. However they held only 1 round. We were suppose to find the matching blocks in the picture given to us. One can only feel the pieces without flipping. Sort of like reading Braille. If you get the wrong one you got to leave it back and start over again. However the party was good as you can see in these picture. The final prize was a $50, Yeah ! And then can you guess at the time of leaving, we got the red letter and they had $$$. Well most of us got our $ back. That was sweet. A new year Taiwanes IsHtyle.  

Ayako finally doesn't close her eye in this pic. Took me 3 clicks to get it right at the Taiwanese New Year Celebration, 2005 

Traditional Taiwanese morning exercise. 

Well here is the Taiwanese New Year Celebration 2005, Eric, Sumant, Ploy, Robert and Uma 

Vowel Words !<->

This message was posted on a group LASTFriends by its moderator Bill Allin

Ok, OK, so you know that the only English words that contain all of
the vowels in their natural order are: facetious (amusing),
abstemious (think 'abstenance') and arsenious (meaning 'containing
arsenic'). You probably have them memorised. [Joke: laugh here.]
But do you know there is only one word in the English language that
has all of the vowels in the reverse order?
subcontinental

Wow! Isn't this a great place to learn useless information?

Namaste
Builder
T3

Happy Chinese New Year

 Happy New Year folks. I have always been fascinated by Chinese culture, cuisine, people, chinese movies, panda and dragon stories. I think my curosity began in my early childhood when I went to a book fair I believe somewhere in early 1980s when my sister bought three wonderful story books. I still remember those books they were "Seven sisters", "Magic Knife" and "Teen Ghamandi Billiyan"  (3 proud cats) a hindi translation for me. Since I could understand much english. My parents persisted on me and I can remember when i was in grade 3rd I read "Vasilisa the beautiful" which my elder sister had borrowed from her friend. I was proud that after reading that book I understood some part and told that to my sister and she endorsed that I correctly understood.  So for quite some time "Teen Ghamadi Billiyan" was one of my favorite book. Then one day I could read the other two books "The seven sister" and "Magic Knife" and I was now in love with Chinese stories. 

  Inspite of China being a neighbour country there wasn't much tourism between the two countries.  However these days as the business is on the boom between these two countries India and China have come much closer. There is a direct flight to Beijing and so I am sanguine the next time I visit India I could first visit China and then take a flight to New Delhi. Great Wall of China is the very first place in my list. Other is bashang national park. Then there is this wonderful place called Gualin with its curvy hills that always enchant me. Tibet and Mansarovar yatra and how can I forget the silk route. So friends keep looking at this place when I take my journey of this beautiful country. Once again a very happy Chinese new year to all of you !!

 

再见

Bailwick

Today we learn this word Baiwick.

Example

Area of authority, interest or skill; as, Quantum mechanics was his bailiwick. English bailiff (deputy sheriff) and wick (village).

One quick search on google yielded

Peoples in bibles are shadows and most even mud or gas are padding like sands

Human not only create electronic devices in our bailiwick

Some loves animals and we have veterinarians

Every day there are flowers decayed but there are new plants in our air

Another one on google gave

GMA brings gov't projects to Nueva Ecija, former bailiwick of deposed President Estrada

One Cnn news story had this line

Police officials said the ex-president's return to his bailiwick could have posed a security problem.

The district over which a sheriff has jurisdiction; it signifies also the same as county, the sheriff's bailiwick extending over the county.

Note the correct spelling is Bailivick not bailwick as I initially searched though you could find a lot of people making this mistake as I found out on google. I have corrected all the references where the spelling was wrong.

Thus we see the most common references to this word are for area under juridication, or interest

Time for my sentence !

  I thought learning languages was not my bailiwick until I started learning new languages.  Most of us have sometime or the other discover that we tend to be afraid of other people until we know their language. Try learning new language and you are sure that you will learn to love people speaking that language. So learning new language should be your new bailiwick ;)

 

The protectors of Religion

Lot of times one reads about people getting incensed over trivial matters. They claim to represent us. We are amazed at their zealousness for example I recently read some hindu organization in North America is infuriated over one cafe-press selling thongs depicting the word "Om" a hindu word. I am not at all offended but these organizations are ! How funny. I think they should be happy that more people are able to say this beautiful word. (There is some scientific reason that speaking om helps because of the way it sounds, don't kill me if you are not convinced).  These smart asses know how to gain popularity but the only thing they should worry is thier action will leave many religious people abandon their faith and live a less stressful life. After all its lot easier and better to leave the company of such people who are trying to fool gullible people than to preach them and help become better!!

Cnn Next Report on Best Software Engineer Professionals, Broadband, Mathematics

         I just watched a story on CNN's next program about the top software Engineer Professionals. Not before had the story begun I had guessed that the results will reveal about the dismal performance of the Indian software engineers in this show. The reason is I have observed in my software career the India despite of having one of the best high school students in the world fail to turn them into the best engineers or scientists. Wonderful kids turning out to be mediocre engineers and science student. 

        

                The primary reason is not paying enough attention for the quality of education in higher institutes. Even in institutes like IITs most of the faculty is substandard compared to other countries. Hardly anyone of these faculty members have any original work to their credit. Thanks to the JEE application procedure that it brings together the most informed kids in a platform to excell and bring laurels to thier institute. India seriously needs to invest heavily in bringing the broadband access to its masses at the affordable rate. They should realized that the spinoffs it generate will be so much more beneficial to the masses. Infact it should be subsidized.

 

          Time and again I have seen the industries underestimating the potentinal of people reinventing themselves. The cellular phone in early 1995 wasn't expected to make an impact in India and look how it changed the economics of India. My mom could type SMS on her cellphone more rapidly I could read.  Coming back to the original thought, will the quality of software enginners will improve dramatically in India. Ofcourse the quantity is going to swell but with easy job prospects and hardly any mathematics after class 12. (Its a true fact and India needs to invest heavily in study of mathematics at all level).

          

                Mathematical thinking helps one in not doing mathematics. Its one of the most interesting subject. If a knowledgeable teacher teaches it, it becomes so much easy. As one begins to see patterns it becomes so much interesting. Mathematics satiates the inherent curosity in us and its funny that this subject is so omnipresent in every field. Treating it just as a topic for mathematician is a big tragedy. In India if one is studying mathematics it mean that person is going to be just a school teacher with a low paying job, however learning how to just code can land you a high paying software job, it should be realized that one becomes a lot better coder with a sound mathematical foundation. Otherwise just coding is a no big deal. So what happens in Indian universities are these bright students learn only to code with a mathematics level of 12th grade and so if they don't make a dent in the international competitions they should realize where the problem  is !! 

  

Mnemonics

Somebody conined a wonderful Mnemonic to learn the spelling of Mnemonics. It is
Mnemonics Neatly Eliminate Man's Only Nemesis - Insufficient Cerebral Storage
Loved it.