Talking with Friends is Great

This is the last day of the Spring Festival. I caught the last chance to have tea or coffee with my friends. It is among the best things to do during holidays. I got to know more good places to meet and to have afternoon tea/evening tea. It is important part of knowledge for a city. I didn’t touch this area too much before, and I guess I will start to recommend restaurants, café, tea houses and bars soon.

I also better understood how lucky I am to have a bunch great friends around me. I know who to go to on specific topics. For example, for ideas on Confusions or the great thinkers, I will go to Steven. On the current society, I will see Hua. For great places to eat, I will pick up my phone and give Grace a call. For new ideas, I go to Isaac, and for travel and art, Claire and Edward are the best persons I can find around me.

The best part of life is to talk with friends. It gives new ideas or helps me to review my ideas to get a more systematic view. My mentor at middle school Zhu Hai Jun said to me for more than 10 times, that “people always ignore great people around them”. It is a good echo of Pascal’s “The sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room” (my second time quoting this sentence in one week).

Some Observations

There are some very interesting observations in the Internet world that I haven’t put onto the blog yet.

Google loves XinhuaNews and China Daily

When you visit U.S. version of Google News, you will find a very interesting phenomena: About 1/3 of the pictures or one of the two biggest news pictures are often from Xinhua News or China Daily. According to Google’s rule, it implies these two sites are most frequently quoted sites, which is very true.

Forget about Google. Use Baidu

I found the frequency I use Google in the last month dramatically decreased. I almost pulled my hair off when I use Google to search some common terms and get DNS error. It seems more and more content are not suitable for me to read. The easy solution is, switch to Baidu. It is a cleaner environment and they provide good service to censor the content so I won’t click an “appropriate” link before I am aware of.

Google Maps

Google released beta version of Google Map. Google chanllenged people’s imagination of client scripts after it did with Gmail. It is a fantastic application. I love the drag and drop in IE and the navigation with keys. Google is a real Internet company!

203 Mining Workers Died

Liao Ning mine blaster killed 203 workers there. It is terrible news.