Category Archives: Daily Scribble

My random thoughts of the day.

Daily Scribble

Romanization of Chinese

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Romanization is a way of writing non-English languages using English characters. There are many ways to romanize Chinese. It is very confusing, since there different spelling of a Chinese term in English. People grew up in China use Pinyin, which is the standard romanization based on Mandarin. Older translation uses the Wade-Giles system, which is popular in most of 20th century and still used in Taiwan. The major problem of the Wade-Giles system is that it is not very accurate. In some cases, it cannot distinguish similar pronunciation and create confusion. On the other hand, we can tolerate the lack of accuracy. I found the Wade-Giles system is easier for English speaker to pronounce and remember the terms. Maybe Wade-Giles is designed by Englishman, the spelling looks more like a normal English words. Pinyin is more accurate in phonetics, but the j, q, x, z looks odd in spelling.

Hong Kong has its own system of romanization, or should I say lack of a system of romanization. The HK government has a table of commonly use Chinese characters, but there is no coherent rules in the table. Some characters, such as tree, has two different correct spelling in the table. Most people in HK don’t know how to romanization Cantonese. If we have to romanize any characters, we simply do it in an ad hoc way. On a second thoughts, HK is a bilingual city, most people know Chinese as well as English. There is no need to romanize Chinese, we can simply use English instead. Maybe romanization is only helpful to foreigners who wants to learn Chinese.

Daily Scribble

The greatest Indian + Japanese + Canadian fusion idea.

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We were talking about single engineers at work are having a hard timing finding girlfriends. They are distracted from work for looking for a mate, so they are not performing at their peak productivity. Here we come up with a great idea to solve this problem. Arranged marriage is popular in India. Most of my colleagues in the India office met their wives through arranged marriage. It is obvious that arrange marriage is benefits boring engineers who lacks dating skills but somewhat appealing to the parents. On other hand, Japan does not have arranged marriage, but it is common for Japanese companies match making their employees.

Maybe we can combine the two systems, the company can simply arrange marriage its single employees randomly. Now, the single guys has found their other half, they don’t have to worry about finding a wife, so they can concentrate on work. However, gay marriage is legal in Canada. In order not to discriminate against the homosexual, the company should ignore the gender difference when arranging the marriage. After all, we are an engineer firm with more male than female, we don’t have enough single female for the single male, so some guy will end up pairing up with a male wife.

Indian arranged marriage + Japanese corporate match-making + Canadian legalized gay marriage + a company full of single male engineers = ?

Daily Scribble

Health service in Vancouver

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Canada is famous for its medicare system. It is expensive, that’s why our tax rate is so high. I never understand why it cost so much until my father in law has a surgery in the Vancouver General Hospital. The surgery is a success, the treatment is fairly good. When I visit him in the hospital, my first impression is I am in a business hotel. The decoration and finishing of the lobby does not look like the hospitals I had in mind. He got a private room for his recovery and there are more than enough nurses in the ward. He is recovering pretty fast, it is able to sit up, walk and eat within a few days. Originally, the nurse told us he can be discharged on Monday. But the hospital don’t have psychotherapist on weekend, so we have to wait until psychotherapist session on Monday. Then the nurse told us he can be discharge on Tuesday afternoon. It turns out they are still waiting for one of his lab report from a test in Tuesday morning. The report won’t come back for another day, so my father in law will have to stay in the hospital until Thursday if the nurses did not forget anything else. If the hospital could stream line the work, take the test on Sunday and arrange the psychotherapist over the weekend, then we can take him home on Monday as planned. Oh! Did I mention he got a private room? Our health system is so inefficient, no wonder it cost so much to the tax payers.

I drove all the way to VGH to pick up my father-in-law without know he can’t be discharged today. It is a total waste of my time. Maybe the hospital should learn from the airport, setup a website for the family of patients to check discharge status. Like the arrival information in the airport, you can see whether the discharge is delayed or not. Then my friend, Chris, hear my idea and joke about this idea, maybe they should add the canceled status like a flight. If the patient is canceled, you don’t have to pick him up anymore, because he is already dead. Pat said it is cruel and suggested the cancel status change to the departure gate to Heaven.

Daily Scribble

Media overdose

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When I am doing something, I tends to overdose. I have a habit to write a review for all the books I read, anime, movies and TV shows I watched. I often have back-log my reviews, since it takes time for me to organize my thoughts before writing the blog entry. Somehow I found that I often back-logged reviews of the same kind. Last year, I clearly remember I had for a period of time I overdosed movies, wrote 6 movie reviews in a row. Then at another time, I overdosed animes, wrote 6 anime reviews consecutively. This time I have back-logged three book review entries and I am working on another 3 books in parallel. I am in the middle of the book cycle at the moment. It seems that when I consume one type of media, I tends to overdose until I feel guilty for having too much of it and move on to something else. Eventually after I rotate all the different medias, I will come back again and repeat the cycle. I remember a long time ago, I set my goal for a balance media diet. I mandate myself to consume at least one entry from each type of media every month. If I average out my annual media consume, I did better than the minimum requirement. However, the consumption of each media type always comes in large chunks. My media diet would be more healthy if I maintain a balance profile, or does it really matter?

Daily Scribble

Executive book summary

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When I browsing audio books in the company library, I just discover this hidden treasure hiding on highest level in the bookshelves. The company has a subscription to the executive book summary, that is a book abstract service for busy people. It summarize two to three popular business books per month in a single CD. The library a collection from the last 3 years. From my experience with popular business books, most of them just have one great idea, then repeat the same theme over and over again. The book summary is a good way to quickly separate the chaff from the wheat. Instead of spending many hours reading a book, you can quickly scan its key points in 20 minutes. If you found the ideas in the book useful, you can read the full version to learn more about the details later. The only draw back is human’s memory is a leaky bucket, you may forget what you learn if you just spent 20 minutes listening to the key points. Reading a book may takes more time, but the more time you spent, the more knowledge will stay in your mind after you long forget you had read the book. I just add another goal to my 2009 new year resolution. I am going to listen all those CD on my drive to work.