Maybe I am a bit out of date about the internet culture of this generation. I have seen the word “Orz” used here and there, I sort of know it express the feeling of frustration and depression. Today, I finally know its true meaning when I come across the wiki page dedicate to this word. To be exact, “Orz” is a pictograph representing someone down on his knee, defeated, feeling life is totally miserable, and probably yelling “why, why, why me?” sadly. The O is the head, the r forms the upper torse and the arm and the z is the knee on ground. To give a better illustration, to “Orz” is making a pose like the guy in the picture belove. This word can be used as a noun, verb, adjective or even replace a whole sentence. Emoitioncon is really an efficient way to communicate.  It only use 3 characters to express the complex feeling otherwise would require a few paragraph to describe.

Today is the Chinese New Year.  I wish all the readers of my blog a prosperous year of pig.  Here in Vancouver, we don’t really have the atomsphere for celebrating of Chinese New Year, except that the Chinese TV is showing special new year program all day long, the Chinese radio is playing those boring new year songs and we will say “Kung Hei Fat Choy” to friends.  Without the 3 days long public holidays as in HK, the Chinese New Year is just seem like a normal weekend to me. This year is the year of pig, however the TV stations in China refrain from showing the lucky pig on TV.  Out of political correctness, some stupid officials in communist government think showing the sign of pigs will offend the Muslim minority in China, thus may cause social unrest.  First of all, although Muslim regards pig as unholy, the officials are simpily worrying too much.  The enlightened Muslim would know to respect the Chinese culture and lives peacefully in the year of pig.  There may be a few retarded Muslim consider the year of pig offending, but they are the one should change their mind.  The majority should not bend to a few obscured mind minority.  In the matter of fact, other than some random writing from an ancient book, the Muslims has no reason to dislike pig in the first place.  Rather than forbidding showing pigs in TV, the Chinese governmetn should call to moderize Muslim in China, encourage the Muslims to embrace pig by correcting the obvious mistaken teaching regarding pigs in Koran.  Just like we have a chinese style socialism, which is essentially capitalism, we should also have a chinese style muslim, in which the believers can enjoy pork and alcohol.

I have the regular maintance for my Volvo and the dealer gave me a 2007 S60 as the service car.  It is nice able to test drive a S60.  The S60 is smaller than my S70.  Actually it is so small that it doesn’t feel like a Volvo.  The handling and control is very Volvo like, a big car with lots of momentum.  I don’t like the interior design.  The middle section with the radio control panel and gear shift is too big.  The interface for the AC and radio is not very user friendly.  The buttons and knobs are too small and left too much empty space on the panel.  S60 pretend to be stylish by making the top of the car narrower than the body, as a result the inside of the car is not very roomy.  There is a very interesting feature of this car.  There is button to fold down the head rest of the back seats, so it won’t block the rear window.  When the head rest is release by unlocking the spring, so it can snap forward.  If someone is sitting at the back, his head will be spanked.  I tried it during lunch time when I was giving a ride to my friends.  I guess it is quite a useful feature to spank the naugty kids at the back.  In short, I found the S60 is not very comfortable.  Although my S70 is a older model with the box-shape design, I think it is a much better car than the new S60.

Today, I came across book sharing website at anobii.com. It is pretty much like Douban.com, except this one is focus only on books and have a better user interface. Naobii.com is based in HK, which is kinda an unusal place to start a new web 2.0 venture. The website allow users to create and share their books collection. User can enter title of the books, rating and comments, then Naobii.com will take care of the database and provide other information of the book like cover picture, publisher, etc. The website connects users share comon reading interest. The website is still in beta stage, but it has already built up a large book catalog and user base. When Douban.com first come out, I thought about using it to keep track of my books. However, I found it too inconvinent to use and dropped the idea. Naobii.com seems addressed most problem of Doubai and it also provide easy integration to your blog and export your book shelf in plain HTML for backup. The website is still in its infancy, it needs many improvement. It is still too much hassle to add a book, the book search function is not fast enough. I think Naobii.com can post a serious thread to Douban.com, which is slowly turning into an anti-intelligent getto. Probably including music and movie reviews is not a good idea, espeically music, it really dumb down the intellectual content of the users.

I went to shopping with Pat this afternoon.  Unfortunately, after spending 3 hours in the mall, the only thing I bought is a polo shirt.  Not a very productive shopping trip.  I first went to Mountain Equiment Co-op then head towards Park Royal.  This two places has totally different shopping style.  I feel very comfortable selecting clothings in Mountain Equiment Co-op, while I am quite uneasy finding the right clothings in Park Royal.  I don’t know much about the clothings in general.  The clothings in Moutain Equiments are all functional, there are specification for me to look up.  I can compare their water-proof, warm-keeping, breathness, price then make an objective judgement.  On the other hand, the selection criteria of the clothings in Park Royalother is subjective.  I know what kind colour I like and whether the clothes is comfortable or not, but I can never tell I bought the right clothes.  If clothing style is purely subjective and there is no dispute on tastes, then at least I don’t have to care what others people think about my clothes.  But this is obviously not the reality, people judge you by what you wear.  Yet there is no objective rules to capture how people may judge you.  To make it worst, try to use statistic approach by simpily getting the most common fashion style won’t work.  Fashion is something contradictary on its own, it has to follow the trend, but at the same time blame the lack of uniqueness or character.  Almost policy in the old communist China is wrong, but at least they have done one thing right by making everyone wear the same style uniform everyday everywhere.  This policy is probably the only way to my problem in clothes shopping.  Ok, I do agree the Mao style unifrm is ugly.  Maybe we can fix the system by hiring some top fashion designers to make a better looking uniform.