Serenity

(Originally written in 2006/12/22)

One day, Aoss told me that he found that students in Computer Science don't usually look into the eyes of the guy/girl he/she is talking to. After learning this, I have begun to pay more attention to this situation. I have found that not only is he right, but also that I have the same habit sometimes..

It's a little shock for me to notice this bad habit. I am trying to focus my eyes on the other's eyes or forehead, but it's hard work. I don't know why I can't look into aothers' eyes. Maybe we use computers too often and lack the experience of having face to face talks, or maybe we work and talk to people simultaneously less than we once did because we are busier. I do have lots of talks to people, but in most of these, we both sit in front of the monitor and talk. Therefore, our eyes focus on the screen naturally. We need a computer to demonstrate the things in our discussions.

Summer’s Left is the name of one of my favorite piano songs. About three years ago, I found a rearrange piano album named Kanon Air Piano Arrange Album “Re-feel” (also known as Re-feel for short) on the Internet. I loved this album very much, so I asked my friend’s help to buy this CD from Japan because it didn’t sell in Taiwan. The price index in Japan is higher than the one in Taiwan, so I paid about NTD 700 which was the double of the normal price for CDs in Taiwan, however, it was worthy! I have listened to this album for hundreds times.

Beside the CD, the publisher also provided three piano scores of this CD so that buyers can play the same music as the songs in this CD. As a young man who has learned piano for a while, of course I gave it a trial after receiving the CD immediately. After some trials, I found that the scores are absolutely correct, so I can play the same music as the songs in this CD in deed! However, the premise is that I have good enough skill.

During these years, I practice my skill in piano sometimes. Although I don’t practice with much time, I still improve my skill a little. This summer, I made up my mind to challenge these songs again. I chose Summer’s Left as the first target because this is my favorite one in this CD. I like its name, too. Actually, the original name in Japanese is 夏影 which means the shadow of summer, but I found that the name in English is Summer’s Left. I don’t know the reason why the publisher changed the name in English, but I like it. The name Summer’s Left reflects similar feeling as夏影 in both Japanese and Chinese; however, the direct translated name Summer’s Shadow is somewhat weird.

Bulletin Board System (abbreviated as BBS) is one of the services in the Internet. It was invented from a western country, but it was populated in Taiwan. Foreigners don’t understand why Taiwanese like to use this service so much because it is not convenient in deed; however, it has a kind of magic power.

The functions of BBS are similar to instant messages (such as MSN) plus discussion boards on web. You can send and receive private messages in BBS, read and post articles on e-boards, play small games or discuss in a chat room. The only different is that BBS use terminals to communicate, that is, users in BBS can only read and type plain texts, and there are no images, music, or other formatted contents as web. The biggest BBS site is ptt.cc built by students in CSIE in NTU. There are more than seven hundreds different boards with different topics to discuss, for example, technique jobs, basketball, atheism, private classmates’ talks, etc, and more than thirty thousands people averagely. Therefore, these people create diverse and deep information. Sometimes I look up some specific things there; however, the native drawbacks of BBS make it hard to search.

Speaking of search, there are two important criteria. One is comparing the similarity between query words and documents, and the other is ranking the relative documents. In this information exploding times, people become losing patience. A good search engine such as Google can help people find what they want quickly. Because the bad architecture of BBS, there is a few people try to make up search engines. The first famous product is bbs.openfind.com.tw, but it fails several years before. Currently, there is a new team of challengers from NCCU. They spend about a half year to build up the BBS search engine YouSee on web. I gave it some trials and found that although the ranking is not good enough, it has shown the power of searching in BBS, since there is so much information in BBS and this information can’t be found globally before. In the past days, the only way for us to find the information is to navigate from boards to boards, but now we can only type some keywords and click the button “search”. How convenient it is!

One of my younger friends had read the book Into the Wild and he seemed to like this book very much, so I went to the library and borrow it. There was a story about why this book was published. At first, there was small news about an anonymous young man who died in Alaska, and then his friends identified who he is. The young man, Christopher McCandless, is well-educated, smart and strong in sports. Nobody knows why he went to the wildness in Alaska and finally died there. Therefore, Jon Krakauer, the editor of Outside Magazine, wrote a report on this. Many readers wrote mails to Jon after they read this report. Some of them gave positive comments such as brave man to the young man, while some of them gave negative ones such as reckless and arrogant boy. On the other hand, some of the young man’s friends shared what they knew about Christopher and they wanted to know why Christopher died there because they thought that Christopher was strong enough to live everywhere and he definitely didn’t go to their suicide. This brought Jon an idea to dig out what happened to Christopher.

Jon desired to understand Christopher because Jon had a similar experience as Christopher. He went to climb a notorious mountain named Devil’s Thumb in Alaska when he was young. To find out what happened to Christopher, Jon traced where Christopher had visited and interviewed the family and friends of him. Combined Christopher’s notes, Jon’s personal experience and some related and famous people who have been wildness in history, Jon tried to write this book to explain what Christopher thought and why he did these things; however, the clues were too less to build a whole view of Christopher, so what we read was inferences of the author.

Christopher seemed to not like the civilization and didn’t want to live with folks. In contrast, he liked the nature and lived alone, and he did do many trials to close the nature and succeeded to live peacefully with it. It was a pity that he made some mistake in his final trip. What I learned is that there are many possibilities in life. Before reading this book, I only knew to be a scholar or an engineer in the future; however, we could live with more freedom as long as we drop some desires in physics. I knew that I can’t live as Christopher since I like convenient functions of cities and I don’t like trouble, so I may never try to go to the wildness. Also, I think I don’t need to go there to find out the deep feeling of mine. At least, I don’t need currently. By the way, a new movie based this story will show up on Sep. 21, 2007. When there is a DVD in Taiwan, I’ll take some time to watch it.

( This articled have been revised by Magar. )

There is a famous program named “Britains Got Talent”. The program will invite some special people and let them show their special skills. As is usual with normal programs, there are some judges who give some comments and determine whether the performers will reach the next stage of the contest or not. This year, an unbelievable performer appeared.

The performer was a man, and he looked a little shy. Before he started to perform his act, one of the judges asked him what he was going to perform. And he answered shortly “To sing opera”. The judges didn’t like his response. But after he sang the first sentence, everybody on the program changed his/her face. The singing was so amazing that no one had expected it to be so good.. The performer sang the song “Nessun Dorma” from the famous opera Turandot. Although I haven’t seen the opera before, the song is so famous that I have heard it several times. As a result of his glorious voice, a member of the audience seemed to burst into tears. My eyes felt a little wet, too. After the show finished, both the audience and the judges clapped and shouted loudly.. Finally, he was declared the champion without any doubt.

Speaking of making money, why should we care this so serious? Sometimes people chase the way of making money and lose their ways in life. Therefore, before we start thinking of how to make more money, maybe we should think what life is first.

So what is life? I don’t know, and even I know it, it still can’t be the answer of others because everyone has his/her own life. Psychologist Maslow had given a hierarchy of needs in 1943. The hierarchy from the lowest to the highest is Physiological, Safety, Love/Belonging, Esteem and Self-actualization. The hierarchy is in pyramid form, that is, the lower part it is, the more people there is. The idea is simple: after we have satisfied in the lower parts, we can be interested in the higher one. For example, we won’t be interested in self-actualization if we don’t have food (physiological) and safety.

Or we can view the life in the other way. The basic of life is finding a goal. We will live with more passion as long as we have a goal to achieve. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a kind of goal which is ordered by necessity. Take me as an example, I always would like to find something meaningful to do because I don’t have the problems about no food, no safety or no love. Since I have earned some awards and been the class leader for several times, I do have some esteem from others. However, I never feel comfortable with self-actualization. In deed, I don’t know what kinds of goals I should achieve. Therefore, I lose the way to work hard sometimes.

When I was a boy, I only knew that I should study hard and get a good record of formal schooling, so I can have a good salary. However, because of many people have the same thoughts, there are more people have college degree than before. What’s worse is that even master degree is not valuable as before.

On the other hand, young people are becoming losing their patience in working in company because this makes them have less freedoms and salaries. The new idea about making money is to set up their companies. Actually, some of my friends have done that for a while. The most famous examples are Wretch and Pixnet. Watching they grow up from a nameless company to a famous one is really interesting. Recently, one of the members in out lab is setting up his company. He has gotten a position in ITRI, so he don’t need to worry about no income. Also, working in ITRI is not as busy as the other companies in Science Park in Hsin-Chu, so he is able to have enough free time to manage his company. To be honest, I am becoming having the similar idea. Maybe I won’t set up my company, but I think working in a company is not a good idea, since the salary is getting lower than before. Who knows how lower it would be after I finish the duty in soldier.

There is a famous book named “Rich dad, poor dad” written by Robert T. Kiyosaki. The author has written a series of books after this one. The main idea of these books is to introduce how poor our normal working plan is and some knowledge in making money. We know that if we could earn more money more easily by reading these books, then everybody would earn more money. This implies nobody would earn more money since the richness is relative instead of absolute. Some readers said that although the books teach them some knowledge, to accomplish it is very hard. However, this message gives me a insight of challenges. As what I’ve said, if everybody could earn more money by reading these books, the methods in these books wouldn’t be useful. I think I’ll take some time to read these books, after all if I don’t find new thoughts, I couldn’t achieve new ways to make money.

Recently there is too many things to do, and I found that I was lack of the power to execute all things soon. Therefore, I go to the library to borrow the book “Execution”. I think it may tell me how to execute well. For example, how can I live with more energy, or tell me a story that makes me have new positive thoughts. In fact, I was wrong; it is a book about management.

Although reading this book can’t improve my passions so that I can solve a lot of things, I learn many principles from it. This book tries to emphasize the importance of execution. Usually, books about management tell much abstraction, and I understand nothing after reading these kinds of books. The great thing of this book is that it gives a lot of examples in order to explain their simple principles. For example, ten focuses are no focuses, or execution is not a strategy in business, it is a basis of everything. There are some principles that many manager think they are impossible to achieve, but when this words come from the mouth of the chief executive officer of the top 100 companies, they will trust and follow them. For example, no matter how high your position is, you should still go to talk to the lowest staffs, otherwise, you won’t be aware the situation of your company. Also, no matter how busy you are, you should still supervise the plans, otherwise, your staffs would think these plans are not important, and therefore they wouldn’t do many efforts.

Another good example is that managers who work more than normal hours are bad ones. This point is somewhat opposite to many people. People who work harder than others usually earn the respect from their managers. The authors don’t think so. They think that managers who work harder would also ask their staffs to work harder. This department may crash suddenly someday because the whole department works too many hours than usual ones. Also, this reveals a drawback of this kind of managers. The drawback is that they can’t authorize their jobs to their staffs, and this means that they can’t afford more complicated jobs since authorization is a necessary part of a organization.

When it was winter, I didn't like the cold weather, and I thought that higher temperature is better than lower one. But now I think cooler is better than hotter.

Sometimes people are forgettable; maybe we have too small brain to memorize all things. During the cold days in each year, I recall that I don't like the cold days, but I think that I like hot days more. During the hot days, I recall that I also don't like the hot days. So now I really hope that summer could pass faster, I'm expecting the winter come.

Air conditioning is a great invent that saves many people in summer, but I don't like it very much. I don't like the fast change of temperature; no matter it is changing from hot to cold or from cold to hot. After staying in a room with a air conditioning, going to somewhere without a air conditioning makes me uncomfortable, and vice versa.

When we were children, we were on the road which our parents had set up. Sometimes the road is similar to others, or we can call it the road of the expectation of the society, for example, having a master or doctor degree.

When we grew up, we found there were many other choices; we didn't need to compete with the others in the narrow road. We can live with more happiness and chase what we would like to be. However, when we are closing the society, we realize that finding what we like is really hard. Sometimes living on the original road is easier and we can suffer fewer pains.

For me, I had made a decision that I wanted to live easier when I graduated from the junior high school. I chose to study in the classes not in sciences, although I was good at mathematics and sciences. I thought I needed think harder if I would study in scientific areas. However, this lazy decision was changed after entering the senior high school with a half of year.