Posts written in Chinese, posts about the Chinese language or culture, or posts concerning my experience being of Chinese descent. (以中文寫作, 或是內容有關於中國語言及文化, 和我個人的華人經驗的文章.)
2008.02.0710:28:33 ESTHappy New YearHappy Chinese New Year! I think my penmanship (or should it be brushmanship?) was better two years ago. And strangely I cannot find any pictures of last year's. (Though, I composed the Lian myself th
2007.12.0116:11:55 ESTThe story of 'garbage'First, a flow chart: For those of you who know Chinese, the characters on the far left are Chinese for "garbage". (The little Japanese kana-like things to the left of the characters are the Taiwan Bo
2007.04.2713:06:46 EDTJournal: the flight back; lost luggageHome sweet home! But not so for my luggage. First let me back track a bit. Dinner had been plentiful for the past few days: Tuesday, we treated Ms Yu and Tian to dinner (we being Pin and I) at the res
2007.04.2517:21:15 CSTJournal: hair cut, uses of Chinese ancient medicine-fuThis is the first time I've been to the barbershop in almost two years. It feels good, to have someone professional, someone who knows how to handle thick Chinese hair, to give me a decent haircut. Th
2007.04.2420:18:19 CSTBuilding securityA few days ago, out of curiousity, we asked the guy down at the ground floor guarding the door about the door-locking policy of this building: he kindly informed us that 1) yes, they do perform a comp
2007.04.2322:19:04 CSTJournal: Elevators and badmintonElevator The elevator in this building allows for passengers to "cancel" a request. There had been several instances prior where, for example, Sergiu leaned against the panel and accidentally pressed
2007.04.1821:15:40 CSTJournal: RecapLots to talk about here, so I'll actually include section headings. More Good Food Sometime around last weekend, I was in my office on the computer, and a westerner knocked on the door and asked in En
2007.04.1308:38:03 CSTJournalWhee! Two wonderful dinners in a row. Wednesday afternoon, Ionescu was invited to give a seminar on some recent stuff he has been studying with Sergiu. The problem is that of unique continuation: in p
2007.04.0721:41:26 CSTJournal: YiHe YuanYay! I went out to play today. (And thanks to S's wonderful suggestion of bringing a USB cable with me, now I have pictures!) Our wonderful host, Ms. Yu, took Sergiu, his family, Alex, and Jean-Michel
2007.04.0613:12:13 CSTDeliveries, cheap labour, and expensive coffeeOne of the things about China that Big Business loves is the fact that labour is cheap. One evidence for this even in everyday life is the curious phenonmenon where everything can be delivered. Pin or
2007.04.0608:56:26 CSTJournal: Another day in ChinaSo wind-chill seems to be a big factor in Beijing. Without the wind, even the cool morning air feels wonderful once I am in the sun, but when the wind starts blowing, staying outside for long is unbea
2007.04.0508:29:11 CSTJournal: Smog, gaijin, pineapplesI got up this morning, looked out the window, and it looks dank and dark and grey and all other kinds of unpleasant. As I put on my backup extra sweather, Pin said, triumphantly, to me, "This is what
2007.04.0211:01:58 CSTChina: Journal 2Yesterday we went out to lunch with Alex Ionescu (and Klainerman and the whole gang). We found out that at one of the cafeterias, they have a booth just for Islamic food (right next to the one for veg
2007.04.0111:33:27 CSTChina, First few daysI am currently in Beijing. At the invitation of Sergiu Klainerman (my advisor), my officemate Pin Yu and I traveled to China to join him, who is taking part of his sabbatical year at the Institute for
2007.03.1513:55:06 EDTRare Chinese coins collectionThe Princeton University Library has recently acquired a set of rare coins collected by the late Souheng Wu. The coins will be integrated into the Rare Books and Special Collections' Numismatics Colle
2007.01.0501:31:39 ESTChinese soft keyboard via XKBDOh well, since oxim won't run on my laptop, I've decided to code myself an on-screen keyboard to use with gcin. Ideally I would like to have done it with xvkbd, since its layout scheme is more elegant
2007.01.0417:40:51 ESTgcin: another Chinese XIMI've been running into some problems with XCIN: the default install is missing a few things here and there, I can't get libtabe to work (so no bimsphone module). I tried the Gentoo-Taiwan overlay, and
2006.09.0617:31:40 EDTBawu playingThanks to S and her mother, I have came into acquisition of a Ba Wu (巴烏). The Ba Wu is a traditional Chinese wind instrument finding its origins in Yunnan. It is a transverse free-reed i
2006.05.1416:40:42 EDTLightCone, Skywalk, and Roman Legionnaires in ChinaLight Cone. Via boingboing, I found a neat little website that generates RSS feeds (based on one's DOB) of stars which the news of one's birth could possibly be known. In other words, stars within (on
2006.04.2818:26:46 EDTOn the Miyagawa/Dower incidentUpdated May 2nd S sends me a link at ESWN commenting on the same issue. The author there did more research than I did, and quotes more liberally. To see some examples of what I was riling about below,
2006.02.0711:15:39 ESTI blame it on the 1986 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry from TaiwanWhat if, on the SAT, you see the following question? 1. LOL :: :-D == a) OMG :: :-O b) ROFLMAO :: :-( c) WTF :: :-P d) TTYL :: :-) e) J/K :: :-X Ridiculous? Sacrilege? Perhaps you'd be thinking about
2006.02.0122:06:23 ESTEmil周華健, a.k.a. Emil Chow, is one of my favorite Mandarin singer. The release of his CD Emil and Friends coincided with the end of 8th grade for me, immediately prior to my leaving Ta
2006.01.2900:26:53 ESTJournal: Chinese New Year's EveIn another 8 minutes comes the new Chinese year, one of 丙戌, a year of Dog. Today, being New Year's Eve, in accordance to the Chinese tradition, we made 年糕 (Nian2 Gao1; Year
2005.12.0417:57:59 ESTNews from Far East: Taiwanese election, Chinese dog in spaceTaiwanese Election w00t! The KMT (國民黨) and its "Blue Coalition" Won Big (link in Chinese) in the local election on December 3rd. Of the 23 administrative seats up for grabs in cou
2005.12.0223:32:28 ESTDuck Poem 鴨子詩My parents, my father's old boss/teacher at UMDNJ, and I went to visit another of my dad's old teachers. For lunch we went to a restaurant called 京苑 (which is kinda funny since they cert
2005.11.0522:10:34 ESTA big political mess in TaiwanA summary of what happened thus far, courtesy of Mom: The Taiwanese government has been involved in construction projects. One of which is the High Speed Rail system (高速鐵路
2005.09.2223:44:39 EDTI grew up there這是我的故鄉，我成長的記憶。這，是Google鳥瞰世界的影像&#
2005.09.1222:05:17 EDTDepartment Reception; Cooking JournalToday was the reception for first year grads. I woke up earlier than usual (8:30am), showered, dressed, doodled around, had breakfast, and left home at 10:30. Got to school by 11. Spent about half an
2005.08.2600:00:00 EDTPrivate EntryFirst Private Entry. If you are a LiveJournal Friend, you get to see it.
2005.08.2318:49:14 EDTThe decline of science in AmericaHarold Evans writes in the BBC about the decline of Science in the United States. If America were to continue on the present trend of catering to the lobbyists of large conglomerates, it will soon los
2005.08.2000:36:09 EDTJournalWoke up this morning with a really bad aftertaste of a bizarre dream. S knows all about it, and why I shouldn't include it in my journal entry. Note to self: the details of the dream is in a e-mail co
2005.05.1005:34:00 EDTFixing MuttMan... it took me five hours to trouble shoot this problem. So I noticed yesterday that I've stopped being able to send out e-mails in Big5 encoding. Tracing the problems back through all the content
2005.05.1001:49:00 EDTChinaman will not attack ChinabearI just got this hilarious email from my elementary school teacher Andrew Li. It is an "alleged" news report from a mainland Chinese reporter. Here's a screen shot of the document displaying via abiwor
Anime/Manga (3) News, reviews, recent purchase, thoughts, and pretty much everything about Anime and Manga.
Books (7) Book reviews primarily. Sometimes recommendations of new publications or mentioning of books I really want.
Chinese (33) Posts written in Chinese, posts about the Chinese language or culture, or posts concerning my experience being of Chinese descent. (以中文寫作, 或是內容有關於中國語言及文化, 和我個人的華人經驗的文章.)
Creations (12) My creations, could be musical, literary, graphical, or in other formats, but generally fall under the category of Art.
German (1) Posts written in German. It will be empty for a while, until I become passable writing in German.
French (1) Posts written in French. (Les entreés écrivées en français.)
Religion (1) My thoughts about religion in general, specific news about the various religions.
Japanese (1) Posts written in Japanese. It will be sparse until my Japanese becomes better.
Linky! (55) Boing-boing-like entries which links to fun stuff I found on the web (many of them through boing-boing).
Linux (22) Things related to the Linux operating systems. Particularly prominent on things about Gentoo, my preferred flavor.
Mathematics (59) Posts about mathematics. Upcoming conferences, conference descriptions, papers I am reading, papers I am writing, pre-prints, all sorts of goodies. Also some of my thoughts about mathematical education and such.
Movies (1) Movies I saw recently. Reviews. Movies I plan to see in the future. Expectations.
Music (10) Posts about the music I listen to or the music I play. Things about the music industry usually don't go here (they end up, almost always, in the outrageous! category.
Politics (7) Things that, unfortunately, I have to deal with as an American in a democratic republic, but about which I really wish I could just stop caring.