Tian Bai

Just read in Richard Stallman‘s personal page: "I also visited Tibet unawares, because nobody told me that JiuZhaiGou was part of Tibetan territory annexed by China since the conquest".  WTF…

I’m fairly active on Douban, but not on Facebook.  On Douban, I always feel like I’ve got something concrete to talk about and share; on Facebook, although there are various applications, people are still more into something inane (IMHO), such as biting one another.  However, Douban still needs to figure out how to better encourage users to discuss/share/socialize based on the concrete content, and furthermore, loop in their friends from real life.

"Love does not consist of gazing at each other but looking outward in the same direction".  The same for Friendship, I believe.

I got my iPod Touch on Jan 2nd.  I’m not very into entertainment, but for what I spent $300?  Just a portable browser.

There are complains that compared to iPhone, iPod Touch does not have Email, Stock applications installed.  So what?  It supports JavaScript!  I don’t understand with Gmail, Google Finance, why we still need those applications (doing emails when you are offline is the only scenario on top of my head).  Also I cannot understand why things like Mobile Windows Live Messenger and Mobile QQ are still under development.

On PC, compared to RIA web pages, applications locally installed may be more responsive.  However, when it comes to handheld devices, this is not necessarily true.  AJAX makes Rich Internet Applications (RIA) widely adopted.  Flex will probably take it to the next step.  I guess in future, we need local applications only when we need daemon processes, like to capture service messages or to prompt a coming event.

GPRS->EDGE->3G->4G, these will enable us to access Internet anywhere, anytime.  I would say if we could only choose to build 1 excellent application on Windows Mobile, we have to choose IE for sure.  The others will eventually not matter much.

With all these being said, looking at the mobile experiences with which Google are surprising end-users, the web API’s with which Google are inspiring Dev community, I can’t help worrying about the future of Microsoft.

Microsoft declaims that globally every dollar it makes brings 5 dollars to its partners.  yeah, sure.  Just take a look at how many Microsoft teams have to upgrade laptops just for switching to Windows Vista

I’m cheerfully surprised to know that our sovereign-wealth fund, China Investment Corp (CIC), is going to pay $5 billion for as much as 9.9% of the Wall Street giant, Morgan Stanley.  This was announced together with Morgan Stanley’s $9.4 billion write-down for its fiscal fourth quarter.

It’s really a wise move. The Subprime Crisis introduces this golden opportunity that many foreign banks/funds are significantly under-valued and need cash injection.  We should just widely invest on those banks/funds now.  It’s also a firm move, with respect that CIC has been extensively snickered for the loss on Blackstone.  I admire the determination.

It is said that "for the first time, Chinese companies and the government bought more overseas than foreign buyers have invested in China", which is good news considering the piling up foreign cash on China’s balance sheet.

I’ve been asked several times about how to track emails as threads (grouped by subject) in Outlook.  I did find some neat tricks and would like to share them with you here.  I’m using Outlook 2007, and you may need to adjust these a little bit to apply the same idea to older versions.

The main idea is as simple as

1. Create a Search Folder, for say "Threads", which searches in both Inbox and Sent Items, with the Criteria being blank.
2. For the "Threads" folder, choose ‘Arrange By: Conversation‘ and ‘Newest on top‘, so that the most recently updated thread will pop on top.
3. In addition, I put the "Threads" into Favorite Folders, so that I can access it conveniently through the Navigation Pane.

If I send an email to a group which I belong to, the email will be in both Inbox and Sent Items.  Previously this issue just wastes some storage space, but now it’s more annoying since I would see the duplicate in the same thread.  To address this issue completely, I create a rule to filter out all incoming emails sent by myself (move them to Deleted Items).

BTW, if you have rules to move email lists, which you subscribe and only want to check intermittently, to some sub-folders of Inbox, it’s better to disable ‘Search subfolders’ for Search Folders like "Unread Email" and "Threads".

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