Watts Humphrey began his book Managing the Software Process with two proverbs:

“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will do.
If you don’t know where you are, a map won’t help.”

Again, these Taoism sayings reminded me that how important it is to learn to let go. Upon understanding our real locations and identities, can we easily and happily follow the road of life.

Since yesterday until now, you might have noticed that some images on this site can’t be loaded. The server on which those images reside became inaccessible because of DNS failure. But how to contact the administrator? That’s a question.

Well, thanks Google cache. I got their telephone number, QQ number, and alternative email address. The custom service girl told me that their DNS server had been recovered. But there is still a buffering time up to 24 hrs, during which DNS records should be updated.

March 10th UPDATE: not solved yet.

Mom and I went back to my grandparents’ home when I gotta get into the third grade in primary school, while dad was sent to Burundi by his company. (I didn’t realize the reason why we must move there until recently.)

At that time, I was totally absent to the “odd” names and directions of the towns in the surroundings. Now it’s clear. In fact, their topological positions never change. The only thing that has changed is my perceivings - I could view them from outside for now.

Experiences of life in villages is always worthwhile for a child.

Picasa 2 (freeware)

On July 13, 2004, Google acquired Picasa. So you might have guessed the answer. Picasa is great at searching and organizing pictures stored everywhere in your machine. Picasa is tightly attached to other Google services(Gmail, Hello, Blogger). Picasa has a simple but florid user interface, and a bad support with GB2312.

IrfanView 3.95 (freeware)

Do you think your ACDSee 6.0 PowerPack is extremely slow? Although it is really more powerful than version 3.0, I just couldn’t bear its startup speed, slow like a snail. So if you were also hunting for a high-efficient image browser, you’d make a trial of IrfanView, which is on the top of my recommendation list. Believe it or not, its setup file size is only 856.5kB!

With various plugins, it can also handle text/audio/video files. This brings a shortcoming that you may find too much IrfanView icons(little red reptiles) in your computer.

Turbo Photo 4.2 (shareware)

It contains both an image editor and an image browser. I use Turbo Photo to resize images, enhance quality, and add personalized frames.

It would provide:

• an external personal information portal, through which other people could get this person’s profile easily. Concretely, this might be a blogging intermedium, or a complete blogging space;
• an internal personal information portal, through which he himself could access lastest news, weblog subscriptions, mailboxes, search results, and even everything. RSS feed aggregator is a good example for this;
• a powerful networking mechanism(foaf, community, interest, tag);
• an audio/video P2P communication tool;
• …

For now, Google has Blogger, orkut. But both are unsatisfactory. This is absolutely true for me at least - thinking about the inaccessible blogspot, and so few functions with orkut. Comparatively speaking, Microsoft has MSN Spaces, My MSN, wallop(though it exists for experimental purposes), MSN Messenger. Yahoo has only My Yahoo!(but it is the first internal personal information portal with RSS support). It seems M$ has surpassed Google.

So, big guys, come on. Grab these goodies: Six Apart(Movable Type and LiveJournal company), WordPress, Bloglines, Friendster, Meetup, Skype.

P.S. //addoil uuzone~