Category: Life

I have an iPod (generation 3 20 gb version). I won it while attending one of the conferences.

Since I was an engineer, I value function over fashion much more. That’s why I never really liked the iPod. Most of things I listen to are audiobooks, and if I don’t buy the audiobooks from the iTune or Audible.com, I’m left with MP3 files that are not bookmarked.

I have two other small flash based players, one from iRiver and one from SanDisk. They both work well, showing up as USB mass storage devices when connected to my computer. However, the SanDisk requires a music management software to put the MP3 to remove mp3 files, which is a bit of pain.

I’ve recently discovered a great use of the iPod though, to download PodCast from the iTune store.

A lot of the podcasts used to be fee-based. I had a friend telling me he pays Audible.com to download all the WallStreet Journal news on a dailly basis to his portable mp3 palyer.

Well, if you look at the iTune store now, there are tens of thousands of free podcasts now. I initially brought out the iPod so I can listen to Jack and Susie Welch’s Business Weeks podcast. When I went to iTune store though, I found so much more free podcast, I now subscribe to at least 15 of them.

My favorite one so far is still The Welch Way. My second favorite is actually David Linthicum’s podcast on Service Oriented Archiecture. I really enjoy listening to his insights. A lot of people thinks he’s kind of high-level, but as an enterprise architect, he’s speaking to me at exactly the right level.

So enjoy all the great content from thought leaders of today, and hope you learn much from what you hear.

Until next time.

最近和JY品尝了一些Michel Cluizel的巧克力。

Michel Cluizel是非常有名的法国巧克力生产商。 他们的Single Cru巧克力在世界上是数一数二的。

下面是我和JY的印象。

Los Ancones:
一开始感觉味道不浓，可是含在嘴里时间长了，味道就出来了，主要是Dark Chocolate,而且越来越浓。-JY
开始时有一种形容不出的感觉，然后又有种烟草味道。然后就是甜的水果味道。非常易溶，回味悠长，有点意犹未尽的感觉。 -LW

Marilumi：
一开始味道就非常浓。无层次感，没有上次的好吃。 -JY
开始是淡淡的。后来越来越酸，又非常强的莓的味道。回味没有上次的长。 -LW

Tamarina：
一开始味道很淡，然后慢慢开始变浓，象渗透开来一样，先是清香味，再是浓烈的黑巧克力味（清香味此时还在），我觉得是到现在最好吃的。-JY
闻起来有很强的巧克力味道，有点酸酸的。吃下去开始好几秒钟以内没有什么味道。慢慢的有青草的香味，到最后有一点酸，回味没有Los Ancones长，清香味道。-LW

Concepcion
入口就有清香味道，而且不散。后来巧克力味道越来越浓的时候清香味还是有的。-JY
问起来有浓浓的巧克力味道，不过没有象Tamarina的酸味。吃起来开始淡淡的，然后有水果的酸味，巧克力味道非常柔和。到最后有一点酸味，回味有一点苦。-LW

Mangaro Noir
和其他几种比起来，这种巧克力刚入口时没什么味道，而且味道一直很淡，可是后来突然爆发出来，很浓烈。我没有觉得很甜。-JY
闻起来有股清香的味道。味道很快变浓。有非常重的水果酸味，越到后来越甜，结束时酸甜味道为主。回味时有巧克力味道。-LW

我和JY的口味有些不同，她比较喜欢甜一点的，我比较喜欢酸一点的。

你们如果有兴趣可以在网上买到Michel Cluizel的巧克力。

Hi. Just in case you are looking for an affordable house in the San Francisco Bay Area.

My house has 4 bedrooms, 2 1/2 baths, 1,544 sq ft, built in 1999 with view of the bay right outside the door.

You can read more about it Here.

Here is the MLS Listing

If you or anyone you know would like to see the house, please contact my agent, Jennifer Chen at (925) 242-8970. She’ll be hosting open houses on Sundays 1 – 4 pm.

Please forward this information to your friends for whom you know is on the market for housing.

Thanks.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

When I first read these words, I was both inspired and a bit confused. Does the government actual guarantees my happiness, how could they do that?

I only come to understand the meaning of the phrase “pursuit of happiness” recently. If you think about it, it actually implies that happiness can be obtained through effort. By the end of the speech, you will learn ways to become a happier person.

There is a new branch of psychology called “positive psychology”. Traditionally, psychology focused on correcting negative emotions and behaviors. Positive psychology instead focuses on how to build human strengths and happiness. It started in 1998 after Martin Seligman’s became the president of American Psychological Association, and it’s the fastest growing field in psychology today.

Let’s go over some findings from positive psychology and see how we can leverage them to make ourselves happier.

At genetic level, we humans are born with a happiness range, and our goal is to keep ourselves at the upper limit of the range as much as possible.

At the biological level, the brain chemicals related to the feeling of happiness are serotonin and dopamine. They are produced by the brain, are similar to ecstasy and opium in effect, and generate a sense of euphoria and peacefulness respectively.

Three recent findings in positive psychology are of interest. One is that the biggest factor affecting happiness is the quality of your relationship with your friends and family members. Another is that we can only have one feeling at a time. The third is that our body affects feelings.

First, biggest factor affecting happiness is the quality of your relationship with your friends and family members.

– So invest time and energy in friends and family – Right after my daughter’s birth, I was so busy taking care of her, I got really stressed out. I found that talking to my friends on the phone even briefly really helps me to take my minds away, and I felt much better after every conversation. If what you are doing is affecting you negatively, then stop doing it, and start engaging in meaningful social activities with others.

Second, that we can only maintain one feeling at a time. That means we need to maximize the time we spent experiencing positive feelings to leave no place for negative feelings in our minds. Positive feelings include gratitude, kindness, joy, sympathy and many others.

– So count your blessings and be grateful. I have recently started a journal where my wife and I keep track of things we are grateful for, and thank God for all the blessings every night. It really helped us to see how lucky we are. Also thank people who helped you along the way. Make sure to be specific and thank them face to face if at all possible. It helps you to gain a deeper connection those special people in your life.

– Practice act of kindness. These can either be random or systematic. Being kind triggers many mechanisms, it makes you feel generous and capable, give a great sense connection with others, and wins you smiles, approval and recipricol kindness in return.

– Savor life’s joys – life offers many joyous moments such as your graduation, the birth of your children. Mentally capture them and relish in them during less happy times. Einstein says “A happy man is too satisfied with the present to dwell too much on the future”.

– Learn to forgive – let go of anger and resentment by writing a letter to a person who has hurt or wronged you. Again, the mind can not be happy when revenge and hurt occupies it all the time.

The last finding which is quite contrary to common sense is that our bodies affect our felings.
– So develop strategy for coping with stress and hardships – I found praying lift my burdens and I’m left with a sense of inner peace. A simply thing you can do during times of stress or when experiencing negative emotions is do force yourself to smile by putting your facial muscle to use. Keep your smiling face for more than 30 seconds, and I guarantee you’ll feel better.

– Take care of your body – I use to have a really sedentary lifestyle, weighing 180 pounds, and not taking care of my body. I later found jogging really helps me to release stress. It puts my mind and body at east to prepare for the next set of stress. Getting enough sleep is also important.

Happiness is not shallow, when we are happy, we positively affect others around us. Not only should we strive to be happy, but also encourage other to be happy as well.

To summarize, happiness is achievable through your own actions. Strive to live a life of meaning and purpose, fill your heart with gratefulness and joy, practice acts of kindness, spent time to connect to others, and practice your smiles. Take the steps to heart, make them into habits, and you’ll live a happier life.

Now let me see that wonderful smile on your faces.

I’m in the process of selling my house now.

I’ve lived here since I got to California, for about 7 years. It was a brand-new house, and it still looks and feels pretty new.

I’m moving to an area that is closer to work, with better schools and safer neighborhood. I haven’t decided which exact areas to live in yet, and I’m currently considering Pleasanton, Dublin or San Ramon. They are all great places, and once my house is on the market, I’ll start looking for another one to buy.

I already have a great agent, but if you have any goood leads, please let me know.

Thanks.

Today, I’m going to show you some quick and easy ways to improve the quality of your digital photographs.

Let’s see if this will be a good topic. By the show of hands, how many of you have digital cameras? How many of you use the digital cameras on a regular basis? How many of you would like to improve the quality of your digital photos?

I see. Well, I think I can help.

Let’s get right to it. I like my digital camera because I can see the photos right after I take it and retake the photo if I’m not satisfied with it. I don’t need to waste good money printing out not-so-good photos. I don’t need for wait for the photos to be developed, because I can print them out right at home, on my home ink-jet printer.

I was going through couple of film rolls a week before digital cameras became popular and affordable. I was a pretty good photographer by that time already, and I was actually thinking of opening a side photo business doing events. I can tell you, my first experience with my digital photography was not very encouraging. Most times the photos came out looking dull, sometimes with a color tint such as green or blue. Some of them looked OK on my monitor but looked horrible when I printed them out on my ink-jet printer.

So I decided that digital photography was not for me, and went back to film cameras for awhile.

Then Three years ago, I attended an one-day workshop by a professional photographer on digital work-flow which really opened my eyes.

The term digital work flow refers to the multiple steps in digital photo-taking, and the secret to improving your digital photos is by understanding and following the digital work flow steps.

A simplified version of a digital work flow has four parts: setting the camera, take and review the photo, digital darkroom, and printing.

The first step is to set the camera. Unlike a traditional camera, a digital camera takes a bit more time to set up. First you will decide what mode to use, do you want full automatic? aperture priority? shutter priority? or full manual mode? Then the resolution, how big should the photos be? Then the image capture mode, raw or JPEG? They all have an impact on the resulting photo, but are not as important as setting the white balance.

White balance is a new concept only applicable to digital photography. You adjust for white-balance to account for the color temperature of the lights falling on your subject. Your eyes are very good at telling what white is in most situations, but your camera is not. It relies on you to make that judgment. Most people know about the white-balance setting on their cameras, but don’t know what it’s used for, and therefore automatically leave it on auto white-balance which means the camera will do its best to determine the color temperature of ambient light. However, digital cameras are not good at determine the proper white balance in many situations. Most digicams also have settings for sunny, cloudy, florescent and incandescent lights. Use these when appropriate. The best approach to white balance though, is to use a piece of white paper and calibrate your camera for manual white-balance like so.

Now that you’ve setup the camera, you are ready to take some photos. I will not cover photo taking techniques in this speech, and will elaborate on them in a later one. The biggest advantage of digital over traditional photography is the ability to review the photo right after you take it. You can decide whether to keep or retake it. Most people look at the image on the LCD screen, and it they like what they see they keep it. This approach works in most situations. A better approach is to evaluate a photo based on a histogram. The histogram is a simple graph that displays where all of the brightness levels contained in the scene are found, from the darkest to the brightest. These values are arrayed across the bottom of the graph from left (darkest) to right (brightest). The vertical axis shows how much pixels are found at any particular brightness level.

The histogram should accurately reflect the dynamic range of the photo. In most situations, a histogram should stretch out in the full brightness spectrum. A lopsided histogram either means the photo is underexposed if the pixels are all on the left-hand side, or overexposed if they are all on the right-hand side. Use exposure compensation to deal with under and over exposure issues. Look it up in your camera’s manual on how to do exposure compensation.

After a day of great photo-taking, now you can go home and relax right? Well, not quite. There is a reason digital photography saves you money, it’s because you as the photographer will also work in the digital darkroom instead of some clerk from a photo lab. The digital darkroom is where you make fine adjustment to your photos to make them ready for sharing and printing.

There are quite a few things you can do in your digital darkroom such as correcting color cast if the white balance was not set correctly, adjusting levels, cropping, and special effects. The two that gives you the most bang for the buck are adjusting levels and cropping. Some photo editing programs, such as photoshop element, can automatically adjust levels. This means the program will stretch the brightness range of your photo to fill the whole spectrum. It results in a contrasting and detailed photo. Cropping is important in a lot of situations. For instance, you may want to crop out bystanders and focus the photo’s attention on the real subject, you may also crop the photo so that it fits in the ratio that you want to print the photo in (4×6 or 8×11).

The last step is actually printing the photos. In order to print, you will need to calibrate your monitor and printer to match their color profiles. This will enable you to print photos that match the one shown on the monitor. The process is not simple and takes time. I suggest you look at the Adobe Gamma control panel to calibrate your monitor and import the color profile of your printer into your photo editing program to preview it. By the way, you can find color profiles of many photo printing services on the internet. For instance, you can download color profiles of your local Costco’s printers.

To summarize, there are a few things that you can do to improve your digital photography. First is to understand the digital work-flow and tasks involved. Then make sure that you pre-set the white-balance on your digicam, use histogram to distinguish well exposed photos from the duds, use auto levels to stretch out the brightness range of your photo, and calibrated your monitor and printers for WYSIWYG printing.

Life is full precious moments, and make sure you preserve them well with your digital photos.

I’m actually in the process of selling my house right now. That explains why I haven’t written any long post for couple of weeks.

We found a great agent who’s helping us preparing our house for sale. It will go on the market by mid of February. It’s a very hectic time for us because getting rid junk from 7 years of living is not easy.

I’m still in the process of cleaning things out.

In the mean time, I have quite a few steeply discounted items for sale for those who are interested.

Tilia Food Saver 420 White or Black New – $30
Apex 703 DVD Player / Karaoke – $80
Custom-built Armoir – solid oak – $700

I also couple of 17″ CRT monitors for $10 each.

If you want any of these items, email me at luwang20 at gmail.com. (replace the word “at” with @)

I’ll have more stuff for sale in very soon.

谢谢Charles的提示。

Free Call Planet也提供免费打往中国的电话服务。

我还没试过，不过看起来不错，还可以打中国手机。