Guided by Anthony, our trip to Australia started a fine day. This rainbow is captured en route to Fremantle, an old town of Perth. It contains well-preserved 19th century buildings, and perhaps is the one of the most recommended  historic site from your Perth friend.
It’s been a while since last time I updated this blog. Actually, I was busy with all sorts of stuffs that I rarely have any time do things like writing something here on the blog.
My life has changed a lot with this global financial turmoil and Now I believe everything could happen like my company Lehman Brothers, that I thought would work for a long period, went bankruptcy.
My written English is getting worse and my Japanese level does not improve much neither. However, one more exciting thing was that the Dictionaries in Apple’s iphone app store are surprisingly selling well.
Today I checked out, Korean English Dictionary KE No.4 in Korean app store. Chinese English Dictionary CE No.5 in China app store!
Chinese/English Dictionary
Korean/English Dictionary
And all applications
Sendai is the cultural and economical centre of Northern Japan, and some food which we found there are very rare in Tokyo. Who can name the below food?
Despite smirks and giggles from foreigners, the Japanese people treat this festival seriously as it supposed to have deep meaning of it. The story goes back to 1600s, when local sex workers would pray for protection from sexually diseases at this shrine, where the current festival is held.
Nevertheless, it is still a penis festival, and there are penis hats, penis puppets, penis candles and penis lollipops. So you won’t be disappointed if you want to see some of these funny objects. It is one of the ten events not to miss in April according to BBC.
For people who want to check out this forward-thinking Kanamara Shinto shrine in Kawasaki, Japan, the closest station is Keikyukawasaki.
Chinese New Year, also called Chinese Spring Festival (春节) used to be the happiest holidays for me just like the Christmas season for western people. People gather together with their friends and family and I can reunion with my nephew and playmates and we can “play” together and get the “Red packets†from my parents and grandparents and don’t have to get up early and go to school. It used to be such a good holiday that I was always look forward to.
while this sort of feeling fades and I could not find much happiness as used to. Perhaps it is a festival for kids as my mother told me.
I have been receiving some emails asking about the IT division of Morgan Stanley in Shanghai over the last a few weeks. First of all, I would like to clarify that I am not a Morgan Stanley employee any more and I can’t disclose any confidential information to the interviewees.
Morgan Stanley is a great company with robust technology infrastructures. I think this is quite rare for a financial company. People are smart and friendly there and it’s definitely a good company to work for! However, it is not suitable for everybody.
Without knowing where I was going and who exactly I was going with, I joined this snowboarding trip. I was just told by my friend that there was a good deal of snowboarding trip. I accepted and it turned out that 11 people joined the group. And it was a lot of fun. Village, snow, mountain and hot spring. But also the nightmare – the night on the bus where I struggle to sleep, at least for me.
My friend told me to assemble at Ikebukuro at 10:00 on Friday and in fact the bus took off around 11:20 just because I was late for playing tennis last time. What a big revenge! The nightmare lasted the whole night that I couldn’t believe that many other people were able to sleep well in the bus while I couldn’t get sleep at all.
After arriving the hotel at about 6 early in the morning, we picked up the wears and snowboards from the rent room and took bus to the ski resort. It was a big challenge for me as in my case I hardly slept during the previous night.
Browbeaten by other friends claiming that snowboard is much cooler than ski, I was “forced“ to pick up the snowboard in the rental room. I never tried snowboarding before. Without surprise, I suffered light injuries of my arms and legs and I have to give up going to mountain to ski again the next day.
However, I found that snowboard is not just cool, but also fun. My friend Steve gave us personal training, which mainly target for the girls though.
While the good thing was that part of the snowboarding trip. I got the chance to have a look around in the place Hakuba 白馬 with nick, mie and chao, who were exhausted same as me. The place was amazingly beautiful after the snow on the second day. And we cannot help ourselves to play snowball. There are a few of nice cafes and restaurants in the small village. We picked up this Italian restaurant and had a really nice lunch in this snowy world. Would be really romantic if you take your girl there I could image.
Wuchao and Nick were playing snow 😉
Overall, it was a really good trip except the night bus. I would definitely go there again by Shinkansen.
On the second day of my Kansai trip, Anthony and I went to Nara, where you can encounter these lovely deer in the park and street.  It only takes about 40 mins from Kyoto to Nara by the ＪＲã¿ã‚„ã“路快速 train.
Nara is a place where you will encounter a spade of deer asking food. It is such a small town, which makes that you can almost walk from one side to the other within 10 minutes. Although we did not book the hotel in advance, it didn’t take long for us to find one despite the busy tourist seasons.
Apple? Macbook? Mac OS X? These terms used to be alien to me, but  I now fall in love with the Mac OS and bought my Macbook soon after get my credit card in Japan and regretted not knowing apple sooner before. After getting the hang of the Mac OS, I started feeling that Windows is just too buggy and immature to me.
Compared with China, Japan is much more foreign-friendly. However,  it sometimes can be very xenophobic. The arduous journey for foreigners applying a credit card in Japan would be a quintessential case. Most of the credit card companies reject your application basically due to the fact that you are a foreigner here, regardless of your job, income, profile or whatsoever.
It’s been a long time since the last time update the Blog. I Just got a mail from Daniel complaining about no update of the Blog for a long time. I feel that someone is still interested in this blog. how should I give up updating then?
Having my work changed a lot during the last year, from a Lunix developer to a half developer half support and now are purely support, I do not have many chance to use Emacs that often anymore, but I keep to use to it as much as possible. After all it’s my first editor in my programmer career. One thing I like is its shell buffers. Unfortunately, It only support one shell as I thought before. Because if you type M-x shell to open a new shell buffer, if you already have one open that will just switch to the existing one.
