鬼にも涙–淡淡夏日黄昏的芳香

七月新番中有一部叫作《夏目友人帐》，和《百鬼夜行抄》（改编的电视剧当然就没有原作那么有神韵了）一样是讲人和妖怪的关系。

一直很喜欢妖怪的故事和题材，比如《モノノ怪》，哦，对了，好像捉妖人总和猫有千丝万缕的联系。

嘛，其实妖怪大都很可爱，可怖的反而是人呢。

夏目友人帐公式

片尾曲–夏夕空

色付く西空に

差し込む一筋の日

夕立の雨上がりに

気づく　夏のにおい

ひしめく光が照らす思いに

耳をすませば聞こえし友の面影

夏夕空　香り立つ

鮮やかな過ぎ去りし日々

心のまま　笑いあった

あの夏の思い出よ

绯色渐染西方天空

漏下一缕阳光

骤雨初霁

嗅觉那夏日气息

充满斑驳阳光的回忆里

侧耳倾听，那是昔日友人的旧影

夏日夕空，清香漫溢

韶光似锦

心意互达，相视而笑

那是夏日的回忆

The Play “Proof”

Yesterday, I went to watch a play called “Proof“, which was awarded 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and 2001 Tony Award for Best Play. It was originally produced in Manhattan Theatre Club and then went to Broadway, and the adopted film was released in 2005, directed by John Madden and starred by Gwyneth Paltrow, Anthony Hopkins, Jake Gyllenhaal and Hope Davis.

A story about genius, someone admiring genius, someone struggling hard to be as close to a genius as possible, it intrigues me far beyond all of these. The heroine Catherine is 25 years old at Act One, ironically, the same age I’m now. She hasn’t really “worked” since her dad getting bad, and actually she quit from undergraduate, not to mention graduate school. However, born to be a daughter of a genius mathematician, she does have talent on mathematics, which seems to already be part of her nature, although most of the time, she denies this fact. The story isn’t that out of imagination, but as “ordinal” as I could anticipate, however, it makes me think a lot when Catherine first said to her father’s ex PhD student Hal, ‘you just don’t wanna believe someone could do all these work who wasn’t a graduate student, and who even didn’t finish her undergraduate, while you have been struggled years to get your PhD degree.’ Something like that, maybe not exact. I could now understand why some people always leave theatres full of tears. I felt my throat congested by something, some mixed emotions I could not tell or which I just don’t want to face.

I was deeply fascinated with geniuses and their stories since I was a three or four-year-old girl. Instead of playing toys or dolls, I played medical instruments as well as laboratory wares. My tales were never ever about Cinderella, Princess, and their happy ending with Prince, but about Madam Curie’s Ra, X-ray and the ring of Ringen’s wife, Einstein’s theory of relativity, and so on. Such a passion drove me to collect every edition of biography of Marie Curie I happened to see, to feel or believe that crazy scientists always had a natural affinity for me, and to try to be another Frankenstein myself. Years and years passed, and now I’m in graduate school, doing research, however I start to forget my original motivation, that kind of crazy passion which makes me afraid, impulsed, but more, excited and exalted. They’re away from me or more exactly, not as strong as they used to be. I’m afraid of being a person like Hal, a person as common as the commons. I know there’s a long long way ahead, but I don’t know where it will take me to.

President Faust’s Speech to Harvard Class of 2008

Baccalaureate address to Class of 2008

‘You are at a moment of transition that requires making choices.”

“You won’t know till you try. But if you don’t try to do what you love — whether it is painting or biology or finance; if you don’t pursue what you think will be most meaningful, you will regret it. Life is long. There is always time for Plan B. But don’t begin with it. “

“I think of this as my parking space theory of career choice, and I have been sharing it with students for decades. Don’t park 20 blocks from your destination because you think you’ll never find a space. Go where you want to be and then circle back to where you have to be.”

An inspiring “parking space” theory. Most of us would become more and more puffed up with conceit, thinking we know the world, the crowed and ourselves, thinking we could make a best pathway of ourselves. However, we easily got frustrated as soon as there showed up some obstacle on the pathway. It’s always a benefit to learn from those who have experienced everything, even though we are facing different circumstances from the older generations.

The whole address could be found on website: http://www.president.harvard.edu/speeches/faust/080603_bacc.html

won soccer game!

So tied after soccer game…but we won. That’s the point! I played defense and did a good job, maybe?

Now our team is ranking the 2nd among total 5 with a record of “2 wins, 1 lost, 0 tie”. Well, this is only the first half of the league, still 6 teams standing along. We’ll see whether we could get a better result than last season.

Failing to plan is Planning to fail

For those PhDs (some abnormal life mode beyond most of the world~~), here is some interesting and thoughtful guide. Though you might be much smarter than lots of others, it won’t hurt to go quickly through it. Many thanks to Dr. Azuma (let’s mark the title to show respect to those finally got it. “To know the road ahead, ask those coming back“–Chinese proverb) to prose such a guide.

“Everything I wanted to know about C.S. graduate school at the beginning but didn’t learn until later.”

A Dreamer or an Engineer?

“A vision without a task is a dream.

A task without a vision is drudgery.

A vision and a task is the hope of the world.”

–Anonymous, 1730

“Just do it.”

–slogan for Nike

–interesting and meaningful quotes from “Center for Biofilm Engineering” at Montana State University.

Soulmate

Natasha Bedingfield’s “SOULMATE”:

Incompatible, it don’t matter though
Cause someone’s bound to hear my cry
Speak out if you do
You’re not easy to find

Is it possible Mr. Loveable
Is already in my life?
Right in front of me
Or maybe you’re in disguise

Who doesn’t long for someone to hold
Who knows how to love you without being told
Somebody tell me why I’m on my own
If there’s a soulmate for everyone

Here we are again, circles never end
How do I find the perfect fit
There’s enough for everyone
But I’m still waiting in line

Who doesn’t long for someone to hold
Who knows how to love you without being told
Somebody tell me why I’m on my own
If there’s a soulmate for everyone

If there’s a soulmate for everyone

Most relationships seem so transitory
They’re all good but not the permanent one

Who doesn’t long for someone to hold
Who knows how to love you without being told
Somebody tell me why I’m on my own
If there’s a soulmate for everyone

Who doesn’t long for someone to hold
Who knows how to love you without being told
Somebody tell me why I’m on my own
If there’s a soulmate for everyone
If there’s a soulmate for everyone

iMac setup D*O*N*E!

I’ve been trying to downgrade Leopard’s X11 to Tiger’s, under the introduction of Ben Byer and Tim Baur as mentioned in the last blog post, but failed. It gave me an quartz–wm controlled X11, still no full screen mode available. I tried to modify .xinitrc and org.x.X11.plist, also the preference parameterization, nothing better. I just gave up and forced myself to get used to it. One lightly good thing is that I could use Leopard’s Space function and associate X11 to an individual space. That’s all of it.

Once I faced a license problem with MATLAB, which cost me much more time than it should be to figure it out. There’s no license manager, say, lm/ folder installed, therefore I’ve noway to lmdown or lmstart. I thought there’s some files missed during installation or the installation isn’t completely successful. I uninstalled MATLAB, reinstalled it, but nothing happened. Today, I just asked someone whether the license has expired since it was passed to me. No surprise or much surprise, the answer is yes. So I’m now having the new license on and it starts working finely. It’s just that this time my MATLAB doesn’t need lm command anymore…

Whatever, my iMac is setup now, no matter how well the X11 part is functioning and that’s the whole story of couple days’ struggling. I hate it!

Some clues and tips for X11 under Leopard

Ok, so it’s the intrinsic bug of Leopard’s X11 server. It uses “launchd” to toggle X11, which gives you a feature that whenever you launch an application needing Xterm, the X11 will automatically launched itself. I tried to update my X11 to XQuartz’s 2.2.3, but it didn’t give me too much.

The latest releases of XQuartz:

http://xquartz.macosforge.org/trac/wiki/Releases

Here are some inspiring discussion:

http://homepage.mac.com/sao1/X11/

http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=80171

Some tips to handle it (or to “obviate” more accurately, which is to bring back Tiger’s X11):

http://aaroniba.net/articles/x11-leopard.html

http://lists.apple.com/archives/x11-users/2007/Nov/msg00005.html

The damned X11 problem

So finally I catch the reason why I cannot install windowmaker on my Mac successfully. The Fink I once installed was a beta version and not working in this case. There is a new version for Mac OS X 10.5 recently released: Fink 0.9.0. After updating my Fink to this version (just do a quick fink selfupdate), now I could get windowmaker. However, one more problem followed. The X11 windows crashed immediately after its being launched. I could even do nothing before its disappearing. That really sucks. I couldn’t even touch the “Window Focus Preference” option. I thought it might a problem of the .xinitrc file, so made some edition to it with comparison to my old Mac file, but it didn’t work. Somehow it showed “fatal IO error 32 (Broken pipe) or KillClient on X server “/tmp/launch-R27MOU/:0″, so I turned to the org.x.X11.plist file trying to make it work. There were 4 items in this plist instead of just 1. Since I don’t have another such file to look at, I kept it unchanged. BTW, in my previous OS X Tiger, there’s no such a file. It seems Apple just changed the way X11 works on their Leopard (I know this is OLD news). Well, after I install whole bunch of softwares, including steps such as “sudo apt-get install gv” and “sudo apt-get installauctex“, the X11 server finally came back…BUT, whatever I did with the preference setup, I couldn’t get the “Full Screen” toggled. It’s really ridiculous when I found out this is because the damned bug in Leopard X11! Actually people are now taking back Tiger’s X under Leopard to fix this bug and one step is “sudo mv /usr/X11 /tmp/“! I’m beaten!! All I need to do is to go back to Tiger’s X and what I’ve done is wasting my time!!! Shoot Leopard X11 !!!!