Years of Poems and Spirits

Calendar:
1. First choice: cheap, has everything I need, looks simple too.
http://www.easyphpcalendar.com/demoTOC.php ($20)
2. 2nd choice: a little pricy, looks pretty complicated, too much a tool by itself.
http://www.extrosoft.com/ ($50)

Community:
1. http://www.xoops.org/
XooPS: pretty complicated. Seems to have most of things. Widely supported/community. Many component for download.

Just came across a daring proposal that has been circulating in China for a century and half: redirect water from Southeast Tibet to population centers in Northern China.

Especially when this plan is juxtaposed against other alternatives, it becomes so more attractive: rich water resources in Tibet now largely flow into Indian ocean untapped, low population density along proposed canel routes means low migration cost.

The keywords to look up for are: 大西线调水, 郭开, 西藏之水救中国

The concerns: engineering difficulties, ecological consequences, and international disputes.

If the project does take off, it will be a defining moment.

Remember had dim sum with Shange and Matthew in Beijing. Shange is a Mormon living in SF and Matthew is from Connecticut and went to U Chicago, working as a Foreign Service officier in Beijing after a tour in Korea and Taiwan.

During the meal, Matthew complained Beijing’s nightlife is not even as good as in Taiwan. But Shange has been saying that Beijing is so much a western city.

The two Americans can’t agree with each other on whether Beijing is American enough. That is probably the least surprising in the U.S. because America is so much about embracing diversities (within a boundry of course). A prep boy (I guess) does not feel he has to adjust to a Mormon–no one can claim he is the orthodox American.

The problem I felt so repugnant about is that, in Beijing, on the one hand, there is this strong pretention of being the center of the world but at the same time a mindless drive to mimic the West. The West becomes an object with an Platoian essence that is in fact just some slangs in a rich language.

Before the Chinese can really embrace their own diversity, there won’t be a real Chinese cultural renaissance.