Jia Lin’s Weblog

��Hang-out�� at the days when we were young

It��s fun to have Zhanghong at our place for the winter: we have some very interesting conversations on dinner table everyday. Today��s topic is really branded with the time-ball or so-called social dancing on campus.

When we (Bin, Hong and I) were young (at college), there were not many bars around and the movie theaters only played very boring and stiff domestic movies. In my memory, there were three places very prevalent for ��hang-out��: ballroom, English corner and video room. I guess people at my generation all know what I��m talking about. When I recall all these places, the warm darkness and the exciting dimness hang over me once again. Ballroom dancing is the most popular kind, which I will talk about a little later. English corner is a corner, usually in open field, where people gathered to speak English. At my college, which is located in a picturesque southern coastal city, English corner is held here all seasons on Tuesday and Friday evenings after 9:30. Conversations are, in most of cases, carried between opposite sexes. And you saw they paired up and left together. I don��t have authority on talking this dating form since I do not know in person any couple that initiates their relationship in this way. But I think this is a good excuse to invite a hardworking student for a date: ��how about we practicing English tonight?�� And after the practicing you can go further naturally ��Can I buy you a soda before I walk you to dorm?�� or ��Your English is very good, can we study together sometime so I can learn from you?�� Something like that and it works.

At our time, college students go to video rooms instead of movie theaters. Young people are curious to western culture and eager to embrace it through any of limited channels, among which the video room is the major one. I could not imagine how much wealth those video room owners generated from young students in the early 1990��s of China. The shabbiness of the facility, the roughness of the pirated copy of movies and the unpleasant smell of the screening room could not curb young and poor students�� enthusiasm for peeking the exotic Hollywood or Hong Kong products at a very low cost. You saw a lot of young pretty girls dressed up and walked into those narrow and inconspicuous doors, you felt no kinky about it at that time. The other advantage of going to these places was that you could take a walk on the beach after movie since most of video rooms neighboring my school overlooked the ocean. This kind of invitation works on me, I would even take initiative in this way if I tried to woo a cute boy.

And then is dancing ball. Social dancing is the only good cause for physical touching in our time. To call it social dancing is really disrespectful to its name. There is basically no dancing floor, any material of floor would do. Most of students are not equipped with much dancing technique, but only know ��two-step�� style��one step forward and one step backward, and that��s it. Important thing is that you can hold a known or unknown girl legitimately, at melodious music, under dimming light. Bin and Hong still miss that kind of feeling even today (joking). They both studied in Shanghai and five years earlier into college than me. Hong went there mainly for blind date and Bin only danced with girls he knew-since he was too shy to invite strangers when he was young (but things changed when he grows up into graduate school, he got to know his longest-time ex-girl friend at dancing floor). It is a weekly ritual for both of them, and they are just so-so dancers until today. My story is a little different, I met my first boyfriend at an open-air ball which were called roller-skating field but I only saw people dancing there. He attracted me from other people because he knew how to dance, and he was good at nothing but dancing. In that spring of 1993, there were so many balls on campus (maybe I never noticed before), that we jumped from one to another, sometimes five nights a week. I said goodbye to my dancing King in the summer, since we��ve tried all steps and styles in the spring and the boredom grew up unavoidably in both minds I guess.

And after I also got bored of self introduction and weather discussion in English corner, I found video rooms are the only good place for ��hang-out��. At that time, you never got enough of Hollywood movies, and your young mind was not aware that they were intoxicating you so you could escape from the bland reality.

Time flies, and your life goes by in a blink (blah blah..). Talking about something like ��ten years ago�� or someone I know for ��20 years�� gave me a sudden quiver. But time just goes on, with not a bit of sentiment.

Hook-up & Hang-out

got this article from aldaily . Very insightful perspective on elite college’s politcs and youth.
One insteresting question raised by the article: Is true love too extravagant for young meritocracy, despite that they can gain anything else in the world?

The auther taught in Yale and he observed these prevailent dating rituals– Hook-up and Hang-out:

“Their main lack is time. Students boast to each other about how little sleep they’ve gotten, and how long it’s been since they had a chance to get back to their dorm room. Often they will tell you they have no time for serious dating. They are more likely to go out in groups–the group has replaced the couple as the primary social unit. And then, of course, they sometimes hook up for sex. I’d heard about all this, but I’ve been struck by how many young women will come up to me–a journalist who has been known to write about such things–after a speech and say something like “I don’t have time for a relationship, so of course I hook up.” They do so in the tone one might use to describe commuting routes.

Nor did I really understand how students got from the group-gathering stage to the intimate Hook Up stage. It turns out there’s an intermediate phase called the Hang Out, as in “Do you want to come hang out in my room?” The Hang Out begins with the two students ensconced in a dorm room, engaged in stilted conversation about some pseudo-intellectual topic. It then proceeds through a series of ever less cerebral conversational stages, which may last over a few Hang Out sessions, until the two are in bed. There are thus many different kinds of Hang Outs, and friends will ask each other, “Yeah, but what kind of Hang Out was it?” Similarly, there are many different kinds of Hook Ups, with infinite and ill-defined gradations of seriousness. ”

And here is one of the explainations proposed by the auther:

“When you put it this way, it sounds cold and calculating. In fact, these students are merely following the advice of their parents–the same people who would be quick to condemn them for taking the magic out of love. How many parents do you know–liberal or conservative, atheist or evangelical–who would enjoy seeing their child devote the bulk of his or her collegiate energies to a boyfriend or girlfriend, rather than to the vast array of activities and learning opportunities available at these $40,000-a-year schools? Very few. Parents who are ambitious for their kids imbue them with a professional, strategizing mindset. It’s not surprising that they have carried this over–to some extent–into the arena of romance and sex. ”

movies for the holiday

Watched two movies in the weekend. We are not frequent movie goers; these two movies consist 50% of total movies we went the whole year. And these two happened to be, to some degree, British-imported. Lord of rings-The Two Towers is uncontrovertibly among the best British literature heritage, and James Bond reminds us the remains of Great Britain empire. Who said the American culture imperializes the world? See, these popular cultural products still originates from British archetypal forms.

I went to watch Lord of Rings purely at the instigation of my cousin, 5 years younger than me and one member of the��cool�� generation. I even did not watch the first episode until the night before we scheduled to watch the second one. I thought the movie is something similar to Harry Porter, which I could not sit down watching for 8 minutes. Once you did not expect too much on something, you achieve something unexpected. We are amazed by how good it is. Remember we watched the two episodes at two consecutive nights, the pleasure is even doubled. The story is complicated, sad and spectacular, the type I love and I even ask for the original novel as my Christmas gift from Zhanghong, one of our best friends who insists bringing us some Christmas spirit. Unlike other saving-the-world movies where only ��the one�� hero is endowed to save the world, in Lord of rings, the fate of the ��world��, including the mortal and immortal, human and spirit, kingdom and village, hobbits and warrior, even trees are so closely tied; no single one can fulfill the holy mission. Therefore, the movie creates a group of unforgettable heroes, with unique and vivid personality respectively. For most part of the movie, I was suffocated by the shadow of disaster and death, and that��s why I, as many others who��ve watched the movie, enjoyed so much of the magnificent scene of siege battle at the last half an hour. And again, there is no miracle on the victory, but the cooperation of all heroes and ordinary lives. And finally but not the least importantly, the animation and special effect in this movie did not overwhelm but complement the human element. These are something make me like about this movie, and it stimulates me back to read the book, to become a Tolkien fan.

As for Die another day, I did not felt totally disappointed since people had kept telling us how crappy it is. Well, what else are you expect from a James Bond movie? If you are fed up with the combination of high-tech gadgets, never-ending action and Bond girls, get something else. Besides, James Bond was among the first charming men we��d ever seen since Western culture was imported to China during my childhood. To me, watching 007 is a nostalgia ritual, and therefore not cares much of its artistic taste or philosophical insight. When I walked out of the screening room, I heard an American couple said the movie ��is quite realistic��. I��m not sure if they mean the special effect of bombing and blasting is quite realistic, or the threat from one of the ��axis of evil��nations is realistic. Since the two guyes going with me convinced me that the laser from satellites is not able to hit the ground target at present, I assume people will think the threat of North Korea is realistic. But I guess after 911, all crises in movie have become real for American audience (Time magazine even compares Saruman in Lord of Rings to Bin Laden, and find their resemblance). The movie came out just about the time when North Korea declares their Nuclear facility, and US went to Iraq for war on terrorism. The evil role in the movie is much more realistic than the media tycoon ( in Tomorrow will never die) or beautiful heir of oil tycoon (in the world is not enough). Since I did not hold high expectation, I still find novel things in the move. James Bond is not as heroic as he used to be: he was imprisoned for 14 months, bearded and ragged as he never was before; His adventure to some degree is for his personal revenge, to crackdown the one that betrayed him; He only stopped the further bombing of US base in Korea instead of saving the whole world. Helle Berry distinguished herself from other Bond girls with her boyish and naughty personality. The only part I really don��t like is the sex scene in the Korean temple, which just reflects the arrogance and ignorance of western invader to the third world: they show no respect to your tradition and religion.

open sesame

Here are something that I expect from my blog server (only if they are free):
*spell check, even better if able of grammar check
*automatic hyperlink to keywords
* easy to insert image
*forward comments to my email account

From my paper to my destiny

I need to finish my “world -system and American’s knowledge on other countries” paper and revise my “Determinants of Internet diffusion in China” paper before New Year, so I can present them to my committee as soon as possible. I do not expect to get my candidacy done before the new semester now, since the preliminary defence thing will take me tremendous amount of time. And I still want to spend more time working on Network connectivity paper with Alex, which might be presented in SUNBELT on Feb. I also want to focus my disseration on this track.

The situation for me is quite kinky now: I want to dedicate to my disseration next semester instead of taking 9 credits’ course, but as an international student, I need to obtain my candidacy first to get my full-time student status. In order to get my candidacy, I need to defend two of my preliminary paper in a very formal manner and the papers should be qualified for journal publication. However, since I have to take pains to dearl with my heavy course work to keep my full-time student status, I never have time to either focus on my preliminary paper or my dissertation.

I’ve come across numerous awkward deadloops like this as a foreigner. Another classic example is visa application to France in the past Fall. In order to get visa to Schengen countries, I need to hold valid US visa, as well as prepaid round-trip tickets and room reservation in France. Since all poor Chinese citizens are only issued six-months visa, mine has expired a long time ago. Ok, to obtain a US visa, you need to go to a third country with the US embasy or consulate, however, you risk being rejected to reenter US, then all your money on expensive flight and hotel room are spared. You may ends up buying another aritickets flying back to China to apply for US visa….

I have a Chinese girl friend whose greatest wish of her life was to give birth to her baby in US territory, and now she has proudly brought her US baby back to China. I used to scoff on this kind of “American Moon is rounder than that in China” logic. But now I accept it with deep sorrow and swear to give my offspring life with more freedom that I did not enjoy.

All humans are born as same species of creature, but nationality is something really makes our life different, despite all our ultimate goal is being free humanbeing.

spending whole afternoon to change the outlook of my blog. The templates provided by Blogger are horrible, so I have to change the codes of one of the sample templates. It turns out OK, simple and neat, as I like. Unfortunately I somehow lost my ‘archives’ and could not recover it.
Havn’t touch any HTML for three years, this coding thing really kills me.

Spending one hour or so in the morning reading Zhang Yining’s weblog, pretty cool. I admire his life style: he seems weave together work and fun pretty well. Keeping an decent IT job he is able to pursue his love of travel, photography and writing. I’m glad someone I know in my generation has entered this stage of life. And he got spirt and class. I wish I had had known him better back to high school

Networking at home…too early?
Finally, we got the Powerlink at home. I personally did not have particular need for high-speed Internet connection: all my online activity can be realized satisfactorily on 50kbs/ dial-up modem. But I still called to order this popular cable modem, because–I want to keep my workaholic husband home. We don��t have life; we work day and night at school. Among thousands of his excuses of sticking on his office instead of working at home, a major one is that the dial-up connection is so slow that he wastes too much time working on the remote application to his worksite. To protect my strong family value and realize my normal family life, I cannot wait to welcome the cable man to get my computer, modem and TV hooked. And I wish we will be happy everafter, like in the fairy tale…

Let me tell you how things turn out after four weeks: Bin still work in his office every single night, and I have to stay at home to enjoy this high-speed connection alone to avoid wasting our $40 monthly fee.

Why is it so devastating? Here is the story: Bin used to connect to his office Unix system with a software called Hummingbird. It works OK when we had our dial-up and a hub to connect our home computers through USB. But since we have this cable modem, the connection was cut down every two or three hours. It really pits Bin off every time he is running a super huge program on the remote system. We called on the cable guy to check it up, and were suggested that cable modem was not built compatible with USB, but with Ethernet. Ok, we ordered this routerthrough Amazon. It looks sleek and sexy, and has wireless antenna. After rebate, we got it for as low as 50 bucks. However, Bin has started to mutter for extra cost for my pursuit of new technology. I crossed by finger for better performance when we have the router hooked which later turns out as we expected: we never lost the Internet connection again. But here comes the worst thing, Bin��s dear Hummingbird does not work anymore! We guess there is some compatibility problem with these two things, so we turn to SSH and X-win32, which are widely used in all universities. But the same problem happens. We were able to connect to the remote system, which is indicated in ping message, but we can never have the display window showing on the computer. Bin guessed since there is different IP address for each computer, router does not know where to send the data after it received it.

That is rather frustrating, I still can not keep my husband home! Although we can hook his desktop directly to the modem so that X-terminal window works well, there is no reason to leave our other two computers unconnected. This is a age of home-networking! isn’t it? We checked the device and configuration, and could not do anything different. Then we called the technical support of both router and school server, though we know they could never solve any problems. And after hours of routine check, both of them apologized they did not know what is wrong but blame the other party��s fault, just as we expected. The school server ascribes the failure to the router��s firewall management, while Netgear guy assumed the school server use firewall to keep request from outside.

Come on, you should give us something better. We are always suspicious that technical support could know more than we do, but this time it goes too far. Both of them, plus cable company, could not give consistent explanation. As we surf the Google Newsgroup, we find we are not alone facing this problem. There are plenty of complaint, Q&A on this problem, but no effective solutions. My busy husband gave it up after two days of researching without any results and go back to his beloved office concentrated on his work.

That really struck me. The high-speed Internet connection is not only for fun, but also for convenience of working at home and efficient home networking, at least in our case. It seems now we need to sacrifice one function to achieve the other. The more ironical thing is that some of the problem is inexplicable, unreasonable and unsolvable. We as the technical-rich group, can not figured out a lot of tricky technical issues after we switch to broadband (such as networking on Instant messenger, renewing group name for wireless connection, firewall configuration to really stop things we don��t want and let in things we need, even DNS resolution). And the so-called technical support in most of cases can hardly give good explanation to application issues, not to say to provide good solution.

Bin is putting himself in job market since this winter. Scared by the dammed economy, we are only seeking stable faculty position at schools. As we search the opening positions, we are surprised by the insatiate need for professors and researchers on networking and security. Isn��t there lay-off every day on IT industry? But through our experience, I kind of understand why we need more professionals but not technicians for future of networks. Similar to the early days before all networks adopting TCP/IP, the booming of broadband connection faced numerous problems in compatibility, from modem to router to computer to networking software. We need more than technical support that only performs routine 5-layer check-up, but some genius and diligent scientists to integrate uniform protocols to all subject of matters. Maybe we need deeper corporations among all manufacturers, who are expected to provide one-step installation of home-networking. We consider ourself among the Elite group of the society (although poor): Bin is a to-be Dr. in CSE, and I was even teaching undergraduate students about Internet in past 4 months; but still we are so frustrated by handling this new connection. We belive the frustration will be even deeper for average population who expect easy, safe and reasonable networking at home.

How about living like a New York city woman with some-times boyfriends?

got this tips for publication from Kara’s blog.