diet and exericise rules

diet:
no flour & no sugar diet: no bread, no cookies, no dessert, no cakes
no food after 7pm

exercises:
average 1 hour exercise per day (karate, squash, swim, bicycle, walking)

往事随风 - 小娟与山谷里的居民

你的影子无所不在
人的心事像一颗尘埃
落在过去飘向未来
掉进眼里就流出泪来
曾经沧海无限感慨
有时孤独比拥抱实在
让心春去让梦秋来
让你离开
舍不得忘
一切都是为爱
没有遗憾还有我
就让往事随风都随风都随风心随你动
昨天花谢花开不是梦不是梦不是梦
就让往事随风都随风都随风心随你痛
明天潮起潮落都是我都是我都是我
就让往事随风都随风都随风心随你动
昨天花谢花开不是梦不是梦不是梦
就让往事随风都随风都随风心随你痛
明天潮起潮落都是我都是我都是我
(music)
你的影子无所不在
人的心事像一颗尘埃
落在过去飘向未来
掉进眼里就流出泪来
曾经沧海无限感慨
有时孤独比拥抱实在
让心春去让梦秋来
让你离开
舍不得忘
一切都是为爱
没有遗憾还有我
就让往事随风都随风都随风心随你动
昨天花谢花开不是梦不是梦不是梦
就让往事随风都随风都随风心随你痛
明天潮起潮落都是我都是我都是我
就让往事随风都随风都随风心随你动
昨天花谢花开不是梦不是梦不是梦
就让往事随风都随风都随风心随你痛
明天潮起潮落都是我都是我都是我

on privacy and facebook

there's much debate about the privacy issues with facebook. i think as long as people have a choice about how exposed they want to be, everything should be fine. the popularity of facebook shows that it does provide value to the users, and it's legitimate for them to ask for something back. nothing comes for free, otherwise how are they going to survive and how the facebook employees going to earn their lives? so we need to trade something for the service facebook provides. this is how the world works: trading governed by the law of comparative advantage. we have our own strength in doing certain things, but not everything.  in this case, facebook has the social utility service that has value, and the users have their personal information that also have value, and they trade these two things.

edward benson in his blog post mentioned two alternatives for facebook users.
1) facebook asks for a fee for using its service, but doesn't sell the user information to third parties. this could work. with such a large user base (more than 400 million active users), even a small fee can make the company very profitable and the fee can  be insignificant to the users too. maybe we are too used to the free service paradigm for internet services that we forgot about this option. if people think it's worth the price, they would pay, unless they think their personal information doesn't worth the fee. if this is the case, then there shouldn't be such privacy issues. people may have different opinions about their privacy. maybe there can be 2 options. for those who don't want to have their information shared to third parties, pay a subscription fee.

2) if our personal information and web browsing information  is valuable, why don't we directly sell it to the third party? i think this goes back to the point of law of comparative advantage. not everyone has the technical expert to build web tools to do so. if we try to do everything ourselves, we go back to the primitive society with self-sustainability. the law of comparative advantage says if parties produce good or service that they can do with higher efficiency and trade for other good or service, there is a net benefit for all the parties.

the requested lookup key was not found in any activation context

i was trying to figure out why my usb flash drive was not detected when plugged in. so i followed instructions in this link http://support.microsoft.com/kb/925196 to change the registry. bad bad idea. after deleting the UpperFilters registry value and restarting, a lot of things stopped working, for example, couldn't access the H drive. so i repaired the windows os using the reinstallation disk.

after this, things mostly went back to normal, but ie stopped working. basically couldn't navigate to the website by typing the address in the address bar. it gave the error in the title. could still click through links in the home page displayed. i searched the error online, and most pointed to the problem with ie 7, i checked the version i had and it was ie 6. tried a lot of things, installing ie, uninstalling it, repairing os. in the end, what works is upgrade ie 6 to ie 7 by doing all the necessary updates. after this, ie still doesn't work. even worse, it would launch. but then the upgrade came with a unstallation program in %windir%\ie7\spuninst\spuninst.exe to uninstall ie 7. after that, everything works.

usinstall ie 7: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927177