It has been an incredibly busy day. It’s been mad.

Did you ever have the feeling that you have so many things on your head was going to explode?

It felt great.

Microsoft has announced it’s new server platform. For years, it seems, we have been calling it by it’s codename– Longhorn. It is supposed to come out next year.

Funny thing is, I read about this news in Chinese. I woke up early this morning to study some zhongwen and picked a random news story. I read about Vista.

It looks very exciting. Can’t wait.

Originally Posted 27-July-05

On Friday, an electrician from Brazil was shot in the head five times by police who suspected he was a bomber in London. When they tried to stop him, he ran (apparently his Visa has run out). This is surprising for England. There is a general abhorrence of guns that I never saw in the States.

So I walk through London at lunchtime and wonder whether it is likely I would ever be mistaken for a bomber and killed on site. Then I realized that it was unlikely– because I’m white. London is full of Muslims like no US city I’ve ever lived in has been. It must be terrible to have this weighing on Muslim parents minds when their kids go out– will they too be mistaken? This electrician wasn’t even Muslim–he was just brown. What a terrible blunder.

It makes you think– would you rather live in a world with terrorist activity (and risk of death every day) but knowing the authorities are on your side?

Today we traveled to the new Roald Dahl museum in Great Missiden (I think I spelled that right). As well as dedicating his own imagination to the world, looking at his life captures the imagination of everyone who visits the museum.

He was an RAF pilot in the second world war and wrote occasionally after that. Then he launched a series of kids books like the BFG, Charlie and Chocolate Factory, James and Giant peach, etc.

We know the films, they’re all pretty good–but the pace of the books will hold the imagination of my small children.

Anyway. A great day out.

Originally Posted 23-July-05

Just a day after my last post, there were more bombings in London. But his time they were thwarted, thank God.

It’s been a hectic few days. Difficult to keep up with what’s going on. It’s also very difficult to concentrate at work when you are constantly wondering what’s going on outside the office walls and whether you will be able to make it home.

Well. Saturday is here now and it couldn’t have come too soon.

I guess the Chinese curse is “may you live in interesting times.”

I’m sitting on a train from Oxford to Paddington. I was already on a train from Didcot to Paddington, but the train was stopped in Reading because of a fatality on the tracks. No trains were going on to London. There was a tremendous queue of people waiting to get on a train to Waterloo, so I decided to head up to Oxford to get a bus–when I got there, the trains had resumed. So I’m on my third train of the day and it’s only 9.

Yesterday evening, there were severe delays because someone else jumped on the tracks between Didcot and Swindon. Two fatalities in two days–just two weeks after the London bombings. We definitely live in interesting times. Kind of makes you long for a return to normalcy.

But then again, I think maybe the interesting times are what we need. I’m not talking about the death and destruction, but in between all of this death, there has also been Live8, the Olympics going to London in 2012, and people banding together in the bombs aftermath. Would you rather have stability or peaks and valleys? I wonder.

My mother-in-law was talking to me the other day about growing up in post-war England and how they were better off because they appreciated things more. They lived through decade of rationing and rebuilding. They took nothing for granted. Was this a better life?
Then again, I think about my favourite essay from Emerson’s ?Self-Reliance (well, it’s most people’s favourite Emerson essay I suppose. In it, he says

The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one, is the healthy attitude of human nature. A boy is in the parlour what the pit is in the playhouse; independent, irresponsible, looking out from his corner on such people and facts as pass by, he tries and sentences them on their merits, in the swift, summary way of boys, as good, bad, interesting, silly, eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers himself never about consequences, about interests: he gives an independent, genuine verdict. You must court him: he does not court you. But the man is, as it were, clapped into jail by his consciousness. As soon as he has once acted or spoken with eclat, he is a committed person, watched by the sympathy or the hatred of hundreds, whose affections must now enter into his account.

Would a person with a guaranteed dinner, home, and love “with nothing to perform for” be more true to himself than someone who is deprived in any of these areas? It goes back to Maslow’s Hierarch of needs. Only when the lower basic needs are met, can one achieve higher levels of cognition and achieve self-awareness.

Perhaps in the age of abundance–where we have everything . . . In an age where we complain about “too much choice” . . . When more people have basic needs met than ever before . . . Perhaps in this age we will see the greatest and most enlightened minds emerge.

Interesting.