Iraq won the Asian cup

What an emotional moment it is. Just one hour ago, I accidentally switched the channel into CNN and saw the last few minutes of the game. The Iraq beat Saudi Arabia by one point in Asian cup soccer game. I saw the Iraqi crowded at the TV and cheered for their coming championship together as I experienced our third position of the world cup baseball game tournament in 2003.

From the news, I realize that it is the first soccer championship for Iraqi for the last 31 years. Iraqi people made the impossible into possible. As discussed in the news, this incredible job is made under the condition of lack of money, lack of training, lack of everything. Even more, these players fought for their countries, their families, every victims of the war. They are the historical heroes of Iraqi now like our little baseball players from the little league with the championship cup few decades ago. Their achievement will last for long. They give the Iraqi hope. The gunfire started everywhere in Baghdad at the moment they won.

Congratulation to Iraqi. I can feel their joyfulness. I hope they can stand up again after the years of suffering by the invasion and suppression. I also hope our Taiwanese can stick up too to show the world that they should not ignore the truth of our existence. But I think the pity is we will not be able to this emotional moment from our very biased Taiwanese media.

Making the vacation message in the unix email system

I do not know if the commands apply to every server. It is the way how our department email server works now.

1. Check and see current vacation message: cat .vacation.msg
2. Edit vacation message: vi .vacation.msg
3. Edit vacation message within vi editor: I am not familiar with vi at all, and for me to remember all the commands. Here are some essentials:
   
• dd: delete entire line
• dw: delete the character before the cursor
• ":" : go to the command line
• wq: save and quit of the file used in command line
4. Activate vacation message: mv inactiveDotForward .forward
5. De-activate vacation message: mv .forward inactiveDotForward
   

Research Memo: co-kriging functions

The function kriging and coregfit are two functions to work for cokriging in BMElib. The convention of using kriging in multivariate problem is discussed in BMEprobamoments. The idea is to use the cell data structure to save the multivariate information and do the prediction.

No surface M-bags to Taiwan anymore .....

It was a really bad experience by shipping books to Taiwan this time. The USPS closes their service for surface M-bags to Taiwan now. It means the shipment of 60 lbs books to Taiwan will cost me $233 US dollars. Isn't it crazy? The shipping fee is even more expensive than buying the new books.

American baggage company is the one I found from those Google advertisement for international shipping services, after my few hours desperate internet search. I do not know if they offer the best prices but at least their price sounds to me is more comfortable. $135 for the books of 300 lbs. The disadvantage of such service is they only deliver the packages to the depot rather than your home. It means I will have to drive to warehouses to drop off or pick up my stuff, but, anyway, I save at leat $200 dollars per 60 lbs parcel. Hope it can be a pleasant experience with this small delivery company.

Rising Superpowers in the history (大國崛起)

This series was produced by CCTV China. It is no doubt today that China is one of the most terrifying emerging power in the world. Many magazines or articles predict that China or India will overpass the US in the next few decades. This series shows their Chinese people's ambitions. This series discuss every super powers in the past or nowadays about the mechanism, the boundary conditions and the reasons for their success. These countries includes Portugal, Spain, Netherlands, British, France, Germany, Soviet Union, Japan, and United States. Every country took its own historical opportunity to become the major domination of the world. Such discussion generates a lot of buzz within China as mentioned in some newspaper. No matter whether the China will become the next super power as the media or Chinese people expect, this series can always be a good media for us to understand our world nowadays and the contemporary history in the world.

Be a Taiwanese, the funny thing learned from this series is that Taiwan was found as Formosa by the first super power, Portugal, then governed by the third super power, Netherlands, and then colonized by the other one, Japan, and finally controlled by the current super power, United States. It can be said that we are so internationalized.....ha...

Such a educative series can always help us understand where our position is even though we will be never in the list of super powers. The series still teach as how to find and hold our own opportunity. Hope one day we can be the Netherlands in the series ....... as long as we will not fight each other anymore. The vision should take further into the world rather than the political opponent as we are doing now.

Taiwan -- A People's History (打拼-台灣人民的歷史)

Taiwan's PTS (Public Television Service Foundation) recently produce a series talking about the Taiwanese history. Given the previews, I anticipate to see this series very much. I do not remember I had seen any kind of very organized Taiwanese history TV shows in the past, even though I am from Taiwan and I had been focus on our own culture and history for a little while.

I do not know if this series had already been broadcast, at least I still can not find their full version on youtube. Anyway, I believe this must be a valuable series to see at least for our Taiwanese generation who had never been well taught our history. It generates the debates and argues nowadays about the Taiwanese identity in Taiwan society. In addition, the production from PTS is always good from the past experience, as it was called leading sports station in the universe in the past years .... Ha .....

Suffered by mlb.tv blockout?

It is always annoying that mlb.tv has the block-out policy once the games are broadcast by nationwide channel, especially my favorite Yankees, Redsox or off-season games are often in this category.

For the guys like me without TV at home, here is the solution. The P2P technology provides the forwarding TV show from the current channel. MyP2P is an website which put all sports games available in all kinds of P2P services together, even CPBL .... Ha. Also, the P2P services are also arranged for the easy download. With this service, we probably will not miss any interesting games easily again.