Friday, February 20, 2009
Learning Mandarin Chinese - 2
Recently I got a native Chinese language tutor and I am following something like an official program as taught in the Chinese language university classes around the world. The tutor confirmed the books I recommended before are very good and that she knows personally the author to be a very good teacher.

I also enjoy the free KT-Dict CE application for IPod/IPhone realised by Klaus Thul that also have a very good page on why and how to learn Chinese language at http://www.klausthul.com. As you may already know, IPod Touch is a great tool to exercise writing in Chinese, still the paper and the pen are the fundamental tools.

Will be back on this subject.


 | 
Saturday, February 21, 2009 3:54:33 AM (GTB Standard Time, UTC+02:00)  #  Comments [1] 
 Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Living a wide life
After changing my blog theme I found some bug on the new template and I attempted to fix it. Then I was thinking what to write to have some global significance. Then I came up with "Living a wide life".

I want to make my life very wide. As some wisdom man told me once, we must search to live a wide life. What is a wide life? Well everybody has a personal life. Here you may have or not a family and you may have a poor or a rich personal life. Then we should widen this life with our social life (friends, profession, etc) and with our spiritual life (create space for your own spiritual being). We should struggle to widen all of these three lives. In many cases our destiny only permits to reach a certain level of life width. We should not be angry with it but use whatever we can get in it.

I recently saw the "Yes man" comedy. Indeed we should be able to reach to the extent of our destiny.

And a big secret is this: if you make your life very wide, it also becomes very long.

I wish a very wide and long life to you.



Wednesday, February 11, 2009 8:52:32 PM (GTB Standard Time, UTC+02:00)  #  Comments [0] 
 Tuesday, April 29, 2008
More home automation

I registered to a 5 days seminar in UK in order to learn KNX/EIB. It was the single seminar that gave me confidence upon my web research. The company name is Ivory Egg and they also operate a website with other KNX/EIB products: http://www.knxshop.co.uk

I will attend in July and hope will return home with KNX certification.


 | 
Tuesday, April 29, 2008 6:08:06 PM (GTB Daylight Time, UTC+03:00)  #  Comments [0] 
 Monday, May 07, 2007
Building www.vencu.ro

Building www.vencu.ro was quite easy and enjoying experience.

I have an account with www.shanje.net for my business and I still can create 70 websites with no additional payment as far as disk space and monthly bandwidth is conserved.

Therefore the idea of vencu.ro family website. The hosting company supports ASP.NET 1.1 or 2.0 that is already familiar to me. However on the Internet one may find very good tools for free to fit such a need as mine: a website with simple CMS and a blog application. Based on recommendation from my friend and future neighbor Aurelian I discovered the 2 packages:

  1. My Web Pages Starter Kit from http://www.codeplex.com/MyWebPagesStarterKit based on ASP.NET 2.0 used to build www.vencu.ro
  2. dasBlog from www.dasblog.info based on ASP.NET 1.1 used to build the blog sites richardblog.vencu.ro and danblog.vencu.ro

Both kits reverted the usage of SQL server toward file system and XML structures which simplified a lot the setup. The blog application exposes RSS feeds that can be easily consumed by the main website via custom made .NET 2.0 user control.

The quality of the kits is great and the price is a very attractive zero. Learning how to deal with the applications and build the present state (12 pages and 2 blogs) took only 5 hours and main delay was caused by ftp upload speed. Finding a FTP client was included in the 5 hours and I ended-up with FileZilla, a free FTP community project at http://filezilla.sourceforge.net/. It has it's little problems with FTP site content cache but one can do it's job quite easily.



Tuesday, May 08, 2007 12:25:19 AM (GTB Daylight Time, UTC+03:00)  #  Comments [0]