近日某君时不时提起"相互利用"这词, 语气带着一点淡淡的愤然感, 使这原本趋中性的用词也无端地沾染了更多带贬义的俗气. 其实万物都有着自己特有的特性, 能凭着自己特性在世界上办演某重要角色. 但对自己不擅长及力所能及外的东西往往是力不从心. 别人代替不了你特有的角色, 你也不可能也没能力办演好其他人角色. 生活在世上, 每人都有自己的一份责任和义务, 除了做好自己本份, 演好自己角色外, 少不了还要各方相互合作配合, 个人家庭社会才能和谐向前.  就象企业里有技能的员工, 和员工后面的企业老板. 只有他们都合力走到一块, 劳力才智才能转化成养家活口资源, 员工才能发挥他们的才干, 追求和实现他们的理想, 老板的投资才能实现增值. 只有这样, 两者才能达到双嬴, 成就一番事业. 明白了这道理, 对生活上的事也应能悟出这道理.  如这样, 就不会简单化地分开说你能做某点事, 我也干那么些活, 进行切割, 硬是刨去感性甚至理性因素后就剩下相互利用了. 如不能悟出这道理或不甚理解当中的含义, 就连亲人, 朋友它日也能说成是相互利用的工具了. 看来朋友之道还应是君子之交淡如水好了, 望不会给人再落下个曲高傲寡的印象就好了.

今年暑假有机会开车到外地旅游, 离开了平时居住的小区, 一路开车途经城郊如画的小镇, 城区带给人们的繁杂,乏味及紧迫感可稍微解除一下.  眼前一望无边的中谷平原, 使人又顿然开阔, 身心坦然.  当车子迂回于野外山路时, 又是另外的一番景象.  蓝天白云下, 山澗溪流流水潺潺, 草木青青, 灌木丛生.  山腰路边无数的参天松树在车侧闪过, 仿佛是在跟奔驰中的汽车暗地里斗力攀高似的.  而山巅的还没完全溶化的积雪活象给山戴了一顶白帽子似的,乍看有点别扭, 但又在飘浮的白云中和夏日的阳光下显得那样轻松自然.  看着缠绕在山间不断向上的弯曲前路, 走在这渺无人烟的山上, 脑子里突然略过瞬间的疑虑:  大自然美好得确使人赏心悦目, 但我是否能在大自然的野外存活么?

虽是瞬间的思绪,但还是想起了年前发生在俄勒冈州的一起悲剧.  一个亚裔家庭开车旅行穿越俄勒冈州时, 在森林里迷了路, 汽油将耗尽, 又是冬天.  他们就这样靠剩在车上的食物, 电源, 汽油苦撑了一两天.  为了一家能脱离危险, 父亲便孤身徒步到外求援.  当家人最后获救时, 这位父亲已经被冻僵在几里外的雪地里再也不能苏醒过来了.

这事故无疑是现代人的悲剧.  当现代人离开了我们居住的城区, 我们的生活就可能有问题, 甚至于不能生存.  从另一方面来说, 随着人类文明社会的发展, 现代人已经慢慢地失去了我们先祖在他们时代赖以生存的基本技能.  试想我们现在能象我们先祖那样在艰苦的野外生活么? 我们先祖能在条件极端恶劣的野外生存发展, 他们能上山守猎,下海捕鱼, 垦地耕作.  如今, 试想想近视眼的我们要打猎时, 还没看清楚猎物, 那猎物可能已冲到我们面前反把我们吃掉了. 挺着啤酒大肚子的我们要下海打鱼时, 鱼儿可能早已在我们的肚子还在水中沉浮不定时悄悄地溜走了. 当我们要开垦农地耕作时, 还没等到收获, 我们已经劳累死了. 

这不知是我们文明的进步还是我门进化的悲哀.  是进步也好,悲哀也罢,  我们现代人要生存发展就只能按着当今社会的游戏规则, 在都市里随波逐流地跟着走了.   偏离了, 路就难走了, 或根本没路可走了.

相信很多旧版红楼梦电视剧观众都不会忘记黛玉葬花这场戏.  黛玉葬花可算是红楼梦最经典的一幕了.  说得是黛玉爱花也最怜惜花, 觉得花落以后埋在土里最干净. 这是她对美有着自己独特的见解和追求.  她又以花喻己, 写了葬花词, 抒发自己情感. 对这位多愁善感的贵族小姐, 看花开花落, 从而感怀自己身世, 满目凄凉.  她父母双亡,寄人篱下,无人做主,孤苦一人. 花开美如画谁来惜? 花落凋零又谁会怜?  虽说宝玉具有爱花惜花的情怀,且两人能互解互爱, 无奈于当时礼教观念, 性格的悲观的她只能无力地看鲜花的凋零, 并预视着自己可悲的未来.

是啊, 古今中外, 世间最可悲的是看着人生最美好的东西抓不住后流逝而感触到的无力感.  世上所有美好的东西都象美丽的花朵被欣赏被珍惜多好!  但试问世间无数的花朵能有几朵能綻放于象大观园般的花园里?  而大观园内万千落花又有多少能得黛玉的怜惜下葬而无憾地化成净土?  又有多少能是玫瑰牡丹?  其外又有多少是默默无闻地花开花落而不为人知而飘逝?   就算世上有很多象怡红公子般有爱花惜花情怀的人们, 到头来恐怕他们也是白操了那颗心.

花谢花飞花满天,红消香断有谁怜? 游丝软系飘春榭,落絮轻沾扑绣帘.
闺中女儿惜春暮,愁绪满怀无释处,  手把花锄出绣闺,忍踏落花来复去.
柳丝榆荚自芳菲,不管桃飘与李飞.  桃李明年能再发,明年闺中知有谁?
三月香巢已垒成,梁间燕子太无情!  明年花发虽可啄,却不道人去梁空巢也倾.
一年三百六十日,风刀霜剑严相逼,  明媚鲜妍能几时,一朝飘泊难寻觅.
花开易见落难寻,阶前闷杀葬花人,  独倚花锄泪暗洒,洒上空枝见血痕.
杜鹃无语正黄昏,荷锄归去掩重门.  青灯照壁人初睡,冷雨敲窗被未温.
怪奴底事倍伤神,半为怜春半恼春:  怜春忽至恼忽去,至又无言去不闻.
昨宵庭外悲歌发,知是花魂与鸟魂? 花魂鸟魂总难留,鸟自无言花自羞.
愿奴胁下生双翼,随花飞到天尽头.  天尽头,何处有香丘?
未若锦囊收艳骨,一抔净土掩风流.  质本洁来还洁去,强于污淖陷渠沟.
尔今死去侬收葬,未卜侬身何日丧?  侬今葬花人笑痴,他年葬侬知是谁?
试看春残花渐落,便是红颜老死时.  一朝春尽红颜老,花落人亡两不知!

The entry was from a descriptive essay from my English learning class years ago.....  

My father was an immigrant who had limited English skills.  Wanting to improve his English, he attended an ESL class in a community college in San Francisco once.  That was his first encounter with the U.S. educational system. "The school and the classrooms are wonderful",  he exclaimed in delight. 

"The classrooms are roomy and bright and the lightings, the chairs, the glassy blackboards and the video are so great",  he said on the first day he attended the school.  I knew what he was doing - he was comparing the school here with a school in a remote Mongolian town where he taught before.  I knew that because I had experiences with that school, too.  I spent two semesters in there.  I still remembered even though that was about seven years ago.

Every morning, I could feel the chilly wind on my face and the freezing coldness beneath my feet when I walked on the unevenly paved and graveled path to my classroom.  The dry and brown fallen leaves cluttered on the path as well as the roof of the classroom.  When the wind blew,  those leaves would scatter, and I would hurry to that wood-framed door, which was about the height of a tall grown-up. When I entered the classroom, my face could feel the warmth.  I didn't know why the skin on my face was so sensitive.   I thought the warmth had something to do with the room, a small narrow room with a extremely low ceiling with those several inches of fallen dry leaves on the roof.  Maybe those  fallen leaves served as a layer of insulation to the small room keeping the coldness out and keeping the room warmer.

There could be another explanation why the room was warm, too.  There were too many classmates in the small room where there were only two windows on each side.  There were several rows of desks with the same color but different conditions, broken or half-broken dark brown desks arranged row by row.  We would puff and breath in the room with the windows closed.  Very soon the glass in the windows became vague.  Thousands of dewdrops would stick on the window glass.

When the sunlight penetrated the windows, the room would become warmer and warmer.  I wondered if this had something to do with the giant blackboard sitting in front of the room.  It was entirely black.  Though the ceiling and the walls were not black but dark brown, the whole room seemed dark and gloomy. I thought that would capture more heat from the sunlight.  The blackboard was made of wood, with a very smooth black-ink-printed surface.  It looked like a mirror in someway.  It could reflect sunlight penetrating the windows, making us unable to see what was written on it. We would feel extremely warm, even uncomfortable, because of the  kerosine lamp hung above the teacher's table in front of the blackboard.  The lamp was lit when the room was dim.  It was about ten inches tall and it was hung two feet above our heads.  Air had to be pumped in and fuel had to be filled in before it could be lit.  It emanated not only light but also heat, noise and smell.  The light it emanated was like sunlight: it filled the whole room, soft and bright.  However, the heat that the lamp gave up made us sweaty and wet.  We could ignore the 'zzz' noise made by the lamp, but we could not withstand the awful smell and the white smoke of the burning fuel, and the burning insects trapped within the lamp.  The disgusting smell, the flying chalk dust and the foul-smelling sweat melted together in the classroom.

The schools here are so great", my father was still murmuring.  "Do you still remember that Mongolian school that we left before we came to the U.S.?" my father asked.  "Sure, I do. Thank God I need not to stay there any longer", I replied, implying that if I had studied there, I would have had a terrible education.  "It is not necessarily true.  Having good facilities doesn't mean everything",  said my father. "Ceceg, one of my Mongolian students, your sister's friend, who is a famous writer now in the country, graduated from that school", he said proudly.  "But now, see what you have gotten here:  you have nerve gotten a single A paper in composition", he added.  I was embarrassed.

We sometime tend to take some little trivial things for granted without realizing these trivial things can be a big challenge for some other people.  For example learning the English Alphabet is seemingly simple enough, and yet for a child with Dyslexia, a learning disablity that impairs a person's ability to read, that doesn’t seem to be easy at all.  Unfortunatly, our world isn't perfect.  There are always people coming to this world with this kind of subtle imperfections that other ordinary people are hard to understand.  For a long period of time in the past,  their bitter experiences can only be swallowed by themselves.  Some struggle and suffer in their very day living even without realizing what their real problem is.  Some blame themselves, their families, their teachers, and even the society.  They don’t have a clue that they were born with their imperfections, an invisible obstacle inside themselves that they can't overcome.

It’s good news that the medical communities have started to identify those syndroms and try to find ways to help these people with these obstacles.   Hopefully, the general public can treat these people with open minds.  So, when you see a quiet child alway walking alone around the edge of a playground in which others are playing happily together,  please be kind not to simply label him or her as a loner or a stranger.  He or she may be a person with obstacles such as Autism or Asperger Syndroms.  He or she needs your understanding and support in his or her road ahead.  In a minimal way, we all should have a more friendly attitude toward them.

I've just learned lately that someone vowed that she would register to become a Republican voter.  For a long period of time, this middle-class individual has been leaning toward Republican's conservative ideology.  Further influenced now by a local radical right-wing conservative talk show host, she is now motivated to vote in the elections.

I have heard enough from both parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, that I should vote to make my voice heard.  Living in San Francisco, the most liberal city in the west coast, I have especially been bombarded by our local liberal politicians and community leaders to take part in the election process.  However, over the years, I have realized that under the current political climate both locally and nationally, my vote is very insignificant.

Locally speaking, people living in San Francisco Bay Area tend to be open-minded.  Politically, they are more liberal than people from other cities in the region.   Thus, the Democrats have basically dominated the politics here in San Francisco.  In theory, every vote counts.  In reality, my vote in the election process doesn’t make any difference no matter how I cast my vote in such a political environment in the city.  My vote is too tiny to have any effect on the direction of the huge Democrats' powerful political running machine that rolls over me with tons of energy.  Voting in such an environment is meaningless except that it fulfills my duty of being a responsible citizen.  If you think that your conservative vote can make a difference in San Francisco’s politics, you are a bit naïve.  You may be brainwashed by your talk show host too much unless he or she can summon substantial amount of followers to change this political landscape.

The essential issue that I see is that the current system, especially in the national level, has been established for centuries and has been hard to change for the better.  The outdated establishment is so solid and rigid that it makes changes almost impossible.  The system itself has determined its political machine and how it should be ran for a long time.  I mean that no matter which party is in power and no matter who becomes the president, this system remains the same system and the political machine is still the same machine.  The role of the president is just like a super agent who maintains this huge political machine, making sure it doesn't go astray, and it doesn't run out of gas and stop.  No matter how people vote in each election, the country is still ideologically the same capitalist country, pursuing and practicing the free market driven economic principles based on the greed of our human nature.  Basically, the system has dictated very element under the system.  So I believe that essentially, there would be no major difference if we had chosen Senator Mccain as our current president instead of President Obama, who pleaded ‘change’ in his running platform and won in the last presidential election.  If you think otherwise, please ask youself now:  What are the changes now?  Are we better off now fundamentally?  Aren't we doing the same things as before?  Please also look at these:  Our nation's debt has reached record high, and yet we are still fighting two wars in the other parts of the world in the name of anti-terrorism.  We are still struggling in the recession resulted from the greed by our elite capitalists on Wall Street, who are good at exploiting the capitalistic system’s flaw and taking advantages of  our weakness of our contemporary human society.  We are still losing our jobs while the capitalists on Wall Street continue to abuse the system even with our taxpayers’ dollars.   We are still struggling to have our heath care while the heath care related industries continue to pursue greedily their higher-profit driven agenda.  I don’t expect President Obama or other future presidents can make some critical changes to fix our problems because they have been deeply rooted in our current system, the only same old system that we have had ever since this country was founded.   In that sense, I think my vote is meaningless to me unless we people have the power to overhaul or even to break down the current system from its root and establish another system much fairer to everyone in the country, a system built based on our positive human nature, rather than the current system driven not only by the dark side of our human nature but also exploiting that of it solely without mercy.

You may say I am a dreamer.  Whenever John Lennon’s Imagine lingers in my ears and my mind, my soul becomes one, indeed.

Imagine there's no                                   Heaven It's easy if you try
No hell below us                                      Above us only sky
Imagine all the people                           Living for today

Imagine there's no countries               It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for                      And no religion too
Imagine all the people                          Living life in peace

You may say that I'm a dreamer          But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us              And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions                        I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger               A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people                          Sharing all the world

You may say that I'm a dreamer          But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us              And the world will live as one

I recently got a retired Dell Poweredge 600SC server from a local company.  This machine had a single Intel Pentium 4, 1.8GHz processor, with 1.5G SDRAM.  In terms of hardware, it's better than my old server machine (with 400MHz processor, 1G RAM), in which the Glassfish application server was installed to serve this blog and our online store application.   These java-based applications ran well in my old server and I would think that they would have better performance on the Dell machine.  I started to setup this Dell machine to replace the old server. 

The first problem that I encountered with the Dell machine was that I had problem installing the current version of Ubuntu into it.  I first tried to install Ubuntu 9.04, the same version in the old machine, but it faild to install.  Then I tried to install Ubuntu 10.04, the newest Ubuntu version as of this writing.  It also failed to install.  At last, I tried the Unbuntu 8.04 LTS version and it finally worked.   I was not sure why this Dell Poweredge 600SC couldn't install Ubuntu version newer than 8.04 version.  If you know the reason or know how to install the newer version on the Dell Poweredge 600SC,  please let me know.  I would appreciate your information very much!

After installing the Ubuntu server operating system, I tried to install the Glassfish Java application server.  I had an option to install either OpenJDK 6 or Sun JDK 6 for it first.  The Glassfish application server in the old machine ran on OpenJDK 6, the default option when installing the Glassfish application server.  Hoping it would perform better with Sun JDK 6, I installed Sun JDK 6 for the Glassfish application server this time.  The Glassfish application worked as I expected.  However, I realized at once that our online store application loaded slower than usual.  This application ran on Java EJB extensively and it took a few more seconds to load and initialize when compared with the old machine.  Checking the application logs on both machines confirmed my observations.   The time to perform the same operation in the Dell machine was in the magnitude of a few hundred milliseconds while it was in just a few ten milliseconds in the old machine!  I then ran some MySql tests to check the database performance on both machines.  MySql in the Dell machine indeed ran faster, cutting half of its time to run the same query in the old machine.  What made the application so slow in my new machine?  Would it be the Java version?  

I then installed the OpenJDK 6 to the Dell machine with: sudo apt-get install openjdk-6-jdk.  After a reboot, it worked!  The application finally picked up its speed as it should be.  It's a mystery to me that Glassfish(v2) in Ubuntu would behave in that way.  My guess was that the binary byte codes of Glassfish(v2) from Ubuntu were compiled with OpenJdk 6.  So using OpenJdk 6 might have advantages over Sun's Jdk 6. 

Now that the machine had two Java virtual machines installed in it, Sun Jdk 6 and OpenJdk 6,  I could choose which one to use with the following command in Ubuntu. sudo update-alternatives --config java

如果有人问我, 你愿意跟思想复杂的或与敏感的朋友交流?  我会倾向于选前者.  前者虽思想复杂, 但一经理顺, 大家还是可就事论事, 各述其见.  最坏的, 顶多是互不相让, 各持己见而尔.  与敏感的朋友交流却比较费心, 你说某门子的事, 对方会立刻会联想另一门他们敏感的事, 总怀疑话是冲着我来的.  久而久之, 每次交流, 你先得考虑这话要不要说, 怎说, 就怕对方听后可能又想歪了. 说了不如不说. 说了, 可能还要承受对方想歪后的后果.  如果你可能是这种比较敏感的朋友, 我愿意跟你分赏我的感想:  当你看到迎风而下的落叶时, 那就让它自己轻轻地飘落在地上吧! 只是秋天来了.

有人说欲望是一切烦恼的根源, 我想这里所提的只局限于个人感情的范畴, 是个人烦恼.  这狭义的说法也说得过去,有一定的道理.  有人为财而死, 也有人为色而亡, 更多人在两者之间徘徊沉浮, 要经历人间无数的悲欢离合 . 从广义上说, 欲望不单是一切烦恼的根源, 甚至也是一切罪恶的根源, 但话又说回来, 欲望也是推动个人和社会向前的原动力, 是双刃剑.

欲望是人性的最基本的体现.  人类能从远古繁衍致今, 连绵不断, 靠的就是人的生存的意志和欲望.  人类从石器时代到今天的计算机时代靠的就是人的求发展的欲望.  于个人而言, 欲望也是追求个人美好生活的源泉, 欲望更是追求个人成功之路的动力.  这些都是人性正面的美好的因素, 大家都了解, 不用再作解释. 

然而, 人性也有黑暗的一面.  欲望象一坐山, 它的另一面便是险崖是贪念. 对欲望的追求象攀山, 一不小心便有危险, 轻者使越轨者迷失方向而烦恼不断, 重者使人作奸犯科致家破人亡.  当然我们不谈那么些为一点私利而杀人放火的没人性的无耻之徒.  但我们应该怎么样拿躡掌控我们的欲望, 使它恰到好处才是我们要考虑的问题.  我和你可能都是默默耕耘的大多数人, 虽有小资私心且常有各种各样梦想或幻想, 这也是现时人之常情, 主要不伤害他人, 不危害家庭及社会, 便无可非议.  个人很佩服那些无欲无求却能活得一样精彩的人们, 他们洁身自好, 能启迪人心, 是现今纸醉金迷灯红酒绿社会的一股清流.  和他们相反的是那些不顾礼义廉耻和社会道德, 用尽各种方法为自子拿好处的贪得无厌人.  这样的人国内有, 如最近香港争产案的男主角陈某君.  在美国, 这也是常事.  君不见华尔街金融大行的寡头们哪个不是吃得肠满油肥地陷国家经济于破产困境, 而每个国民要为他们的贪念而结帐买单.  再看看我们的医疗健保系统, 由生化药品公司, 医疗健康保险公司, 各大小医疗机构, 到穿纯洁白袍的大夫们所组成强大的坑人系统, 已把我们老百姓压得喘不过气来而不敢生病.  这些既得利益阶层贪得无厌地坚拒改革.  他们的所作所为已危害到每个家庭及社会.    回头再看, 在这些系统内的人都是受高等教育的读书人, 应也知礼义廉耻.  再想想看, 我想他们是知到的, 他们很多都会信神, 都是上帝前的罪人, 可在神面前忏悔罪过, 以求心安理得继而同流合污.

记得在校念书时, 国内比较着重数理化等自然科学的教学, 故能理解天地万物按一定法规而运行, 树上熟苹果将必落地而决不会飞天而去. 我们主要能查找出自然科学定律, 变能帮助我们了解自然界的奥密, 更能推演万物发展之势. 从苹果落地到人类太空飞天探险, 就是很好的例子. 然而这里说的只是自然科学, 但在人类社会范畴, 也可有如自然科学般法规?

当今世界, 人要生存, 必是物质至上, 金钱万能.  但社会贫富差距巨大, 资源财富分配很不均衡, 造成不公.  有人腰缠万贯, 更多人为口奔驰, 一生奔波劳碌.   我有时会想, 除了个人因素, 究竟还有什么因素确定了我们所现有制度和经济模式, 使我们动弹不得, 只得随波逐流, 逆来顺受.  究竟将来有没有一个完美的公平的终极模式, 如果有, 那又是怎样的一个模式?  如何才可达致?  现在有没有法规可寻呢?