The First AC and Automatic Fan at UNESCO China

It started getting cooler here and no more AC is needed till next year. I wonder what people do before AC and electrical fan. Well, my theory is they had higher threshold to heat.

I recall visiting an UNESCO site at Anhui in Southern China. There is a well reserved historical village with intact architectures. It was once home of many wealthy merchants 500 or 600 hundred years ago. They accumulated their wealth by trade Tea and Silk. The planning of village was done before residence moved in. Its roads form an intertwined spider web shape which resembles the Eight Diagrams of Taoism and divide the village into 8 sections. The center is a lake or reservoir. Water needed by the entire village is distributed through 8 canals. Each estate in the village has a unique design with extravagant decoration, yet still in harmony with the overall style of the community.

One of the most interesting I found in one courtyard is an ancient prototype of Air Conditioner and a very original automatic fan. The owner definitely knew how to enjoy life. A cave used to store water spreads underneath the whole courtyard. Fresh water from a closest river flows into this gigantic water tank as old water was dumped out. What is this for? Keeping the house cool! It is the world first AC!

Now let's talk about the fan. The house consists of a mill. At the other side of the mill wheel connects a big palm leaves fan in living room. The big fan would start to spin as river pushes the mill wheel. Isn't that amazing? I think it is such advanced technology for 500 to 600 years ago. No need to mention how environmental it is! No harmful chemical released :-) Oh, besides, the high ceiling and thick walls help to maintain the temperature of the room as well.

Why aren't there more environmental safe cooling inventions these days? And why are modern houses not as energy efficient as they were used to be. I mean they are much better comparing to old house built 30 years ago, since higher quality thermos material are introduced. However, I still think buildings made today are still less energy efficient comparing to buildings made hundreds of years ago. :-P

Myers-Briggs Personality Test

A friend of mine told me about the Myers-Briggs Personality Test that he took at a training. So I was intrigued to take that test myself to see what I get.

Googled a little bit, found this online.
http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/JTypes2.asp
There are 16 different types result in this self-analysis. http://typelogic.com/
My result: ENFP

According to the assessment, people with ENFP personality are found in 5% of the population. ENFP are enthusiastic, effervescent and spontaneous. ENFPs can become restless quickly if occupation involves too much detail and follow-through over a long period of time. Variety in day-to-day operations and interactions best suits ENFPs. ENFPs enjoy inventing new ways of doing things; don't like repeating experience. Once things become routine, ENFPs will lose interest. ENFPs can be curious just about everything, always try to find what's new and then pass on the information, hence they could make a good reporter, newscasters or journalists. (Now I know why I like to write blogs. LOL)

ENFPs are also hyper alert and always ready for emergencies. They continuously scan the external environment and nothing will escape their attention. They are keen and penetrating observers. At times, ENFPs have the tendency to interpret the hidden meaning of events beyond words or actions.

The evaluation is very accurate and I agree to all of it.

Flat Tire

I got a flat tire yesterday. Right before entering DSCC,...all I hear was a sound "boom" following "pssss", then the car start to limp. Apparently I drove over a huge nail on the middle of road. Hard to spot those kind of things when driving 40 miles a hour.

Luckily there is an auto service right across the street from the DSCC base. So I had to drop my car there and walked to work. Although the auto shop is right outside the DSCC entrance, there is still a long walk from the gate to the building I work at. It is such a coincident that every time I end up have to walk long distance unexpectedly, I have my favorite pair of dress shoes on :-( Well anyway, still have to walk in those heels. Took me about half hour to get to the building and I was late for work obviously. The base is about the size of an airport :-P. It is by the Columbus airport too.

Later of the day, the auto shop called me to pick up my car. I got there the same way i came, on feet. The cashier showed me the nail they pulled out from the tire. OMG, it is huge. Technically it is not even a nail; it is a flat tip screw. It must be approximately 7 inches long, 1/4 inch in diameter. Crazy how that thing stuck to the tire.

Anyway tire was fixed, I got my car back. Did not get another flat tire on my way home. Haha :-D

Recaps for last week

Mid of last week, I went to see a Columbus Clippers vs. Louisville Bats Baseball Game with some friends from the church of my coworkers. Although the game was really long and boring and we were on the losing side. It was still fun to enjoy the summer evening with some friend, just chilling, chatting while watching the game.

On Saturday, I had to work during the day for the cutover of a migration project. It went pretty smoothly, so get every done around 2pm. Went home, took a nap. Two of my friends are leaving Columbus to pursue bigger and more important things in their lives in other parts of the country. So there were two farewell parties I had to go on Sat night. It's just really difficult for me to see people leaving, especially one of them are very good friend of mine. I tried to have a good attitude about this, but it is just hard to have uplifting mood. There is an old Chinese proverb "No banquet that will last forever." I know we will still keep in touch, and our friendship will still remain, but it is just not going to be the same anymore, that's why people alaways need to make new friends.

Unfunctional Family

I heard my mom talk about her friends' daughter's marriage couple days ago. I was really surprised when I heard about the story. Here is the brief in a nutshell. My mom's friends' daughter is Chinese. She married a white Australian guy. Both of my mom's friends don't speak English. Last year, they went to Australia to visit their daughter and her husband for the first time.

The problem is this guy can not stand listening his wife speak Chinese to her parents. He told her that they can not speak Chinese at his home when he is present. It makes him "anxious" when he doesn't know what they are saying. I mean that is NONSENSE. First of all, it is her home too; Secondly, it is their right to speak in their language; Thirdly, they only know Chinese, how he expects them to talk to their daughter? Fourthly, what if he goes to a non-English speaking country? such as Germany or France, can he stop all Germans and French to speak German and French? I mean who he think he is! What right he has to do that!

What is most ridiculous is that their daughter seems OK with it. She told her parents not to speak to her when he gets home anymore. So during those a few days they were visiting, they could only talk once he left for work. After he returned home, they stopped talking. Since they don't know how to speak English, they could only use hand gesture, and shake or nod their head to communicate! This is insane. I can not believe such rude and inconsiderate people exist. I was more mad about the daughter. Why is she so weak? Why couldn't she tell her Australian husband that what he did to her parents are wrong? I know I would never do that to my parents.

Among all the bazaar stories I heard about intercultural relationship, this is NOT the weirdest one indeed. There are a lot of things I heard and read were even worse. Although most of those stories are quite unfortunate, I do believe there are good and bad people in every race actually. It is just when it comes to cross-cultural things, people become more sensitive and skeptical and tend to focus on the negativity much more than the positivity. I'm certain there are just as many successful cases of intercultural relationship, but most people don't pay much attention to those good stories, since to most people horrible ones sound more interesting.

Thoughts after taking online teambuilding training

I just finished an Accenture internal online training called "Cultivating a High-performance Project Team: Building a High-performance Team". There are some new concepts that differs significantly from my previous understanding.

In traditional Chinese culture, the "art of leading" is to keep the everyone in team "balanced", the best leader is the one who can keep the "harmony" of the team. Every since China opened it's door to the the outside world. The westernized influence swept China. Many private new companies adopt the westernized management philosophy since the early 80's. Promoting competition within employee, rewarding individual contribution and etc become popular buzz words used in modern enterprise management.

By completing the training, some of my views about how to create an successful team changed. In this training, it doesn't recommend severe competition between team members, because that "break" the team. When prizing individual contribution, it suggests do it one-on-one. My guess that avoids unnecessary jealousy among team member which can negatively impact team culture. It also said for upper managment should emphasize and reward team achievement rather than individual success.

Majority of the training are agreeable to what I already knew. Couple things that are different, such as, team manager should try to resolve team members' conflict. In modern China, if there is a conflict between two employee, boss would just say: "deal with it, or you both can get fired". It is not a common practice for lead to get involved in team member's conflict, because they think that will just make things become more complicated. What was taught in this course is more aligned with the traditional Chinese management method, which is lead supposes to maintain the harmony among his subordinates in every way.

The training also explained about the importance of informal processes and foster of feeling of inclusion, devotion, dedication, pride and trust among team to further improve team performance.

I can't always get what I want

Growing up, I'm a very lucky person in general, short period of hardship in my teen year, but overall I'm pretty blessed. I don't like pray, because I think GOD is too busy to answer so many prayers, and it is unfair to grant prayer to everyone. I think GOD will do the justice regardless if you pray or not. If it is thing that you are not supposed to get, you won't get it anyway. Nobody always get what s/he wants.

Fast food culture

In today's society, most people are not interested in the idea of long distance relationship, just as most people are not willing to wait in line for their food. This is the result of the fast food culture. Everything has to be convenient.

We all know fast food is tasteless, because the process and ingredients into making the food is too simple and plain. Building a good relationship is like preparing a nice meal. It takes long time to make, and sometime you have to go out far from home to shop for that special ingredient. Only things that you spent a lot of time and effort to achieve that u will know how to appreciate it and cherish it more.

To me distance is more romantic. There are some really good things about distance. It forces guys to make more effort than when they are in the same place. That way they get involved in a deeper way. Sometimes the physical proximity can drive the relationship into a more physical direction and completely stop paying attention to the emotional aspects. If someone wants to start a long distance relationship with you, then you know that person is very serious about it.

Nothing is impossible. I definitely think long distance relationship can be worked out, it just takes more work. Problem is most guys don't want the extra work, because they think they can find someone else soon, but chances are those easy things will fizzle out just as fast. A connection is not something that happens to everyone everyday, and most likely not someone next door. It takes many guys many years to realize how hard it actually is to meet the right person. A person who happens to find someone easily usually ends up having other issues that have to resolve later. Just think about all the health issues people have discovered due to over consume of unhealthy fast junk food.

Great Trip to Hartford

I went to visit my good college friend from U of M who lives in Hartford now. It has been 10month since I last met her at NYC. We got a lot to catch up, and talked a lot, have a lot fun.

We hung out with her friends pretty much every night of Thursday, Friday and Saturday. And we bar hopped. heheh. I've never done that before! It was so much fun. I drank a little bit just enough to get a buzz, but wasn't drunk. Because I don't think it would be fun anymore if get too drunk.

For day activities, we went to New Haven to visit Yale University and ate at the famous Frank Pepe Pizzeria. I order a pizza with clam and shrimp. It was so yummy. The clam and shrimp tasted so fresh. And the spice on the pizza is so good too. The pizza had a very rich flavor. And there is no redundant mozzarella and tomato sauce used on the pizza, which is great decision, all I could taste was the awesome flavor from the seafood.

Saturday afternoon, we went to the very first Connecticut Wine Festival. We tasted many quality local wines. I enjoyed the wine tasting experience :-) We must have tried 20 some different wines. heheh. And when we were having lunch at the festival, there was man who works at the winery at one of the booth at the festival happened to sit at our table too. So we had a nice chat with him, and later we went to his winery to tried a few wines. He was a really kind old man, remind me of Santa. :-D

Other than that, we also had dinner at a fancy Asian Fusion restaurant, and Sunday brunch and the Manchester downtown area. Manchester is this small town adjacent to Hartford. And we got there, we realized an antique car show was holding there. So as we walking thru the old town to our brunch place, we glanced thru some of the cars too.

Overall, it was a very pleasant trip. And I like Skybus airline. So convenient and so efficient. I highly recommend anyone to use Skybus as their top airline choice.