It appears to be true now, the work load of my last year's bachelor study is immense and has way exceeded my expectation, forcing me to partially give up on some extracurriculum activities like blogging here.

I have always said, no matter how busy I am, blogging would be the last thing to give up because its significance in helping me achieve a number of personal objectives. So I'm definitely not to give this blog up.

However, because of the work load I'm currently experiencing, there is little free time available for me to use in this blog. I'm currently considering several restructuring options that would reduce the amount of time needed to blog here while do not comprimise the quality. One possibility is to make this blog more work related so I can copy my assignment and other works straight to here :) But if there is no other option, I will then have to adapt a twitter-like style for this blog, short, but stll on the point, or face the possibility of concentrating my time on Chinese blog and close down this English blog.

More coming soon.

Making my feeling worse is the price hike on almost everything. I only left the country for 3 month but everything seemed to have its price increased for several rounds, and I'm hearing the GST is also on the price hike list.

It's very difficult to avoid paying GST, it exists everywhere in people's daily economic life, making it one of the most effective revenue gathering machines for the government. There are many ways to avoid paying too much personal income tax, and tax on specific goods is more likely to decrease demand rather than increase the taxation revenue.

But of course this isn't all about revenue gathering. This is because Mr Key wants to give people tax cut, more specifically, the high income earners. In his speech made to parliament,  Key states that low income earners will be compensated through a upfront increase on benefits and working for families programme, but the trouble is, there's still very little details to see whether the compensation is enough to offset the GST increase.

Another feature of GST is that it treats every one equally, people all pay for the same rate. Statistics New Zealand says GST increase to 15% is likely to affect the CPI by a 2%+ one off increase, theoretically at least. What would really happen after the increase is still subject of a debate. Many New Zealand businesses advertise goods price ends with .99 just to make the price more appealing.  Many businesses will be facing a not so tough choice - whether to absorb the 2.5% increase themselves, or add it to the current price.

Well one of the phrses or excuses businesses just love to use is " we have to make profits".  So my guess is that the actual increase is likely to be more than 2%. Low margin and low price goods are more likely to get a $1.99 to $2.99 type of price hike as businesses are already sturggling making profit on those goods. Statistically, the overall increase would not be that huge, but the fact that troubles me is that low priced goods are more likely to be daily necessities.

I can't really quite understand the ideology behind this tax structuring apart from making high income earners happy. Yes this does give people more choice, as they got more money in hand - whether by more it means another 50cents or $50 in hand, is another problem. However, there are some choices people just don't have the choice, we all need food survive regardless whether you are high or low income earners.  The idea of removing GST on foods and petrol has been floating around for quite some time, but the government seems to have very little interest in it.

Capital gain tax is another thing government isn't very keen on. Speculating on real estate did make a lot of people rich, but that's at the expense of putting even more people at miseray. And most importantly, a healthy economy needs real economic activities,  new money has to be made - in the form of goods or services.  Prosperous property market sounds good, and looks good on GDP, but that's not real economy. It's unsustainable and who knows if he or she isn't the unlucky one or the greatest fool?

Government's very little action on these area does suggest me something they didn't tell. In his election promise John Key said he wants oversea kiwis back to their country and keep the young ones here. However, as a young adult myself,  the outlook of  me to stay in this country looks fainter every day, stuffs this government is doing, or not doing is making a graduate student  more difficult to make a decent living out of average wage.

There aren't many of celebrations happen in New Zealand and the weather isn't spring-like at all, but luckily, this year's new year's day coincides with Auckland anniversary, which means that I can spent the new year's day to do what ever people are suppose to do in new year ... I don't know really, my family tend to keep it very simple by just gather family friends and dine together on New Year's day.

What you do isn't that important anyway, the important thing is to maintain that cultural tie with your root.

I understand for many, last year was "a year of chaos", financial crisis, earthquake in China ... I think the best thing to have in new year is not necessarily a bank account with a substantial total, but a healthy body and peace for every family members and friends.  The earthquake in My home province, Sichuan taught me that I should cherish whatever I got at the moment and every moment I have with my family - you just don't know how lucky you really are.

My heart is with all the people who lost their loved ones in the earthquake, as I understand, most of them will spend this new year in temporary housing, with worries that aftershock that may strike anytime.

The herald has a report on the reaction from Fonterra, New Zealand's biggest company which had 43% share of the Sanlu Company. The prosecutors of this case also disclosed more details on the case, here's my translation of  the summary, and the original is here (in Chinese).

• While sick babies appeared as early as in march last year, Chairwomen of Sanlu only learnt the problem with their product in May, and nobody knew the actual cause (melamine) . Sanlu product was sent away  for inspection on July 24. To keep the issue secret, the inspector was informed by Sanlu that the samples they received are "some raw materials".
• An emergency meeting was held on 1 August, hours after Sanlu received the report back the inspector.  Fonterra claims this is the first time that the issue has come under their attention. News from the Chinese side seems to confirm the claim, however, with one thing missing in the herald report: although Fonterra wanted a product recall, their directors "did not reject" the proposal of not to recall openly but to do it in secret.
• Chairwoman of Sanlu, Tian Wen Hua, made a report to local government a day after the emergency meeting, but had no clear response.
• First Chinese media report on the link between kidney stones and Sanlu products, published on September 9. As Herald reported earlier,   New Zealand Ambassador to China was instructed to act on the issue on September 8.

You know the rest.

I think it's becoming more and more clear that New Zealand government played a big part of making the scandal public, and NZ officials' should be praised for their effort.

However,  there's also more evidence pointing out that there was indeed a cover up at some level, possibly between Sanlu and Hebei Provincial government. And I have to say, if Fonterra really tried hard to make the recall happen as they claimed before,  there's no reason why the total public recall shouldn't happen in Augest. I'm still very suspicious of the Fonterra's involvement in the cover up.

No doubt that 2008 was a tough year, people, especially my fellow countrymen back home, they had suffered a lot - nationwide snowstorm, earthquake in Sichuan ... but as what we always say, a new year means a new start.  You cannot go back in time and change what's already happened - they are set in concrete;  but the future is always in our hands and we can do whatever we want with it, the only thing you need to do is just don't let the chance go.

Bush Senior's vice president, Dan Quayle once quoted: " The future will be better tomorrow". Sounds funny, but in principle it's actually quite right. The force that drives most of us to work hard is indeed the belief that there will be a "better tomorrow". This is also the force that drives our world to progress.

But  that kind of thinking can sometime get you into a really unhealthy loop.  You always work for tomorrow but never stops for a while and enjoy what you achieved today and in the past. So don't push yourself too hard in a new year, achieve what you can, and let others go. Whenever you feel tired, rest for a while, look back and see what you have accomplished, then you will find the power to keep yourself going.

I'll be back sometime after the new year, until then, I wish every one here to have a very happy, and safe holiday.

As the result of that, you may experience brief outage, errors when opening pages ... and other strange stuffs while I'm working on things, just bear with me for a day or two, and my apology in advance.

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I give up on threaded comments ... I'll work on that later, so it's all done.

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Yes I did it! The theme now supports the new threaded comments feature! I amended my original CSS a bit so if you ever come across any bug while browsing ... please tell me here, thanks.

In fact I'm even luckier than I thought. At least I had the chance to go home and sleep on my bed. For some degrees I understand it's quite normal that most people simply moved their home to university, and made couches as their beds.

That's not because my laziness during the semester, I worked harder than everyone else. It's just because the final assignment really requires that amount of time to finish it.

So ... I'll try to restart this blog after the exams...

Well Christmas is fast approaching, but before that it's also the busiest time of the year, again. I need to take some time away from this blog to do my own stuffs, so I won't update this blog as frequently as before.

I hope to end all  works and to start thinking about Christmas no later than November 21st. I'm currently considering whether I should have my holiday in China this year. If this travel plan goes ahead, I'll definitely visit the area devastated by the Sichuan Earthquake happened in may this year, maybe volunteering some works.

If you feel that you need to read something from me(I sincerely hope no one does), you can subscribe to my daily digest. It's a collection of best and most interesting articles in my subscription list(as you may know, I monitor a large amount of blogs and news sources), and is updated daily - read others' blog is far more easier than to write my own :)

The only down side is, the content is a mix of Chinese and English articles, so if you read English only ...

The white rabbit creamy lolly has been one of the most popular lolly in China, and has been found of being contaminated by melamine.

Most people born between 70s - 90s in China, including myself, consumed the "white rabbit" at some stage of their lives. I even brought it once here in New Zealand - they are more than lollies, they are ... how should I put this, a kind of your childhood memory.

If this brand also falls in the scandal, I really don't know what food is actually safe in China - I can assure you that this is not an isolated food safety case. People deliberately add all sorts chemicals to nearly every type of food, and we've been eating those everyday.

This country needs to have a serious consideration on its economic development policy - it just CANNOT override other things like food safety - enough is enough.

Google Apps is a service most of ordinary users never heard of, but yet it is so popular that some of small site owners just cannot live without it. It provides an integrated solution for small site owners, provide the Google services like Google Chat, Gmail and Google Canlendar to users of those sites, free of charge.

I'm not a very tech savvy person so the Google Apps saved me from all the hassles like manage emails. If somebody is more unsavvy than me, they can even build a whole simple site by using Google Sites.

Compare with old university 100mb storage  (1mb maximum attachment) email system, the Gmail service is just too generous, and it was free in the form of Gmail for quite a long time now. And even better, it is free.

There's only one down side:there will be usual google ads in it. Oh maybe two, another one being the administrators have little control on storages(I think all your emails are now stored on Gmail server）.

I thought people paid enough tuition fee to fund an email service that has no ads on it.  I didn't expect to see this kind of time and money save move on New Zelaand's largest universiy.

It's bit worrying that corporations are becoming more involved in the process of educating our future generation.  I wonder what kind of effect would have on the people who get their business degree in "Fisher and Paykel Appliances Auditorium".

Another worrying bit for more self is that my other bit of life online is now just fell into the hands of Google, yet again. I'm already dependent on lots of google services like Gmail, Google Reader, Calender, Apps, Docs ... they are all good but you just feel you cannot put all your stuff in the hands of one giant corporation.

It may not doing the evil today, but who knows what will happen tomorrow?

I won't invest too much time in here from today to possibly until end of this month(June).

However, I am still closely monitoring development of news such as China Earthquake, NZ elections so on ... So you can still expect to see frequent new updates in my Digest, well if you subscribed it.

Today's the Queen's Birthday holiday, but what's more important than that, it marks the start of Winter season. The weather's so cold at night and I was struggling to type up my work.

Take care of yourself - get worm clothsing and don't catch cold -  if you are a student it  definitely gonna costs you a lot  if you catch cold around this time.

It's not a rover and cannot move. It landed in the Mar's north polar region, where scientists thought to be relatively uniform and has no need to move around. I don't quite agree with this though - you never know what you would see out there.

The mission object is quite clear, dig up the soil there to see if any form of water, either solid or liquid, is present.

Quite excited to see what kind of stuffs Phoenix would find.

More on NASA's project site or Wikipedia.

By the way, Spirit and Opportunity Rover, both launched in 2004, exceeded far beyond their expected 90 sol days functional period, and still working quite well at the moment.

The current death toll is 30,000+.

Your help is urgently needed.

From my 10+ years online experiences in China, an educated guess is that the BBC website is in "blackest" list of Great Firewall of China(GFW), along with Falun Gong, VoA and anti-CCP websites - you should never expect those sites to become accessible in China, and the fact is , I never sucessfully accessed any of those in the past ten years in China, without using any sort of 'special method'.

So this unblock is quite unusual.

Just over a week ago, Youtube and several other websites were blocked because of the tibet related photos and videos. Other recent reports also confirmed the unblock of youtube in China, but it is conditional - if you ever try to access tibet-related videos on youtube, GFW will block your access to the whole site for about 5 minutes or more.

There are quite a lot of materials related to Tibet on BBC as well. However, GFW treated BBC quite generously this time ... em... very weird.

I never opposed the presence of Internet Censorship, but its whole process must be made 100% transparent to every citizen this censorship will affect, otherwise it will be abused by the government like the case in China, tens of thousands of website are blocked without any form of notice, and only a few of them are pornographic websites, the majority of blocked websites are the ones that the government does not "like".

He was recognised by local residents. Before police arrives, brave locals hogtied this so called tai chi master.

As a member of Chinese Community, I am more than delighted to hear the news of his arrest.The justice is bit overdue for him, but hey, the important thing is, we got him!

For Qian Xun Xue, the "little Pumpkin" Mr Xue abandoned in Australia, as far as I know, she is happily living with her grandmother in Changsha, China. Not sure about whether she will be involved in court procedures after the arrest.

More on the development of this story in Bear's Blog Chinese.

I'll reappear here after that day. But before it, there is hell lot of works to do.

What really amused me is that, ABs are able to win first tiers in IRU many times in tournaments and other cup matches, but always falldown on really "vital" matches.

My guess is some people are just too scared to lose. Got to learn something, ABs.

It should not be a big deal.

Cause of the problem is still unclear and I’m investigating on it. It seems like a DNS resolve problem either from my host or my own error… not really sure about it, so if you see this blog go offlined again today or in the next few days, please don’t think of that the whole site is gone.

Other strange thing is that the IP of my site seems to has changed. If you are visiting this site from Mainland China, please leave a comment here so I know that this new IP is not blocked by GFW and still available in China, thank you.(Still accessible from mainland china,  thanks  for those who help confirmed this.)

I apologise for any inconvenience caused and thank you for your patient.