A short while after I posted “Why Asian girl in US doesn’t want to date me “, Niniane visited my blog and said, ·

This was pretty funny. If you are a slashdot/digg geek, shouldn’t you be running linux? Instead of a PC with 640k memory.
I must agree that LOLcats would not work on girls. The grammar is not funny! You should instead use AllYourBase.”

First, thank Niniane for visiting and leaving very helpful suggestions. According to her suggestions, I refined some sentences here:

I am running Debian sid (unstable) on my grandma’s Pentium 66MHz + 128M which is buggy so I have to reboot X after 30 minutes, while they are running Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Long Time Support) on Core Duo + 4GB.

And next time if I want to date an Asian girl, I should say:

How are you young lady!!
All your base are belong to me.
You are on the way to our dating.

I guess it works, at least for Niniane. LOL.

I, a bitter Asian man, don’t want to insult any Asian girl. Here is a wrap-up.

The initial post is here:
Why I Don’t Date Asian Men

My response:
Why Asian girl in US doesn’t want to date me

Some other responses:
为什么我找不到中国女孩作女朋友

也说为何找不到女朋友

A funny site to see:
Bitter Asian Men

My readers, especially Asian girls, please try to be humorous and don’t treat this too seriously. If you want to send me hate mail, here is TEH ADDRASS:

youxu [A@LOLC@T] wustl.edu

MAIKE SURE U CAN LET ME LAUGH！

KTHXBYE.

(Change all [#!#$] to @)

[In response to this. Satire, proceed with caution]

I am a loser in color

Yes, I am a loser, by all means. In the first place, I am not white, and this kills me. As I’ve said, I am a loser. According to the definition of loser in Asian girls’ dictionaries, if you are not white, you’ve already been punished by ___ (fill this blank with Buddha, Jesus Christ, OMG, Flying Spaghetti Monster, etc., as long as you believe them) because you are a loser. So, you see, I am a loser in religionary view.

I am a loser in the real world

But that is not the end. I am also a loser in the real world. As a research assistant, I get about 1.7k bucks per month, which is slightly better than working at Wal*Mart. I don’t have a car; I ride my skateboard or scooter to school everyday because gas is expensive. I live in an apartment with one roommate but no pets. I am not working at Google or Microsoft for 100k+ per year because I withdrew their offers. The best company I’ve ever worked in is SIEMENS–a stupid German company, as an intern. I am a Ph.D. student of Washington University, which is far worse than Harvard, Yale, Stanford or MIT. Asian girls won’t like me at this point for my Forrest Gump’s IQ or even can’t enter a university better than George W. Bush.

I am a loser in bodybuilding

I am 5′7, while all white guys here, according to Asian girls’ descriptions, are 6′+. Milk with Calcium and Vitamin D turns out to be not so that helpful. According to Asian girls research data, all white dudes here have “hard drivers” larger than 200GB, while I was cheated by Bill Gates and thought 640k is enough. The white dudes obviously are running Linux with a quite long uptime, while my PC (personal something) has to reboot every 30 minutes maybe. I am a loser in bodybuilding.

I am a loser in language

It’s definitely true. I know tons of Tang Poetry, but it’s out-of-date. The only language, which can be used to date Asian girls, is English. As you can see, “vous êtes belle!” doesn’t work for Asian girls. Sometimes you call them and say HAI, I CAN HAZ A DATE WITH YOU? KTHBYE. And they will point out your grammatical error. Asian girls are all kindly teachers and a grammar error will totally ruin your date. I have to admit that my English ARE BELONGS to inferiority and am afraid to give them a call with my poor English. While I am officially a loser in language, Asian girls also have more than one million choices available, which are of course, US men from 18 to 80. This won’t change until I get a green card, which states I am a permanent resident, and therefore certifies I am not a loser in language anymore.

I am a loser in bridging the culture gap

Wait, do I really have culture gaps with Asian girls? Yes, I do. There is a saying: When in Rome, do as the Romans do. Here we have to replace Rome to America. Therefore, I have to act as American. I am a Pastafarian, read LOLcat bible, while general American is Christian and read Holy Bible. I am family-centric and Americans prefer NSA (w/wo condom). I hang on digg/slashdot everyday (yes, I am a geek) while Americans have party everyday. Asian girls, in the other hand, expect their significant others, to be conservative American style. I am liberal and will definitely go to hell after death, and I know I can’t bridge the culture gap.

In conclusion, I am a loser in everything. Now you can see the reasons why Asian girls don’t like me. Asian girls, “leave me alone” :)

If you were on Digg or Slashdot yesterday, you might notice an article titled “Last Lecture“. Yes, it’s an eyeball-catching title, but it’s true. Prof. Randy Pausch from CMU gets incurable pancreatic cancer and is dying soon. He gave this lecture and talked about his childhood dreams several days ago at CMU, which was his “last lecture”.

Here are my understandings towards his lecture.

1. Don’t panic, there are lots of brick walls in our life — all kinds of difficulties. Break them!

2. How many dreams did you hold in your childhood? Can you write/have you written them down? How many items on that list are checked?

3. Leave something for the world. All of us are dying anyway, but we can choose to leave a legacy or just die like an insect.

4. Let our bodies to the dust, but let the souls be everlasting. Live free, and die with your own significance.

I strongly recommend this video for everyone, the “last lecture” from Prof. Randy Pausch.

And of course, the perfect Time Management talk.

I was talking to a geeky American girl via AIM.

Me: I once asked the God to offer me a girl.
She: Offer: command not found.
Me: sudo offer me a girl.
She: Password:_
Me: shutdown -h now.

Later…

She: Wanna catch a movie? 2:00pm - 4:00pm, “3:10 to Yuma”.
Me: Nice, but I have an appointment at 3:00, no time slot available…
She: Freaking stupid segmentation fault. How can you have an appointment at 3:00pm?
Me: Nice equivoque. I should kill dash nine my cron

Finally

Me: It’s raining cats and dogs outside, any luck to stop it?
She: We are raining dinosaurs here. They should be dead million years ago.
Me: So, do you want to go out and kill them? you are not an environmentalist, right?
She: No, just beam them up.
Me: Captain Scotty is absent.
She: LOL, KTHXBYE.

–

Warning: this post contains some inner jokes about Linux, Star Trek and LOL_Cat.

No Animals Were Hurt Writing This Post

————————————-

实在忍不住了,  再补两个和微软有关的搞笑的.

1. They only Microsoft product that doesn’t suck is the vacuum cleaner

2. 我觉得微软还是有可取之处的, 提醒大家要有安全意识

[Disclaim: Some text here are cited from Wikipedia under the GNU Document Licence]

Qi Xi (七夕; Pinyin: qī xī; “The Night of Sevens”) is Chinese Valentine’s Day (sometimes called Magpie Festival) It’s on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month on the Chinese calendar; thus its name. In 2007, this festival falls today, August 19.

There is a very romatic story of Cowherd and Weaver Girl. As in late summer, the stars Altair and Vega are high in the night sky, our ancestors observed that and a love story came out.

A young cowherd named Niulang (Chinese: 牛郎; Pinyin: niú láng, “the cowherd”, the star Altair) happens across seven fairy sisters bathing in a lake. Encouraged by his mischievous companion the ox, he steals their clothes and waits to see what will happen. The fairy sisters elect the youngest and most beautiful sister Zhinü (Simplified Chinese: 织女; Traditional Chinese: 織女; Pinyin: zhī nǚ, “the weaver girl”, the star Vega) to retrieve their clothing. She does so, but since Niulang has seen her naked, she must agree to his request for marriage. She proves to be a wonderful wife, and Niulang a good husband, and they are very happy together. But the Goddess of Heaven (in some versions Zhinü’s mother) finds out that a mere mortal has married one of the fairy girls and is furious. (In another version, the Goddess forced the weaver fairy back to her former duty of weaving colorful clouds in the sky because she could not do her job while married to the mortal.) Taking out her hairpin, the Goddess scratches a wide river in the sky to separate the two lovers forever (thus forming the Milky Way, which separates Altair and Vega).

Zhinü must sit forever on one side of the river, sadly weaving on her loom, while Niulang watches her from afar and takes care of their two children (his flanking stars β and γ Aquilae).

But once a year all the magpies in the world take pity on them and fly up into heaven to form a bridge (鵲橋, “the bridge of magpies”, Que Qiao) over the star Deneb in the Cygnus constellation so the lovers may be together for a single night, the seventh night of the seventh moon.

There are also lots of traditions, but now in China, we usually treat Qi Xi as the second Valentine’s Day in a year. We also have many beautiful poems about Qi Xi, one of my favourite is:

秋夕 –(唐)杜牧
红烛秋光冷画屏，
轻罗小扇扑流萤。
天阶夜色凉如水，
坐看牵牛织女星。

Translated as:

The painted screen is chilled in silver candlelight,
She uses silken fan to catch passing fireflies.
The steps seem steeped in water when cold grows the night,
She lies watching heart-broken stars shed tears in the skies.

I am not so that sad, of course ;)

Here is a quite funny picture I found today on digg. It is called the Best Phishing Email, Ever. Despite the funny nature of this hilarious letter, have someone really noticed that in this letter, we have G mail or Gma il instead of Gmail? (one extra blank in between the letter “G” and “m”, or “a” and “i”).

Last year when I was interviewed in Google, I reported this bug to Gmail team, (Sadly to say, they didn’t take it very serious, as it’s still there now). Maybe they can argue that it’s a feature, but let me take five minutes to explain why is it. (I guess it’s fairly simple and straightforward).

Let’s start from a little background about HTML. We all know that when we send colorful texts like “Google” via gmail, the email format is actually HTML. Here is a quite important aspect about HTML: An HTML user agent should treat end of line in any of its variations as a word space in all contexts except preformatted text.(Page 20, RFC1866) That is to say, a cstring in HTML source file like “a\nb\nc” will have the redering output identical to “a b c”. Therefore, it’s really confusing that we have to use <br/> to make a newline within a paragraph in HTML text, and “\n” is equivalent to a white space in most of the cases.

Now let’s go back to Gmail. When I send myself a piece of email with a colorful string “Google” via Gmail, I got “Googl e“. Via viewing the source of the HTML, we can actually find that there is a “\n” in between those letters. For example, this is a piece of HTML(javascript) excerpted from Gmail source related to this colorful Google:

\u003cfont color\u003d\”#000099\”\>G\u003c/font\>\u003cfont color\u003d\”#ff0000\”\>o\u003c/font\>\u003cfont style\u003d\”background-color:#ffffff\” color\u003d\”#ffcc00\”\>o\u003c/font\>\u003cfont color\u003d\”#3333ff\”\>g\u003c/font\>\u003cfont color\u003d\”#33cc00\”\>l\u003c/font\>\u003cfont color\u003d\”#ff0000\”\>e\u003c/font\>\n \u003c/div\>\n\u003cdiv\> \u003c/div\>\n\u003cdiv\>

Here \u003c is “<”, \u003d is “=”, without the bold “\n” in this line, the result should be “Google“. So, why we have an extra “\n” here? Who did this trick? The answer is simple: “Gmail”. For some reason, Gmail breaks a long line in HTML source file into multiple lines and sends the email out (I haven’t figure out the rule that Google uses to break lines in HTML source file). By doing several trival experiments like sending mail from Gmail to Hotmail and vice versa, I am now pretty sure the problem is caused by Gmail automaitc line breaking strategy. That is to say, Gmail client automatically inserts a newline(”\n”) symbol in the HTML source file and causes this “visual bug”. Actually this bug is quite easy to fix, for instance, just break the line at the first blank after the label name, for example, like:

<span
style=”color: rgb(255, 0, 0)”>red</span><span
style=”color: rgb(0, 255, 0″>green</span>

instead of say

<span style=”color: rgb(255, 0, 0)”>red</span>
<span style=”color: rgb(0, 255, 0″>green</span>

or

<span style=”color: rgb(255, 0, 0)”>red</span><span style=”color: rgb(0, 255, 0″>
green</span>

The first generates “redgreen“, and last two give “red green”

BTW, here is a nice tip for interviewees: love your prospective employer, love their products. Eventually, you would have a very nice understanding about their culture and products. All companies are willing to hire guys who actually love their culture and products (and can even find bugs :).

PS: in preparing this article, I found that Gmail team has secretly updated the text format system from using plain old <font> to fancy (and elegant) XHTML+CSS <span>.

PS2: http://www.opinionatedgeek.com/dotnet/tools/Base64Decode/Default.aspx is a nice online tool for decoding the base64 format.

When I was in collage, I had two classes in computer science, namely, “Algorithm” and “Data Structure”. These two concepts are universal in both computer programs and software applications, whether on a rescued laptop or a million dollar mainframe. Nowadays, Web becomes tremendously popular, and of course, extends significantly in scalability. Therefore, are there still any general concepts like algorithm and data structure in modeling the web? Here are some incomplete thoughts of mine about the computation and storage model of the web.

1. Google.

For Google search engine, it treats the web as a sorted list based on different keywords. Thus, provided with keywords, the web is sorted by the relevance and PageRank system. Google does both the computation and the storage. For general users, these lists are sorted via some criteria extensively studied by Google; we just get the result out. It seems to me that this is the most successful model for user to access the web. However, sorted list requires both sophisticated sorting mechanism and advanced computational power. Although there are fairly amount of search engines in the world, for most of them, their “sorting quality” or “general coverage” are not as good as Google.

2. Del.icio.us/YouTube/Flickr/Google Base, etc.

For these and other similar sites, they basically organize the web or some special media files on the web on a tag-based system, or preciously, an n-to-n mapping structure. All these four in this category are the leading websites on their own fields. For instance, YouTube is the largest video-sharing website, etc. I would conclude that n-to-n mapping about the media sharing is suitable for socialized website. We can find other success models elsewhere.

3. Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and Google’s Data Storage API.

According to R/WW, today Microsoft announced Windows Live SkyDrive. Facebook actually quietly released the Data Store API beta recently. Amazon has already had the famous S3 service for a while. They are all treating the web storage as Lookup Table. A closer look shows that all these four data storage API sets are trying to let the user to store heterogeneous media as “object” and support random accessing via keys. For some startups, this feature is critical as the storage scalability is usually an obstacle. Via using these four APIs, the scalability is hidden or moved to these big name companies. Treating the Web as objects will absolutely simplify the storage model and reduce lots of overhead in scalability. Similar to organizing all files under the same folder or on a disk using the file name as the key, sooner they might need some search tool/index/tag mechanism to get rid of the name space nightmare. Additionally, as meta-information should be stored in this system, a search will take twice the database access. Obviously developers have to do more than simply dump the data in. The bottom line is, data storage pools are not big trucks, developers has to maintain them. But I do see the dawn of gird computation here. Here, this is for storage task, but if we can later provide a similar interface to computational task, we will jump into the era of grid computation.

4. Yahoo! Pipe and Google Mashup Editor, FQL, etc.

There is an article about Yahoo! Pipe named “web as a database”. I would rather say that Pipe treads the web as an UNIX file with handy tools dealing with it. Later we got Google Mashup Editor, which is ugly but powerful (at least for me). GME is somehow like Yahoo! Pipe but more natural for programmers. They both tread the Web as a special file (or the concatenate of several files). They provide the “operation system” where you can run the services like sorting and filtering on that particular file. They are making some sort of operation system and binary applications on a Google Inside (or Yahoo! Inside) web. FQL is another funny thing worth mention. It models the Facebook data like people and groups as RDB, and FQL/Facebook platform is RDBMS. My conclusion in this section is Yahoo! Pipe might be a GUI for mashup editing and GME is like a console-based editor. It’s hard to tell which one is better now. Facebook is quite aggressive in reorganizing the web information; guys at Facebook are going to re-model the web in a Facebook manner via the F8 and several millions of users.

5. SUN/SETI@home

While SUN is selling the CPU power at 1$/h to general public, SETI@home utilizes all the idle CPU power around the world. Since I haven’t done much research on the computational model, I just list these two here. The previous one might become the future of grid computation. Actually SUN is very good at grid computation. The second one is the distributed computation. We also have other computation models like P2P computation or other decentralized computation model. While SUN is treating itself as the CPU for the web, SETI@home is treating the Web as the CPU. It’s hard to judge which is superior. SUN might be the first several companies who can develop the actually grid computation on the web, with SETI@home project might be the most powerful computer on the web.

Keep in mind that there is not silver bullet in modeling the web. I do believe that if one wants to setup a big company, he/she does need a big picture about how to model the web and how to setup the model.

Again, all ideas here are immature and need to be refined. You are more than welcome to leave comments and suggestions.

Why I am writing blog posts in English.

The reason is elementary, my dear Watson:

0. “The British are coming!” (Just kidding)

1. I want to improve my English

2. While we wait for the babel fish, I have do something.

–
“You forgot Poland.” — George W. Bush

====Chinese Version==中文版==

我为什么用英文写作?

最近间或写一些英文的文章, 一些读者来信表示不快. 因为我的母语是中文, Blog 也大部分是朋友在看, 用英文写作给他们的阅读也带来了麻烦. 那么, 为什么我要用英文写作呢? 我可以用两句英语解释清楚, 因为美国朋友很欢迎我用英文写作. 但我必须费点功夫告诉我的中文读者, 我这样做不是瞎折腾, 是有我自己的原因的.

1. 我想通过写作提高英语水平

我 的英语不好, 这一点我很小就知道了. 高中时候, 英语没有城市里的小孩好; 大学时候, 英语没有那些刻苦准备GT的同学好; 四六级过是过了, 也不能算好; 跌跌撞撞到了美国, 更加知道自己英语很糟糕. 因此我觉得要有意识的提高自己的英语. 而英文写作很有帮助.

我从去年开 始订阅了<时代>, 新单词新句型记录了很多, 可惜从来没有实际用过, 转眼即忘. 英文写作能让我牢记单词和句型, 用多了还能信手拈来, 脱口而出. 如果您细心看, 就觉得我用的句型大部分会来自最近几期<时代>上的文章, 引文也来自互联网上最新的一些资讯. 我觉得模仿是比较有效的方法. 而且既然写出来给人看, 就要多次检查, 防止语法错误等等. 这样战战兢兢好几次, 现在也能独立于语法检查器写出没错误的句子了, 算是不小的进步了.

2. 我想让更多的人了解我, 和我交流

IT 圈子中, 大家都知道王建硕(Jiansuo Wang), 毛向辉 (Issac Mao). 他们都在坚持写英文的Blog. 他们的英语水平或许都不算特别好, 不过他们都有很多的国际读者. 思想是核心, 语言是承载. 可惜在Babel Fish 到来之前, 我们还都必须受制于语言. 用英语写作, 不是我不爱母语, 而是我想更多的把我用母语表达的意思用另一种语言, 传给更多的人. 至于写英文是否崇洋媚外, 我倒不想辩论. 我尽量做到行文不中英夹杂, 因为我觉得夹杂中英文才是对母语最大的玷污. 如果您觉得看英文不舒服, 略过去就是了. 以后我尽量每周写一两篇英文的, 大家可以捧捧场, 也可以喝个倒彩. 我倒是希望通过写作英文Blog, 我的国际读者相对多一点, 读者之间的交流更加多元一点.

小提示: 您可以使用 Google Translate 把英文翻译过来. 虽然质量不够高, 差不多也能知道大致的意思了.

–My thoughts on making choices.

I have to admit that starting an article with the cliché “to be or not to be” [1] is somehow awkward. But actually, this is the topic of this article. No, I am not trying to answer the question asked by Hamlet. Everyone asks the same question towards different things over and over again everyday, and so do I. Several bits and pieces came to my mind recently, so I just record them down. Instead of getting the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything, which is 42 [2], here, I want to figure out my principles in making choices.

Thought #0: Making choice is a choice, or why only the paranoid survives.

Lots of people won’t make decisions unless they have sufficient information. But in the real world, information is necessary, but never sufficient, for making decisions. The idea never making decision before you get sufficient information is common but misleading. The long period of making decision finally hurts the outcome of that decision for lacking of time in implement it.

In making choices, our goal is to choose the best one. However, usually there is no obvious superior as the world is complicated, that’s the reason why information is needed to distinguish all the alternatives. Keep in mind that information should be helpful instead of delusive. Sometimes, conflicted information will make people lost and let the decision-making procedure be very painful. Therefore, in the decision-making process, one still makes decisions like ‘whether I should take this information’ or ‘whether I should wait for more information’. I would call this procedure “meta-decision making”.

My idea here is at any time, never let the meta-decision making take up the actual decision making time. I’ve seen more than once that someone staggered at the opportunity and hesitated before deciding. Needless to say, they finally make no better decision than roulette. There is a famous saying that only the paranoid survives. The paranoids usually make decision at the very beginning and hold on straight to the end. There is no meta-decision making for them. Sometimes they make worse decision, but hopefully, they can make superior decisions surprisingly, and they survive. Thus, please focus on the decision making itself and do not let the meta-decision murder your decision. Be aware of them, they may kill your decision.

Thought #1: Occam’s razor, or why more is less.

Once upon a time in my life, I had three pretty good offers, and I have to choose one among them finally. Frankly speaking, I’ve never imaged that. Anyway, I had to choose one. I began to realize that the more is not always the better. Sometimes, we do need an Occam’s razor [3]. Why is that?

The reason was because I felt satisfied with any of the choices, which means I could not simply nuke any one of them. Actually I shouldn’t always mention my achievements in the past, but please allow me to explain it in brief. My first choice is attending Peking University for the graduate study. Before taking the graduate entrance exam, I just want a try. I didn’t want anything more than an exam score. The thing turned out to be amazing that I ranked the 1st among all the students in that major–one of my favorite majors–Bio informatics. My second choice is Google China. At that time, Tina (I guess she is a senior assistant to Dr. Kai-fu Lee) told me that I have a probability of 99.9% to get an offer from Google China. In the meanwhile, I got the offer here, Washington University. Well, for some distinguished students, probably they can withdraw all of these and choose Stanford or MIT. However, for me, all these three are really really good — I had my beloved girlfriend studying in Peking University at that time; Google China was (and is) shining and flourishing; I wanted to stay in Beijing as lots of my relatives and friends were there; I wanted to have my own start up in Zhongguancun with some friends there and Web 2.0 was a buzzword at that time; USA is a free land and the major is computer science, my dreaming major; My advisor was (and is) doing excellent research work in his field; professors at Peking University were quite nice to me; to stay in Beijing would be definitely better for my parents; Gee, tons of pros and cons in my mind at that time. All of these things are twisted together. As a result, I got serious insomnia and was in a blue funk in making this decision. I would rather choose to hide under the rock.

Then, I would like to say that my uncle and my advisor gave me the Occam’s razor. My uncle suggested that I shouldn’t consider too much about others’ idea; and my advisor just told me that I could choose Beijing and Google in future. I’ve noticed that, unlike me, someone takes a different decision [4]. I would like to say, there is no standard Occam’s razor. I absolutely admire him if he didn’t get insomnia in making this decision :). I am saying that the more is not the better is not because I’ve hold such three good offers and am trying to show off, I just want to say that keeping the life simple and stupid is indeed very necessary. For more details about why more is less, I recommend a Google Video [5] for you guys.

Thought #2: Murphy’s Law, or how to use greedy algorithm.

This is about making decision between the current worse choice and the future better choice. Some people will take a risk of 80% probability to get another opportunity in the near future that is 20% superior over the current one. It sounds perfect, right? Since you can get a better one at a relative high probability, why bother with the current one. Now let’s do a simply mathematics. The expectation of the outcome of the future opportunity is 80% * (1+20%) = 96%. Boo, it’s worst than 1, so why not holding the current opportunity?

Most people, if not all, are very optimistic towards the future opportunities, and this 80-20 principle is universal acknowledged. But simple mathematics reveals the truth that one should never be too optimistic to put a bid on the future, unless it’s 25% or more better than the current one. In fact, in my opinion, 25% is not enough. If we take into account the time wasted in waiting for the future, I won’t bid for it unless it’s 30% or more better than the current one.

I am not trying to persuade others to be conservative. In fact, I encourage taking a risk on high-rewarded opportunity. But the Murphy’s Law states “things will go wrong in any given situation if you give them a chance.” [1] The future event will always have a larger probability to go wrong than your expectation. Therefore, if you want to be greedy, the best algorithm is not choosing the best choice in terms of result, but the best choice in terms of expectation. That’s the usage of probability. :)

Thought #3: No bargain choice, or don’t catch the deal if you don’t want it.

Some people make decisions to do something not based on their need, but because doing those are easy. In other word, they want to catch the deal. For instance, a friend of mine had two choices: one was going to a big company as an intern; the other was going to US for graduate study. The previous offer would delay his admission for half a year. Actually, the previous offer, even accepted, wouldn’t help much about the graduate study here. However, he would like to choose the first one because he thought that the later one was “difficult” for him at that moment. Therefore, the previous choice is like a bargain — you can live without it, but if it comes, just get it.

I am going to say “no” to bargain choice. First, bargain choice will misdirect one from the main road. Second, as Paul Graham pointed out, bargain choice will consume your energy [6], and you will be controlled by all these bargain choices. If you don’t really want it, why get it? Remember that more is less, and too much bargain choice will degrade your vision in making choices.

I’ve put all four thoughts here. If you have other principles or idea that is worth while sharing, why not leave your comments? ;)

PS: I am not an expert in making choice per se. Here I just summarize my thoughts in making choice. I will be very glad if someone can help translate this article back to Chinese, as I really have no time to do this.

References:

[1]: To be or not to be in Wikipedia
[2]: The ultimate answer
[3]: Occam’s Razor
[4]: http://blog.wangjunyu.net [A Google China employee’s Blog, recommended]
[5]: The Paradox of Choice — Why more is less.
[6]: Stuff by Paul Graham