How to clean your glasses - A lessen

Recently I found my glasses are full of scratches and do not know what caused that. I can not see the monitor clearly but can see large objects without problems. When I looked at my old glasses. They do not have these many scratches.

Then I started noticed that maybe I have used my clothes and dry towers to clean the glasses. That caused so many scratches on the glasses. This really gives me a lessen.

I searched online and find this page very helpful for cleaning your classes and tips how to keep your glasses clean.

http://www.wikihow.com/Clean-Eyeglasses

Paint a room and windows - Do it by yourself

I am planing to paint all the interior windows by myself. Found a very useful article to follow step-by-step.

http://home.howstuffworks.com/how-to-paint-room.htm

Also, this video is very helpful too

http://www.howcast.com/videos/716-How-To-Paint-a-Wall?ref=share

if you are going to do any paint work by yourself, I highly recommend you to look at the video and article beforehand.

Good luck!

Free Internet Faxing Service by Email2Fax.com

Free Internet Faxing Service by Email2Fax.com

This internet fax service allows you to send fax for free.

自制春卷

自制春卷
1. 到中国超市买春卷皮。味全排就不错。一包共有30张皮。
2. 准备馅和调料。
3. 虾去皮
4. 干蘑菇泡软后切成丝
5. 把青豆洗干净
6. 用热水浸泡粉条
7. 用剪刀把粉条剪短
8. 用打碎机把虾和胡萝卜打碎
9. 准备一些葱花和姜，把姜切碎，也可用打碎机打碎
10. 把青豆，虾，胡萝卜， 粉条，和蘑菇搅拌在一起
11. 用油把馅炒一下，油加热后，加入葱花和姜，盐，五香粉，炒到八九成熟
12. 加热不沾锅，用油擦一下锅底
13. 用春卷皮包馅制成春卷，可用清水或鸡蛋清来封沾在一起
14. 把春卷放在不沾锅里烤熟，注意温度不宜太高，中火即可
15. 3-5 分钟后，春卷就可出锅
16. 春卷最好出锅后立即食用，口味极佳。

How to Repair Rotten Wood

Just found a very good website which tells you how to repair rotten wood.

http://www.ronhazelton.com/archives/howto/rotten_wood_restoration.shtm

Sweet Potato Pie

The other day I made sweet potato pie. very delicious. So I decide to publish the menu. Very simple to make it. Hopefully you like it.

1. Wash and clean sweet potato, cut to small pieces
2. Steam the sweet potatoes with a steaming pot
3. Peel the sweet potato
4. Smash sweet potato
5. Add Korean pancake mix flour
6. Add a little sugar
7. Stir and mix together into a dough
8. Cut dough into small pieces, flat these small pieces into pies, using hand to flat the dough, or use a small Chinese plate to help to make the pie
9. Heat frying pan and add a little oil (only a little to cover bottom). It is better to use non-stick frying pan
10. Put the pie into the frying pan
11. Fry the pie, do not deep fry. Fry each side for around 5 minutes
12. The sweet potato pies are ready to eat

Commands to quickly start programs

Would like to quick start for office applications:

Go to Start -> run

for word winword
for excel excel
for powerpoint presentation powerpnt

will add more later.

Real time bus informaiton

Have you took public bus before? I like taking bus when possible. I used to ride Triangle Transit Agency buses before. One thing I do not like is to wait in the bus stop and have no idea when the next bus is coming. Sometime you wait 5 minuets, sometime you wait 10 minutes. It is not fun for waiting the bus.

Fortunately, new technology (GPS) allows real-time tracking where the bus are and home long the bus will come to your stop. Some public transportation service providers already provide this kind of service. You can get the real-time information by web, or text messages or digital signs at some stops. Then you can easily schedule your time more wisely when riding a bus.

To view some example, please visit the following site.

• View real-time bus locations and arrival predictions for Chapel Hill Transit (CHT) routes in North Carolina
  
• View real-time bus locations for NCSU Wolfline routes in Raleigh, NC

Very good services.

GoTriangle provides trip planner service. it is also a great service for bus riders. You just type your start location and your destination, then it will provide you a list of route options for you to choose. It is very useful when you need to take bus but are not very familiar with bus schedule.

Hopefully, more and more people would take public transportation to help our environment.

North Carolina County GIS Data

This site lists all the GIS sites in each county. What a good service provided by a college library! NCSU did an excellent job to collecting/organizing all the GIS links together. It saves people a lot of time if you are interested to viewing county GIS maps. Are you curious to the deeds, and tax records, NC department of Administration make a page to list these information for each county online. A great service too. Here is the link.

http://www.doa.state.nc.us/spo/county.htm

By the way, Nov. 18, 2009 is GIS day. There will be a lot of GIS events across country. for more information, visit this site: http://www.gisday.com/

ArcGIS Server Application

The most recent version of ArcGIS Server is 9.3.1. It help building caches faster than before. If possible, using cache if possible, it will help to load your pages faster. Also try to have all your layers in the same coordinate system. It will make the map loading time shorter. Furthermore, do not show high-detailed layers (like parcels and local roads) in small scale. Testing your application in both Internet Explorer and Firefox. Also testing your application in different version of the same browser.

Language translation to your site

I think most of you know how to use online free translation tools to translate words, documents into another language. Google, Yahoo and some other sites provide these service. But do you know how to add another language to your own website then other visitors can view your page in their native languages. This blog spot shows you how to do that.

Add Language Translation to your Website - Tutorial

Follow the steps, it works very well.

learn to play Guitar

Do you like to relax a little bit after work, playing guitar is a good thing to do. This website show how to learn guitar for beginners in Chinese.

刘天礼吉它视频教程

About.com: Guitar

ABCLearnGuitar

Bought a guitar from BJ's and would like to learn to play it.

Dimdim, Online Web Meeting

Have you ever heard the free online web meeting? Dimdim is a good one. With Dimdim free version, you can hold web meeting with up to 20 people. You can control who to share their desktop to give presentations. It is very useful. And it is interactive.

Need to hold a webmeeting, give dimdim a try. DimDim, It saves money and time. It save energy and reduce CO2 emissions.

Discover Card Direct Pay

Just found out the Discover Credit card offers the DirectPay service. This is very good news. From my previous blog, CitiCard offers the similar service that will automatically withdraw the money from your banking account to pay your credit card balance. Now Discover card offer the same service too.

I like this kind of serviced offered by Credit Card company. You will never have to worry about remembering the due date. No more late fees, no more missed payments, no more emergent telephone payments.

From Discover Card website, it says:

"DirectPay takes care of your Discover Card statement on time every month automatically for free. No more having to remember your payment due date, no more late fees and no more missed payments."

For more informaiton, visit discover credit card website. http://www.discovercard.com/

How to delete duplicate record in SQL Database

After you identify duplicate records in a table in SQL database, the next step is how to remove duplicate records.

One way to do this is to copy unique records into temporary table, then delete the original table and then copy the temporary table back.

The below is a web link about how to delete duplicate record.

Deleting Duplicate Records

If you have other ways to remove duplicate records, please share it by leaving comments.

Duplicate Record in SQL

How do you find duplicate records in a table in SQL database, here is a script

Select First_Name, Last_Name, Email, Phone, count(*)
from Table_ABC
having count(*) > 1
group by First_Name, Last_Name, Email, Phone

How to update record in a table based on values in another table

Update Table_ABC
set First_Name = (select FIRSTNAME from Table_BCD where Table_ABC.Email = Table_BCD.Email)
where exists (select FIRSTNAME from Table_BCD where Table_ABC.Email = Table_BCD.Email)

If the table_BCD have duplicate emails, you can pick the first one by using the following script.

Update Table_ABC
set First_Name = (select top(1) FIRSTNAME from Table_BCD where Table_ABC.Email = Table_BCD.Email)
where exists (select top(1) FIRSTNAME from Table_BCD where Table_ABC.Email = Table_BCD.Email)

I found these scripts are very useful.

HTML text editor - FCKeditor

have you ever used the HTML text editor "FCKeditor".



FCKeditor has a lot of features. From its website, it lists:

• Multi browser compatibility
• Outputs XHTML 1.0
• CSS support for better integration with your web site
• Font formatting: type, size, color, style, bold, italic, etc
• Text formatting: alignment, indentation, bullets list, etc
• Cut, Paste, and Paste as Plain Text, Undo and Redo
• Paste from Word cleanup with auto detection
• Link and anchors support
• Image insertion, with upload and server browsing support
• Table creation and editing (add, delete rows, etc) - one of the best systems on the market.
• Table cells editing (size, colors, etc)
• Form fields
• Right click context menus support

• Complete toolbar customization
• Skins support
• Plugins support
• Spell checker
• Multi-language support with automatic user language detection. Including Right to Left scripting.
• Complete page editing or just contents.
• Lightweight and fast
• Automatic browser detection and customization
• Integration with ASP, ASP.NET, Java, ColdFusion, Perl, PHP, JavaScript and more.
• Image and file links upload and server repository browser.
• For web developers it is easy to install and customize
• For web users it's simple and easy to use!

Private Posts for Blog

How can I keep some post private in my blog. I have this question because I would like to keep some posting just for learning, or note purpose.

Hopefully the Blogspot has this option so that i can set up what posts to share and what posts to keep private.

Xcopy Command

Do you know what Xcopy does in dos command? It is more powerful than the copy command. If you would like to copy all the files and sub-folders from one drive to another, you may need xcopy command. Of course, you can use windows explorer interface to do it. But if you would like to write batch file, and run from DOS command, Xcopy is very useful.

The below is an example listed from MicroSoft website:
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Examples

To copy all the files and subdirectories (including any empty subdirectories) from drive A to drive B, type:

xcopy a: b: /s /e

To include any system or hidden files in the previous example, add the/h command-line option as follows:

xcopy a: b: /s /e /h

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

More information can be found on this webpage from MicroSoft Website.

List directories or file names into a text file

Sometime you may want to have a list of folders or file names into a text file for other processing. A simple way is to use DOS command to list the folders/file names and then output to a text file instead of on the screen.

For example:
C:> dir *.* >> text.txt
C:>notepad text.txt

It is very easy and simple.

Virtual Windows

Do you want to work in an office with windows even the room is a windowless room? TheSkyFactory can help you to build virtual windows, virtual ceiling in your office. Look at its website, it is really a good idea since most of the time a virtual windows is better than no window. Plus, you can change the landscape outside the window. It does not list the price, but I guess it wot be cheap. Anyway, I like this idea a lot.

TheSkyFactory Features SkyCeilings and Virtual Windows.

Learn Geography

My major is Geography. I love geography. Today I found a youtube video to describe four seasons. It ia very informative and I would like to share with you.

Follow this link to water the you tube video.

Geography Seasons

Enjoy the video.

Also I like the following videos:

US Geography (State and Captial)

Learn Spanish via Video

Today I found a YouTube video to teach Spanish. Spanish Lesson - basic conversation. It is very good. Later on, I found the video blog which lists all the lessons. I think the presenter is Mr. Señor Jordan. He is very good at teaching the Spanish language. It definitely stimulate my interest for learning Spanish.

Check Mr.Señor Jordan's Video Blog at http://srjordan.wordpress.com/.

Great Videos.

Some Websites to learn Spanish

I found another site that you can learn Spanish called Speak7.

It lists 4000 common Spanish words to remember. It also explains the grammar which is very important for leaning a new language.

Finance Website

I would like to suggest several finance website:

http://www.investors.com/

http://www.bigcharts.com/

http://finance.google.com/

Happy Investing!

Documentation

When you have a job in the work, most likely you know what the documentation means. Most of the time, we do not pay much attention to documentation. When we have a new idea, develop an application, discover a new method, we are very excited. But then we do not pay time for documentation. Later on, we were caught that we do not even understand how things work before, but not now. What procedure, when steps we forgot, ........

Documentation is very important for a job, especially programming job. please reserve some time for documentation. Even a very simple documentation can help you and other persons to understand how stuff works. It will save you a lot of time in the long run. Plus, it also help you to get more new ideas, be more good at the process.

So, when you are doing something new, it is always a good idea to document it.

Free Anti-Malware

If you computer does not have anti-virus protection software, you can try the following free version software to help protecting your computer from virus infection.

Malwarebytes Anti-Malware or Superantispyware are good choices. You can find them by searchign interntet and then download them.

Google Voice

I am very excited that I got the invitation from Google to use Google Voice today. I have signed up a free phone number from Google Voice and connect my cell phone to the Google Number. You can connect(attached) many numbers to your Google Voice number and then just share your Google Voice number with friends. When someone call you by the Google Voice number, all the phones (attached to the number) will ring and then you can pick the phone most convenient to you to answer the call. I am very exited with this service from Google. Best of all, it is Free.

If you would like to get more information about Google Voice, please visit Google Voice site and try by yourself.

SQL code

Have you ever had the need to list all the column names in a table in SQL database, do you know how to do it. Here is the code:

select COLUMN_NAME from INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS where TABLE_NAME = 'TABLE_NAME'

Yahoo group

Have you ever used Yahoo group features? It is a very good way to connect with friends, or making new friends, connect with people having same interests.

Search yahoo groups with your interest or just create your own yahoo group. It is very easy and convenient.

I am a member for several Yahoo groups. For some groups, I am the moderator who help manage the group.

Listen Chinese radio station online

Have you ever thought to listen Chinese Radio online? Here is good news. You can come to this website to listen Chinese radio online. Not all radio stations listed on this website are very reliable, but some are very good. The website is called radiotime.com. Click this link to see a list of Chinese stations.

Another website you can find chinese radio and other radios is called Live365. It is also very good. Select your favorite radio station and listen the radio as background music.

Yahoo Search Pad

Just tested the Yahoo Search Pad service, still in Beta. I like the feature a lot. It saves you a lot of time to remember the useful website you have visited. And you can also add your notes on it. It does not require any specific software application installation on your computer. Simply just do the regular search from yahoo search. You do not even have to log in to use this service. But if you would like to save the notes, you have to log in with a yahoo account. You can easily share the search result with your friends. I likve this new feature a lot.

Learn spanish

Recently, just kind of starting interested in learning some Spanish. First learn the Spanish from one to ten.
(uno dos tres cuatro cinco seis siete ocho nueve diez) Then learn some colors.
Today I found a website which can teach you spanish. It is http://www.studyspanish.com. The website teach you pronunciation. It will read for you the Spanish word and also read you incorrectly in order for you to learn the authentic Spanish.

Hopefully I can keep my interest on learning spanish. I like to get some encouragement.

Online Coupons

When you shop online, sometimes just a quick search can save you a little bit money bying using online coupons. There are many websites which can help you find bargins and coupons you can use online or in the store.

Some sites you may like to visit:

http://dealspl.us/
http://www.retailmenot.com
Coupon Share
Finance Coupon Code
dealsea

If you have some other coupon sites, welcome to list them here with comments.

Phone number to an interesting word for remembering

Have a problem to remember a phone number, want people to easily remember your phone number. A easy way to do this is to tell/remember the number by one or two words, instead of number. When I think of this idea, I searched Internet and find this site can help you to make/find word for the number to you type in. But for some phone numbers, the site just can not find any interesting mnemonics correspondingly.

Please click this link to test by yourself, maybe you can find an interesting word for your phone or for your friend's phone which you would like to easily remember it.

Suddenly I have another idea, actually this service can be used to remember any long digit number, like SSN, driving license number, library card number and so on.

Pizza box can be used as pizza plates

Today I would like to talk about an idea about Pizza box. Sometime you order a pizza and a couple of people would share the pizza but with no plates. I am thinking the Pizza box can be designed to be easily cut into "plate" pieces. These plates then can be used to hold the Pizza. Especially, the cap of the box can be easily designed to have 4 small plates. That will provide a lot of convenience and also save our environment for not using extra plates.

Zillow.com

Are you going to buy a new home, or sell your home, one website you should go to check is Zillow.com. You will surprised at how much information you will get from Zillow.com.

If you are a buyer, search home for sale, ff you are a seller, put the right price for your house. It works both for buyers and sellers. Especially for a buyer, it can save you a lot of time for doing research to find right home for you.

One of the good features is that it list houses on the map, you know the surrounding environment immediately by viewing the air photo image.

Policy Map

Most people are familiar with the map to show roads, schools, parks. This website display maps to show demographics and policies. It is called The Policy Map.

From the website, it says:

PolicyMap is a revolutionary, easy, new way to explore geographic data through maps, tables and reports.

No matter you are doing your business, or you are just interested in the spatial distribution of policy changes and demography, this site is for you. You will be surprised at how much more information and knowledge you can get from this site. And that will help you make smart decision.

Google Translate

Today I am going to talk about Google Translate, One of great services Google provided.

"Google translate" can translate text to different languages. It is very fast and convenient. Furthermore, Google translate can translate whole website to another language. It is very useful for reading research papers in another language.

I hope Google can read the text in different language besides the translation. Anyway, this is a great free product provided by Google.

If you have a website and you would like to make it available in another language, you do not have to hire a language expert to do the work. Just use "Google Translate", it can do the job for you for free.

Give it a try.

Where to find Open Source Software

If you are a programmer, your may have heard the website http://sourceforge.net. A place you can "Find and Build
Open Source Software" The site have a lot of open source applications that will help your for programming and applications.

From the site, it says:

"SourceForge.net is the world's largest open source software development web site. We provide free services that help people build cool stuff and share it with a global audience."

I like this site. You can find a lot of useful applications which can do the same jobs as that commercial software do.

Pandora internet radio - you pick music you like to listen

A colleague told me a site you can listen your favorite music you pick for free. It is an internet radio site called, Pandora.

From the website, it says:

"At Pandora, we have a single mission: To play only music you'll love."

I think most people will be interested in this service. It is free. If you love music, give it a try. You won't be disappointed.

Other radio stations: blip.fm, last.fm

CitiCards Autopay Feature

I sometimes forget paying my Citi credit card. That brought a late payment charge. But now with Autopay option, I do not have to worry this anymore.

With the Autopay feature, forgetting to pay monthly bills will be a thing of the past. You can choose to pay minimum, full balance or a specific amount. That is very convenicent. You won't get late charge anymore from Citibank.

You may also like to use this service if you have Citibank Credit cards. Welcome your comments.

Skype

Have you ever used Skype before? if you have not, it is worthy to give it a try. You can make calls to friends with Skype account for free. I like its conference call feature. The sound quality is very good.

With a small fee, you can make phone calls via your skype.

CutePDF

Would like to convert your documents into PDF files, a free software application can do the job. It ia called CutePDF.

But if you would like to create forms in PDF format, Adobe Acrobat is your best choice.

GridMove Split your wide-screen monitor

Today, I am going to share with you another useful computer application. It is called GridMove. I found it is very useful when you want to efficiently use your wide-screen monitor.

From the website, It says:

"GridMove is a program that aims at making windows management easier. It helps you with this task by defining a visual grid on your desktop, to which you can easily snap windows. This program comes bundled with some predefined grid templates, that can be easily swaped, but also has ways of creating custom grids or sharing grids made by others."

Download it, install it, and use it.

Portable Applications in your USB drive

Just found a website that your can download applications to your USB drive and use in any computer. The website is called www.portableapps.com. From the website, it says:

"Now you can carry your favorite computer programs along with all of your bookmarks, settings, email and more with you. Use them on any Windows computer. All without leaving any personal data behind."

It is open and free. I think it is very useful.

Google Voice

Have heard the Google Voice for a while. But the Google voice still not availabel for everybody to sign up yet. Would like to see Google voice coming soon, then can sign up and get a free phone number. That would be very exciting.

Check this link to follow Google Voice.

Text to Speech

I have been looking an text to speech tool that can read documents for you. The AT7T text-to-speech demo works very good. You can save the Audio file. There are maybe other free software can do the same thing, I will add more later.

An Online Chinese Dictionary

Search Google or Yahoo to find an online chinese dictionary, I found this site MDBG is very good. You can search Chinese characters and listen its prouunciation. It also give you the English definition. It is a very useful tool to learn and improve your English.

A website to edit document with Friends concurrently

Recently found a website that people can edit document with friends concurrently. The site url is http://etherpad.com/. From the site, click create new pad button. Then you are starting working a new document, just share the URL with your friends, then you can edit the same document with Friends concurenly at once.

Hopefully you found this site is very useful.

Starting my blog with Blogger.com

Sign the blogger service with Blogger.com. It requires google account. So sign in the google account, and then following instructions to create the first blog.