Rainbow

LA Street Scenes

Night Herons

There used to be 20+ night herons living around my apartment. They perched in the pine trees in the daytime and flew away for food at night. “Flew away” is just a logical guess; actually I never saw them fly.

Their full name is Black-crowned Night Heron (Nycticorax nycticorax). They are neat and quiet birds.

Someday this year they disappeared. At first, I thought they might migrate to the north and would come back in winter. But it’s already December now; they still haven’t showed up. I start to believe that they have left for good.

Are they also tired of paying Californian rent?

济南－家－鹊山－华山

离开北京去上海的那天天气很好，我在飞机上打了一个盹醒来正好看见济南，甚至还认出了我的家。这倒不是因为我眼力好：几个月前我没事时经常Google济南，我家在天上非常好辨认。
首先看见黄河，Google地图上黄河是蓝的（图一）；飞机上看的确是“黄”河。那个三角形的水库没见到，大约冬天枯水吧。
济南市区容易看到的是大明湖，天上看水很蓝（图二右）。再往前有一片小山（图一、二左），形状像个倒过来的问号，那是四里山（英雄山）、马鞍山、五里山、六里山和七里山。右上角三角形的是英雄山，中间的白色亮点是人民英雄纪念碑；英雄山下面是马鞍山；仔细看得话，山中间有一个细细的断口（图二箭头），那就是开山而建的六里山南路，我家就在这条路上。

这是一张六里山南路的照片（图三），有这条路之前我家很安静，但交通不便；现在路过的公交车很多了，可惜噪音也大了：汽车通过山口时总要加油门。
在飞机上看比这些Google地图要清楚很多，我还认出了体育场，植物园，玉函路；继续往南还看到了南部山区，泰山和泰安城。泰山的玉皇顶非常清楚。

黄河岸边有两个很有名的小山，图一右上的箭头指的是鹊山；中间的箭头指的是华山。赵孟頫有幅名画《鹊华秋色图》画得就是它们（图四右为华山，左为鹊山）。华山的华是“花”的通假，全名应为华不注山，意思好像是花骨朵。华山是“齐烟九点”中最高的山峰，海拔才197米，不过不要笑：我爬过华山，华山周围是一马平川的黄河冲积平原；一望无际的稻田里刺出这样一座锥形的青黛色小山，还是很突兀的。

Enjoy Blogging in Chinese!

I just found out that BlogSpot.com can be accessed in mainland China now. The reason it was unavailable was more likely to be technical rather than political. A friend in China said it might have something to do with DNS server. Anyway, it's nice.

In a previous blog, I complained that Microsoft IE could not display Chinese Blogspot blogs reliably. It was fixed by changing the template language to Unicode (lang="UTF-8">). So, it’s not, at least not completely, Microsoft’s fault. Firefox was just being more robust.

I also downloaded PinYin Jia Jia (拼音加加), the best Chinese input software according to many users. It’s convenient, straightforward, smart, and free. It at least doubled my input speed.