floyd

While I could elaborate, since all I would be doing is recapping the elaborations that are available from the links I provided, it would probably be best if you actually followed the first link then clicked on some of the FAQs that are linked to from that page. They can explain it far better then I can. If you did follow the links you would see this has been an ongoing project for awhile, the cancer part is now in phase II after the University of Oxford though the phase one results were promising enough to do another phase, and is sponsered by the likes of the University of Oxford Chemical Dept., IBM life science solutions, National Foundation for Cancer Research, and the Medial Research Institute of Infectious Diseases and others yet. My understanding is that it is breaking new ground in modeling that only the massive computing power the internet can serve to tap, and advance in modleing from completing the human genome allow. As I said, all this is better explained by the FAQs at the links I gave, did you even follow the link?

Since many people at candle are online alot, either reading and posting or chatting with loved ones I thought this would be a good group to tell about the UD project(s). What this is, is a program that runs in the background, using all the idle cpu time your cpu has between your keystrokes and such. It uses this time to run things like protein models that will aid in finding cures for things such as cancer and smallpox,. If you are interested in donating your idle comuting time to this goto: UD download then please go here to team the language bin team Language Bin UD Team Feel free to repost this on other BBS's the more people that run this the faster they get results.

My wifes interview was less then two minutes. One of the main questions was if I had visited her, and to show pictures from this visit. When some of the pictures included her in-laws (who decieded they wanted to see China also to know better where their daughter-in law came from) the interview was done. So you being able to answer that your husband is visting you rightt now should make for an easy interview also, bring a photocopy of his passport entry stamps. I do seem to recall one of the forms early in the process having a box to check if both would be at the interview though.

This seems to be a good case to fall back on the when in Rome rule. How do you address others of the same position in the company? I guess by first name since you mention you are not comfortable using this with him? I suggest you ask him what he wants to be called in the different settings directly, and not try and second guess what he may prefer. My guess (not following my own advice! lol) is that he would want to blend in at work as best he can and have you address him as you would others in the proffesional enviornment, but talk it over with him, he may be relieved of the same worries of how to address you !

I just sent a photcopy of everything along. No idea if it was acceptable, since no one ever looked at it. I got it given back to me after she unpacked here, and she said no one ever asked about it or for it. Also, you mention three years tax returns, you just need one years for the I-134. It is the I-846 that needs three years of returns.

Pkg#4 was just the letter to say show up for the interview. I seem to recall my wife actually got her medical exam done before she had recieved pkg#3. Something about before a fee increase again I think. In any case, pkg #3 had the forms, and pkg #4 was nothing more then a letter with the interview date.

Well, I was working and did not get home from work till about an hour and half before the bars around here closed. I even got stopped by the police on the way home, who were probably thinking I must have been out drinking already and were suprised someone was out at that hour on St. Patricks who had not had anything to drink yet. When I got home my wife insisted I eat some dinner first. By this time the pubs had 45 mins. left before closing, and I told her she was going to celibrate St. Patricks with a Guiness. Unfortantly, the first pub I then went to was already closed!!! (This one I knew has Guniess), so we went to another pub, had a local lagar, and then tried one more that also had no guiness. I found out that she is not much of a beer drinker, she was tipsy after just these two. She did then tell me I was NOT allowed to wear a green hat though!! lol (an item for the culrural section I suppose?)

I remember my wife rushing to pay and get the receipt to pay a few months back before some price increase. She was then able to use this receipt to get her visa a couple of weeks ago. I also agree that it is probably worthwhile to just pay the $100 over the other costs of fighting over it, since the visa is otherwise so close at that point!

Since you mentioned one of your uses for your DVD-RW drive will be storing data and not just videos, I would recommend you get a drive that supports DVD-RAM for this use. You can get drives that support DVD-R, DVD-RW , and DVD-RAM. The DVD-RAM is a fully seekable and rewritable format, what this means is you can in effect use it like a big zip drive for removable storage without the overhead of adding sessions and such to the formats that are really designed to write out a whole image at once.

UTF-8 is a neat 'hack' to be able to make programs used to dealing with 8 bit streams deal with UTF easily. For db storage you will many times want to use UTF-16, especially when it is a field you will collate and search on, and when the other predominate language in storage is Asian, you will almost always want to use UTF-16, or you will use 33% more storage and slow down all the processing to boot. Since you mention you are coding with servlets you are already dealing with UTF-16 internally anyway, so you can save the converstion to and from UTF-8 that you do not really need anyway. I am not sure any of the free db's support UTF-16 out of the box yet though. Did you build mysql with utf-8 support? Is it even support? That page another poster showed, did not show utf-8 as an option. They also make some statements that show they do not really know this area well.. think about this statement they make "If you are using Chinese data in the so-called big5 encoding, you want to make all character columns BINARY. This works because the sorting order of big5 encoding characters is based on the order of ASCII codes.". It is nonsense since if you are using big5 you are not using ASCII per say. I will also repeat, postgresql!! : - )

Robert.... All I can say, is that when K gals get here they get the "sticker" shock.. WHAAAAT??? 3 bucks for shampoo?????????? Take her to the dollar store for shampoo. From what I understand some things at the dollar store are cheaper then in China even though they are from China.

Hmmm.. they really sent a note saying this??? I would love to find a reference to this law. They then state a number of incorrect things, you do not need a SSN to open a bank account or pay taxes, or for many other purposes then work in a job that you are required to pay FICA. They seem to get a lot wrong in a short note! Also, the civil war did not give federal law precedence over state law, in fact there are many areas state law has precedence, and the constitution itself says that powers not enumerated by it are reserved to the states. The feds have manged to stretch the commerce clause to the max though. The civil war settled that the states do not have the rights to succeed from the union they entered when joining as a state (or commonwealth). Odd they would mention this in a letter from the SSN, this letter seems highly misleading.

The visa is a K3. She got the visa the next day after the interview, the timeline was noa#2 2002/08/30, pkg #3 2002/11/15, pkg#4 was end of Feb. (don't have the exact date as we found out the interview date about a week before through email). She has yet to tell me any details of the interview, just a couple of terse messages from her since then. I presume she is ticketing the booking and doing whatever else she needs to move home. Probably shopping also. Actually it is just as well we have not been able to talk on the phone, (and I am pretty sure she is not reading candle till after she gets to the USA, at least I hope not after I post this) as my dad's pilimarnary bioposy results came back and it does not sound good. So I am not going to sound as happy as I should on the phone, and she would wonder why, and I don't plan to tell her about this till after the final results come in, and she has been in the USA a week or two. So less then a week till she will be home now.

Well, she passed her interview yesterday, and is supposed to get her visa today. Seems we can finally start making plans again that are not prefaced with 'wait'.

Number one is a lousy reason, perhaps is a plethora of members complained, but 'a' member is a bad reason. The second makes sense, how about adding a area that is readable by members only that is more open to full discusions about more areas of China and our own government? Make is ssl only to prevent snoopers at the great firewall of china, and open it just to memebers with a bit of a posting history. As for Candle's policy, it also states no copyrighted materials may be posted yet I see this often with cartoons and such and people not only do not close the threads they encorage them.

If this is not a case of seeing what they can get away with, then why did the behavior change rapidly when I would do the same back? If it is the norm there is should not have phased them one itota.

A polite way to fight back is to say"When typhoon hits, I will be the only person standing. You will blow away like a feather". B) B) Yes, this is very similar to just what I did say. And with a smile and in a far more jovial manner then they used. What makes me think that they were really just being rude (like the orginally poster wondered about), was the reaction when I started commenting in this manner myself. If it was truly ok in their culture they would have taken the comment back in stride, instead they at times dropped their jaws, and stopped talking on this topic from then on. So it seems they were trying to hide behind the culture, and counted on me to not 'adapt' to it so quickly.

Well, I would get some comment on my weight, and also on a grey hair or two. I still think it is a little of the case of pick on the foreigner, as after I started making comments back they quickly stopped, or at least switched the comment to Chinese so I could not understand. They would say, you should buy some weights to excersise more, and I would agree, and say they should buy some to make sure a strong wind would not blow them away. They would say I must not be able to bend down (which I can just fine), and I later say something about how they can not reach up to get a book off a high shelf, they would comment on me looking old with a grey hair, and I would say they look old due to a wrinkle. The reactions to my commenting back, and the ceasation to the comments afterwards lead me to believe they were pushing based on me staying too polite to comment back.

Really? That is impressive, I joked about visiting Everst when I was in the region but the highest I got was 5020 meters, and that was plenty for me!

They save on labor. Labor is a high cost in the USA. UPS and Fedex cater to businesses which generally are closed on the weenkends. You can get them to deliever on Saturdays but it costs more. The mail still moves in transit on these days, and there is often a regional processing center you can go to and get mail into the system if you know what th postage should be. I think the postoffice is not allowed to not have delievery more then two days in a row. Do they take off the week long holidays in China? Also, what is it that you do not understand or like about it? As a person, it basically just means no mail delievery on Sunday. I only go to a post office a few times a year so it does not effect me if they are open or not. Is there something you think the post office needs to be open for other then sending mail? Maybe there is something you use a post office for that we use something else for that type of business?

Do you know how much he is making? Or just the floor on what he is making? well, technically, he's only "making" as a MS salary a bit more than you and I make... ( I think less than a Mil ) . The rest is paper money.... Stocks..... Worthless really unless you buy or sell it.... But I've heard he could afford a 2003 pinto ! Well we also can look up how many shares of Microsoft stock he has, and figure out just how many millions he is getting from the dividend they now pay also. He has been selling shares regular to diversify at least a little for years though, and we do not have any idea how much he makes on what he has invested most of the money into, so we just know a floor amount on his income/wealth.

This is not always true. It will not be for us. In fact it is one thing that concerned my wife when getting a letter about 'having to interview' where married. She thought they would send it to the worng place. Seems I always become a corner case when dealing with the government.

Do you know how much he is making? Or just the floor on what he is making?

I think there is going to be quite a crowd of Candle folks at GZ on Monday! Well starting on Tuesday my wife will be at a hotel near the consulate to await her interview on Thursday. Seems she gets to miss the crowd by a few days.

Humor and the use of explicatives are the last parts of a language to master before fluency. In fact some feel that only a native speaker can every be completly fluent in these areas. I know at times when we were watching American TV, and I would laugh at something my wife would look at me very quizically. BTW, since you menttion teaching classes in China I am sure you are already aware that the US government has a catalog full of materials they publish, available at low costs, and that are only available outside the USA, for teaching American English and culture. For those that want to learn proper American pronunciation, a better choice then movies would be listening to VOA broadcasts. Since this is a humor thread and not really a language thread I will resist the urge to go further off topic on other language issues.