What I'm listening to right now: Feist

Apple recently featured her on their iPod Nano commercials. Feist's music is soulful and happy --kind of oh... feist-y? Sort of like a bubbly Cat Power. Personal favorites include Mushaboom, I feel it all, and 1 2 3 4.

Could the Surge be working?

I opposed the Iraq war from the beginning, but --At least from what I gather this last couple month, there are encouraging evidences that the surge is working* --or at least Al Qaeda is blundering and we're seizing the moment. They all point to evidences that the local Sunnis and Shiites are increasingly alienated by Al-Qaeda and Shiite Militias (This is key to counter-insurgency):

• Relations sour between Shiites and Iraq Militia (NYTimes)
  
• Observation of military strategy on the ground by people from the Brookings Institute (NYTimes)
  
• The most hopeful and latest note is Bin Laden lambasting his lieutenants for being too extreme! (CS Monitor)
  

Things are still exceedingly horrible and costly for Iraqis and Americans. (But, I'm even less convinced that immediate American withdrawal would be to the benefit of Iraqi or American interest.) The Onion satire summarize the latest condition pretty well.

* working means a trajectory to reduce Iraqi misery and withdraw troops without causing a tottering State to completely collapse. See Congo for what kind of complete misery Civil War, opportunistic neighbors, and rich resource can cause.

Chinese Font Set in Ubuntu is much prettier than Windows Fonts

I recently installed Ubuntu just for fun on one of my old computers. Later, when I was putting up some pages in Chinese. I was shocked at how much better the Chinese Fonts look in Ubuntu The English looked slightly more polished too, but it's nothing in comparison to the Chinese Fonts. When my brother saw the web page article displaying using the Chinese font set in Ubuntu, he thought they were images. The strange thing is that my sister thinks the Windows font set is cleaner and nicer looking.

Click on the thumbnail for the side by side comparison (Ubuntu is left/Windows is right):



Here's the whole screenshot in Ubuntu:



Here's the whole screenshot in Windows:

This is going to allow me to read Chinese on web browsers. Chinese on a Windows computer was ugly and difficult to read (especially due to my minimal Chinese skills). Maybe I can finally convince my dad to read Chinese articles online too....