Author: shun

Thirty-six Stratagems

“The Art of War“, a military strategy book written by the great military general, Sun Tze, has been re-interpreted to apply its concepts on business and fields other than military. It’s arguably one of the most famous literary exports of China.

However, there’s another collection of lesser-known strategies that are equally useful but perhaps easier to understand and apply in real life. They are often called the “Thirty-six Stratagems“. I remember growing up in Taiwan, the grown ups would often refer to one of the strategies in their conversations about work and about life.

Ancient China was basically a bunch of huge warring states. It’s no surprise that our ancestors took the brutality of wars and systematically came up with organized methods in order to win more frequently in battles.

Here’s the list with rough translations. Wikipedia apparently has the same list with brief explanations as well.

瞞天過海: crossing the sea under camouflage
圍魏救趙: relieving the state of Zhao by besieging the state of Wei
借刀殺人: killing someone with a borrowed knife
以逸待勞: waiting at one’s ease for the exhausted enemy
趁火打劫: plundering a burning house
聲東擊西: making a feint to the east and attacking in the west
無中生有: creating something out of nothing
暗渡陳倉: advancing secretly by an unknown path
隔岸觀火: watching a fire from the other side of the river
笑裡藏刀: covering the dagger with a smile
李代桃僵: palming off substitute for the real thing
順手牽羊: picking up something in passing
打草驚蛇: beating the grass to frighten the snake
借屍還魂: resurrecting a dead soul by borrowing a corpse
調虎離山: luring the tiger out of his den
欲擒故縱: letting the enemy off in order to catch him
拋磚引玉: giving the enemy something to induce him to lose more valuable things
擒賊擒王: capturing the ringleader first in order to capture all the followers
釜底抽薪: extracting the firewood from under the cauldron
混水摸魚: muddling the water to catch the fish
金蟬脫殼: slipping away by casting off a cloak
關門捉賊: catching the thief by closing his escape route
遠交近攻: befriending the enemy while attacking a nearby enemy
假途伐虢: attacking the enemy by passing through a common neighbor
偷樑換柱: stealing the beams and pillars and replacing them with rotten timbers
指桑罵槐: reviling the locust tree while pointing to the mulberry
假痴不顛: feigning madness without becoming insane
上樓抽梯: removing the ladder after the enemy has climbed up the roof
虛張聲勢: putting artificial flowers on trees
反客為主: turning from the guest into host
美人計: using seductive women to corrupt the enemy
空城計: presenting a bold front to conceal unpreparedness
反間計: sowing discord among the enemy
苦肉計: deceiving the enemy by torturing one’s own man
連環計: coordinating one stratagem with another
走為上策: decamping being the best

For you Chinese readers, explanations with historical context can be obtained here and here. For business-related application, some good examples (also in action in Chinese only).

via [不辣哥的 BLOG]

The Baby and the Cat

Grace told me a phenomenon about one of our cats (Wawa, to be precise) that I thought was pretty interesting.

When Bryan is hungry, sometimes he doesn’t have the patience to wait for his formula. So he’d cry at the top of his lungs until Grace gets back with a bottle of formula. But Grace can’t really get the formula ready with Bryan in one arm. So she has no choice but to put him on the bed and let him cry while she’s preparing his formula.

One day Bryan was crying for his formula as usual, but Grace noticed that this time, Wawa jumped on to the bed to examine why the baby was crying, then she calmly walked to the kitchen, looked at Grace, meowed at Grace a few times and then went back and sat by the bedroom door, waiting for Grace to come back with Bryan’s formula.

Looks like the cats are starting to warm up to the baby.

Mail Bouncer

Apple Mail Bounce Every morning when I fire up my favorite email client, I usually get in the neighborhood of 30 to 40 spam messages. And they just continue coming throughout the day. The upside is my mail server was setup so that 90%+ of the junk mails are appropriately labeled as “:SPAM:” in the beginning of the subject line by the time they reach me. And at home, I setup my Apple Mail to filter everything with “:SPAM:” in the subject to go directly to the “Junk” folder. It’s a nice setup. But It’d be nicer if the junk mail can just simply stop coming.

Recently I’ve been painstakingly using Apple Mail’s built-in “Bounce messages” feature. It bounces emails back to the sender, tricking it into thinking my email address doesn’t exist. The effort seems to be paying off. Now I get no more than 10 junk mails in the morning. And I have been experiencing a reduction of spams throughout the day as well.

Now only if Yahoo, Google and Hotmail can catch up and develop something similar, that would be great (in the voice of Lumbergh from “Office Space” ).

Google Maps Maniac

When I started noticing useful implementation of the Google Maps, I compiling the links into a master list, not knowing why the list would ever be useful to anybody… until I found another maniac crazier than me… a whole blog dedicated to collecting and commenting on various Google Maps related whatever.

I lose. The Google Maps whore wins.

Where’s Karl Rove?

Does anyone wonder what ever happened to the investigation of Karl Rove? It was a hot topic not too long ago. The White House has done an excellent job in deflecting bad news to its nonexistence. And of course, the American mass media has no choice but to go along.

Bless PBS. It’s probably the only news channel these days that still follows and updates the general public on news that really matter. PBS today revisited the progress of the Karl Rove investigation.

PBS also produced a FrontLine special on Rove and his rise to power as the puppet master behind the Bush Administration.

Scream

Ever since Bryan learned how to scream, he’s been using it as an effective way of, let’s just say, “communication”. When he’s really unhappy about something, a shrieking scream from the top of his lungs can probably be heard hundreds of yards away in the relatively quiet neighborhood.

I hope the neighbors don’t call the cops on us for “child abuse” one of these days…

Panhandle This Attitude

I drove out to grab a quick bite when a mid-age lady walked up to me and asked if I could spare some bucks. I politely explained that I was laid off sometime ago and am struggling with money myself.

Her glance snared at my 10-year-old car and replied sarcastically: “At least you have a better life; I wish I had a car.”

WTF! Why do some of those panhandlers think the world owes them everything? U.S. still has better social services than a good majority of developing countries. Why don’t they take advantage of that? And for those who do, some of them just leech off of the system for whatever it’s worth.

Bastards.

I guess a government can do all kinds of social reforms and provide every possible safety net to catch those who happen to fall in the gaps (kind of like us). But there’s just no way to treat a social disease like something I experienced today. But then again, who am I to blame the system? I am not the one in her shoes.

WordPress UI Improvements

Following changes were made to the blog… some may be noticeable to readers…

1. Updated the colors of active/hover/visited links in CSS. I think the new colors fit the New York skyline picture from POV of Brooklyn heights (a.k.a. DUMBO) rather nicely. But I’d love to take any suggestions on ideas to improve the look and feel.

2. Moved “Archives” to the top nav bar. The process wasn’t as easy as pasting the “display archives” PHP code in the nav page. I had to make a new and modified “archives.php” template to fit “pages.php” layout in it because standard “pages.php” does not allow PHP codes to be inserted directly into the text field (in fear of hackers, I am guessing).

3. Some moron kept spamming the comments with a link to his mortgage, home loan and refinancing sites. It’s similar to what some other moron did to his online poker and casino sites. So I just banned those keywords (and his IP address) from the URL in the comments so that they’d have to be approved by me to be posted. This makes it easier for me to batch delete them on one go. God, I hate jackasses.

4. Added “Get Recent Comments” plugin. But it didn’t really work right “out of the box”. I had to modify it by following this tip to get it to work. Now it works like a champ.

5. Put a brownish tint to the border graphics.

The Joy of Steve Jobs Stanford Speech

I finally came around to do a quick grep of all the log files since I put up Steve Jobs speech at Stanford. The total tally came only 3,000 shy of 50,000 downloads. Impressive.

Last time I checked, I am still the first site that shows up on Google with a downloadable speech.

Let the inspiration spread.