Sometimes people feel unhappy because they see themselves important.

Today, when I used google earth finding accent Chinese capitals locations, I played with the mouse and zoned out to google earth’s limitation. From that altitude, earth becomes a ping-pong size ball, lonely in the universe. What about me? It’s nothing but dust.

GPS is an important new function for iphone 3G. But without Internet access (Edge or 3G), it’s useless.

Many people are discussing OfflineMaps (for 1.1 or later firmware) in forums, generating maps by oneself, transferring files from computer to iphone. (I don’t know weather OfflineMaps can combine GPS with downloaded maps.) But is there some apps can save our time in doing these? Yes, xGPS can!

When your iphone is connecting to Internet, you can use xGPS to download map of a chosen area from google, and browse it , or see your real-time location on it later even without Internet access.

I tested it just now when I drove to Wendy from my dormitory. It worked well, showing my moving position on the map, just liked a professional navigation. However, when I tried to browse the map, it appeared that the map just covered very small area, even though I’d chosen downloading a large area (but just 54 M maps, ??). I think there’s still some problems in downloading specific area of maps.

xGPS can also give driving direction, which is calculated by google maps. This suggests that you can only do that when accessing internet.  

Even xGPS is not so mature, but it’s promising, and a very good GPS navigation solution for newly unlocked iphone 3G at present. It worths everyone’s try.

Add source in cydia http://cydia.xwaves.net and install xGPS.
Don’t forget to choose “iphone 3G GPS” as your GPS receiver.

I payed my first visit to Getty Center yesterday. If I wasn’t too tiered to continue, I would spend another two hours there, after my nearly 6 hours exciting exploring.

This is a great place beyond my expectation. Maybe I am sort of outdated, I expected such famous museum is all about huge buildings, big gardens with European classical style. But Getty tells a different story. In my opinion, it’s better. First of all, the location of the museum is good. It is on the top of a mountain, from which you can see the whole L.A., snow topped mountains in far, and blue pacific on the other side. On the other hand, the architectures of the museum are modern and they go with natural surroundings harmoniously. In addition, from the point of functions, the museum excels in displaying collections and is convenient for visitors.

Well designed look and functions make a good work of architecture, but not enough for a museum. What makes Getty stunning are its world-classed collections and changing exhibitions. Here, I caught big names, such as Titian, Millet, Monet, Cézanne, whose works I only saw in the powerpoint in my European paintings course when I was studying undergraduate in China. This is the first time I was so closed to large amount of master pieces, and got great shocked by them.

We have great theme parks in China; we also have walk of fame in Hong Kong. But we don’t have a museum like Getty Center. The unique characters of the museum make it unparalleled in the world.

Tips: Getty Center closes at 5pm except on Saturday at 9pm. Go there on Saturday, enjoy the sunset and LA’s night scene from it.

After a busy semester, I finally have time to deal with lots of things that I should deal with months ago, including 1000+ (maybe 2000+) unread RSS in my google reader. This is time consuming, especially when English is not my native language.

CNN, The New York Times, Reuters, FT, Economists , and other news agents are on my list. I’m not really interested in all of them. But I try to know more about the U.S. and the world through these main stream media agents. It seems you should know what’s happening in the place you live in. I think is also many people’s reason for reading news.

But after two days’ tedious reading, I find that I can never read all of the RSS as the new news begin to pile up. No wonder they describe the way of RSS spreading information as ‘push’. So I decide to mark all of them as read, just pay attention to the coming news. As Confucius said,”Don’t chase the past, work on the future.”

Until today, I’ve been in America for 3 months. In this period, I had a lot of exciting experience, of cause, lots of difficulties too.

Long time no word in this blog because of busy study and life. As the semester gonna to finish, my life here become more and more smooth, everything begins to be arranged. This is my first post since I’ve been here, just say to the world “I am back.”