The graduation ceremony of 2006 started today. I was asked by Arata to take photos of her and her parents. Because her timetable is the earliest one (9:00am), I had to drag myself out of bed very early this morning.

This is my first time been to a Durham graduation ceremony, didn’t go in my first year. It’s kind of like matriculation as I remember. Students need to wear gown and they have different gown for different degrees and different department. For example this purple one is for science student and this pure white one is for non-science ones. Also I went to the law department ceremony this afternoon (students got different timetable according to their department) to congratulate my other friend Bonnie, it seems they have got a special one for law department. I was going to go inside the cathedral and see people shake hand with Bill Bryson (although it’s not that exciting to watch) because my friend got me a ticket, but I went too late and miss entering time. Never Mind, I will be the one officially shaking his hand next year.

Photos are uploaded to Flickr, welcome to have a look. I will go again on Friday to attend other friends’ ceremony and take more photos.

Finally, congratulation to all my friends who are graduating this year! All the best to life in future :)

Just had my hair cut done this afternoon. It’s very difficult to find a right barber which can cut Aisian people’s hair, this is a comment I heard many times from my friends from China and Japan. I have tried several in Durham and almost none of them can cut my hair that I am happy with, some of them even make me stay in the house for days. But of course I haven’t tried those expensive ones like Tony and Guy. Recently I found one in Nevilles Cross near where I live, the lady there is very friendly and more importantly, she can do my hair cut in the way I like.

Not sure this is common or not, but it seems English hairdresser always bring some conversations with customers when they cut their hair. My housemate Megan said her hairdresser always ask her about her holiday or talk about Christmas. The one I went to this afternoon asked me about my study, my summer plans and her niece in America. It’s very nice and friendly to talk to them, but somehow I was worrying how can they manage to keep the conversation going and concentrating on cutting at the same time. A few times she stopped half way and went “hmm…ye…but the….the…the…” and then never came back to the same topic again. I guess she was thinking how to trim my hair next. And sometimes I have to keep the conversation going just prevent being silent. So doing a hair cut in England is not just getting your hair cut, but also a good practices for you conversation skill too!

Ps. a English question: Is there any difference between “barber” and “hairdresser”?

I got my results of this year today. Although I got a two-one, but it’s a lower two-one. By “lower”, I meant it’s actually quite low. But anyway, when I told my friends here about my results they responded as “That’s good, it’s a two-one!”, whereas when my parents heard the exact score I’ve got even though I explained how university here rank student’s result and a two-one is considered as not too bad, they still went “hmmmm…..”. This interested me a lot.

In English University normally there are five classes of results ranking - first, two-one, two-two, third and fell. A “first” is when you got a score above 70, a “two-one” is 60-70, “two-two” is 50-60, “third” is 40-50 and “fell” is lower than 40. So if I got 60 I will get a “two-one”, which is the same as those got 65 or 68, we are in the same class. To me, I would say there is a big difference between the efforts you made to get a 68 and a 60, however in university here, they are all the same. When employer look at your CV, they will see a “two-one” but don’t see whether it’s higher two-one (above 65) or lower two-one (under 65), although there is difference.

In China, and probably other Asian countries, schools count student’s exact score rather than classifying into several groups. The pass line is 60, so if you got 59, you still fell, although there is only 1 mark different. This is the why my parents were not entirely happy with my lower two-one, because the score matters more to them, in a Chinese way of looking at results.

I feel this is something to do with the mind-set differences between westerners and easterners. Generally westerners are more emphasis on the progress you make and the knowledge you gain rather than the results. On the other hand, easterners seem care more about what you actually get from the efforts you have made. Of course this depends on individual, but as general I can see a lot this kind of different mind-set in daily life, and this example is one of them I found today.

VS.

Since Google announced its online photo album Picasa, numbers of bloggers had wrote about this another-new-google product. I have already have my Flickr pro account for two years and there are about 3,000 photos there. But because it’s google, I decided to give it a try tonight.

I like its design and all AJAX applications, some of them are even better than Flickr. However in terms of sharing aspect and storage, Flickr is far better than Picasa. Flickr has already had a huge user community and thousands of people uploading photos and sharing on the site, but I hardly find other people’s photos in Picasa’s homepage. For storage, you can pay £24.95 in Flickr for 2G monthly limit, which means if you do be able to upload 2G every month, at the end of the year you can have 24G of photo storage. Whereas Picasa charge you £25.00 for 6G a year. Also, the uploading tools from Flickr is way convenient compare to Picasa’s photo organising software. Actually this online Picasa album is a extend of Picasa photo organiser, so it would be convenient for those who already using Picasa in your computer, but not for those want to use this online album. Like me, I won’t put install this big software just to upload my photos. I had tried this photo organiser before, to be honest it’s quite convenient with those timeline and tag function, but it change my way of organising photos totally and I can’t go back if I install this software, so finally I removed it from hard drive.

After all, I am still going back to my Flickr, because I have already got used to it’s utilization and I’ve got a lot photos there already, there is no point for me to move them or give up it. People say Google launching Picasa is to compete with Flickr, I don’t see it’s happening.