A future daughter in law visited her fiance’s English family. In return, she got a scathing email from Carolyn Bourne, her future mother in law.  Unfortunately, she forwarded it to friends (another faux pax and bad judgment, in my opinion) and it went viral.  As you see, not only chinese mothers in law are tiger moms (grin)…  Here’s the email. Some of the points I agree…
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It is high time someone explained to you about good manners. Yours are obvious by their absence and I feel sorry for you.

Unfortunately for Freddie, he has fallen in love with you and Freddie being Freddie, I gather it is not easy to reason with him or yet encourage him to consider how he might be able to help you. It may just be possible to get through to you though. I do hope so.

If you want to be accepted by the wider Bourne family I suggest you take some guidance from experts with utmost haste. There are plenty of finishing schools around.
 
Please, for your own good, for Freddie’s sake and for your future involvement with the Bourne family, do something as soon as possible.

Here are a few examples of your lack of manners:

When you are a guest in another’s house, you do not declare what you will and will not eat - unless you are positively allergic to something. You do not remark that you do not have enough food. You do not start before everyone else.

 
You do not take additional helpings without being invited to by your host.

When a guest in another’s house, you do not lie in bed until late morning in households that rise early—you fall in line with house norms.

 You should never ever insult the family you are about to join at any time and most definitely not in public. I gather you passed this off as a joke but the reaction in the pub was one of shock, not laughter.

 You should have hand-written a card to me. You have never written to thank me when you have stayed.

You regularly draw attention to yourself. Perhaps you should ask yourself why.

 No one gets married in a castle unless they own it. It is brash, celebrity style behavior.

I understand your parents are unable to contribute very much towards the cost of your wedding. (There is nothing wrong with that except that convention is such that one might presume they would have saved over the years for their daughters’ marriages.)

If this is the case, it would be most ladylike and gracious to lower your sights and have a modest wedding as befits both your incomes.

I have been into Facebook a lot lately and maybe that’s why the blog has not have that much posts.

Obviously, I see the same with many blogs that I follow.  Being able to update through Twitter or Status updates with shorter and easier messages means that a lot of ideas do not make it anymore to the blog.  In short, microblogs is competing now with blogs.

At any rate, one of the games that I find quite entertaining lately in Facebook is Mafia Wars.

Here, you are a mafia don, and you try to gain power and money through alliances, and accumulating loot or items and weapons. You also can use your money to invest in businesses to earn money.

It is possible to play that you just make money.  It is also possible to play that you go ahead to gain power.  If you make more alliances, and buy more weapons, you become more powerful.  If you just concentrate make money, that is fine, but when people attack you, then you will keep losing, and therefore your money will slowly be lost or robbed.  However, if you spend too much time to accumulate power, then obviously your ability to use your money to create money generating enterprises becomes limited.

I find the game reflects real life businesses.  At first, I started to play that I only want to concentrate to earn as much money.  Then I find that by avoiding wars, or conflicts, or fights, I may minimize my losses, and not get hurt, but it is only through fights, or risks of losing that you gain experience, and  more weapons and power.

Thus, at the end, you win by taking the right risks, and not by avoiding risks.  WEll, its a game, and they always make you win, but you really will have the most winnings and power if you take risks, and even when you fail, get up again, and try.  

We are now in a much more affluent society, and happily one of the things is that it is easier to bounce back, and there are more opportunities to tackle even if some things do not work out.  So I guess in business and technology, what is important is the question: if you want to succeed, are you taking enough risks?  After all, a ship is safe in the harbor but that is not the reason ships are made.

I’d always believed that the best education is a requisite for success and that self-investment in your skills is probably the best investment you can ever do.

In here, Gates argued that identifying and measuring the best instructors will give the best payoff.  So does identifying and measuring your best employees in a company.

Bill Gates: Better data mean better schools by AP: Yahoo! Tech

Gates suggested that developing data to identify the best instructors should be a priority for legislators even in a tight economy. Better teachers are more likely to result in higher achievement than other approaches such as lowering class size, he said.

“The way I see forward is to use measurement to drive quality,” Gates said.

The Seattle-based Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation spent nearly $4 billion between 2000 and 2008 to improve America’s high schools and award scholarships, primarily to low-income and minority students.

Its aim is to increase the U.S. graduation rate from about 70 percent to 80 percent and to double the number of low-income adults who get a degree or certificate beyond high school by age 26.

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The developing countries may have a point …. Probably 90% of the pollution yup there are by developed countries, and their not only being wealthier, but their putting those existing pollutants on the first place means that they should spend more, and get higher responsibilities in terms of eliminating this….

It is not fair to start imposing the same standards to all —

Key developing nations reject G-8 climate plan: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance

China, India and other energy-guzzling developing nations on Wednesday rejected key elements of a global warming strategy embraced by President Bush and leaders of wealthy nations. And the U.N’s top climate official dismissed the G-8 goals as insignificant.

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