Oct 28, 2009

The sound of Skype

What is actual sound of "Skype", which is one of the famous internet voice phone service.

Some of Chinese friends around me keep sounding "Sky-py" or "Sky-Pee", but I believe American doesn't sound "pee".

One of example sound is from one of Ted presentations: http://www.ted.com/talks/david_pogue_on_cool_phone_tricks.html

He sounds "Sky-ee-p" or "Sky-ip".

One of rules on English sound is that if "e" follows any consonant, the sound of "e" comes first.

Examples are "Swipe", "Plane" and "Pane".

Oct 14, 2009

House Centipede in my house

From Sep 1st, I am living in a new house, which was owned by a chines. I have lived there about one and half month so far.

One of the serious problems the house has is house centipedes; there are other serious problems as well.Today I found that what kind of centipedes they are from Wikipedia. There are House Centipedes.

It says that it is generally considered as harmless to human, dogs and cats, because their bites cannot penetrate human skin; I hope they don't attempt on my skin at night.

As the Wikipedia says, they seem nocturnal. Interestingly they seem to have well developed eyes, because whenever I try to hit it, it run away fast.

Fortunately they eat many harmful insects such as cockroaches, bedbugs, spiders and termites. In addition, they are harmless to human. I like to give some credit for them in this sense.

Only one problem of them is, however, that they look extremely ugly. One day I saw one centipede in my room, and it was as big as my palm. I even had a bad dream in the night; I was killing several centipedes in the dream.