Guy Wiener

I have been on a quest to find the perfect Personal Information Manager (PIM) application for a while, so far, without any success. That must sound weird, since that there are hundreds of applications who brand themselves as “PIM”s. These applications range from the traditional Outlook clones to hackers-galore self-contained wikis-on-a-stick. IMHO, they all share one thing in common: They have no understanding of what is “Personal Information” and what is exactly the thing they should manage. Continue Reading »

I received this presentation by e-mail: unTibet.pps. Some people has the hobby of editing and forwarding PowerPoint presentations of beautiful places in the world. This one is titled “Beautiful Tibet”. It contains 31 beatiful pictures. There is only one problem: Most of them are not from Tibet.

• Slide 2 is from the great wall, at the northern part of China. Tibet is at the south-west.
• Slide 4 looks like one of the nature reserves at Sichuan, although it is a Tibetan area.
• Slide 5 shows Yao or Miao people, from Guizhou province, central-south China.
• Slide 7 is from Beijing. It is the Hall of Heaven in the forbidden city.
• Slide 8 is the outer wall of the forbidden city.
• Slide 11 is also probably from Guizhou.
• Slide 13 is, if my memory serves, another park in Beijing. It is certainly not Tibetan.
• Slide 14 is from the Li river near Yangshuo, Guangxi province, south China.
• Slides 15 and 16 are either from Guangxi or Guizhou province, south-central China.
• Slide 18 is the famous “Moon hill” near Yangshuo, Guangxi province, south China.
• Slides 19 and 20, if I recognize the place, are from Jiuzhaigou nature reserve, Sichuan province (although, Tibetan ethnic region).
• Slide 22 is from Dali city, Yunan province, south China.
• Slide 27 is, if I recognize correctly, from a nature reserve at North-west China. There is also a similar region in Yunnan province, near Kunming. It is definitely not Tibetan, since Tibet is mostly a plateau.
• Slide 28 is again from the forbidden city, Beijing. It is the back side of the hall of Heave, shown in slide 7.
• I can’t tell from where slide 29 is, but it is a typical architecture to minorities in the Guizhou province.
• Slide 30 is similar to slide 27.
• Slide 31, the last, is also typical Guizhou architecture.
• Only slides 6, 10, 12, 22, 25 and 26 shows indeed something distinctly Tibetan.
• I don’t recognize the origin of slides 1, 3, 9, 17, 23 and 24 - They don’t seem especially Tibetan.

In other words, someone took a presentation that should have been called “Beautiful China”, branded it “Beautiful Tibet” and spread it onward. Truth, when it comes from the internet, is still “caveat emptor”.