Chinese Herbal Rice Soup

Chinese Herbal Rice Soup, originally uploaded by Three Headed Dragon.

This is a traditional Chinese Herbal Soup. Although it is called herbal soup, it does not have leaves and roots. All of the ingredients are some kind of grain or seeds.

Ingredients
It's hard to translate this into English, I looked up the ingredients in the dictionary. Here they are

Rhizoma Dioscoreae, 2 tbsp (chopped)
Gorgon Euryale Seed, 2 tbsp
Pearl Barley, 2 tbsp
Millet, 2tbsp
Cornmeal 2tbsp
Rice 1/4 cup
(add honey or a little salt if you don't like plain soup)

Mixi all the ingredients and add water until 3 in. above ingredients, bring to boil and cook at low heat for 2 hours, stire occationally.

It's supposed to be good for spleen and getting rid of extra water in your body.
Here are more information about the ingredients.

Rhizoma Dioscoreae, it is also called Chinese Yam sometimes, its Chinese name is Shan Yao(山药). I googled on internet, gosh, there are all kinds of extract made from it. But I think you benefit most from just this original mother nature packed format. It is supposed to be good for spleen and stomach, promote fluid secretin. It is usually available in dried form. But sometimes, you can find fresh Shan Yao in Chinese glocery stores. The fresh one looks like a huge root and tasts good sture stire fry with othe vegetables or meat.

Gorgon Euryale Seed, I think it is called Euryale Seed or sometimes Gorgon plant. In Chinese, it is called Qian Shi 芡实. It is a water plant, the flower is so beautiful. There is a drawing here http://www.efloras.org/object_page.aspx?object_id=39361&flora_id=2

Pearl Barley, you should be able to find this in some super market. I bought it from HyVee. This is good to get rid of extra water from your body.

A Good Chinese Zither Learning Web Site

I recenlty found this web site http://www.yuesha.com/ when searching for a Chinese zither music. I immediately fall in love with this site. There are tons of information and friendly discussions. A lot of the memebers are like me, self-taught. This is a very good platform for us to learn from each other. I sent a few questeions, immediately got a few very good answeres. Hope more people can benefit from this site.

PL/SQL Programming 2

Fall into Autumn 1, originally uploaded by Three Headed Dragon.

ALPHABET SOUP
Just like any language, there is a set of characters. For PL/SQL, here they are:
A-Z and a-z (letters)
0-9 (digits)
Spaces, tabs, carrigae returns(white spaces)
+ - * / <>= (mathematical symbols)
( ){ }[ ] ? !~ ; : . '" @ % $ ^ & _ | (punctuation symbols)

VOCABULARY
Like any language, if you don't build vocabulary, you won't be able to communicate. Here are a few basic vocabulary.

Indentifier: these are used to name plsql variables, objects etc that are containers that contains resources that you will use in your program to perform tasks.

Reserved Words: these are identifier reserved for system use. They can not be used to name your own identifiers.

Delimiters: they are used to separate identifiers.

Literals: they are made of the alphatec mentioned above but are not identifiers.

PL/SQL Programming 1

Fall into Autumn 2, originally uploaded by Three Headed Dragon.

PL/SQL BLOCKS
PL/SQL program is consists of block of codes.

If the block has no name, it is called anonymous block and it is usually constructed dynamically and executed only once. The format is like this,

DECLARE
declare variables here;
BEGIN
statements;
END;

If you'd like to give the block a name, there are two ways to do it. The first way:
<<block_name>>
DECLARE

declare variables here;

BEGIN

statements;

END block_name;
This kind of named block is still usually executed only once.

The second way of giving it a name is to replace the "DECLARE" with "CREATE OR REPLACE PROCEDURE block_name AS" like this:

CREATE OR REPLACE PROCEDURE block_name AS
declare variables here;
BEGIN
statements;
END block_name;

This second way is usually called stored procedure, the code is stored in database and can be executed mutiple times.

BLOCK STRUCTURE
There are usually 3 sections in a block. The declarative section where you declare variables, the executable section where you write executable statements that actually performs some tasks and the exception section where you handle errors and exceptions in case any happen. Just like our daily work, we have resources stored in different places, folders; we perform tasks using those resources. In the middle, if we are thirsty and can't perform tasks anymore, we go out to get a cup of coffee (thirsty exception handled) and then we come back to continue our work. I can think of all kinds of exceptions, such as bathroom exception, hungray exception, etc. If exceptions are not handled, programs terminate unexpectedly or hang, because computer does not know what to do when these exceptions happen.