water8838

一个朋友的孩子大学毕业半年了，没有去找事，窝在家里，白天睡觉，晚上上网。

最近跟他父母要钱，想去美国游学，朋友来问我该不该让他去，我望着他苍苍的白发说：“你如果真的要为孩子好，让他去，但是不要给他钱。”

我想到了我妹婿的故事。

我妹婿是美国人，从小就想作水手，向往外面的世界，想先环游世界再回学校念。虽然他父亲是医生，家庭经济环境许可，但是父母并不给他钱，他也没向家里要，高中一毕业就先去阿拉斯加伐木存钱。

因为阿拉斯加夏天日照很长，太阳到午夜才落下，三点多又升上来了，他一天如果工作十六小时，伐一季木的工就可以让他环游世界三季。

他在走遍世界两年之后才回大学去念书。因为他是在自己深思熟虑之下才决定念的科系，所以三年就把四年的学分修完，出来就业。他工作得很顺利，可以说平步青云，一直做到总工程师。

有一次，他告诉我一个小故事，说这件事影响了他一生。

他在阿拉斯加打工时，曾与一个朋友在山上听到狼的嗥叫声，他们很紧张的四处搜寻，结果发现是一只母狼脚被捕兽器夹住，正在号嚎，他一看到那个奇特的捕兽器，就知道是一名老工人的，他业余捕兽，卖毛皮补贴家用，但是这名老人因心脏病已被直升机送到安克瑞契医院去急救了，这只母狼会因为没有人处理而饿死。

他想释放母狼，但母狼很凶，他无法靠近，他又发现母狼在滴乳，表示狼穴中还有小狼，所以他与同伴费了九牛二虎之力找到狼穴，将四只小狼抱来母狼处吃奶，以免饿死。

他把自己的食物分给母狼吃以维持母狼的生命，晚上还得在母狼附近露营，保护这个狼家庭，因为母狼被夹住了，无法自卫。一直到第五天，他去喂食时，发现母狼的尾巴有稍微摇一摇，他知道他已开始获得母狼的信任了，又过了三天，母狼才让他靠近到可以把兽夹松开，把母狼释放出来。

母狼自由后，舐了他的手，让他替牠的脚上药后，才带着小狼走开，一路还频频回头望他。

他坐在大石头上想，如果人类可以让凶猛的野狼来舐他的手，成为朋友，难道人类不能让另一个人放下武器成为朋友吗？

他决定以后先对别人表现诚意，因为从这件事中看到，先释放出诚意，对方一定会以诚报。

因此，他在公司中以诚待人，先假设别人都是善意，再解释他的行为，常常帮助别人，不计较小事。所以他每年都升一级，爬得很快。最重要的是，他每天过得很愉快，助人的人是比被助的人快乐得多，

他对我说，他一直很感谢阿拉斯加的经验，因为这使他一生受用不尽。

的确，只有自己想要的东西才会珍惜，下过霜的柿子才会甜，人也是经过磨炼了才会成熟。

领悟到“对孩子最好的保护就是不保护”

如果一个人大学毕业了还不知道自己要什么，那么应该要让他去外面磨炼一下，不要给他钱，让他自食其力，重要的是父母要舍得放下!

给他一个机会去证明自己、体验人生，相信他也能从中得到一个对他一生受用不尽的经验。

“如果不能使工作少一点，就让快乐多一点”。

"Reader is dead," says Mihai Parparita, one of the former Google Reader engineers. You still have 2-3 days to use Google Reader, but the best thing you can do is to export your data.

Google Takeout lets you export some of your Reader data, but not everything: your subscriptions, your notes, starred items, shared items, liked items, the list of followers and the people you were following, the items shared by the people you were following. Mihai Parparita wrote some Python scripts that download everything from your Google Reader accounts, including the entire content of the posts from your subscriptions. You need Python 2.7, some basic command-line skills and a lot of free storage: my backup has more than 5 GB for about 250 feeds (vs 125 MB for the uncompressed Takeout backup).


Here are some tips for running the script in Windows 7/8:

- install Python from here (Python 2.7.5 Windows Installer)
- download Mihai's zip file and extract the files
- open the folder in Windows Explorer and you should see a list of subfolders like "base", "bin", "feed_archive".


- Shift + right-click below the folders and select "open command-line window here".
- copy this code, paste it in the command-line window and press Enter (I assumed that Python's folder is c:\python27):

set PYTHONPATH=%cd%
c:\python27\python reader_archive\reader_archive.py --output=download

- a web page will open in your favorite browser and you'll need to click "Accept", copy the authorization code and paste it in the command-line window.
- wait until the script downloads all the files.

Mihai also started to write a script that lets you browse your archive. It's a work in progress, probably because the script for downloading your data is more important right now.

There's also a script for downloading a feed's archive. "Google Reader has (for the most part) a copy of all blog posts and other feed items published since its launch in late 2005 (assuming that at least one Reader user subscribed to the feed). This makes it an invaluable resource for sites that disappear, can serve as a backup mechanism and enables tools to be created." My post from 2007 provides another way to download the history of a feed. You can also upload your OPML file to this site, which preserves hitorical feed data.

"I don't fault Google for providing only partial data via Takeout. Exporting all 612,599 read items in my account (and a few hundred thousand more from subscriptions, recommendations, etc.) results in almost 4 GB of data. Even if I'm in the 99th percentile for Reader users (I've got the badge to prove it), providing hundreds of megabytes of data per user would not be feasible. I'm actually happy that Takeout support happened at all, since my understanding is that it was all during 20% time," says Mihai Parparita, who spent 5 years working on Google Reader.

If you're curious to know which Reader alternative gets a thumb up from Mihai, his answer is "a toss-up between NewsBlur and Digg Reader."