Bookstore

I went to Border bookstore today after a church band practice. It always a pleasant experience going to a physical bookstore even though the virtual online bookstore does pretty much every thing I need reagrding to my book shopping need. There's the aspect of physically touching a book that is appealing to me, and then the fact that social and culture awareness magazines help me to broaden my view on humanistic aspect of life around the world.

For instance, I read the Bitch magazine with an article that talks about the raise of JAP culture which makes me better understand the subtext behind comedy show Sarah Silverman Program. And then I read the translated Japanese comicbook ROBOT and read some distribing Japanese comics.

I mean, sure maybe I am able to find all these online, but the beauty of a physical bookstore is that they are all just right there, instead of me jumping around to find interesting material to read.

A simply animation

I spent the last 2 days to learn both the technical side of actionscript events in Adobe Flash CS3, and then the artistic side of creating animation. The result is the following short animation:

If you couldn't see it, you can try this link.

It's not that pretty, but it's a start.

Snoop Dogg's Fatherhood

There's a reason why Snoop Dogg's so called reality show Fatherhood is on "E!". The show is so fake and artificial that fits right into the whole E! lineup. I watched a few episodes just for the sake of keeping up with pop culture, but other than that giving it a "pass".

Another crazy dream series

I was trying to take a nap at 3:30 p.m. so that I had energy to attend a prayer meeting at 6:00 p.m., but it turns out that I woke up at 8:00 p.m. . I wonder how many people I pissed off this time.

So during that "nap" I had a bunch of dreams, and at the end I was waken up because of a horror scene.

The dream started with my and my ex-roommate Joseph Lai living in a big house. One day we drove and we somehow got into time travel, and saw ourselves on the same street moments ago. And then we started to talk about the sequence of time traveling and how it works. Pretty nerdy a conversation. And then I chatted with Joseph's wife Simon about some game magazine stuff.... darn that part of dream was pretty nerdy.

And then the scene switched to something strange. It's a sort of office workspace environment but I knew non of the coworker. We were in a meeting and someone was playing some thing toy. Boss was pissed and asked who did it. Then someone said, "accident happened and someone loss a finger. we need to spread up and look for the finger part ....." and I woke up from shock.

And that's when I realized that I missed the prayer meeting.

I came home early so ....

I left office at 4 p.m. as there seem to be something wrong with my car and thus I needed to go tot my auto mechanic and figure out what's wrong. Turns out my mechanic told me that the battery is fine, and I got motor oil changed. And if there's still problem, I may need to shell out US$200 - $300 for a new starter. Oucch!

Since I am home a bit early, I was trying to not wasting my time

What I did tonight:

- Tuned my nylon string guitar
- Figured out how to use the central air conditioning system to give me more heat. Eventually, though, I think it's more energy efficient to get a heater.
- Installed Visual Studio 2008, and then watch the Get up to speed on Visual Studio 2008 video to learn more about how to use Visual Studio 2008 how effectively.

Eventually it's the third item that sucked most of my time ... til now ... sleepy ... bedtime.

NetFlix really is better than Blockbuster online

After using both NetFlix and Blockbuster.com for 2 weeks, I have to say that NetFlix beats Blockbuster hands down. The availability of title from Netflix is definitely better than Blockbuster, or at least for the titles that I care, like music video, ballet and independent movies. Honestly, I am still debating about whether I should continue subscribing NetFlix since I really love their service but doesn't have enough time to consume all the video content as I still have a lot of TV shows in my back log. Oh well, maybe later. But I highly recommend Netflix for those who are movie and video junkie. With Netflix, there's just no reason to pirate online at all.

Just had a very nice nap during lunchtime at work. Sleeping is always great for my productivity. I even had a dream during the nap. Somehow my dream these days tend to have something to do with dropping out of college. Like this morning I had a dream about I decided to quite my master degree study because I found certain subjects like Biology way harder than I expected. This is strange, consider that I never had my master degree. I did thought of getting a master degree but I pretty much gave up that idea since I much preferred learning from the Net these days, and I don't see master degree graduated earn significantly more than those who hold just bachelor degree.

It's still strange that I continue having dreams about school related topics.

A day wasted

Whenever I couldn't recall my accomplishment for a day, I call that day wasted. So I think I wasted yesterday.

Granted I figured out some technical problems of my system, and it was also partly that blue screen of death that caused me semi depressed for most of the day. And I also got too cozy of my bed that I spent most of my time just "feeling good" on my bed (guess you don't really know how much I enjoy sleeping). But I still consider that day wasted. Not that I am way too bad about wasting a day. After all I tried working and thinking too much time that maybe wasting a day or too is not a bad idea.

More nightmare coming out of my friend last night

This time I didn't remember all the details of my dream, but I knew that they were mainly nightmares. It includes a scene which a TV drama was shotted near a industrial building about someone fallen from a building. Someone sent me a huge box of industrial material which was clearly a wrong address delivery. And then some other bad things happen, something seriously bad but I forgot the detail.

鐵公雞

也不是甚麼傳奇。事情是這樣的：

年幼是家裡買了一部錄影機。我喜歡武俠電影，而當時每晚在深夜，電視台會播放一些十多年前的舊電影，於是一有機會，我便會深夜醒來，看看電視有否播放武俠電影，有的話便用錄影帶錄下。

有天深夜，我開電視，看到是武俠片，便按錄影掣，然後睡覺。第二天我查看錄影，才發覺只錄下十分鐘左右，然後已經沒有帶了。我也沒有認真看內容。

幾年後的一天，我翻看我的錄影帶，偶然看到這段「鐵公雞" 的錄影，覺得十分可笑。首先女殺手們用洗衣的木版，頭巾和籮作武器，根本沒有可能男女主角造成威脅。跟著看到一大班大男子漢臨時演員身穿女裝格鬥，再看到「她」們如何一個個一碰便倒下，不合情理到達可笑的地步。可是同時我又看到男女主角非常認真。「到底這套片是怎樣的一回事」我想。於是便萌生要看這套電影的念頭。

可惜當時互聯網仍未流行，相距錄影日子已久，就這樣過了十多年的幾年前，我將手上的錄影全盤電子化，這段影片又出現在眼前。一心要解開童年的迷的心又再燃起。

昨天終於收到這套電影，坦白說，我所謂買了的刺馬實在有水準得多。但一如我所說，好演員之所以好，在於他們不理劇本多爛，接了，便好好的演。

另外，臨時演員其實非常重要。既然要安排一場女殺手們的場面，就算請不到打女們，起碼鏡頭也要避忌，不要近距離被人看到一班男頭女裝的殺手吧。話說回頭，有沒有一些七十年代的武俠片有一些好看的女打場面？

Second Chance

I forgot the detail of the dream. All I remembered was that at the end me and 2 other young men was trying to commit suicide by driving a car into the ocean. But then time rolled back before the car hit the water, and the next thing I know we were back the "beginning", when me and two are my friend (no recollection of who they they were) was starting to have a vacation in some sort of beautiful resort area.

And then I realized that I was in some sort of US teenage movie.

Killed a roach

I saw a big roach near the front door while I was back from post office. So I took off one of my shoes and slammed on it. I think it was dead after then. Somehow roaches are kind of slow in this country.

I am so good at pissing off people, even when it's in my dream

I had dreams again.

A lot of things seemed to be happened in my dream. Among all of them, I recalled 3 segments.

The first was about living place. My family in Hong Kong seemed to move to yet another place again. Interestingly, my dad was living with us this time. Me and my elder brother was living in a double deck bed and I had the upper deck. I forgot the detail about how my dad was boasting about the stuff he brought back from some strange places.

Then the scene of my dream turned to a reunion of my primary school classmates. I was hosting a game which people got prize by certain gift card in envelop, so I let them take a look at the gift card inside the envelop, and then I took the envelop with gift cards back, shuffled them, and put them back on the table. But just when everyone picked their gift card and seemed happy with what they got, I suddenly realized that the look and shape of these envelope were all different, and thus people might have cheated by simply paying atttention to the envalope with giftcard they wanted, and picked the one with the gift card they like instead of randomly picking one. So I insisted in taking all the envelopes back, and restarting the game. Such action ticked off my friend Albert and Woo, and they were very pissed. In fact, later they left the reunion party without saying a word. I also remember chatting about some gadget with Raymond.

To think about it, the game had tons of design loophole, and I didn't thought through before I take action. I have a feeling that this kind of echoed what I did in my workplace.

The final dream segment that I remembered was about a farewell gathering for my previous fellowship pal Siu Ling. Not much was recalled from that segment except that I knew she's leaving and going to a place far far away. Also, after the gathering, I found out that Siu Ling left her iPod at my place. I hold it up, found that it was attached to an external battery, and it was extremely heavy. I took out my own iPod (very interesting the fact that I was totally aware of myself having a iPod Classic!), and found my iPod being much lighter.

And that's when I woke up.

People asked why I had so many dreams. I don't know. Maybe everyone has a lot of dreams, but rarely will they document them as frequent as I do.

Dreamtime report again

In my dream last night, I was in a very strange school. The school, from the outside, looks pretty much like any regular secondary school in Hong Kong. However, this one has giant birds (seems freindly) giant stepway wide open without wrench to protect people from falling off and all sort of strange thing. I was a prefect rushing to the class while the class starting school bell was rang ... but then ..

I suddenly jump to a scene which I rushed to an auto-repair place which I've never been before, and I asked for the condition of my car. I told the repairman that I have 2 cars, 1 in shop and 1 at home, but I said I forgot where's my car which supposed to be parked at home. The repairman told me that the car was fixed and it will cost me $50 in cash. But instead of opening the wallet to pay up, I continue running away, and that's when I woke up.

Today I learned ....

Today I attended a fellowship Thanksgiving gathering. I learned a few things:

• The most powerful ministry is when people directly involve in building other's life.
• We who lived in North America owned so much material that it's totally ridiculous. And yet we took them totally as granted. Shame. Shame.
• Plasma TV really looks better than LCD TV. Color looks more natural, and ... well, it just look better.
• Plasma TV playing off the air HiDef signal is ... man ... it makes crappy TV shows look good.
• An effective ministry turns out to be a "illegal" ministry .... so much ironic thing in this world I would say. You can argue about a lot of pro and cons regarding to the approach, but as long as I see life being turn around from sadness to joy, then that's the ministry worthy to support.

Another nonsense dream

In my dream last night, I was singing in a French (or Italy?) variety show, pay tribute to a dead opera singer. I seemed to be an old opera start trying to make a coming back. Nobody seemed to care about me, but I was having a good time.

I know. The older I am, the more nonsense my dream is.

More on my dream last night

In my dream last night, I shaved my face so hard that it became all red and almost bleeding...

Dream time again

Last night I have a strange dream:

I dreamed that I came back to Hong Kong to visit the dance organization that I was with these last several years. Strange how, except the leader instructor, all members are stranger to me, but they still gave me a warm welcome.

And then my dad (yeah, what a bad storyline segway) was there trying to fix some sort of electroic device for me. But instead of fixing it, he seemed to just break it apart, and told me to buy some part. And then he rushed out to drive. And then I heard some loud screaming, which I thought he accidentally rolled over someone. It was not, even thought I didn't know what they scream were for.

And then I saw an old friend Sam Lau. He was still in his same old attitude.

And I woke up.

Slim Jim

I just had my first Slim Jim in my life, and let me just say that I was so glad that I didn't pay for it. I probably won't have another Slim Jim in my life again because it's just not that tasty.

Come only when trouble

Why do people only show up and IM me when they have trouble, and either disappear or avoid answering my IM when there's nothing troubling them?

Wii depressed me

My Wii was not working since last Thursday, and it drove me so despress last night that I didn't do anything but instead go straight to sleep for about ..... 10 hours. Wii is still not functioning. The sleeping was great though.

換畫

女人會先去愛一樣東西（有時候是外表），然後再看功能，慢慢調較自己，接受各種缺憾。
男人嘛，發現缺憾，會選擇盡早換畫。

Lazy me

Sometimes I am just impressed by my own laziness. When I am into something, I can totally addicted to it and do it 24 Seven. Like the fact that I spent hours playing Paper mario Wii today. And then when there's something that I am not too interested, say ... eating, I can defer it until I am about to die from starving. So here I was wait until 11:00 p.m. before I absoluly couldn't stand it, and then I went to Jack N The Box to buy some burger and taco.

Don't be surprise when one day you see me on the news as a die person because of starvation in front of Nintendo Wii.

Roaches and God

I was throwing out some garbages when I saw a dead roach in a plastic bucket in the kitchen. I tossed the dead roach in the garbage bucket, and then started to wonder a lot of things.

How come I only see dead or near-roaches in this town house? And how come once in a while I see roaches dead in strange spot, like inside a plastic bucket? Did God take special care of Yenn the righteous man? Is God looking at my writing this blog now? Can I add Him as a friend in FaceBook.

And then I thought, He's everywhere and know everything, right? So He clearly saw how that 5 year old kid in Texas got killed by the train, saw the news mentioned in Digg about how a man was died in an industry accident by dropping into a pool of sulfuric acid, and not to mention all the most disgusting and gore, bloody accidents. And He saw all of that. I am not even talking about Him not extending His hand to keep these accidents from happening, but just by trying to see stuff form His perspective, and the fact that HE really SAW all these things everyday millions of times.... that is pretty spooky .. to be Him.

End of the rebate saga ... for now

I finally received my last rebate check on my waiting list. So as of now, I received all the rebate application that I summited. Never the less, I think rebate is not that worthy unless you are really willing to devote a lot of time to track, follow up, send hate mail, call, make angry call and so on and so fore in order to get your rebate. In most case, I don't think it' worthy. Some stores does better job on processing rebate, like Circuit City. Getting money from their rebate is relatively easy. Some companies, like Samsung, prolongs the rebate process to a point that I almost decided not to buy their product anymore just to revenge on the pain and agony I suffered from he process.

Weekend recap

I was amazed by the fact that my dream last night was following the Halloween theme. This is strange consider that I should have no media influence as I don't watch TV and listen to radio at all.

Anyway the dream was about me watching a movie which was about a bunch of kids smack talking some scary movies that made them scare. They played with food on their table, pretending ham eating ham, and made kind of a mess on their dining table, no knowing that all their scary movie scenario became reality later. In the dream, though, there was only this beginning part, so there was no gore and high blood scene.

But the me the even more scary dream was the one I had a few days ago, in which Amy younger brother was involved in an accident, and while I was heading to the hospital I kept asking myself why I didn't force him to accept Christ as personal savior. ....

I played so much video games this last weekend, and it was almost insane. On DS I played Donkey Kong Climber, Zelda DS, and then some. On Wii I played Zelda Wii, PaperMario Wii, Resident Evil Wii, Need For Speed Wii, and ... then some more. And yet I also accomplished so much regardingly to finishing the design of a poster and leaflet for a dance performance, and then learn some technique and Illustrator CS 3 and Photoshop CS 3, plus picking up the basica about how to use ScatchUp 6. It's amazing how much I did in the last weekend.

Oh, and thanks to Susana, I learned how to braid hair. I read about it online, and although the instruction looked simple, I never understand how it works, but once Susana showed it, it was ... so simple. This proves that there are still things that YouTube and web page couldn't teach you.

Man, the weather is much freezer now. I have real hard time getting up earlier to go to work.

Sleep

I am pretty darn happy this morning for no good reason. Or maybe it's mostly because I got enough sleep last night. It was a full 8 hour solid sleeping. There's nothing more important than a good night sleep to me..

Horror movie, driving on narrow road, videogame competition and fish ball

This is yet another serious of very strange dreams that I had last night, and this time I can remember a lot of the detail. The storyline was also very vivid and action oriented.

The dream started with something like a horror movie, something like SAW. Me and a few persons that I didn't know was being turned into some half man half machine thing, and we had to find way to avoid the machine half of our body killing ourselves. I sort of remember that one of my peer (who I actually cannot recall who he was now) turned into a vending machine or disc changing machine and was threaded to killing by the items storing in the machine.... it's very weird and almost like a Japanese horror movie.

And then the scene switched to a scene which I was trying out a new tollway. The tollway was very narrow and I was driving a big old school American car. The tollway was so narrow that both sides of my car can almost touch the wall the both side of the tollway, yet I never did crash my car to the wall. After driving to a spot I had to took off and ride subway (like the MTR is Hong Kong), and I was told that I was actually trying out a new railway system.

I was then trying to find the best way to get home using the subway system. And that part slowly blended into a video game competition. The title I played was mainly some Wii-type of family oriented video game, like shotting flying plates and something like that. I thought my butt was being kicked by competitor. BUt at the end when I got the really I seemed to have won based on the score. My competitor gave me sort of a friendly strangle "damn, how dear you beat me" and then walked away.

And finally, one young man who also was into the competition but didn't played with me was leaving the competition hall with me. I looked at some posters and said "I would like to get involved into more or these cosplay and anime expo thing but I rarely leave home." Then the other person said, "well, you really should leave home more."

The last scene is when we went to buy some food from street hawker. I ordered some fishball and some sunny side-up egg. The street hawker told me that the raw fishball were all sold out and all the left was the well-cooked one. I was like, of course I want to buy the well cooked one.

And that's what my dream was about.

Blog

很奇怪，每次在教會也很有寫 Blog 的衝動。

舌頭上有一片小傷口，好像是自己不小心咬到自己造成的，並不是痛得要死，但每次不小心碰到，總是很不自在。

除了舌頭，咀唇上也有一點小傷口。

很久（六年吧）沒有到過福遍教會，佈置和間格也轉了很多，也許我根本從前也不是時常出沒福遍，亦沒有甚麼懷念可言。

Strange dream

Haven't had any blizzard dream recently until Friday night. I was thinking of writing it down yesterday. And now that I tried to think about it, I couldn't remember a thing. Strange.

Kanye West and open source

Once again, I am late this work this morning, arriving office at 8 am. I have, though, excuse this time as I need to drop off New Heart's main man Yenn to the New Heart office. On the top of that, I, well, made a mistake when I exited from freeway. I made a left turn too soon, probably because I was thinking about how someone and something irritated me, or because I was listening to the Kanye West's new album Graduation, or that I was still impressed by the fact that an open source firmware RockBox turned my old iRiver iHP-140 MP3 player into a whole new beast.

Anyway, I made a wrong turn, and it took me 15 minutes to get back to the right road. Same old me, same old way of easy to lost my way.

I have to admit that my mind is still in awe about RockBox. The fact that I can play FLAC audio file on my iRiver, the fact that it supports text viewing with bookmark and honoring line break and the fact that it supports Unicode text display .... And I know that this is probably just tip of the iceberg, as I saw a lot of game screen shot, saw menu about bookmarking on songs .... With all these feature, this little old MP3 player now is even more feature rich that the iPod Classical 80Gb I was planned to buy.

Simply awesome the old source movement, and my highest salute to all who made this possible.

Wow, there are a lot headphone friendly appreal!

I wasn't serious before I started to searching, but I was wondering: is there any T-shirt that is "headphone friendly", meaning that I can have my headphone attached to my clothing some way without creating a messy look on me. Mostly of the time when you wear headphone you will have wire dangling around. It's really clumsy when you tried to unplug your headphone and leave it dangling while you need to make conversation with someone for a short while.

Well, I did Google search and I found a few that got my attention:

• T-shirt with equalizer.
• iPod jeans from Levis
• Music T-shirt
• Another music T-shirt
• Nike shirt

I probably won't buy those products for myself. But they seem to be pretty nice gift. And you know what, some maybe able to make some money by setting a ship and sell these items in Hong Kong.

Late to work

I was "ultra late" to work today, leaving home at 7:45 am, stuck in traffic for a while, parked at 7th Floor (while I usually managed to park at 4th floor), and finally arrived my desk at the office at 8:30 am. A paper already sticked on my table, meaning that some co-workers already tried to find me this morning.

Nokia 5300 no iPod Nano 3rd Gen

I found it totally not making sense to put video longer than 5 minutes on my mobile phone, as there's no chance that I could finish it. And the video playback software on the NOKia 5300 surely is not helping as it DOES NOT remember the position and the video I left off last viewing the last time. It does not have feature to let you lock your phone when you are in video playback mode. All the video playback settings, like mute sound, are one shot deal. There's a white border at the left and right side of the screen for really no good reason. The list goes on and on.

On the other hand, as a pure tag on feature it works pretty OK. It's one of those "wow you know what I can do that" kind of feature, but surely not a main course.

Damn you Summer Romance

For some very crazy reason, Leon Lai's song Summer Romance kept popping up in my brain, like those nasty pop up Windows on pirated software web sites. This is very strange considered that I hate Leon's singing.

Hard habit to break

After spending weeks to get used to, I still find it pretty hard to leave home before 6:45 am to get to work. These days I tend to leave at 6:45 am and arrive office at 7 am. Not too bad, but surely doesn't entitle me to leave office at 4 pm.

news around the world

I am thankful that because of Internet, I can read about the op Burma's situation from both the Western and China's point of view. I hope that people can really take advantage of Internet's global natural, and trying to see things from all side, and not being manipulated by any one dominant media.

小腳酸了

小腳酸了好幾天，今天終於開始康復起來。都是上星期二的芭蕾舞課中，因為太久沒有上芭蕾舞課，所以用錯了力，傷了小腿，害得我過去幾天行路的時候一垮一垮的。今個星期二上課時，一定要好好控制力度。

昨天跟朋友看表演，發覺他對藝術評論完全沒有興趣。當我對表演中的表達手法，編排和音樂運用進行分析和表達意見時，他甚麼也沒有說，完全沒有反應。但當我談到情節時，他似乎相當有興趣。

由他對表演團成員的熟識，和親切出席表演前的介紹會，我大概可以確定，他是一個 Fans. 他用Fans 的心態和行動參與他的愛好活動，支持她喜愛的團體。這種心態沒有甚麼問題，就正如不是每一個看電影的人，也喜歡用媒體審視的眼光去看每一套電影。

我只怪自己表錯情，太不適趣，下次看表演的時候，還是談談情節，說說戲服，便會少一點監介經歷。

Spent two hours in Apple store last night

I spent two hours last night at Apple store comparing various new iPod in order to find one that I want to "committee on". So far my conclusion is that I may get a iPod classic because it gives me well balance feature even though iPod Touch has some cool feature. But then I still decided to wait because:

• The homebrew scene of iPod Touch is in development, and it may be a good choice to get iPod Touch just as a WiFi device.
• There are quite some issues on the the iPod Classic that needs to nail down, including issues mentioned in macInTouch and Apple's own technical forum.
  

Some additional issue on iPod Classic:

• major slow down the song playback delay when browsing under the album flow mode.
• I still cannot get over the fact that I need to reconvert all my video media file in order to put them into a iPod classic.
• an additional USB cable (which allows me to use the iPod as an external harddisk at work) will cost me US$20, and the plug is so freaky proprietary. Apple just love keeping people in proprietary world.
• The 160Gb seems to be more reasonable from price perspective, but I can feel the weight difference between 80Gb and 160Gb. 80Gb seems to be have better weight as a portable device. The 160Gb starts to become slightly too heavy to be a real portable.
  

I also found that the new third gen iPod nano is so not friendly to control. Controlling the click wheel on iPod classic was much better an experience.

Hopefully one day I will get myself an iPod, but for now I give it a pass.

Cool cool home

Ever since my roommate came back (2 days ago), I was enjoying cool breezing home thanks to my roommate turning down the temperature. Well, I could do that myself when he's gone but I am too cheap and too concern about the high energy bill. At least when he is here I can justify the cost :-P .

中文手寫輸入的 iPhone

我有點期待支持中文手寫輸入的 iPhone，因為我實在不想長期用 Pocket PC 的手寫輸入，特別是英文字的輸入，準確度遠比Palm OS 輸入的準確度低。所以我期待著Apple 的軟體工程師巧妙地設計出好用的輸入介面，畢竟介面設計是蘋果的強項。

Buying clothing in United States

I am not a fan of doing appeal shopping as I am too price conscious. If I came to a point that I need to do shopping for clothes, it must be something driven by necessity. That happened yesterday when I realized that almost all my black pants had been shrink (mostly because of the dryer), socks are too short, and shirts were old (they were all shirts I brought a year ago, and I literally wore them weekly). It's time to shell out.

So I went to the Target need my workplace, and brought 4 pairs of socks, 2 shirts and 2 black Khakis. They all look pretty OK. Total cost was about US$95 (tax included), and I would say it's a fair price. Also, now that I know my size, it would be easier to buy clothing online.

Shirt size: Small, Mens
Pants size: 31 x 30

On a totally unrelated topic, I slept 8 hours last night. I was ultra tired when it was 9:30 p.m., so I went to bed. I knew I woke once at 3 a.m., but I felt like I want to sleep a bit more, so I fell back, and the next thing I know it was 5:30 a.m..

I just love sleeping.

IT Crowd, second season, brilliant

Just finish the episode 1 to 4 of second season of IT Crowd. For those who don't know it, it's a British sitcom on Channel 4 about three (errr ... actually 4 now) staff members in a IT department of a big company. I wasn't like the show in the beginning because I was expected a lot of inside geek jokes,but turns out there's not much tech content but rather mostly general sitcom jokes. The different expectation made me ditched the show in the beginning.

But then I started accepting the fact that the show is for general audience and not the geeks. Once my perception was gone, I started enjoying the show. In fact, I laughed out loud a lot of times in these 4 epsidoes of season 2. Those offbeat humors reminded me the good old Seinfeld and they are pretty well written.

So check it out.

新的工作

新的工作相當不錯，同事亦很友善，工作本身亦很吸引

，讓我有機會學習到一些我很想學的電腦知識。最有趣的是工作時間，同事們在工作非常認真投入，但上班和下班的時間卻非常準確，不會有（起碼這段剛開始的日子）超時工作的情況。

家裡亦已經有一段日子沒有蟑螂了，但願好景可以繼續吧。

頭痛

頭有點痛，也許是因為昨天沒有好好的吃午飯和晚餐。本來不打算化一整天重修電腦，但結果卻用了一天的時間。

6 a.m. in the office

Here I am being in the office at 6 a.m. . This is the first time I came to work at this job so early. The good thing is that I can leave at 4 p.m., and that can be very good for the sake of avoid lousy traffic.

For instance, the driving for this morning was actually pretty seamless. The only thing that stopped me, turns out, was the traffic light instead of traffic jam. Parking was great too. I can park very close to the elevator on the 4th Floor instead of parking far far away on the 6th floor.

The air conditioning system, though, doesn't seem to be on until 6:15 am. This is not way too bad, consider that the air conditioning system at the place I live in isn't particularly spectacular neither. So I can live with a little bit heat.

Driving my friend's car

I need to send my car (1997 Rav4) to the shop for some semi-major maintenance work to do. So this morning I drove my friend's Toyota Cammy to work. It's a stick shift car, but then so was my Rav4, so the driving itself is not an issue. It's just that I don't like the feeling of driving somebody else's car. I always need some ease in time when sleeping in a strange case. And then same applies to driving. Still, it was fine and safe, and my friend's car worked pretty well.

roach

Cleaned up one dead roach today .... sparyed the door.... an infinite cycle that seems to be ...

Roach is back, and getting worse

Remember I said before that I have never seen roach on the second floor of town house that I lived in? Well I woke up this morning I saw a huge roach died right in the middle of room, right on the carper between my computer gears and my bed. Also worth noticing is that my room's right was on. So the roach no only came to the second floor, it also doesn't care much about the light.

I guess something is not right here, and some serious action has to be done. I don't quite understand how come all roaches were dead (or near dead when I discovered them, but that's just enough horror for me to deal with everyday.

I will probably need to spary on the door again, but since the ex-roomtate of the house owner is here, so I probably need to wait for a few more days, wait until after he left, and then I will spray the door again.

Maybe it's also about time for me to look for another living place.

And I thought my next desktop computer will be a Mac ...

I was totally serious about getting a Mac as my desktop until I started to do the math, and found that Mac is simply too costly.

In fact, the last nail on the coffin just put down today. I ordered a DELL Dimension 9200 desktop machine with Intel Quad Core process and 2Gb of memory. The graphic card isn't something state of the art (128MB nVidia GeForce 8300 GS ), but sure better than my old desktop graphic card (Nvidia FX5200) . For US$660 (tax and shipping included), I think it's a pretty nice purchase.

Almost plan on rush out to get a Core 2 Duo Mac Mini, but then...

I knew I kept saying that I will get a Mac Mini as soon as Apple release a Core 2 Duo version of Mac Mini. Well, Apple finally released it today. I was so excited that I called the Apple Store near my workplace to make sure that they have it in stock. Just when I am so hyped up and so ready to pick up one after work, my rational side kicked in, and so I did some research, and found a few things that may force me to think twice before shelling out my money:

- I need to first grab a USB Keyboard since I don't have it at home.
- Graphic capability of MacMini is kind of lame as it shares 64Mb memory with main memory. It doesn't fill up my 20 inch LCD wide screen monitor though.
- The memory setting stinks. I was planned on getting a 1Gb version, and it's made up of 2 512Mb memory. So in order to get to 2Gb later, I need to throw away my 2 512Mb memory and then plug the new memory in.
- Mac doesn't support NTFS external harddisk.

So .... need to think twice.

Here comes the roach again ....

Saw semi-dead roach lying on the floor this morning, and it took me sometime to clean it up. As always, I sprayed around the edge of the doors. Hope it works.

Should have been awaken 3 hours ago ...

5:00 am now, and I am fully awake. I remember that I woke up once at 3:00 am, but didn't dare to wake up until now. I really should be wake up at 3 am, considered that I slept at 9 pm! 6 hours is really what I need, for now I am really over slept. Sigh.

I still remember the dream I was having right before I woke up. I was in a decision of skip a Geography examination, and trying to justify it with some unknown friends. The fact was that I was not studied for the examination at all, and will fail the examination indefinitely. Yet I was trying to make up excuse for myself about how useless that examination was regarding to my career.

I would say that a huge percentage of my nightmare were public examination related. Interesting indeed.

A pair of speaker fonud at dumpster

It all started this morning. I went to work as usual, started some coding, and then when I was about to throw some tissue paper into a trash bin, I saw ..... a PS2 mouse and A PAIR of SPEAKER!

"The hell! Is this pair of speaker still working? Why thrown it away?"

Our IT lady to me that no one is using speaker in the office, and then she said I could take it away. So here I was, taking this pair of speaking, and put them right next to my pillow. They are not great in sound quality, but great enough to allow me to enjoy Podcast while I was sleeping at night.

Need to find more web 2.0 savvy friends :-P

It seems like that I am the only one doing microBlog (Twitter, Jiku ...) . So it doesn't really make sense for me to update my twitter that frequent. Still, if you are interest in subscribing my Twitter feed, you can either go directly to the Twitter page, or use whatever Twitter feed RSS subscriber, or using Twitter gadget for iGoogle home page, like what I am doing now.

My Twitter user name is deecayone, by the way.

I am also planning to get a Mac as my desktop later. It's time to let me Lenovo X60 Tablet work really as a Tablet instead of being both my notebook and primary desktop. I want to get a Mac Mini, but simply cannot accept the fact that I got only a Core Duo machine after pay US$599. So I am going to wait for the release of Core 2 Duo Mac Mini with the new OSX Leopard. This is be mainly act as my media center on the desk. And yeah, I DO NOT have a TV. Don't really see a need for it at all.

Instruction for Alice

Alice was having some problem figuring out how to access the multiplayer option on Mario Party 8 and Bomberman (J) for Wii, so last night I drew these instructions so that she can bring them with her in her next party gathering:

Movies and Roaches

I haven't seen dead roaches in almost a week. Spraying around the door edge really worked like a charm. I shall do that more often.

Recently I've seen quite some movie, like the Twenty Three, the Simpsons Movie, Transformer and so on. I want to see Harry Potter 5, but I will wait til my wife have time and then see the movie with her.

Oh by the way, I am still search for a good audio hosting site that does what YouTube do to video. Let me know if you heard of any good one, for I have some old audio recording that I would like to post online.

Google makes me careless on spelling!

It seems like Google search and most of their related properties (like Blogger, iGoogle) are so good at guessing my misspelled words to a point that I don't even care about double checking my spelling. It really it that bad :-P .

Went to Blockbuster

I went to Blockbuster today mainly because .... I wasn't there for many years. Beside, I was looking for the Taiwan movie Splendid Float, and couldn't find it there nor at Blockbuster's web site. To be fair, I cannot find the movie at NetFlix neither. Eventually I found the movie at YesAsia. So now the question becomes whether I am crazy enough to order that movie online.

No more buying iTune song

I just brought my first iTune song, and it will most probably is the last. I already brought it, but now I cannot play it on any of my mp3 player because it's not a MP3 file.

And then I found out that the iTiune on my machine does not recognize the cd burner.

So now I am stuck listending the song on my computer and computer only.

So long, iTune purchase.

My first iTune purchase?

I was very much enjoying practicing and playing with the morning service team. The music they picked, the energy of the team members and the arrangement we used totally reminded me the good old days when I was playing drum set at Bridge Community Church.

Speaking of the Sunday service, I was trying to find the CD version of song that we will do this coming Sunday morning since I believe the arranegemnt expection the team made was based on some CD recording on some praise and worship music CD. I have to admit that after trying to find audio sample with no luck on Amazon.com and some CD purchase site, and turned my way to look for the song in Google using terms like "download mp3", "torrent" and such. Still no finding.

Then I suddenly remind that I have an iTune account, which I never used it to purchase anything except downloading some free TV shows and songs when they have special promotion. So far I mostly use iTune to download Podcast to listen while I am on the road, so the idea of PURCHASING something from iTune was actually pretty new to me. Nevertheless, I enter "You", which is the songs name, in the search dialog box.

Boom.

Song Title: You
Album: Live Vineyard Worship: Winds of Worship - Come Now Is The Time
Singer: (she's also the writer too) Rita Springer
Cost: $0.99

Cool! I should have try this in the very beginning! But just before I pressed the "Buy Song" button, I suddenly remember the REASON why I never brought anything from iTune before.

DRM. Digital Right Management.

In order to listen to the songs I purchase from iTune on my Pocket PC PDA, or my Nokia 5300 music phone, or my iRiver 40Gb MP3 Player, I have to burn the song to a CDRW disc, and rip it back into MP3 again, thus lowering the quality of the music. I don't have an Apple iPod, so the only way to enjoy the music file that I brought is to play it on my PC. And I hate that.

Nevertheless I want to listen to that music a few time before tomorrow's Sunday service, and $0.99 is not bad a cost to just do that job.

Still, I have that some day these music sellers will drop this DRM thing. I mostly blame record companies because it was THEIR idea that this DRM will help them to make more money in long run. It's not. It only encourage buyers to skip legal digital music download and go for either illegal download (as they are all DRM free) or buying the physical CD (since there's no DRM on CD, as even the rootkitted Sony CDs were being replaced with regular CD).

Until then.... sign... buy song, burn and rip again.

Too much sleeping maybe

What will you do if you have all the time in this world? You do nothing. At least nothing useful.

I feel like I am lazier these days. I got a job which doesn't require me to be totally punctuate every day. The stress level at work is low, and I feel good about being able to learn stuff everyone. But somehow I sleep more than I used to be, and feel like having less incentive to instantly being productive right out of the bed.

Don't get me wrong. There's tons of things that I need to do and want to do. It's just that the ignition that starts the engine doesn't seem strong enough these days.

My blog is actually quite a good ignition in that sense. Like now that I wrote a little bit stuff, I start to feel like I am ready to take on the things that piled up in my to do list. That's a good thing.

Here comes the roach again...

I saw a roach dead on the floor today. Interesting enough, all the roach that I saw was found at different location. I never need seen a roach showing up at the same place before.

May suspect that it's because of the rain that they came again. So before I left home, I once again sprayed around the edge of both front door and backdoor.

Cassette Tape ... what cassette tape?

It's possible that after 10 years, kids won't know what the heck cassette tape is. But back when I was a kid, it was a big deal to have a cassette tape recorder. And since then I spent a lot of time recording stuffs: songs, radio shows, audio production that I created by myself. It was was era of my creativity budding. Cassette tape recorder, just like computer today, was a platform of expressing myself.

And the time of cassette tape is about to end, and so are my collection of cassette tapes. I am in a long and consistent process of converting cassette tape content into MP3 format so that I can store them in DVDR disc. Here is a bunch of cassette tape with French and Japanese language tutorial radio program recorded in them. I listened through the Japanese program and was benefited from it. The French program was, on the other hand, not as attractive to me. However since Alice mentioned that she was interest in it, so took some time to process them too.

Speaking of processing cassette tape, there are two applications that definitely need to mention. I would not be able to complete my project until I have these two applications: MP3Gain and MP3DirectCut. They are both freeware and they both allow me to enhance and edit the converted MP3 (I use my iRiver to do high quality 320kbps Mp3 direct through the hardware) lossless. In fact, I was stuck for a while and had to suspend my conversion process because I couldn't seem to find a way to see audio gain level with the 320Kbps Mp3 I captured. Finally I decided that I don't give a damn as long as the trimmed file seems fine. And then mp3Gain flawlessly pumped up the volume. They are definitely critical for my work.

Blog wrote during Sunday service

I needed to play drum set for two sessions of Sunday service today, so I spent the second session doing the stuff that I could do while not interrupting the others and not creating a scene: I wrote blog on Pocket PC, and the following is the result:

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I wonder how will iPhone provide Chinese support. The fancy AI soft keyboard feature on iPhone won't work on Chinese input. Let's hope that Apple invest as much money on Chinese input as on English input.

無論試了多少次，用Pocket PC 中的Block Recognize, 依然覺她相當不寧光，自從我離開Palm OS, 我便沒法用PDA 高速地作英文輸入，我想，下次當我要轉用另一個PDA OS. 那新的系統一定要比我現有的更加方便輸入。

蟑螂大戰也許算是暫時告一個段落。自從用Alice的門蓬殺蟲水噴霧計劃在上星期三晚實施以來，暫時沒有發現任何蟑螂的屍體。希望和平能夠維持下去吧。

已經不再忍受Vista了。自從用了以後，系統時常無故進入發呆的境界。今天我要載入XP，跟發呆說再見。

Finally a day without see a dead roach in the morning

Enough said.

A few dreams

I started with having a dream about working in my mom's electroplating factor, and then I had dreams about .... oooop , too bad I already forgot it. But I knew for sure that there was some other dreams.

The Sega Dreamcast that brought out from store room was working fine except one problem: it kept asking me to set it's system clock everytime after I turned it on. I have it connected to a power socket that has power constantly supplying, so I shouldn't deal with that crazy problem. But well, it's an old gear, so what can I say?

Roach problem put me into sleep

I was so frustrated by the roach problem (or maybe so scare about cleaning up the dead roaches on the floor at the ground floor) that I went straight to sleep last night at 9:00 pm without having any dinner. In fact I woke up at 5:30 am once, but not dear to wake up until 6:50 am. And then I realize that I simply have no choice but go down to face the music. I picked up 3 dead roaches this morning.

Again. I am thankful that all the roaches I saw in the house so far are the dead ones, and that I haven't seen one at the second floor so far. But this really is fustrating. I mean, I've seen more roaches in one week than all the roaches I've seen in a year at my old apartment at Riveraine 6 years ago. I am just desperations.

Sigh. I still need to throw away the garbage bag full of roaches, and then may be I will have appetite to have breakfast.

interview, more roaches and heat

I just had my interview a few hours ago. One of the interviewer was my old colleague, so I asked him was I going.

"You really need to work on your interview skill."

Yeah I think it's pretty much the case. I was never good at talking after all. And I tend to talk way too much than I should be.

On the bright side, it pretty much certain that I will at least have two more months extension on the current contract job that I am working on. And then they were talking about to possibility of turning to perm position. But then there's always possibility of change. We should see.

My battle with roaches just keep continue.

I just saw yet another two roaches laying on the floor. One surely dead, and one 98% dead. I was so frustrated that I sprayed tons of roach killing spray on both the dead one and the almost dead one. And then I practiced what Alice told me to do: spray along the door and so that roaches won't (hopeful come in). And man, the huge amount I did spray.

It was pretty frustrated, and made me feel very uncomfortable staying home. In fact I am still feeling the chill right this moment. This roach thing must be stop ..... too scary.

Roach: why do I always see you in the morning

This morning I need to get to work earlier so that I can leave on time and attend an interview. So I did all the usual (shower, brushing and so on). Just when I was about to put on my shoes, I saw a big roach next to my shoe. Surprisingly I was not scared. I just found it annoying.

So I found a roll of advertisement paper, stick some tapes at the end in order to stick it up. And that's when I found out that it's alive!

However, it seems it be on drug or something, and still just staying there. And then my instinct kicked in and use one of the shoe to shame it into a big burr or brown substance. I used the roll of advertisement paper to pick it up, cleaned up the brown ooze, and leave home. It's 8:13 a.m. already.

And I started to feel scare while I was in the middle of the commute.

Why do I always find roaches in the morning. First 2 dead ones at home. Now this drugged living one. It's just insane.

Sleep sleep and sleep

I simply cannot believe how much I sleep these days. Yesterday I went to bed at 9:30 pm because I felt very tired. My plan was to wake up at 3:30 am to set up my home recording studio. And guess when I woke up this morning? 7:00 am.

On the bright side, I feel extremely energetic now.

Lyrics and video game

I finished a lyrics for a friend. To write lyrics effectively I had to first draft a lot of content and sample lines on a paper and then formulate the song from all the fragments. So picked last Saturday to do so, and although I have a whole day to mess with, it was not too productive as I kept having writer's block.

In order to relax my brain I took the moments to play Nintendo Wii. As the result I got some good progress in games like Zelda for Wiii and Warioware for Wii.

Speaking of Zelda fot Wii, I have to say that I wasn't too enjoying the game, mostly because I didn't like being as a wolf for so long at the current storyline that I was at, and I didn't like the alien who was riding on my back neither. And control was also pretty odd from my perspective. Nevertheless, the game seemed to be pretty well designed and I will continue playing it ... every once in a while.

I also played Space Channel 5 on Dreamcast. It was such an old school and the graphics were very much dated, but I still enjoy the style and the simplistic "simon said" kind of musical game style.

Strange dream never ends

I just woke up, and vaguely remember some strange dreams that I had a while ago. They were all .... very strange.

It started with me in a Dollar Movie theater trying to watch some round movies. "Which movie worth seeing?" I asked someone at cashier. A young man spent some time to introduced a few movies to me: there was a drama about a design who were bright but had a twisted sense of beauty in the 20s who also happened to be the designer of Playboy bunny suit (the what?). And then there's a movie about friendship among several female friends. All these movie had some very think and colorful promotional books at the lobby.

"Can I take these books" I asked.
"Sure. One per cusotmer." the young man said.
"One booklet each movie per customer?" I wanted to clarify.
"Yeah, you can have one for each movie," he said while taking the books on my hand and put them in his backpack (where the hell did he suddenly yanked a backpack out?).

I found it very odd that he put my books into his backpack. I pointed it out, and he was kind of embarrassingly giving the books back to me, saying "oh, I was worrying that you might forgot to bring them with you so I kept them for you." I found that totally awkward.

I also asked the show time for one of the movie, and he kept suggesting me to see the movie at another theater.

The more I deal with guy the more I found him strange, and almost creepy.

The suddenly the scene of my dream changed to some street dinning place in the night. I was minding about the booklet in my backpack, and also trying to find my mobile phone so that I could call my friend and asked about their preference on the movie pick.

"Sir, I think you are using my mobile phone." An OL told me. I looked at the phone and found that the phone was indeed not mine, and in fact that bag that my searched was not my bag either. I apologized and walked a bit away from her table.

She was not mad, mainly because she was busy discussing some issues with her boy friend. (This is not too realistic, because in reality her boy friend will beat the crap out of me for checking around his girlfriend's handbag.)

And then there was another OL came and sat on the table that I was at.

My dream was then sort of ended by that time.

Strange dream that was, but at least more entertaining than some of the dreams I had a day before. My brain was so lazy that I had dream about me having a dream and woke up! So back then my brain was so tired that it didn't bother to come up with storyline!

Bad haircut ... by myself

"What in the world is going on with your hair?" Alice asked yesterday after Sunday Service.

She was pointing at the spot which I had a segment of my hair cut by myself. It was Wednesday morning last week, and I was in a hurry trying to prepare myself for a job interview. I saw a bunch of hair at the back of my head that kind of irritated me. So I simply grabbed a sharp scissor and snapped a few segments of hairs by myself. I was really good at cutting hair, and cutting hair at the back of my head without even clearly seeing the spot didn't help neither. Thus here I got that nasty spot.

Being the bad guy in a dream

I was usually a victim, a survivor or a hero in my dream. This morning, however, the table turned around.

In my dream, I was going back to a university that I was in (however the surrounding doesn't look much like University of Houston at all), and I went to seek for an old professor. Interesting enough, the professor was also a clown. I went there and ask some question that triggered him to ask me "when was the last clown gathering". I didn't know the answer but I had an urge to cover up my ignorance. So I lied about a after gathering which tons of people were singing and such. And the professor instantly said, "Liar! You were lying!" I was embarrassed but was also pretty angry, so I kept cursing him while he was continuously putting clown makeup, and left after a while.

Strange dream indeed.

Padding my notebook

I was complaining about the heat problem of my laptop for quite sometime. Today, I took the day-off opportunity (JUly 4, dude) to deal with the problem, and the result was very nice. You can see from the photo that I add some pad at the wrist rest area, and then I add some insulation at the back. Now I can actually use my laptop on my lap, and this mobile device becomes truly mobile.

mess

很少在主日崇拜負責打鼓的日子，出現連自己也覺得打得一塌胡塗的情況。今天也可說是個經典。有趣的是其實今早自己非常精神，令今天的一塌胡塗更加莫明奇妙。

回想昨天，時間過得有點胡裡胡塗。最大的成果就是在 Home Server 設定好 .Net Framework 2.0 和 SQL Server 2.0. 這樣我就可以在家裡執行一些自創的軟件，在學習ASP.net 2.0 的同時，也能將自己的資訊用更新的方法去接收。例如在工場上也能看到家中的情況。

昨天也用了很多時間玩Wii. 主要的原因不是自己忽然非常喜歡打機，而是因為在極慢的Home Server 安裝軟件，有太多等候的時間。

Yep, I am working

For those who want to know whether I am still slacking at home doing nothing, I can assure that I am working and making some money now :-P

I am working on a one month contract-to-hire contract (it's the 2nd week now), and in the meantime I am still actively job hunting. In fact, I have a major interview next week that required me to study in advance and have to write a small application during the interview day within 6 hours. That's gonna be pretty exciting.

My current work seems fine. People there are pretty OK too. And I am gradually learning to communicate with other coworkers and client. No matter how it turns out, it's going to be a good experience.

Monday blue

Sigh, I rolled over some broken glasses (from Windshield I think) this over. Now I am worrying whether I may get a flat tire later today.

Did I also mentioned that it was rained like dogs and cats?

On the bright side, my headache seems to be gone after a lot of sleeping.

也許是時候

星期五晚上我從教會回家，在家的附近衝了黃燈，然後發覺車的背後好像被拍了照似的，唉，大蓋就這樣損失七十五美元了。

有些時候，我覺得我太受外在環境的影響。很多時沒法下定心意改變的惡習，要靠一些外在的提醒，甚至需要有一些負面的事情發生了，受了教訓，自己才肯乖下來。這就是所謂「賤骨頭」吧。

Tablet PC 愛恨參半

經過兩個月的使用後，我發覺我對我那部Tablet PC 愛恨參半。說負面的吧：

★太重了。我的Tablet PC 勉強通過「單手測試」，但當我在日常生活中使用的經驗，卻告訴我這部電腦似乎重了點。

★太熱了。特別是當使用了一段時間後，電腦背後的熱力甚至迫使我要加一些保護墊。現在我有另一部電腦作下載用，也許就用不著令Tablet PC長期開著了，儲在機殼的熱力該會下降一點了。

★不穩定。自用機以來，總在一些奇怪的時候會有Blue Screen of Death 發生，非常令我懊惱。我總覺得Vista 是禍首。

080888 .... mileage

It's an interesting scene that I realize before in the morning when I was taking my driving examination. The mileage said 080888. So I took a picture with my mobile.

Looking forward to the 088888 day.

Japanese and Korean comics in American bookstore

I knew that Japanese comics is big in America, but I didn't realize that Korean comics also got their foothold in US market. Maybe it's because the drawing style of Korean comics is almost the same as the Japanese ones. Anyway, here's the whole several book-shelfs of Japanese and Korean comics in a US Bookstore Border. And yeah, it's very astonishing that these comics can fill up three to four bookshelf.

About to start working tomorrow ,,, for a month at least

I am preparing for my work day now. This is a one month contract which allows me to continue hunt for permanent position. So I am a bit excited about this.

I also started serving at church with drumming last week. At the same time I am thinking about whether I should look around and find a church to settle in. We'll see.

Roach phobia

Seems like after the long hard battle I had with a big roach a night before out the town house I am living in, I started to have some sort of roach phobia. Suddenly I started to realize the disadvantage of not having a roommate living in the house.

OK Productive Day

I found today pretty productive:

- I vacuumed and washed the floor on the group floor
- I converted a lot of cassette tapes into MP3s (especially the French course Bonjour Hong Kong)
- I arranged a few interviews.
- I watched two Be My Guess episode
- I practiced dance a bit.
- I throw away all the boxes and have all the stuff I took from storage organized.

And you can see that I am very much crave for sanctification from work.

Speaking of works, I will start my one month contract this Wednesday. In th mean time I will look for other full time opportunities. The one month productive should be able to make me productive and at the same time give me some financial help during the job hunting period.

Delete or not delete

I have a whole box of software and CDR day back to early 90s, and I was thinking of simply ripping all the personal data and simply throw all the disc away since I don't use these ancient software anymore. However, I may need to change my mind.

It started when I tried to open some old Word document that I wrote back in the college, and Microsoft Word 2007 BLOCKED me from doing so, saying that the old version of word document needs to be read by the old import engine, but the old import engine has security problem. To put the long story short, I may need to reinstall the OLD VERSION of office (like, maybe Office 97?) to read my document.

Now there's an incentive for me to keep some of the old application. The question is ... which applications to keep? I sure don't want to keep all 200+ CDR discs just for the sake of some old data files. But then those data files preserve my precious memory.

Sigh, what a dilemma....

Here's my car

Well, by popular demand, here's photos of my car.

My room

Well, by popular request, here's the photos of my room.

I passed the road test

I passed my road test this morning, and finally have my driver's license back. Awesome. Now I can go anywhere I like ... as long as I can live with the high gas price. :-<

I experienced blue screen of death on Vista twice in the last 48 hours. So much for being more stable and more secure Vista is.

That one dead pixel

It's both a glad and sad day today for me. I am glad because I practiced driving this morning, and I was doing pretty fine. I am very much looking forward to pass my driving examination on Friday morning.

Another half glad thing happened today as I received a monitor I ordered 2 days ago. this allows me to have a much bigger desktop space to work with while I am writing software. For instance, I am working on a Flash based mobile application, and this monitor allows me to read the instruction at the right of the screen and then continue coding at the left side of the screen.

Unfortunately, this LCD monitor also has one stuck pixel. This isn't super irritating, but there's still a feeling of being stuck with a defective product.

Life never will be all perfect after all.

天水, 圍城

Suddenly the lyrics of 天水, 圍城 popped up in my mind:

"...
他 親身真正感到.
尺地寸金 人便會無餘地平和獨舞
要見步行步
無車票又怎去覓去路
赤地太濕 這地球沒芳草
仍然留在故地多好
..."

I didn't implied anything.

NIV Bible application failed on Windows Vista

Such a painful problem: the NIV Bible software that I used for years was found incompatible with Windows Vista on my newly brought notebook computer. In order to continue using it, I have to run the application inside VMWare. Thus the startup time of the NIV Bible become ....5+ minutes. Oh joy.

If you find any Chinese and English bible software that is Vista compatible, please let me know.

Woke up from nightmare

I just woke up from a dream (nightmare?), and it was a strange one.

The dream started with Jung Wah (a pal at praise team B) giving me a ride home. So the location is definitely in Hong Kong. The interesting thing is that in the dream I was supposed to be living in a very high place, and Jung Wah was sending me home using something like a double deck bus. I looked outside and saw that a construction site was there building an even taller building. But then the building under construction was quite poorly built, with bamboos forming frames that barely enough to keep the shape of the building, concerning only the height but without anything solid within each floor.

So finally we reached the top of the mountain, which was supposed to be my living place. But pastor Alex Luen suddenly showed up, and asking us to try out the "cable car" since, "you will need to take this sooner or later" he said. So we took the "cable car". But in no time we always reached the middle of the mountain. "Go ask around and see how you can get back home", Alex said. So I asked a person at the ticket booth. "You missed the last one, which departed at 9:00 pm", the person at the booth said. I looked at the clock, and it was 9:10 pm. And I looked aronud, found that both Jung Wah and pastor Luen was gone.

"You can use other means of transportation next the here," the person at the booth said. So I walked away. And by no time (it's like a badly edited movie) I was always in the top of the mountain, when suddenly a middle Eastern approached in a way that I felt like he's either trying to rob me or attack me. I tried to run, but another person ran towards me. I was afraid.

And that's how I woke up.

There may be some minor detail that I was missing, but basically that's it.

So does this crazy dream means?

Driver License rule test passed, and sometime next week I will take the driving exam

Just let everyone knows that I passed the rule and sign test this afternoon. And hopefully I will pass my road test next week and got my driver license back.

Cat Fight continue

The fight between Tiger and Shinny continues. Today they were having a stand-off right behind the room am in.

Finally, the permanent residence card has arrived

Some may know that there's recently some serious cat fight between the cats in the house. Tiger (the younger one) tickled the nerves of Shinny and Spotty (the older ones), and the fight was started on and off for a few days. So far today is the first day that I haven't heard any sign of fighting. I hope that this means the war is temporary over.

I brought a new webcam (Microsoft Lifecam VX-1000). For US$25 (actually US$19.99 after $5 mail in rebate) the webcam does a very good job on capturing both sound and video. I used it with MSN IM and Skype and they both worked very well. So if you want to see my face and hear my voice feel free to get on IM and chat with me. And I recommend you to get this webcam too. The quality is much better than those HK$89 generic webcam from Golden Shopping center. You really got what you paid for.

I finally received my permanent residence card from the mailbox this afternoon, and I will get my Texas ID this coming Tuesday. After then I can start practicing my driving skill, and eventually get my driver license back (hopefully within a week). And then it will be the job hunting.

So my happy happy jobless life is about to end ..... (gee, should I be glad or should I be sad?)

TV Channel surfing

An hour ago I did TV channel surfing, something I haven't been done for such a long time ever since I used BT as my ultimate digital VCR. I have to say that it is still addictive to do so.

I found some new channels that I didn't see several years ago, like Gospel Music Channel, VH1 Classics and so on. MTV2 got populated to become just as crappy as MTV. Music video is so dead. Web and on-demand seems to be the future. A lot of my favorite animation like Family Guy, Futurama and South Park were heavily rotating in several channels. So as the result I wasted 1 hour+ watching TV.

It's always the case: Daniel Kwan plus cable TV equals time wasting.

Once again I was beaten by girls on Wii Sport

Last night I finally set up the Wii at Alice's place. After then it was 3 hours of unproductive Wii madness :-D. Alice picked up Wii really fast, and she beated me on bowling. (see the photo above. I forgot she got a tripple or double strike. But as a first time Wii Sport player, she was good.

Finally, three cats ...

Remember I said that the cats in Alice's house just enjoy sleeping on the bed that I sleep in her house these days? Here's the prove.

First Shinny came by ....


All relaxing .... and then ....


Spotty join in ..... formed a gaint fur ball ...


Will Tiger join the fun to make sure that I will sleep in a huge amount of cat hair at night? Time will tell ...

At 7-Eleven of San Francisco

Because my pal "Ah Ling" (younger brother of Teresa's, which Teresa is pastor Alex Luen's wife) had an interesting craving of Seven Eleven during the San Francisco trip, so we went to one near a church we had worship coach session. I saw the following two items that caught my attention:


You can a higher price tag on something as generic as WATER by putting the product into a fancy package, like we see below.



I hope that the 7-Eleven in Houston also has Sushi like this.

Bus Ticket from good old days

Here's some old KMB Bus ticket that was used back in the early 80s, back when I was in junior secondary school. I throw them away during the Yan Fook Praise Team B farewell day. I wonder if anyone actually dug them up from garbage and then saved them ...

Rumbik Cube Solution, Finally

I promised someone to post the Rumbik Cube Solution that I discovered saving since I was in primary school. So here you have it. I remember back then I actually paid like a buck (HK$1) for this photocopy. So, enjoy.

CSK College, bomb bomb

Another awesome moment of secondary school that I used to study in back in the early 80s.

My primary school classmate in news ... back in the 80s

Here's is a newspaper excerpt which one of my primary school classmate showcase in one of the photo. Guess who he is.

Some funny photos I took at San Francisco

Now that I am in Houston, and that I don't have my permanent resident card received yet, I got some time to organize the huge amount of files I have on my machine, particularly the photos I took during the San Fransisco trip and the books I scanned.

Here's a photo I took at a mega electronic appliance store Best Buy. See that funky electric guitar? I actually saw MIDI plug at the edge. Strange.



Here's the cheaper third party wireless controller for GameCube. But eventually I brought the first party Nintendo Wavebird wireless control, and it's super good. You do get what you pay for.



And then in Border bookstore, I saw this American version of NewType. US$12.99 is too much for a magazine like this, though.



Here I took a photo at a gas station. "Use Car Wash at own Risk". Oh great, then I won't use it.



Nothing special about this one. I just found it terrible that the gas price pumped up so much. 6 years ago, I was used to 1.99 price tag. And now, 3.79!???

Upgrading my x60t ...

I know it's kind of crazy that after using my Lenovo x60t for less than a week, I already started to find ways to upgrade it, but hell what can I say. I am a tech nut case.

Actually no. The 1Gb memory that you see below is just not sufficient for any serious development work on the machine. In fact I cannot even start a 512Mb XP on VMWare properly. Memory is totally running out, with tons of disk swapping. Something has to be done!

So I ordered a 1Gb memory last night. US$60, with US$15 mail in rebate. It should be here 7 days later. Waiting. Until then, I can I can use Eclipse to write some Java code.



I want also interest in getting Windows XP on my machine as I was supsecting that Windows Vista sucked out too much memory (ironically, CPU consumption was not that high), and that the 5400 rpm harddisk maybe a tag slow. So I was thinking of swapping out the 120Gb HD internally and put in my 80Gb harddisk, until I realized that ....


.... the internal harddisk is a SATA harddisk instead of a EIDE one! So if I really need to swap harddisk, I need to BUY a new SATA harddisk.. Errr.. nope. not so soon. I don't want too much shopping for such a short period of time.

Cats

As some may know that my wife has 3 cats, and I mentioned that they enjoy sleepy on the bed I sleep on. They are Shiny, Spotty and Tiger, and below you see Shiny. She a fat one, but extremely easy going.