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.

The gift from Yan Fook Praise Team B: a guitar

Here I am in Houston Texas. It's the sixth day here and I spent most of the time staying at home messing new my new laptop computer (Lenovo X60t, a Tablet PC) and conducting my life online. So far so good, since there's a lot I need to do (like paying bills at Hong Kong, job hunting online, communicate with friends in Hong Kong, reorganizing all the stuff I scanned into my computer in the last 1.5 months.) So I am OK. Hopefully after my 1Gb memory comes, I can start building my software development environment and get back in shape on programming.

Rehearsing some dance pieces is my next step, as I am still suffering from flu right now. I should be OK after 1 to 2 more days.

And then this guitar.

When I was about to leave Hong Kong, Praise Team B at Yan Fook tried to give me something. To put the long story short, they collected some money and asked Pastor Alex Luen to buy a second guitar for me (that's sort of my suggestion). Well, yesterday Alex came by and delivered the guitar, so you can see from the photos below.

The guitar is a very basic one, with no fancy line out or stuff to adjust. But that's the beauty of it: so simple, and yet it sounds so warm and sweet. Too bad that the high E string was broken while Alex was test driving it at my home, so I have to wait until I get time (after I got my permanent resident card, and then Texas ID, and then Driving License, and then update the insurance record of my car).

In addition, the guitar case itself is pretty awesome. It's a hard case box with a zipper and even .....


... a number lock! Geee, I hope I won't mess up the security number and thus render the box to be locked.



Here's the look of the guitar in the box.


That's the brand. I have no idea what's good or what's bad. But at least when I played it, it sounds very nice (but then the last guitar I had was a crappy HK$260 guitar, so what do I know :-E)


As you can see the high E string is missing.


And look, a thermometer! (like ... why?)


And finally a secret comparment. I found no wee in it. (.....)


So here you go. The guitar. Thanks Alex and thanks the whole Yan Fook Praise Team B!!