Since I got my free iPod shuffle, I have been using it quite alot. Especially when I was doing my shopping or have to wait for something. I found that the lack of screen and the overly simply control is totally unnavigable. Skipping to a song or album I want to listen is next to impossible. The iPod shuffle is only good for listening to your old favourate songs, but not as a daily mp3 players for the latest album. After some thoughts, I found a work around to this problem. I reprogram the shuffle mode into switching between albums/directory. This can been done thanks to the rebuild_db script that allow me get rid of iTune and use the iPod shuffle as a plain USB mp3 player. The trick is setup rule files so that only the first song in each directory is added to the shuffle list. Finally, my iPod shuffle is as user friendly as the CD player in my car. I guess I can pospone buying a real iPod for a while, until I really desperate for a screen to know what song is playing at the moment.

Today I finally resume my work for my M.Eng project. I have touch it since my vocation to Europe, which is almost 2 months ago. It took me longer than expect to ramp up, I had forgot the code I wrote, and have to read my own poor comments to gain an insight of my mind back then. I setup the matlab script to generate voice traffic, and run the trace file thru a testing ns script. The next step is build shell script to launch simulation automatically, parameterize the testscipt and means to extra delay information of the data packet. After that, I have to run the simulation with voice and data traffic, but got to figure out what data traffic model to use first. With all the infrastucture setup, I can then concentrate on repeat the simulation on video trace and traffic prediction model. The more I tought about it, the more work it seems to be. I really have to focus and work hard or I won’t be able to graduate on time.

I had only played 15 minutes of soccer tonight. The reason is the court is double booked, and we only found out when we were there. We suppose to start the game at 10p and play until 12a, which is two good hours of excerise. It turn out that the court is booked by another party on 10:30p, so we got kicked out after 30 minutes. The time I spent in driving to Richmond is more than the actual game play. The court told us they had booked us in tomorrow instead. Too bad that I couldn’t make it to tomorrow’s game. Going down to Richmond two nights in a row is too much for me, not to mention the high gas price. Somehow I am surprised by the court low-tech booking mechanism. Everything is done over the phone or in person. Although they have a computer system to keep track of bookings, but that system is not on-line aviable.

This reminds me a recent HK news. The company helped the government to setup online booking system for government sport facilities are charged for making fake bookings. According to the contract, the company will get a hugh bonus if the on-line usage reach the quota ahead of schedule. The company is stupid enough to ask friends, relatives and even hire students to do fake bookings to reach the quota faster. How can it not arose the suspect of the adminstration if an exceptionally large number of users didn’t show up at their booked slot. The moral of this story, if you want to scam off someone, especially the government, please at least spend sometime to play devil’s advocate on the scamming scheme. Instead of hire stupid student, use that money to offer cash-back to real users would probably yield a higher usage naturally and legally.

I was organizing my toy display tonight and move the empty boxes on the shelf to make more room. I found myself has been following toy news on the internet closely, and participating discussion in the toy collector’s forum. I don’t find many people in real life share this same hobby as I do, maybe with the only exception Kenny. I think collection Japanese toy is more common in HK than here in Canada where there a lot more other things to collection. Unlike other people I met on the net, I didn’t buy random toy that appeals to me. I only buy the toy line I like most and to complete the line. I will sell off the toys from the line I dropped to free up some shelf space. I believe if I wait a bit longer, I could even turn a small profit from selling those toys. From now on, I will focus on just three major toy lines: all new Macross toys, Gundam HCM-Pro and non-MSV Gundam FIX. Occationally I may buy SoC if Bandai remake something I always wanted or owned as a kid.

I got the DVD with everyone’s WYD photos from Jan last night, it’s over 3.5GB in total. I have been checking out the pictures this afternoon. I tried to delete some blurry and meaningless ones without me in the picture. This process took me almost 2 hours, and I reclaim 500MB disk spaces. It interesting to check out other’s pictures. Although most of them are identical shots from different angle, some of them do capture important moments. I was taking to my colleague the other day on the problem of organizing photos. He is using Adobe albums to tag all this photos for easy searching. I just dump all my pictures in a directory with sub folders sorted chronologically. I have to remember the when about of the event in order to dig out some old pictures. The only logical solution to this problem is desktop facial recognition, cameras with embed GPS and album software able to sync up with the outlook calender. Every information about the picture: time, place, event and people is then fully captured. This will once for all solved the problem of trying to identify that mysterous picture from the past.