The winter has finally came to Vancouver. In a cold winter morning, it is very hard to me to get up from my warm bed. When I woke up, I just want to stay in the bed for another moment. Sometimes I will even fall back into sleep for a little longer. The most cruel way to wake someone up in this cold weather is take his blanket away, expose him in the chilly cold air. The battle of fighting for the blanket is vigorous enough to garuntee a complete wakeup.

Other than the lack of will to get up in the morning, having hotpot is another feature of the winter. Me and Pat went to Graville hotpot in crystal mall last night. Other than the price is a bit expensive, I actually quite like that resturant. The resturant is very crowded, but luckily we went early so we don’t have to wait in line. We ate the hotpot dinner relaxly, sat in the resturant for almost 2.5 hours. I didn’t order the usualy beef slices because Pat don’t really like eating beef. We had lamb slices, ostrich meat and goose intestine, items that you can’t find in the menu of all-you-can-eat hotpot places. The portion is quite big, make two of us really stuffed. The best part of the dinner is the hotpot soup base, not the orignal clear or satay broth. It was balsam pear with pig stomach, very tasty but not cheap. I never had goose intestine in hotpot before, I really like the texture, kinda chewy. I rather spend a bit more and have better food, than going to all-you-can-eat resturant trying to stuff as much as I can with cheap food. This is the my philosophy of less is more. I rather have less in quatity, but have more in quality. This philosophy not only applies to dining out, also applies to traveling as well.

I came across a very funny page today. Everyone knows Hello Kitty, and here it comes the latest cute toys for kids, Hello Jesus. Among all the items, I like the Hello Caesar wallet most. It is an in-joke of Mark 12:17: And Jesus answering said unto them, Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s…, that refers to money.

I have been spending endless nights in debugging the UMTS extension to ns2, which the simulator for my thesis work. Ns2 is an open source freeware, one of the two most used simulation softwares for analyzing network preformence. The only other alternative is Opnet, a commercial product that no student can afford and not popular enough to have pirate copy to download. I don’t want to work on the slow servers in the stinky school’s lab, therefore I choose ns2 for my work. The core of ns2 is relatively stable, other than lack of documentation, it is fairly good. Alas, the UMTS extension is poorly maintained. The original coder of that module only debug it for his own research. It still has lots of holes in the logics. Worse, there is absolutely no document on implemenation, I can only guess the function of the code and try to fix it. I found to debug hardware is easier debug than software. The major problem in debugging software is I can’t have the wavefrom traced. I can’t run the simulation all the way till the end and then check the state changes back in the timeline. Instead, I have to set breakpoints and step throught the code carefully. This is a very time consuming and repeatitive task.

Ping pong, also known as table tennis, is a common game played among children in Hong Kong. I remember there was a ping pong table in my primary school. Kids play ping pong during recess. The most common format of game is winner stays, each game is up to 3 points. There ain’t much to do in recess, so kids all line up for the game. I am never good at this game and I only know the basics, so I lost almost instantly. Thus I spent more time in the line than playing, and eventually lost interest to this game. Ping pong is not popular in Lasalle, never to say in highschool here in Canada, so I rarely play this game. In university, there is a ping pong table in the engineering student room. Just like in primary school, the table is a monoploy of the good players. Recently, PMC setup a recreation room and brough in a ping pong table. Not many people play ping pong seriously at work. I manage to find some players at my level, and got some pointers from my friends. Finally, I re-discover the fun of this game after so many years. With regular practise and causal game, my ping pong skill will improve to a point that is at least presentable.

Guacamole is the green sause usually come with fajitas. Usually I perfer salsa, the red sause, more over guacamole, with one exception at the Stone Frog. Stone Frog seems to become the default resturant of choice for our subsystem team lunch. Last time when Mike and Mileend came over, we went there for lunch, and we went back there for our tape-in lunch this afternoon again. The famous dish at Stone Frog is their mexican meal that come with make in front of your guacamole. Guacamole is very simple to make. First prepare all the ingredients: The ingredients are: half of an avocadoe, chopped onion, jalapeno and tomatos, dry leaf oregano, salt and pepper, and lime juice. Then put all the ingredient into a bowl and mix them up. I tried jajita last time and I ordered the quesadilla this time. Both taste very good. I finished my bowl of guacamole and had three of salsa to go with my quesadilla. The meal is very satisfying, especially it is paid by the company. The only downside is after such a full lunch, I feel kinda sleepy in the afternoon, and very thristy from the salty Mexican sauces.