Sports fans

I am not a crazy sport fans. I like watching hockey and socceer, but I won’t follow the score of every game in the season. I would start watching when the team is in the playoff or in international tournament. I won two tickets to watch Canucks games, which is the 2nd last game of the season. This year Canucks is having a close call on getting into the final and the game I am going to watch is life or death match, should be quite exciting. I was discussing the chance of Canucks going into playoff with colleagues during lunch. I just couldn’t understand why they can be so crazy about watching hockeys. I can understand watching the game as a social event to have good time with friends. I can also understand watching the game as an entertainment like watching movies. I can understand watching the game to support your national team. But the city teams in the major league are merely business, how can you attached to a company whose solely purpose is to profit from you? The thing puzzle me most is the thrill of unknown when watching the game. What is the difference between this thrill than the thrill from gambling? Maybe I am too logical to be a sports fans, I can only be a sports spectator.

How not to date a girl

This is a true story happen to a friend of mine. This guy like this girl for many years, everyone knows about this. He had made several attempts but all failed. Here is his latest attempt. He got some hockey tickets from his friend, he decided to ask the girl out for a date. Mistake number one, unless the girl is hockey fan, normally a hockey game is not attractive enough nor able to show your sincereness. A better choice of event would be a concert, musical, or anything that is romantic. Then instead of asking the girl himself, he let a common, although good friend to the girl, do the job. Mistake number two, never let a 3rd party involving in the dating process, unless it is a stunt that you can’t handle alone. The result is quite obvious, he got rejected once again. This time he even got hilmulated by the girl. I really feel sorry for that guy, but I just can’t stop laughting at his foolishness. Sometimes I wonder, why can’t that girl give him a chance? In my opinion, as a friend of him, I think the guy is pretty decent, other than he is a bit boring, not handsome enough and probably have absolutely no common sense on dating tactics.

Bitchar-G

I brought my Tomy Bitchar-G mini remote control AE86 back to my office. I put it in my cubilce as my new cubicle toy. I have bought it for a few years, but never have any chance to play it at home. The motor of the car is not powerful enough to run on home carpet. I attempted to run it on my desk, which should be big enough to set up a race track, however it’s coverd with document. Fortunately, the carpet at work has much less resistance, so the car can run in the aisle. My colleagues sitting in my aisle seems very interest to my tiny RC car. I let them drove the car for a while and they are quite impressed that this tiny RC car is nicely built. I am thinking of buying a few more Bitchar-G and bring them to work. So when we are bored writing codes all day long, we can have a car race to relax our mind. I will have to make sure the remote runs on different frequence and all the cars has the same motor. Otherwise, it is no fun if one car over power another too much and end up always winning the race.

Personal traits.

Today I spent all my morning unpacking the boxes in my new cubicle and setting it up. The new cubicle is located on the east side of the building and because of that I found the temperature is hotter than my old cubicle due to sun shine in the morning. One of the first thing I do is to look for the temperature control and make my side of the building cooler. Alison, whom I went to Waterloo with, walked by saw me fixing the temperature control and made a comment. She said this action is so remarkably Horace such that I am already changing the AC setting before settling in. In lunch time, we were talking about the new Audi A3 a colleague just bought. The A3 has a new gear box system, which has two gears instead of one, so the time between shifting is reduced. How the system is one set of gear controls odd gears, and the other set controls even gears. When the driver shift from 2nd gear to 3rd gear, the other gear already pre-fetch the 4th gear for the next shift. After hearding the explanation, I naturally pose a question on how the computer know which gear to pre-fetch. When the car is runnin gin 2nd gear, how does the system know whether the next shift will be 1st or 3rd gear. The others heard my questions, just assume I like to stress test anything I come across. Apparently, they never thought of this scenario. Sometimes I wonder, am I born too curious or have I been working in verification for too long?

CSIA

This weekend I am taking CSIA level 1 again. I took it two years ago and failed. After two more years of practice and a lot more mileage, I think I am more prepared this time. Moreover, my instructor last week told me to give it a try. Althought, the CSIA course in Cypress is $150 more expensive than the one in Seymour, it really worth the money. In Seymour, we had only 1 instructor for 20 students. In Cypress, we have 3 instructors for 24 students and we rotate instructor every day so we get to see different teaching style. I have more attention from the instructor and better skill improvment in Cypress. I did pretty good yesterday, the instructor said my balance and stance is pretty good, he can see I have been taking lessons. Today I did not so good. Normally I only edge my shaped ski to turn so I am not good at privoting. That gets me a bit worry about whether I will able to pass. When I woke up yesterday and today, I have a feeling that maybe I don’t not really want to do it, I shouldn’t register after all. I think this feeling came from my fear about failing the course. Since a little kid, I am always good at exams. The CSIA course is probably the first exam I failed miserably. I guess unless I conquer it this time, I will always have a shadow in my mind.

Boot camp

I have a friend who recently quited PMC, moved back to China joining Huawai as a marketing engineer. The job description seems pretty normal when he applied and interviewed for the job. Before he starts, he was told that he will have a two weeks long orientation training. This still looks pretty ok up to this point. Since he is from Canada, the company provided him accomdation as part of the benefit and he gladly stays there until finding a better place. On the first day of work, he was waken up at 6a.m. in the morning. Instead of normal boring meeting with powerpoint slides introducing the company, he was sent down to an assembly hall with 300 hundred other new comers. The company make them sit straight and take attendance in military style by standing up and yell at the top of your lung. Then after the attendance, they was sent to court yield to pratice marching, running laps and do push ups. At the end of the first day, my friend feels something is really wrong and flee back to HK. He contacted the HR department and found out they put him into the local orientation instead of orientation for foriegners. I wonder what kind of company makes its employees literally go through a boot camp? Maybe it is not that surprising since Huawai is funded by the Chinese Army after all. Now, I am curious on what kind of orientation will the foriegners have.

Move cubicle

I just recived a move cubicle notice today where the move is tomorrow. They only give me 1 day notice to pack my stuff. It really throw my work schedule off since it pretty mcuh costs half a day to pack and another half a day to unpack. I prefer to have at least a week of notice so that I can plan my work accordingly. I have checked out my new cubicle. This is one of my primary concern. The new cubicle is closer to the rest of the project team and everyone in the verification group will sit in the same aile. The location is as good as my existing cubicle, the area is not too noise. The only obvious draw back is I am sitting far away from the team lead right now, so no one really knows when I come to work. After I have moved, I will be sitting right next to my boss, so I probably have to come in more on-time, say 10a.m. every day. In my company, there is an unwritten rule on seat arrangement. The boss gets the windows seat, then more junior you are, the closer to the aile exit. I am moving into the 2nd cubicle to the window. I think that is a good sign, or maybe I am just thinking too much.

Cooking

Tonight I cooked in my new home for the first time. I have been too busy to cook for the past two weeks since I moved in. Although what I did was really cook rice and vegetable and heating my food supply left by my mom’s last visit. I am a bit sick of eating out every night. I ran out of ideas where or what to eat and got tried of food court or resturants around my area. Moreover, I don’t like the MSG taste and all the grease served in those places. Eat simply at home can also save money while staying health at the same time. Since I am the only customer of my cooking. I can determine the trade off among complexity, look, taste and convinience. The main goal of my cooking is easy to prepare and speed, all the rest can be sacrifice.

Personal touch

My new home is almost finish all the arrangment. I have bought some new furnitures and make the place pleasent to live. Pat has complained that my place lack a personal touch. She said it is too boring without colourful decoration and lack of personal style. I don’t want to argue with her but I think my new place has my own style and it is pretty good. I won’t object if she add things with her style to my place, just don’t make me change my style to suit her taste. I don’t understand why woman always complains man don’t have artistic style. Only gay man cares about artistic sytle. My style is totally pragamatic. In my ideal home, everything should be placed behind glass or inside a cabinet in a well organized maner. This way I can minimize the time I spent on dusting and able to locate all the things quickly. I don’t care much about the colours. It just happen to be plain colour stuffs are usually cheaper than colourful ones. Moreover, plain colour can never go wrong with each other, while mixing bright colour stuffs can look really bad unless you plan well ahead of time. I don’t think stylish decoration or furniture can truely reflect the owner’s taste, since the design work can simply be contracted out to the professionals. The only things in a home can truely tells the characters of a person is his bookshelf and his collection. These two things are not some one time job that can be done and forget, it takes time to build up the library and display case. Of course, I have to assume the person read the books he buys and treasure the items he collects. It would totally off if someone just buy books for decoration and collect items for investment.

Toy display

I have came to the final stage of moving to a new place. The only thing left to make my home complete is take my toys out from the box and put them in the display cabinet. I used to have one display cabinat from Ikea and it ran out of space before I moved. So I bought a billy bookcase with glass door as my second cabinet from Ikea. The first criteria of a display cabinet is that it have to keep out the dust. It would be a lot of work to clean up the toys provided my place usually is very dusty. It took me almost a week to setup my first cabinet. I only unbox a few piece every day, since I would feel bored if doing too many boxes in one go. I have started setting up my second cabinet, done the upper two most shelf so far. The only items left are the Gundam fix and Hcm-pro series. One of my problem is decide which toy boxes to keep and which I can throw away. Putting back the toy into original boxes save lots of problem when moving, the only concern the boxes takes up lots of space. I have decided to put the unnused accessories of each toy into a seperate ziplock bag and then put the empty boxes in the locker downstairs to save space. With my new display cabinet, I think it has enough space for the growth of my toy collection for another two years.