This is the time of the Winter Olympics games. The game has been on going for 6 days, I just watched it the first time today. It is a hockey game of Canada against German and we won five to one. I didn’t watch the game intentionally. It is just happen to be my friends wanted to watch the game and pick a restaurant with big screen TV to have lunch. I am not very fond of watching sports events in general. It is fun to watch the team you can associated with occasionally. But I don’t see the reason to follow the game statistics. Those are temporal knowledge that changes every year and other than as chit-chat topics among guys, it is absolutely useless. I would like to know more about the psychology of a sports fans.

Today during lunch time, the driver has to stop by BCAA on our way back to office. He said it would only take a moment and left the key with us. It ended up so long that we were tempted to drive away his car. While we were waiting, someone started the topic on what do I think what I will be in 10 years, as well as what other people will be in 10 years. I am turning 30 this year, and I will be 40 in ten years. I have a few versions of my future but none is solidified at this point. One thing I am sure is I will be married and have kids. I also made comments on other people went to lunch. One of them is a girl, and my standard prediction is she will be married and have kids. Isn’t that prediction suitable for all girls? The other one will have a stable life, if PMC didn’t go bankrupt, he will probably stay in this company. The remaining one is a bit tricky since he is always single. I joked about he will become a priest. It is not impossible if I can convince him come to the church camp this year and renew his spiritual growth. The only problem I am not very convincing talking about spirituality. I can only attract him to come with Pat’s single friends in church. Maybe when the camp has some invitation material, I will try him again.

Every year around this time, I have to headache about buying Valentine’s day gift for Pat. I went to Metrotown after work today to do the shopping. I found I have early symton of shopping-phobia. I feel uncomfortable walking into a shop without knowing exactly what I want to buy. In particular, I am afraid to buy anything involves subjective judgement. Luckily I came across something I think Pat would like and solved my problem. On my way out, I spotted the Footlocker next to T&T has this year’s model Nike ACG hiking boot on sales. I have been wearing this series for many years, this will be my sixth pair. So even the boot I am wearing now is not broken, I can buy an extra pair as reserve.

Yesterday, two seperate group of people asked me to go Whistler, the first group are friends from work and the second group are my cousins. Unfortunately, I was booked by Pat well in advance, and end up staying in door all day. Since the nice weather outside and the fact that I still have three Whislter pass. I carved to go to skiing so much that I go to Whislter alone today. The driving is not too bad, I left home at 6:30a and arrived at 8:15a. I didn’t stop by McDonald’s on my way and found out half an hour earlier makes a big difference. The mountain is empty when I have my first run. I always wanted to take skiing lessons in Whistler, but none of my friends are interested. They don’t want to improve their skills. They only want to zoom down the mountain in high speed. Whistler has ski lesson promotion this week, it only cost $40 for a full day lessons. What a good deal! I don’t have to wait in line at the chair lifts and tables are resevered for the ski school in the cafeteria in lunch time. The lesson in Whistler is much better than in Cypress. I took level 5 today, which is much toughter than level 6 in Cypress. The instructor teaches us lots of drills to make us ski properly, then he took us down on black diamond runs. With the explaination, I found black diamond runs is not as hard as I thought, I can manage to come down smoothly. Althought my knees and legs muscles really hurt because of the up and down motions. The class is done at 3p and I don’t have any energy left to ski more. So I left Whistler at 3:30p after getting change. Driving back home is not as relaxing as driving in, but since there was still lights, it’s not too bad. I can’t think about the pain and sour my muscles will have tomorrow morning. Gota sleep early tonight.

In my new project, what I had worried about has came true. As I expected, this product family is cursed. When all you heard from the managers is reuse, you know it’s a crappy project that kill your creativity and innovation. The original schedule is finish the chip in 6 months, which is quite tight but still acceptable. Now, the marketing guys want us to get it done in 4 months, so they can sign the deal with Nortel. Which means the decision is to sacrifice quality for speed. Before the chip is even taped-out, we already plan for rev B. Some less important features will not be verified, and all the devleopment work in the testbench is axed. What’s left to do in verification is script monkey’s work. Think about the positive side, I can escape from this project 2 months earlier if things line up properly. Hopefully I don’t have to work in rev B of this chip. I can imagine rev B will be even more nasty, just thinking about all the corners we cut in rev A.