I heard a meaningful story in the homily in the mass today. It is like this. There is a man goes to a tailor to custom make a suit. The tailor is very talented but not skillful, as a result the suit doesn’t fit him well, depise having very nice style. The pant is just too tight. He can’t walk comfortably. The tailor offered him discount for the suit and plead that he will lose money if the man don’t buy the suit. The man is too nice to refuse the tailor and end up with a unfit yet stylish suit walking out the door. Because of the suit is unfortable, the man walks funny. On his way home, he passed by a park where two man are hanging around. One of the man notice this guy with a new suit and says to the his friend, “I feel really sorry for that cripple.” His friend answer him, “Yes, but he got a really nice suit.” The morale of this story is that if you don’t fit something, don’t force yourself to fit in. Even if you are forced in and have a good result, you won’t get the credit for being good. People will only notice the one changes you, but not the true self of you.

Today, the header line of most of the newspaper is the ship accident in Egypt. More than a thousand people had died. This kind of accident happens once in a while in developing countries lacks of proper safety regulations. It is unfortunate, but this news doesn’t deserve being on the headline in Canada. It is just a single event happened in a far away country. The incident has no impact on our life, nor we can do anything to help. Maybe it will make us sympathy the victims and give donations. But if the systematic failure is not fixed, this type of accident will repeat again. The newspapers only use this disasters to catch eye balls by the large number of death. Every day, more than this number of death in Africa or Mideast are ignored, only because theese deaths are not news-worthy. I am disappointed on Newspapers these days that only care about their profit, and forget the mission of making the world a better place. Only a piece of news have impact on us, or we can impact on, worth to be on the headline.

In this school year, the food court in SFU has opened a “Bubble Boy” bubble tea franchise. Now every week during the break in my philosophy class, I will buy myself a bubble tea. In the first week, I am the only one getting it, and caught attention of some classmate. I am surprise some of them don’t know we can buy bubble tea on campus and some even never tasted bubble tea before. Last week, there is another guy joined me to get bubble tea. This week, we have 4 guys went over there in the break. It seems bubble tea drinking has gain momentum in the class and I would expect more people join us next week. There isn’t much to do around the classroom in the 15 minutes break anyways. Two of the guys drank bubble tea the first time today. They found that quite interesting. Slowly, bubble tea become a main stream drink of local Canadians. Maybe some day, we will see Starbucks serving bubble tea to cope with the trend.

Finally I my at work holidays comes to the end. Since my previous project was finished, I have been idling for a few weeks waiting for the new project assignment. I am officially joining a new project today and assigned new tasks. It is glad to have something to work on, I am actually eager to do some work. To be exact, I don’t realy mind getting paid with no output, but the fact is there is no free lunch in the world. If I want to get promoted and a raise, I have to deliver good performance. The new project is the new generation chip of the SONET old product line. I have been working in this product line for 3 years and hate to go back. My previous project on VoIP processor is way more interesting, and because of that I did really well on my performance evaluation. I tried my best to get off the hook, but unfortunately it is the only project in the deparment approved at this time. Plus, I am probably the only one left in the company know about the old testbench. I was quite upset about this project assignment when I first hear about it last week. But after talking to my boss and his boss, I learn to look at it more positively. Althought I havn’t got my promotion in this round, but I have more responsibility in the new project. I am no longer the script monkey at the bottom. I involve in not only planning the verification, but also determining the trade off between different approaches. This project only last half a year, I will try to give my best and see what comes out. If I don’t get my promotion after doing another good job, I know it is time to quit PMC. This plan should line up well with my plan to get my P.Eng.

I have been thinking about moving out of my current place for a while. The location is very inconvinient and quite far away from anywhere except work. With luck, I found an apartment rental near Joyce station, where is much closer to Pat’s place. The place is smaller, only 500 square feet, and it is a bit more expensive. However, it is at the 20th floor facing east in a 5 years old building. I can’t use all the empty spaces in my current place anyways. Since it matches all my criteria, I signed the rental contract right away. I am going to move in the last week of feburary. I having to find a moving company, since I have too many stuffs to move by renting an U-haul. I just started packing my stuff today, started with putting my toys in the display cabinate back to their boxes. Somehow I think I have encoutered a spiritual experience, I found inner peace with an empty minds when I am boxing my toys. I am also checking out the Ikea catalog. I know I need an extra bookshelf for sure. I may buy a few more pieces of furnitures if I come across something I like. Maybe a reading chair, another display cabinate and clothing drawers.