Today is the Chinese New Year. Me and Pat joked that this year is the year of Charlie, Pat’s golden retriever. There isn’t much new year atomsphere here in Vancouver. Unlike HK, the chinese new year is just yet another normal day. If there is no holidays, there isn’t no atomsphere. Althought in recent years, almost every politician has “Kung Hey Fat Choy” commercial aired in TV around this time as a mean to win chinese votes. It is funny to hear “gwai-lo” trying hard to speak chinese. I didn’t visit any relatives or friends since there is no one for me to visit. I did called a few friends, wished them good luck in the coming year and catch up with them. In the age of instant message and skype, the new etiquette is ask before you call. You never know the other side is free to chat with you or not. I feel odd calling other people just to chat over the phone paying long distance, but I can call them using skpye at ease. Festival days are good chances and convinient excuse to keep in touch with your old friends.

Tonight I went to Tojo’s to have our year end dinner with Pat and her family. Tojo is one of the best japanese resturant in Vancouver. The speciality of Tojo is the omakase menu, which you specify the amount you are willing pay and let the chef select the dishes for you. One of the fun of having omakase is you will always have surprise, since you have no idea how you will be served. The appetizers are really good, several dishes of interesting sashimi. However the main entree is very disappointing. Due to I am allegic to many shell fishes, except scallop, I end up having just a salamon roll and two pieces of sushi. The others has exotic roll like scallop wrapped with tamago, fresh crab on asparagus roll. The dessert is even worse, just normal green tea icecream in a plain bowl, not the kind of dessert I expected from Tojo’s. There was an indian water serving our table. Although his Japanese is really fluent, he just doesn’t quite fit in. I would rather have a japanese girl serving us instead. That indian guy claimed his is married, but we see him keep harrassing another waitress, putting his hand on her shoulders, etc. Anyways, my conclusion is Tojo’s is way over priced, for the same amount I paid, I can have really delicious sushi else where.

I finally have to say farewell to my old laptop, it is the first laptop I ever owned. It is given to me on my first day of work. It had worked trustfully for 5 years and it is time for it to retire. The company is moving everyone to critix, which is a windows thin-cilent, instead of giving each engineer a PC. The CS guy come by my desk and took it away. It maybe donated to poor school kids or simply go to trash. I wonder how useful a 5 years old PC to a school kid. It can’t even run smoothly anymore. I don’t really miss the laptop every much, it is a piece of crap anyways. The battery is long dead, it is only used as an extra screen for email and as a mp3 player. I did an upgrade to the laptop a few years ago to make it more usable. It is probably the only older model laptop with 512MB of RAM. I got the extra memory from the laptops of people who left the company. I swap out the memory a screwdriver, before the CS guys reclaim the laptop from the empty cubicle. I am looking into buying a cheap laptop for myself. Yes, it is convinient to have a laptop but I don’t really need one.

My company just had a small layoff today. All the R&D people of the microprocessor division in Sanata Clara site are let go, including my friend Suzanne. We had quited the custom MIPS processor market and the remaining few guys are working on printer processors ASIC for HP. We all had expected this day will come just the matter of time. The margin of doing ASIC out-source from other company is really low and we have too many people here in Burnaby, so it is quite nature to move the jobs back to the HQ. There is no company wide announcement about this layoff, not even a single email. However people still somehow know the news thru different channels. I don’t feel bad for those guys, I heard that they have a good saverage pacakge, and the job market in Silicon Valley is doing fine. They should able to find another job without any problem. The most puzzling move is the company is offered to hire some of them back as contractors to finish the project they are working on. Why can’t the company wait until the project finish before letting them go?

In order to take courses in SFU, one must register in an acedemic program, either credit or non-credit. Since I am looking into what to study after my M.Eng degree, I need to register into a program. Having a ph.d. is one of my goal, but probably not in the area of engineering as it is too differcult. I am highly interested in philosophy, which would be an field worth to pursuit as an interest. I thought about applying for philosophy grad school directly, but that would be a sucide mission. After I talked to the department advisor and first-hand experience from my first philosophy class, I know that I need to build a good foundation from sratch. High-level undergrad course is a good place to begin with and I can read the textbook of the low-level by myself. SFU offers post baccalaureate program for student with a bachelor degree. This program which lets you take any undergrad courses or even some grad course as you like. The only problem is that there is no information on how to apply for this program on the university website. I have been kicking like a human ball among the advisors of the registration office, the arts office and the philosophy office hunting for the answer. Hopefully I will land on the one advisor who knows the process at the end of the beauacracy chain.