Normally I do most of my printing at work.? Today is one of the special occassions I have to print something at home.? Unfortunately, I just found out my printer is out of ink.? It is a free printer come with my Dell laptop.? I don’t expect the trial ink cartridge would use up so soon.? It could be the a misfunction of the cartridge.? Anyways, I check out the price of replacement cartridge from the web.? A set of original colour and black cartridge costs $60 with shipping, the cloned version costs $40.? That is almost as expensive as buying a new printer.? I decided to write off the free printer since its print quality quite poor to begin with.? With luck, I saw a decent HP laser printer on sales this week at Futureshop, it costs only $90!? I drove there at once and take it home.? So far, I have absolutely no complain about my new printer.? Many years ago I used to have a HP deskjet 500, the first generation ink jet printer.? This trusty printer is so reliable that it has accompanied for me almost 10 years.? It survived three upgraded of my computer and travelled half the globle form HK to Canada.? If my new laserjet doesn’t disappoint me, I will be a loyal customer for HP printers.

Someone made a comment about my taste of reading.? He asked how come I am interested in reading differcult books loaded with tons of theories.? He said he would fall asleep reading those boring books, especially if the book is in English.? He wants to know my seceret.? I guess reading those differcult books is just part of my reading habit.? A few years ago, I still used to read novels for entaining purpose.? Accustomed to novels makes you not scare of wordy pages.? I out grown popular novels without much substance and move into novels with some intellectual values.? Then my otaku spirit gots me interested in know the big differcult terms used by the authors.? So I start reading some introductory books on that specific subject.? Most of time, that would satisful my curiosity for knowledge.? However, there are a few subjects I am highly interested in and start reading original theory wanting to know more.? The reading appetite for differcult books has to nurture small steps at a time.? Start with familiar the vocabulary, then have the basic concepts of the ideas and slowly move towards the more differcult theories.? For example: Someone read Da Vinci’s Code and fascinated by the history of early church.? Then he read some introductory materials about the early church, understand the difference between the competing christian sects.? Then he may find he agree with the Arianism version of Jesus more than the mainstream christianity version of jesus.? Then he can read more on theology about Jesus, the political struggle between orthodox and heretic, etc.? At this stage, he is already reading some very differcult academic books with in depth knowledge.? It can all be started from a popular fiction, as long as your are curious.

Finally I finished watching the first eposide of all anime released this season and wrote a short critic for each of them. It is really a extraordinary task. Normally, I only select the anime I have interest to watch, never step out the genre I am so comfortable. This exercise of sampling every single anime is really an eye opener for me. I broaden my knowledge in anime and I learnt to appreciate other’s taste. Out of the 20+ anime showing this season, only a handful of them are truely master piece applies to almost everyone. Then it is followed by some winners of each genre but their markets are limited due to audience’s perference. The first quater can stand the test of time and will have rewatch value. Over half of the anime are factory mass production comes in formulate of different packaged plot, character design, mecha, gimmich. These majority are pure entertainment commodity, conusmed, enjoy and then forget by the audience. In the bottom, there are about a quarter of the anime are truely garbage. They have absolutely no value, should avoid like plague. I don’t think I will ever do this again. It is just too demanding to watch everything and no need to mention sometimes it is actually boring. That’s why anime review is so important which helps me select what I really want to watch. I truely appreciate their honourable work in serveing all the anime fans.

I am a grade C philosophy student.? I just got back my philosophy essay and I got a C again.? I talked to the professor after class today when the group headed over to pub for a drink.? My problem is I am too obessive with presenting my own philosophy, neglecting the requirement of the assignment which is to criticize the philosopher in our text.? I am not very focus in my attack to his arguments, trying to cover too many things at the same time without giving a through thought on each of my points.? I also misunderstood part of his argument, so some of my criticisms are just attacking strawman.? It is always more interesting to talk about your own idea than criticizing others point of view.? However, this is the fundamental technics in philosophy or thinking in general.? Just like learning to play piano, before you can preform a lively music, you have to spend countless boring hours practicing the scale.? In philosophy, before you can write about your original ideas, you have to spend time in learning how to cross examine ideas from those famous dead guys.? Without this fundamental learning experience, you just don’t know how to present your ideas in froms others can understand.? It is a long way to go for me.? I have already dream up of a few dozen topics I could work on in philosophy.? I should worry about building my thesis later.? Now I just focus on learning the technical stuffs in the trade of philosophy.

Today I spent the whole day in meeting, from 10a.m. to 4p.m., lunch inclusived.? Our tool vender, Candence, visited us to give us update on their latest tool.? The license fee of those tools cost more than my salary by a two to one factor.? This is one reason why my job is fairly safe from outsourcing to India.? The Indian guys still have to use the same number of license as me, which drawf the cost saved in salary.? The meeting first start with us complaining the problems with their tools, we have gave them a long list of features enhancement.? Then followed by some presentation of their project roadmap.? They keep telling us the new features in the next version of their products.? I doubted the credit fo those semi-sales pitches.? From our past experience, we are manage to stress the new feature to their limits and crash the tool within a few weeks.? Then we spend endless time learning how to work around those limitation.? The products are just never as good as advertised.? The final section is a close door meeting between the managers to dicuss the pricing details of the tool.? I think we are simply paying too much.? The problem is there is no real alternative.? There are only two major EDA tool vender, and each tool has a very steep learning curve.? We are basically locked in with them.? On the flip side, the EDA is not a very good business either.? The are only limited number of customer specified in semiconductor design would by their tools.? In their road map, they call it major milestone for product deployment when they got 10 cusomters!