Last night when I heard Israeli striked Lebanon in the news, I thought it was just yet another endless conflict in middle east and promptly forget about it. Today when I came to work, I found out one of my team members is having his vacation in Beirut at the moment. This incident suddenly seems more personal and arose my interest. The manager have received a short email from him today. He told us he is safe, but he can’t come back to work since the airport is bombed by Israel. He said he is living in the safer part in the city and trying to get on a boat to Greece. The team wonder whether he can seek refugee in the Canadian Embassy in Lebanon. We have came up with creative ways to escape the war zone and have some really good laughts. I guess it sounds funny because the whole thing is just so surreal to us. I am sure my colleague won’t find it funny since his life is on the line. I am expecting to hear many exciting stories when my colleague make his way back home.

Today the co-op student from another project came ask me questions about verificaiton. I guess I am the only guy in the area knowledgable in verification and yet kind enough to answer her questions. Her task is pretty straight forward, testing a minor change in one of the blocks. She came up to me and asked, “What do I have to do?”. I guess she is kinda expecting I will give her instructions in a number of easy to follow steps. Instead of answering her questions directly, which is probably the fastest way to send her away, I start telling her verification methodology. Like the difference between white box and black box testing, what is a stimulus, a checker, etc. Then with background in verification methodology, I asked her to think about how she want to test the device. A few hours later, she came back and ask me how to write the testbench. Again, I pointed her to the testbench frame work training slides. I think it is more important teach someone how to learn and think than simply giving the him the answer. In engineering, as well as in life, it is more important to ask the right question than get the right answer.

In my metaphysics class, the profressor talks about the nature of God and the source of theology. There are two sources of theology, experience and revealed. Theology from experience is easy to understand, namely the natural theology, ideas inheritated from St. Thomas Aquinas. However theology from revealed is different from what I assumed, it is solely based on authority, either the authority of the Bible or the Pope. Contrary to popular beliefs, revelations does not belong to reveal theology, revelation is actually a from of personal experience, so it belongs to natural theology. The problem is where the revealed theology comes from in the first place, some of them are rooted from natural theology, but more are just arbitary thoughts preserved by the authority for different reasons. I think to save christianity, we have to place natural theology above revealed theology. Reveal theology can only served as a mean to an end rather than the end itself. I was discussing orthodox and heresy of christian in anther forum. I proposed inventing a new school of theology that will rendering fundamentalist (and most of evangelist) heresy. I think using the distinction between natural and reveal theology is the right direction of this new theology.

I found driving to and from work without audio books is really boring. I can listen to my old CDs, which are merely background noise. Or I can listen to new mp3 downloads, which mostly are just mediocratie songs. So I search the bittorrent sites and downloaded all the audio books I found interesting. There are over 10 of them. Now, I have another delimma, how can I listen to the audio books? My iPod shuffle is not very user friendly for mp3s in general, worse for audio books. I have to press too many buttons to start playing when I start the car. I want to get a real iPod but the current generation has been out on the market for almost half a year. The next generation should be just around the corner. I don’t want to spent several hundred dollars then see a price drop in a few weeks after my purchase. I have to wait for the next iPod release cycle. Then I can decide whether to buy the new generation at the same price or the old generation at a cheaper price. For the mean time, I will resort to an ancient method, burning audio CDs. Althought it is a bit wasteful burn the audio books to CDs, since mostly likely I will only listen them once. However, just think about how much I would have to pay for if I buy the audio books. The cost of blank CD is nothing. I can also lent the audio book CDs to my friends.

Italy won the world cup final. I was watching the game with Pat at Commerical Drive, the Italian Town in Vancouver. It is really crowded, we couldn’t find any seat in any pub. Luckily we are able to squeeze inside a small pizza resturant with a large TV. There was over a hundred people packed inside the small corner shop. It is not very comfortable, I have to half stand, half lean on a table for the whole game. But it has very good atomsphere, everyone supports Italy. The whole place got worried in the second half of the game when Italy under heavy attack by France. Then we all cheered when Zidane got kicked out with a red card. The penalty shotout is really tense, the whole place was quiet during the 5th goal then bursted into joy when it scored. People flocked to the center of the street to celebrate Italy winning the game. The Police blocked off traffic going into the street and turn it into a outdoor party. There were seas of Italian flags, people were singing and dancing in the intersection. It was a really good experience.

Here is some pictures I took today.