I went to shopping with Pat this afternoon.  Unfortunately, after spending 3 hours in the mall, the only thing I bought is a polo shirt.  Not a very productive shopping trip.  I first went to Mountain Equiment Co-op then head towards Park Royal.  This two places has totally different shopping style.  I feel very comfortable selecting clothings in Mountain Equiment Co-op, while I am quite uneasy finding the right clothings in Park Royal.  I don’t know much about the clothings in general.  The clothings in Moutain Equiments are all functional, there are specification for me to look up.  I can compare their water-proof, warm-keeping, breathness, price then make an objective judgement.  On the other hand, the selection criteria of the clothings in Park Royalother is subjective.  I know what kind colour I like and whether the clothes is comfortable or not, but I can never tell I bought the right clothes.  If clothing style is purely subjective and there is no dispute on tastes, then at least I don’t have to care what others people think about my clothes.  But this is obviously not the reality, people judge you by what you wear.  Yet there is no objective rules to capture how people may judge you.  To make it worst, try to use statistic approach by simpily getting the most common fashion style won’t work.  Fashion is something contradictary on its own, it has to follow the trend, but at the same time blame the lack of uniqueness or character.  Almost policy in the old communist China is wrong, but at least they have done one thing right by making everyone wear the same style uniform everyday everywhere.  This policy is probably the only way to my problem in clothes shopping.  Ok, I do agree the Mao style unifrm is ugly.  Maybe we can fix the system by hiring some top fashion designers to make a better looking uniform.

In grade school or junor high, people love practical jokes. If the joke is harmless, at least physically, it is nothing but some nonsense fun. However I can’t believe someone who is in his mid-thirties still play practical jokes pulling the chair when someone trying to sit down. Yes, I was the victim this time and luckily I was not hurted. Actually, it is my own fault, I should be more aware of that baka colleague. You just can’t let your guard down one second when he is around. It is not the first time his stupid jokes offended friends in the group. I am just the lastest name added to the long list. I won’t even bother to demand for an apologize, since we all know he is shameless, never will, probably not able to, express any sense of sorry to anyone. Judging from his past records, you cannot trust him he to be mature enough to distinguish when is ok to have fun or when is not. I suspected he does not have any awareness about the responsibility of his own action. So you can’t really upset with someone who is simplily retarded. You can only feel sorry for him, maybe pray for him if you are religious. Well, maybe God can’t do much about him except writting him off as a counter example for the rest of us. Nor you can ignore him, he is just part of your work life. Just like everything else in life, it is full of unpredictable events. The only thing you can do is always be prepare and react fast to stay way from harms. The moral of this story is thy shoult never get close to that guy. I had paid my price for not listening to the advice of the previous victims. It is really my own fault.

It is my turn to be the PMC Idle. My old project is finished and the whole term is not assign to new project. There are rumors that the company is going to have another restructure next month. Right now, the executives are waiting other projects to finish, so they can realign the engineers and shuffle people between departments. Since we have almost nothing to do, we start collecting verification statistics and benchmark from the previous project, which is something never done before. In the past, we were rushed from one project to another, never have the time to do a proper postmortem analysis. In the project, we have run over 20000 simulations, combined CPU time is over 6 years. Ironically, the simulations spent 20 years sitting in the server farm waiting for CPU become available. I am not the only one out of work, my boss has nothing to do as well. He called a meeting trying to figure out something for us to work on. At the end, we decided we should just relax and take this time to learn something new. I have assigned myself read management books borrowed from the library and proposed a few verification infrastructure projects. The problem is we will have to go through a few hoops to get those pet projects approved by the upper management. In this company, we don’t have any system setup for personal research or development work. We can only envy those in 3M or Google who can spend 20% of their time working on fun pet projects.