It is nice to have a reunion with my Lasalle buddies. This weekend I flew down to the Bay Area just because one of my old friend whom I havn’t met for 8 years come to visit. Last night we went to Karaoke after dinner. I havn’t been to Karaoke for a long time, the last time I went is last year in Ching’s wedding with this exact same group. Since we don’t have any girls in the group, someone has to fake a female voice when singing girl songs. It’s fun, but I bet our singing must be quite horrible.

This morning I went to have a flight with Derek. We took have a aero tour of the Bay Area, and I get to control the plane for a bit. It is the first time I actually fly a airplane. It is harder than I thought, the steering wheel is quite heavy and continously drifting due to heavy wind. I just have to keep the plane straight and turn to the right bearing. Derek is taking care of the throttle control and all those gauges. It’s quite an experience. I had wanted to fly a plane for a long time. One day, when I am settled down I will learn how to fly. I guess I will have to give up my toy collection for flying since it is quite an expensive hobby.

Today is both Mingwai and SoB’s birthday. We have a suprise birthday party for them. We bought them a birthday cake. After singing the birthday songs, we had the tradition Lasallian birthday ritual, which is punching their backs all together. It has been a long time since all of us get together, we talked a lot and had lots of laughs just like the old days.

Since I got my free iPod shuffle, I have been using it quite alot. Especially when I was doing my shopping or have to wait for something. I found that the lack of screen and the overly simply control is totally unnavigable. Skipping to a song or album I want to listen is next to impossible. The iPod shuffle is only good for listening to your old favourate songs, but not as a daily mp3 players for the latest album. After some thoughts, I found a work around to this problem. I reprogram the shuffle mode into switching between albums/directory. This can been done thanks to the rebuild_db script that allow me get rid of iTune and use the iPod shuffle as a plain USB mp3 player. The trick is setup rule files so that only the first song in each directory is added to the shuffle list. Finally, my iPod shuffle is as user friendly as the CD player in my car. I guess I can pospone buying a real iPod for a while, until I really desperate for a screen to know what song is playing at the moment.

Today I finally resume my work for my M.Eng project. I have touch it since my vocation to Europe, which is almost 2 months ago. It took me longer than expect to ramp up, I had forgot the code I wrote, and have to read my own poor comments to gain an insight of my mind back then. I setup the matlab script to generate voice traffic, and run the trace file thru a testing ns script. The next step is build shell script to launch simulation automatically, parameterize the testscipt and means to extra delay information of the data packet. After that, I have to run the simulation with voice and data traffic, but got to figure out what data traffic model to use first. With all the infrastucture setup, I can then concentrate on repeat the simulation on video trace and traffic prediction model. The more I tought about it, the more work it seems to be. I really have to focus and work hard or I won’t be able to graduate on time.

I had only played 15 minutes of soccer tonight. The reason is the court is double booked, and we only found out when we were there. We suppose to start the game at 10p and play until 12a, which is two good hours of excerise. It turn out that the court is booked by another party on 10:30p, so we got kicked out after 30 minutes. The time I spent in driving to Richmond is more than the actual game play. The court told us they had booked us in tomorrow instead. Too bad that I couldn’t make it to tomorrow’s game. Going down to Richmond two nights in a row is too much for me, not to mention the high gas price. Somehow I am surprised by the court low-tech booking mechanism. Everything is done over the phone or in person. Although they have a computer system to keep track of bookings, but that system is not on-line aviable.

This reminds me a recent HK news. The company helped the government to setup online booking system for government sport facilities are charged for making fake bookings. According to the contract, the company will get a hugh bonus if the on-line usage reach the quota ahead of schedule. The company is stupid enough to ask friends, relatives and even hire students to do fake bookings to reach the quota faster. How can it not arose the suspect of the adminstration if an exceptionally large number of users didn’t show up at their booked slot. The moral of this story, if you want to scam off someone, especially the government, please at least spend sometime to play devil’s advocate on the scamming scheme. Instead of hire stupid student, use that money to offer cash-back to real users would probably yield a higher usage naturally and legally.

I was organizing my toy display tonight and move the empty boxes on the shelf to make more room. I found myself has been following toy news on the internet closely, and participating discussion in the toy collector’s forum. I don’t find many people in real life share this same hobby as I do, maybe with the only exception Kenny. I think collection Japanese toy is more common in HK than here in Canada where there a lot more other things to collection. Unlike other people I met on the net, I didn’t buy random toy that appeals to me. I only buy the toy line I like most and to complete the line. I will sell off the toys from the line I dropped to free up some shelf space. I believe if I wait a bit longer, I could even turn a small profit from selling those toys. From now on, I will focus on just three major toy lines: all new Macross toys, Gundam HCM-Pro and non-MSV Gundam FIX. Occationally I may buy SoC if Bandai remake something I always wanted or owned as a kid.