I found taking care of Charlie, the golden retriever of Pat, is quite time consuming. I have to remember feed him every morning before I go to work and go home early to feed him dinner. Since he is very bored staying home all day, I try to walk him every night. Walk the dog is more time consuming that I had expected. Just want to the park close to Pat’s place and back takes over 15 minutes, and it would take more time if I let him run around in the park. For time when I’m around, Charlie is very lazy. He usually lays in front of the window or TV doing nothing, and very slow in responding to my commands. It is very easy to recognize dog’s facial expression to tell whether he is happy or sad. After this experience of living with a dog, I’ll definitely think twice before getting my own dog in the future.
All posts by hevangel
Layoff
There is another round of layoff today in the company. We had already lost track of the number of layoff, it maybe the fifth or the sixth round. It is not affecting the Headquarter in Burnaby at all. Over 60 engineers are let go in the Santa Clara design center, which is over 2/3 of the design team down there. It’s mainly due to the company decided to exit the custom MIPS core business, therefore we no longer need their expertise. We can foresee the closure of that division when we use the licensed core from MIPS instead the custom core in our own product. Upon hearing the news around lunch time, our usual group have a concern on the fate about Suzanne. Lucky that later in the day, she sent an email to all of us saying she is safe. From my experience and what I heard from other companies, it’s always more secure to work in the corporate headquarter or at least the regional main office. Tiny remote sites often become the first victim of downsizing.
Reinstall
Today continues the painful process of installing software. I get most of the software installed, and I realized I forgot to copy two very important pieces of information from my old hard drive, they are my firefox bookmark and palm desktop contact list. I wonder why can’t all the software save their data in one centralized location, so I only have drag one directory every time I update my system.
Computer Crash
Fortunately, I am able to recover the data from my harddisk after running fixboot, fixmbr, chkdsk /p and fdisk /mbr on the recovery console from the Windows XP CD. However, unfortunately, the OS is beyond repair, I can’t even start file explorer or even go online. To reinstall my computer, I have to find some disk space to host my data while I reformat the harddisk. So I end up buying a 200GB harddisk for backup, and since I am going to open up the case, I got myself extra 1GB of RAM. Now my system has 1.5GB RAM and 440GB harddisk space in total. I’m planning to use the new harddrive and the 512MB RAM in the MS cheap computer though. I still haven’t decide whether should I take advantage of that deal, but will see how it goes.
To save time, I’m going to install the essential software. I found I had installed way too many software that I had not even used once. It’s a painful and unproductive process that I want to go through as soon as possible.
On a side node, when I was messing inside the case, I accidentally pressed the stand-by button of the cable modem and I’m not aware of it. I called the support line to make myself look like a fool for asking why the internet doesn’t work when the cable modem in stand-by mode. While I was waiting for the tech support, the system always play meaningless messages. I find a very stupid one telling the customer who has problem with their internet access to visit their support website. Duh! If I can visit the support website, I won’t be calling this number, go figure.
Dual monitors
Finally I received my dual LCDs at work after waiting for almost two months since I had talked to Uncle Bob. Colleagues gathered around my cube today and check out the dual LCD setting. I am not sure how to measure the productivity increase using dual displays, but it definitely much more convenient to use. The moral of this story is that you will get what you want if you keep asking for it and ask it to the right person.
My windows machine is dead and it keep rebooting itself. I suspect some files of the OS is corrupted since it won’t even boot into safe mode. The only option I have is to re-install windows. I hope the windows recovery works so I won’t lost my data. Sigh.. I don’t have much time to re-install all the software.