Finally, he had passed away after long suffering from Pakinson’s dicease at age 84. He is the 264th pope, the figure head of the Catholic church, which I belongs to. He is an admirable man, although I don’t agree on his ultra conservative view on moral issues, he is well deserved for his credits in fighting against communism, dialogs with other religions and stand up against Bush for world peace. In order to pay tribution to him, I decided to go to mass tomorrow morning. After all the dust are settled, the next focus will be who is the next pontiff. I wish a priest with similiar personality and as respectful as John Paul II will be chosen, however a liberal mind like John XXIII is more than welcome. With the many conservative cardinals appointed by John Paul II, the chance of electing a conservatives one is high. However, we could not rule out the work of the Holy Spirit that may lead the church to another path. John XXIII had succeed under the heavy installment of conservative cardinates by the formor Pius XII, history may repeat itself again. The only concern may arise if a liberal pope is indeed elected, there maybe conspiracy to kill him like the short-lived John Paul I before John Paul II. Anyways, I was worrying that the health condition of John Paul II may not allow him to show up in the World Youth Day. Now, at least it is guarantee that I will able to meet a Pope this summer, no matter who he is.
All posts by hevangel
traffic ticket
I had my speed ticket disputed today, by luck the cop didn’t show up and I’m free of charge. I think the whole speeding ticket system is a scam of the government to make money. I got ticket on the down hill section of Boundary Road on a fine sunday by speed traps. It is almost guarantee every driver will be over the ridiculously low speed limit on that section. The police just stop whoever coming down and issue the tickets, what a easy way to make quick bucks. By disputing the ticket, not only you have a chance to walk away free, you are making sure the government cannot profit from this scam. In a long run, if everyone dispute their tickets, they will stop issuing all the unnecessary tickets, and put the police force into better use, such as catching criminals. To learn more about how to fight a traffic ticket and why the current ticket system doesn’t server the good public, please visit here
legal language
Tonight our project team had a team building dinner with the leaders from Saskatoon. The food and beer are great, and most important the expense is covered by PMC. In the dinner, we had talked about how expensive it is to file a patent. It costs tens of thousands of dollar to hire a lawyer to word the patent using those legal terms. Then I came up with an idea, why don’t we have software automating this process? Legal language is a subset of normal language, and each word has a specific meaning, which is similiar to logic statements understand by computers. The goal is to create a software that will translate contracts and patents written in daily english into a legal document. It would be a great idea for inter-discipline research among the liguistic, CS, and law departments.
Bittorrent
Bittorrent is the de facto peer-to-peer file sharing protocol. According to a latest internet traffic survey, bittorent traffic alone account for 30% of total internet traffic. If you search hard enough, you could pretty much find anything you want to download, from movie to music to anime to software. Comparing to other p2p service, the advantage of bittorrent is the more user the faster download speed, due to its clever distributed torrent exchange algorithm among the cilents. Yesterday I come across a cool bittorrent T-shirt when surfing the web, it has the BT logo ans says “Give and ye shall recieve” at the back. I’d like to buy one to support this wonderful protocol and make a statement on file sharing. And yes, I against the copyright law.
sleepy
It is simply inhumane to have eight thirty meeting in the morning right after a long weekend. I did make it to the meeting on time, but the side effect is I feel sleepy all day due I deprived of sleep in the morning. There is another 2 hours boring presentation in the afternoon, and logically I end up fishing during most of that meeting. It’s unlike in the school days which I can sleep comfortabily in class, I had to try keep myself awake in the meeting. The presentation is done by a marketing guy on our new product. I wonder how successful can the product be if similiar presentation also goes to the customers or the executives.