I went to 3 farewell events for my colleagues in one day. First it’s the farewell lunch for Renee, then afternoon I went to beer and wings for Scott, and at least I hopped to the pub for Renee’s party again. There are many people leaving the company lately. Almost all the capable people are gone and join some startups. Somehow I have a feeling my boss will be next one to go. He was recruited into PMC by Scott, and now Scott and a VP who once wanted to promote him to manager had joined that startup, if they need a verification head, who are they going to hire?
Tonight is the final session of Life in the Spirt Seminar, I was expecting something exciting to happen. Instead of miracles from the Holy Spirit, all I got is a really boring mass with a long-winded priest. In conclusion, the only benefit I got from 7 weeks LSS is having a better relationship with Pat. I don’t think I had changed much spiritually. Since the average age of the class is over 50, maybe I’m just too young for these supernatural experience.
Today after the meeting with Dr. Hardy, on my way back to Burnaby on the skytrain, I gave some advice on research to first year grad student. I’m kinda surprise she does not even know how to use IEEE Explorer, yet already has a paper published in a conference. Internet really is the most powerful research tool, all you need is type in keywords, then the papers will magically show up. Actually one of the problems is there are the search result is too long. I really have to filter out the useful ones to be efficient. Using citation identify the “hub” that everyone else is referencing to is the key. Unfortunately I just know this method not too long ago, and wasted a lot of time reading useless papers.
Tonight, in the second half of my German lesson, the whole class went to a German restaurant for dinner. We had to order our food and talked to the waitress in deutsche. It is the first experience to use German outside classroom, and I realize how poor my German is. One of the classmate brough along his German girlfriend. Some more advanced classmates can chat with her without much problem. Of course, my German is so bad that I can’t even understand half of their conversation, let alone join them in the talk.
Still, I have a great time guessing what does those sentence means and picked up a few useful vocabulary. Most important, now I feel more comfortable in an all-German environment.
Hope is one of the three virtues, and it is an indespensable element of life. If you have a dream and striving for it, you know there is always a way out regardless of the current state. I found the emptiness feeling inside me fades away as I stop wasting time and focus to get my goal accomplished. It took Titanic three and a half hour to sink after it hit the icebery, I wonder how much longer can PMC stays afloat. I need to get myself ready to jump the boat before the final moment comes.
Today when I download the google desktop search bar, I came across a photo management tool from google, picasa. So I installed and tried out both softwares. The searchbar is nothing special, just yet another search tool. But I’m quite impressed by picasa. The interface is pretty user friendly and the speed is lightening fast, much better than the another tool, acdsee, I used to view images. Picasa crawls through my harddisk and index all the the pictures, including some I had long forgotten their existience. When I’m viewing the old photos from several years ago, it brings back some good old memories and I wonder how time had really goes by quickly. Another thing I always wonder about is how come I looked so awkward with the funny hairstyle back then?
On a minor thought, today I got assigned to a new project. It is another rush-to-market kind has development cycle less than 6 months. Somehow I have a feeling that it’ll go bust somewhere down the road. I guess I’ll just keep my head down and staying cool to avoid the turmoils. Just concentrate on finishing my thesis and I can move on into a new chapter of my life.