I am a grade C philosophy student.? I just got back my philosophy essay and I got a C again.? I talked to the professor after class today when the group headed over to pub for a drink.? My problem is I am too obessive with presenting my own philosophy, neglecting the requirement of the assignment which is to criticize the philosopher in our text.? I am not very focus in my attack to his arguments, trying to cover too many things at the same time without giving a through thought on each of my points.? I also misunderstood part of his argument, so some of my criticisms are just attacking strawman.? It is always more interesting to talk about your own idea than criticizing others point of view.? However, this is the fundamental technics in philosophy or thinking in general.? Just like learning to play piano, before you can preform a lively music, you have to spend countless boring hours practicing the scale.? In philosophy, before you can write about your original ideas, you have to spend time in learning how to cross examine ideas from those famous dead guys.? Without this fundamental learning experience, you just don’t know how to present your ideas in froms others can understand.? It is a long way to go for me.? I have already dream up of a few dozen topics I could work on in philosophy.? I should worry about building my thesis later.? Now I just focus on learning the technical stuffs in the trade of philosophy.

Today I spent the whole day in meeting, from 10a.m. to 4p.m., lunch inclusived.? Our tool vender, Candence, visited us to give us update on their latest tool.? The license fee of those tools cost more than my salary by a two to one factor.? This is one reason why my job is fairly safe from outsourcing to India.? The Indian guys still have to use the same number of license as me, which drawf the cost saved in salary.? The meeting first start with us complaining the problems with their tools, we have gave them a long list of features enhancement.? Then followed by some presentation of their project roadmap.? They keep telling us the new features in the next version of their products.? I doubted the credit fo those semi-sales pitches.? From our past experience, we are manage to stress the new feature to their limits and crash the tool within a few weeks.? Then we spend endless time learning how to work around those limitation.? The products are just never as good as advertised.? The final section is a close door meeting between the managers to dicuss the pricing details of the tool.? I think we are simply paying too much.? The problem is there is no real alternative.? There are only two major EDA tool vender, and each tool has a very steep learning curve.? We are basically locked in with them.? On the flip side, the EDA is not a very good business either.? The are only limited number of customer specified in semiconductor design would by their tools.? In their road map, they call it major milestone for product deployment when they got 10 cusomters!

I have to make a disclaimer. I didn’t spread any rumours about Verona and her new potential date-to-be and I am not the one driving her so mad that she consider locking up her blog. The story begin yesterday lunch, me, Ray Woo, Jackson and Verona went to have lunch. Verona blog about her new date last week but didn’t mention any names. In the lunch, we were making fun of her new potential date-to-be. Me and Raymond make some harmless jokes, but some one spreads a rumour about who is the guy. He phased it as a riddle, but I couldn’t guess it right. Not because I am not smart enough, but because the answer is some guy I know of and I don’t think is him. Anyways, last night Verona is really upset and write in her blog someone is not respectful. I message Verona and apologized thought she is upset for my jokes in the afternoon. She explained to me that my joke is so obviously ridiculous that it is harmless and tell me the answer of Jackson’s riddle. Then I found out today Lesile, a good friend of Verona, called her and asked what happened. He thought I did it too. That’s why I ask Verona to state in her blog that I am innoncent. I guess I know I sometimes make the jokes too far that become offensive. Not only the third party think I did it, I myself think I did it too. The only difference is that I didn’t do it intentionally, I would apologize and admit my wrong doing. Not like someone that he don’t even care that he had offenced people. To make it worse, he keep making more fun out of the poor victim’s psychological suffering.

I treated Verona a nice sushi dinner tonight because my P.Eng application.? At first she lent me her textbook and study notes for the P.Eng practice exam, after some bargaining, I promised to treat her sushi if I passed the exam.? Later on, I found out APEG lost the reference from my professor.? Since my professor is really hard to find, I switched my reference to Verona and upgrade the sushi dinner.? She heard about this resturant in Aderdeen Center from her family friends.? Apparently, it has the coldest refrigerator in Vancouver, so it’s sushi must be top quality.? Actually it is a large sushi franchise in Japan, and this is their first oversea shops.? The fish is very fresh, but the portion is a bit too small.? We tried a few not very common fishes, kobe beef and uni seaweed roll.? The decoration of dishes looks really nice, too bad that we forgot to take pictures before we eat, we were just too hungry.? Verona told Pat about her stories of 200 balloons, got picked up in German and her dual professional qualification.? Pat find it quite funny, but I am a bit bored.? I have already heard those stories.? Somehow I am amazed Verona repeat the stories like playing tape recording, it is exactly the same as the version I heard.? Usually when I tell stories, the stories get improved over time.? The more times I tell the same story, it is more exciting and funny.? It may drift further away from what really happened though.

This week I have been spending some time learning PSL assertion at work.? Assertion is a new verification methodology pushing very hard from the EDA venders.? It is a complement to the traditional verification flow, which you have no visibility inside the device.? Assertion allows you put extra checks right into the RTL logics.? Actually assertion exists for VHDL quite a long time.? The problem is the awkward syntax and limit functionality.? PSL is just another implemeent and syntax for assertion.? It seems the industry? somehow agree to support this one standard across different hardware languages.? One thing quite interesting is PSL assertion is inserted to the code as comments begins with the keyword psl.? Some of our old code breaks because we have a block happenes to call psl and we have this reserved keyword all over the code in comments.? Anyways, PSL assertion is quite handy to writing conditional or sequence checks.? Much easier than building a state machine to predict the result.? The more powerful feature of PSL assertion is that it support formal verification, which use mathematical alogirthm verify the code is equivalent to the specification. However, formalv verification is always a promise never comes true.? I guess if there are algorithms checking the specification against the implmentation, how hard would it be to let the algorithm simplily generate the code.? My first experience with PSL assertion is quite good, except that I manage to crash the simulator merely learning PSL for a day.? I guess I am just naturally attractive to bugs.