The company havn’t hire co-op for a long time during the down turn. The business has been slowly picking up, and the summer we have many co-ops like in good the old days. For those lives outside Canada, co-op is the term for intern in Canadian. Usually we hire university students for 4 months through this co-op job experience program.
My team got a co-op, who will be assigned to the tedious tasks that no one wants to touch. We think co-op are great slave labour, usually got fed all the boring jobs. I bumped into a friend working downstairs during a coffee break and asked him how do he like his new slave. I am surprise to find out his department didn’t get any co-op. Engineers with at least several years of experience has to do the grunt works. Not a very good use of resource. However, his department likes to outsource design works to India on the other hand. What is the logic behind oversource instead of hiring co-op. Co-op is as cheap as the Indian guys. From my experience, most of the co-ops are much better. You can work with the co-op face to face. If they have any problem, you can help them out easily. Most important, the co-op are eager to learn. On contrary, the Indian guys just want get by with minimium work and maximium pay.

Today I read a news article about Bill Gate’s comment on the future of software. He claim that in the future, all software will be sold as services instead of shrink wrap applications in a box. I am surprise this kind of nonsense come out from the person who once was a great coder. There is no difference between traditional software or software as a service. Software are just codes, method of delivery is irrelevant. No matter what form a software appears, it takes up some disk space and requires some CPU cycles to run. The questions where to store the code and where to run the code. The term software as a service really means storing and running the code on a remote server. Some application make sense to run remotely as such sales tools or CRM, which requires only a thin layer of code hook up with hugh backend database. The communication between the database and the user is the bottleneck. While most of traditional software doesn’t even make sense to run remotely. Try to image using photoshop or full-featured word over the internet. The speed, even with boardband, would be make it a pain to use. Today’s PC comes with cheap CPU power and harddisk space, while the boardband access is still relatively expensive. If Microsoft really decided to market all its software as services, I am sure the opensource folks will happy to fill in the gaps, as well as empty harddisk space and CPU cycles.

I have been spending my week nights and weekend setting up the software in my laptop. I havn’t update my software in my PC for quite a while and many are a version or two behind. It is very convinient that you can get almost all useful software on BT these days. I have concluded I have installed too many software on my computer over the years and decided to uninstall some rarely used ones. I plan to only keep usually used one installed in my laptop, since it doesn’t have many disk space. One of my bad habit is install all the software I came across, and install multiple software serving the same function. I should only install one software for each catogary, just simplily select the best one. I have also ported my bookmark and firefox extensions to the laptop, and there is a few tools to keep them in sync all the time. As for keep files in sync between two computers, I discovered a useful tool Synctoy, from Mirosoft. I will just store a copy of the files in my linux server for now. When I get my new linux box, I will setup subversion to revision control all my files.

We tried and failed to have lunch at Estea again this afternoon. Although the bubble tea place has big signs at the front saying it is open for business during lunch hour, it was closed. In order to avoid moving our cars, we head to a sushi place in the same plazza. That place is opened by Vietnamese, therefore on top of sushi, it serves Vietnamese menu. Last time when I went there, I didn’t have a very good eating experience. Therefore I decided to stay away from raw food today. I am surprise the resturant doesn’t not take advantage of the dual cultural heritage and offer mix-and-match Vietnam fusion with Japan, instead they keep the two menu totally seperate. I would like to try chirashi-bun (vermicelli) instead of chirashi-don or yaki-pho (rice noodle) instead of yaki-soba, or even try dip sushi with fish sauce and washibi instead of soya sauce.

Tonight I went to a very special birthday party, it is the birthday of the Fr. Pierre of St. Mary. He is turning 60 this year, and he has been a priest for 25 years. The party starts with the usual Thursday party meeting and Eucharist adoration. It was planned as a surprise party, but the father saw our decoration and food prepared downstairs. The prayer meeting is shorter than normal today, which is a good thing. After the party meeting, we have pot luck, cut the cake and a trivia about Fr. Pierre downstairs. Someone even bought a chocolate fondu fountain. The highlight of tonight is two people dressed as Fr. Pierre’s favourate saints. I know the lady cosplaying Mother Theresa. I joked to her that how come she had became a sister just before getting marry. I think being a church leader doesn’t have a private life. He have to celebrate his birthday with the church-goers, and turn the day into a special get together event to make the church life a bit more fun.