Tonight I was having dinner with church friends. One of them is working in a satellite company doing business with the US Army. He didn’t went to go to Iraq to install satellite equitments, but his colleagues did and came back alive with many stories. The poor engineer has first flew to Kuwait, from there he took a US army transport into Iraq. Once he boarded the plane, he was given a bullet proof vest. He was told not to put on the vest, instead he has to sit on the vest. The crew explained it is for random gun fires from below. The flight has no air hostress too. With some luck, he touched down and arrived in the army base in one piece. Upon arrival, he is advised not to go outside the base as his safety cannot be garunteed. When he need to go from the base to another base 10 minutes driving distanace away, he has to wait for the helicopter scheduled on the next day. The street is so dangerous that it is wise to ride a Blackhawk instead. He stayed in Iraq for almost a month, got the work done then came home. It is really the kind of engineering work not for a fainted heart. I would think twice before signing up for such job, it is like signing a life waiver. On the other hand, the job should be relatively safe and it is really an once in a life time experience.

Today I can declare my moving is finally completed. I have cleaned my house the first time since I have moved in and everything is well organized. I still have some toys I want to sell stacking up in a corner, hopefully they will be gone soon once I post them on ebay. I use the space underneath my futon to hide my board games, so the top of my desk looks more normal. I have re-organised my bills, bank statements and paper traces in the new wheeled cabinet. I am going to throw out documents older than 2 years. Since those paper has personal information, I can’t just throw them out to the garbage room downstairs. I am going to bring them to work, throw them away in the shredding box for confidential documents. My place is now presentable and I can start thinking about inviting friends over for the house warming party.

I won 649. Nope, not the jackpot, just merely $10, and have to divided up by three person. The story begins yesterday lunch when I went out with some friends from work. The 649 on wednesday has a $14 million jackpot, I bought one ticket and two of my friends chipped in and bought 2 tickets. We were mentioning 649 during lunch, and we realise none of us had checked the number. One of my friend suggest that we can pool in and combine all 3 tickets. It is human psychology to minimize the lost rather than maximize the gain. My firend’s logic is that he will feel very terrible if I won because the winning ticket is within his reach. I don’t see any reason object to his suggestion and agreed to share the tickets. As engineers, we think about all the scenarios in case we won. To provide the person with ticket flee away, we wrote down our names on each tickets. Although I trust they and myself won’t flee away, but it is logical to avoid any possible dispute. Their ticket won $10, and we decided to re-invest the money into the up coming 649 with $22 million jackpot. Today we were talking like we had already won $22 million and plan how to spend the money. One of the friend suggest we should buy nice houses next to each other, chip in a some money to set up a small bussiness, even share a yacht. That got me start thinking if I really won the jackpot, what will I do with the money. One thing for sure is I won’t be stupid enough to give half of the money to charity like people on TV. I see that the lottery money will substitude my income and free myself to work on a charity project that may change the world. Put it in religious context, giving out large sum of money to charity is irresponsible to the money God entrusted you. To maximize the outcome of the lottery money, work on charity as your back covered is probably the best solution, assuming you are better than an average charity worker.

My old bank card, which I have used over 10 years, finally stop working. I went to a bank machine today, trying to withdraw cash, the ATM machine doesn’t recognize my card. The card looks pretty weather, the front has been piled off and the magnet tapes on the back has holes. I am amazed it still works for that long. Out of all the ATM machines I could go to, I choose the one at my home branch. This makes getting a new bank card a relatively easy task. I just want up to the teller, told her my old card is not working. Within a few minutes, all the accounts on my old card is transfered to the new card. I should get a new visa card too, since the magnetic tape at the bank suffers from the same problem too. Since it is expiring soon, I hope I could still use it until the new card arrive. Wouldn’t it be convinient if the magnetic tape on bank cards are more durable?

After 3 years of service, my old router is finally reach the end of its life. I was working fine all along until last week. It starts to drop IP address every few minutes, and I have to manually restart the cable modem to let it reacquire the IP address. It is odd that it doesn’t work if I only restart the router. At first I thought it is the problem with Shaw’s central DHCP server. I called their technical support. To my surprise, the guy is actually quite knowledgable and helpful. He opened a trouble shooting ticket with a reference number for me and advise me experiment bypassing the router, hook up the cable modem with my PC directly. The connection is very stable when I don’t use the router, so I know it’s time for me to get a new one. I got a Linksys router from Futureshop with $30 rebate. Not a bad deal. I didn’t go for the post 802.11g routers, they are more expensive and not supported by all Wi-Fi nodes. Moreover, I don’t even have a laptop to use the wireless connection. I am quite happy with my new router. It is very stable for the first day and my BT download speed seems improved too. Tonight, the DNS of my router suddenly die. It was fixed after I restart the router. I hope it is just a single incident. My Linksys router has won PC Magazine’s editor choice, it gota be good.