Yesterday, two seperate group of people asked me to go Whistler, the first group are friends from work and the second group are my cousins. Unfortunately, I was booked by Pat well in advance, and end up staying in door all day. Since the nice weather outside and the fact that I still have three Whislter pass. I carved to go to skiing so much that I go to Whislter alone today. The driving is not too bad, I left home at 6:30a and arrived at 8:15a. I didn’t stop by McDonald’s on my way and found out half an hour earlier makes a big difference. The mountain is empty when I have my first run. I always wanted to take skiing lessons in Whistler, but none of my friends are interested. They don’t want to improve their skills. They only want to zoom down the mountain in high speed. Whistler has ski lesson promotion this week, it only cost $40 for a full day lessons. What a good deal! I don’t have to wait in line at the chair lifts and tables are resevered for the ski school in the cafeteria in lunch time. The lesson in Whistler is much better than in Cypress. I took level 5 today, which is much toughter than level 6 in Cypress. The instructor teaches us lots of drills to make us ski properly, then he took us down on black diamond runs. With the explaination, I found black diamond runs is not as hard as I thought, I can manage to come down smoothly. Althought my knees and legs muscles really hurt because of the up and down motions. The class is done at 3p and I don’t have any energy left to ski more. So I left Whistler at 3:30p after getting change. Driving back home is not as relaxing as driving in, but since there was still lights, it’s not too bad. I can’t think about the pain and sour my muscles will have tomorrow morning. Gota sleep early tonight.

In my new project, what I had worried about has came true. As I expected, this product family is cursed. When all you heard from the managers is reuse, you know it’s a crappy project that kill your creativity and innovation. The original schedule is finish the chip in 6 months, which is quite tight but still acceptable. Now, the marketing guys want us to get it done in 4 months, so they can sign the deal with Nortel. Which means the decision is to sacrifice quality for speed. Before the chip is even taped-out, we already plan for rev B. Some less important features will not be verified, and all the devleopment work in the testbench is axed. What’s left to do in verification is script monkey’s work. Think about the positive side, I can escape from this project 2 months earlier if things line up properly. Hopefully I don’t have to work in rev B of this chip. I can imagine rev B will be even more nasty, just thinking about all the corners we cut in rev A.

Tonight I just got back my first philosophy assignment. I did quite bad in this eassy, I only got a C+. I would expect getting at least a B. This is the very first arts course I take in university. I found the marking scheme is very different from the engineering courses. In engineering, our assignments have clear goal, either calculate the right answer or get the project working. At long as we archive the required goal, we will get minimium reasonably good mark. The bells and whistles in presentation are there for bonus marks only. In arts course, there is no objective guideline or checklist on the definition of what makes a good essay. I don’t even know exactly what the professor is looking for in the assignment. No wonder arts students usually have lower average then science students. Plagiarism is against the school regulation, but at least we should be given some essay template to follow.

I have set the day of moving at the 28th of Feburary. I first called both the rental office at my current place and my new place to book the elevator in the morning. Then, I called the moving company, Art Moving, recommanded by Chris who just moved a few months ago. It is not very expensive, about $300 to move a 1 bedroom apartment. I figure it is better to hire professional than ask help from friends since I have so many things to move. After that, I also went downstairs to the shipping department to get some old paper boxes. I need lots of paper boxes to pack my stuff. I start packing stuff into boxes bit by bit every day at night. It is really a lot of trouble about moving. No wonder there is a old Chinese saying that, “Moving from upstairs to downstairs, you will lose a basket of rice.”

Today I heard a news about one of my old colleague, Miss Fatty. I worked with her a few years back then and she is probably the worst colleage I ever had. I am informed by email today that she passed away last Friday. The reason of death is not told. All I know is she died from sickness in a short time. I was making fun on her yesterday on another friend’s blog merely two days ago. Yes, she is bad but not bad enough that need to be dead. I didn’t went to her wedding so I won’t go to her funeral. I will probably forget about her in a few days. We only make fun of her occasionally. I guess I won’t find it funny anymore. I am still curious on why she die. Probably I will find out indirectly from other colleagues in a few days.