I have made a bet with my colleagues on the number of releases of the subsystem we are working on when the project is done. I am quite pessimistic and guessed the highest number. It turn out my guess is right on, it really take 20 releases to fix all the bugs in the subsystem. So they lost the bet and have to buy me a beer. Our team when to the student pub at SFU to have beer and nachos, since of my colleagues have to get a textbook from the SFU bookstore. All of us were students of SFU, the oldest one had graduated over ten years, and he said it is the first time he go to the pub since graduated. We chatted about the school days and talked about all sorts of stuff. We all agreed that thou shalt not date an engineering girl. I had a bottle Belgium white beer, which was really good. I like making bets on various things, but don’t like having money involved, win a drink or a meal is more fun. I will keep the bet on tape-out release number as a tradition on all my future projects. Back in the old days, betting was one of my tricks to ask a girl out. Just bet a dinner with the targetted girl, then you lost a bet but win a date!

I am reading my philosophy textbook preparing for my philosophy course started last week. I found that my reading speed is much slower than I expected on this differcult materials. I can only read about 20 pages an hour, instead of 50 pages per hour on english novels, or even 100 pages per hour on chinese novels. So I need about 5 hours to finish the 100 pages weekly readings. This course is about introduction to philosophy, but mostly cover modern philosophy regarding the question on what do we know, which is epistemology. Other topics such as ancient and medival philosophy, values theory and metaphysics plays a minor role in thie course. I don’t have much reflection right now since I just start taking the course. Hopefully, this course will lead me to think more about some real yet useless questions.

Probably Jimmy Chan is the most famous person in Vancouver among Chinese. He opens beauty salon and run commercial featuring himself. You can find him doing anything you can think of in the commercial, ranging from flying, swimming, running, driving race cars to dancing in the latest one. Today he became the topic of our lunch group when Pat called me she met Jimmy in a resturant. For those of us who are learning dancing all cursed him spoiled the image of dancing. Pat trying to analyze the psychology of his weird behaviour. To me, he just makes no sense. Even though he is rich and he want to be famous, there are many other better ways then buy air-time to let people make fun of himself. I seriously doubt anyone will go to his beauty salon, don’t they afraid to be laughted by their friends? One of my other question is that he claims he is a Dr., I wonder where he get his degree from.

I brought Pat’s family to have oyster in Longsdale Quay today. The oyster bar is introduced by Leon, who visited me over the Christmas. He had really good oyster there a few years ago in Vancouver, it tastes so good that he can’t forget it all those years. The oyster bar in the Longsdale Quay is really good, cheap deal with high quality. Half a dozen of oyster shooters only cost $10. I like using the word shooters to describe fresh oyster. You can really shot the oyster down your throat like a drink. I don’t like oyster much, and somehow I always suspecious about I am allegic to it or not. I remeber I used to eat dry oyster congee when I am small. So I tried half a oyster and see my reaction. I think I am ok with osyters, I don’t feel anything wrong, except have to go to washroom after a while. Maybe I will try eating a fresh oyster nex time, everyone seems to enjoy it so much.

I have submitted my first paper to the Internetional Wireless Communication and Mobile Communication Conference. The content of this paper is directly from my master thesis. Before the christmas holidays, Dr. Tejinder told me about this conferenece and he think I should give it a try, so I reformated my thesis to the IEEE paper format. On thursday’s research meeting, when Dr. Hardy saw my paper, I can see his is really happy. I bet the main reason is he has his name on it as a co-author. I think he deserve his name on the paper athought I came up with most of the idea and done all the work by myself. Dr. Hardy reviewed my paper in a night, proof-read all the typos and mistakes in the paper. I never seen him work so hard since he has been my supervisor. Normaly, he would leave the work until the next research meeting. I only get very general guidance from Dr. Hardy in the beginning for choosing my topics. He gave me many areas to choose from, and I narrowed the topic down to something I can managed all by myself. It seems my research meeting with Dr. Hardy is all about I told him my ideas, and he evaluate which one is plausible. That is very different from other professors I heard, they told you directly what you have to do, you more or less just the implementating their research. Even though my paper may not be very significate, but I can feel that it is my own research. I will know whether the paper is accepted in Apirl. If it is accepted, I will have the chance to attend my first conference. It is so convinient that the conference this year is held in Vancouver. I am also thinking about deriving another paper from this work if I have a publication on the belt. The marginal cost of evaluating another traffic model is not very high. Have a paper published would really worth the effort I have spent in working on my own thesis, instead of turning an company document into another me-too m.eng. project.