Pat told me this story she watched from TV, and got me interested so I researched a bit more on the internet.  It is a case about an Indian girl murdered by her wealth family for marrying a poor guy in order to preserve the honor of the family.  This kind of things happen in India almost everyday, it should not be news worthy except as a drop of water in the sea of statistics.  The interesting thing about this case is the poor girl is Canadian and her family is living in BC.  The family hire killers in India to murder their own daughter.  The Indian police has pretty good evidence of this murder case, however because of international law, the Canadian police cannot do anything about them.  Instead of going to jail, the murder are simpily walk free.  This case exploit a serious loop hole in our legal system.  It is definitely illegal to hire a Canadian killer to murder someone in Canada.  However, if the murder is take place outside of Canada and the killer is hired there locally, you cannot be convicted.  What a perfect murder!  This case also exploit the failure in Canada’s multi-culturalism policy.  Killing disgracful daughter is acceptable in some Indian culture, which is morally wrong.  Immoral acts should not be tolerated in the name of repsecting cultural or religion difference.  Canada should change its policy from multi-culturalism to meta-culturalism.  Immgrants are only allow to maintian the parts in their culture that is compatiable with the meta-cultural of Canada.  Through education and legistrations, the cultural aspects, such as killing dishonour daughter, carrying knifes around, wearing viel, not eating pork, etc, that are incompatiable with secular liberal world view should be gradually eliminated.

Why praise the Lord, this question has been puzzling me for many years. I went to church since I was a kid, but I never understand why man should praise the Lord. Of course I know the model answers given to me from the church. There are two typical responses. The first response is something like thou shalt praise God because it is written so in the Bible, thou shalt glorify him, honor him as a good Christian. The second response is as mundane as superstitious beliefs in Africa, you have to praise God, so that God will bless you, reward you with good fortune and protect you from evil spirit. These two responses didn’t really answer my question. Is it like asking why I should buy this product, the sales answer me because it is on sales. The church never tell me the reason and the meaning of praising the Lord. If God is omni potent and omni scenes, he won’t get angry or lose any of his glory even if we don’t praise him. If God is justice and omni benevolent God, he won’t favor those who praise him, he will treat and love everyone equally. In short, there is no need to praise God.

Today in the mass, when I was waiting to have the communion and hearing the choir singing, “I will always praise you, I will always praise you…”, suddenly I have an insight why should I praise the Lord. One should treat God just like anyone else, you should praise him if he done something good, criticize him if he done something wrong. God did many good deeds to us, so we should praise him. Praise is neither a duty nor a mean to exchange for something. Praise is just a praise. It is that simple. The church and Bible’s teaching has confused me all these years.

Every friday, I go out to have lunch with my friends at work to take a break from the office.  Yesterday when we were heading out, one of my friend complains that how come we always go to the same resturant every week.  Indeed, we have been going to the same resturant for so long that I can’t remember when we start going there.  In the past, we used to have to decide where to have lunch in the parkage.  Nowadays, no one even bother to ask the same question.  We just hop into the car, drive to the same resturant like robots programmed to follow with the same route.  I have come up with a few theory trying to explain our repetitive and boring behaviour.  1.  We are boring engineers who can go to the same resturant weeks after weeks.  2.  We are lazy engineers who don’t even bother to think about where to eat.   3. We are getting old, so we become more conservative and reluctant to try new things.  4.  The group used to have an authoritative figure who like to try out new resturants, so we just follow her commands.  After she is married and moved down to the States, our choice for lunch shrink continuously until it finally narrowed down to the one and one only default resturant.  5.  The group has an annoying figure who complains loudly everytime we try something new or go to some other resturants.  Since most of us don’t really care where to eat, we just let him take over the lunch decision.  6.  All of the above.  There are many resturants around the office, why do we have to go to the same resturant every week?  That is my question for the week.

I have to create a table to present some complicate data at work.  The different sections in the table are included or excluded depends on different configurations.  It would be too overwhelming and confusing to write a static table and then ask the user figure out which piece of data he need on his own.   My solution is to write a dynamic table that will only show the necessary piece of information.  At first I wanted to write the table using HTML and Javascript, which I am quite familiar with.  Unfortunately, the ancient Microsoft Office 2000 at work doesn’t support embedded javascript.  Since including seperate HTML file in the document is not a standard work flow in my company, it would be too much trouble work around the doucument control system.  So I decided to write the table using Excel spreadsheet instead.  I never done programming in Excel before, but to my surprise the Visual Basic support for Excel is very easy to use.  Using just the reference in the help document and some webpages on Excel tips, I manage to create the table in just a day.  Actually, using Excel and Visual Basic script is less programming work than using HTML and Javascript.  It even worths my effort to learn a new programming language.

After waiting for almost half a year, I finially received the title of professional engineer.  (P.Eng.)  I thought I would recieve a welcome letter and the registration package to inform my credential is approved, instead it is the invoice of the registration fee notify me my application is approved.  I will receive a certificate and my engineer seal too, but would take a few weeks for the association to prepare.  P.Eng is relatively easy to get.  All you need is a engineering degree and 4 years of work experience.  You have to take a law and ethics seminar and write an exam, but that is a piece of cake.  After that, it is lots of paper work, you have to fill in the application forms and prepare a 10 pages work summary.  The trickiest part is to hurt down four P.Eng who has supervised your work as your reference.  After the paper is completed, you just have to wait a few months for the association to review your application, then one day you will reiceve the invoice for the registration fee.  The good thing is this title follows me for life, as long as I pay the membership due every year.  Now I can proundly say that I am an engineer.  The bad thing is that this title is absoluately useless to me as an computer engineer, except I can sign the passport photos of my friends.  I have spent almost $1000 in total to get the title of P.Eng, on average $200 per character.