Last night, there was a earthquake in Taiwan.  The earthquake damaged the under sea optical fiber linking most of the Asia to North America.  As a result, I cannot access most of HK websites I visit daily.  No online news form Mingpao bothers me the most.  Although I am still connecting to the internet in the rest of the world.  I feel like I was isolated in the dark.  Communication network is vital to modern society.  The lack of reliability of the network means not only minor inconvenience for the users, but also means billions lost of money.  I can foresee a future that internet will be treated as a public utility just like power, water or telephone.  The government will step in the industry, making regulations to guarantee the service will be provided to all the people all the time.  If regulation is indeed involved, then someone has to assume the legal responsibility.  It is very likely that the duty and privilege will falls on professional engineers, just like those for other public utilities.  If we want to stay in the communication industry for the next 20 or 50 years, it is the time to make the invest to acquire a professional qualification.  When the field is still young, the requirement is often less demanding.  Once the field becomes mature, the existing stakeholder will subconsciously protect their interest when the regulation time comes.

I would like to wish all my friend a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

I wanted to send each of you an email with personalized greetings. Unfortunately my computer is crashed again! The new 1G of RAM seems not compitable with the existing 1G of RAM, causing the machine to reboot every hour. That is not a very serious problem by itself, but combine with a reboot during a disk write corrupts the partition table. The C: driver in which I have spent a whole day installing software is lost again. I don’t have my address book in my laptop, so I can not send my blessing via emails to my friend this Christmas.

I am very religious this Chrismas. I am going to attend 3 masses in 3 consective days. Yesterday, I went to the usual saturday evening mass. Tonight I went to the mid-night mass with my cousin. Tomorrow, I will go to the Christmas day mass as Pat will be directing the choir. In tonight’s homily, the priest cited a unofficial survey in the church that many Catholics think mid-night mass is the most attractive aspect of being a Catholic and I am one of them. I have no interest going to church every week, but mid-night mass is an annual ritual that I love. It is not about celebrating the birth of Jesus, it is all about the atomsphere that reminds me lots of good old memories. I enjoy going to the Mid-night mass which always gives me a hearty feeling.

I went to Whistler instead of work today with half of the verification team from work.  Since our work is mostly done, we get a few free vacation days.  We decided head over Whistler to have some fun together, almost everyone is a keen skier in the team.  The snow condition is very good today.  We just had a big snow dump yesterday, so we can ski on fresh powder snow.

The highlight of the day is the new Symphony chair just opened last week.  The new chair open up many runs at the back mountain.  It has very nice terrains with a few groomed runs between trees that we can go through.  The new chair is not crowded at all, there was no lineup waiting to go on the chairs.  The only drawback about this chair is that it has no easy way out.  You cannot traverse back to the peak.  You can only cut through some steep runs, merge with the long and flat pathway  that leads back to the bottom of the Harmony chair.

Everyone, including the director and manger, in my project loves skiing or snowboarding.  We have already voted to have our tape-out (project-end) party at Whistler.  We like this idea so much that we are even willing to drive ourselves to Whistler provided that gas is reimbursed.  A casual dinner plus a lift ticket should not cost much.  This plan should be within the budget limit for the party.

I decided to keep my old PC instead of buying a new one.? The C: drive is totally dead, I can’t even format or partition the disk.? Luckily the drive is still under warranty from Seagate.? I just have to mail it back to get a replacement.? Since the turn around time of Seagate is at least a few weeks, I have no choice but buy a new harddisk to get myself going.? So I bought a new 320GB harddisk for just $120 after work tonight.? Unhook the old drive and hook up the new one takes no time.? However, my Windows XP CD seems has some scratches and some files are corrupted.? Luckily the CD works fine afte I burned a new copy.? After I booted into windows, I am horrified that my other two hard drives are not accessible, in which I have all my data.? The XP can recongize the drives, but show the file system as foriegn.? Google saved my day, so I foud ways to mount the two disks back to my XP.? Right click “my computer”, go to computer manager, then disk manager, select the foriegn hard disk and choose the import option solve the problem.? Having all my data back is just the beginning, it is still a long way from install all my software.