December 26th is the boxing day. In this day of the year, shopping malls are packed with holiday shoppers who are looking for bargain sales and gift ideas. For those who have received gifts for the Christmas, they have to wait until this day before they can open the gift. I don’t like shopping at all, so I am not going to the mall today. However, when I went out for lunch in the afternoon, the street is jammed with traffics heading to Metrotown. The lineup going into the parking lot blocked the street three blocks away. I couldn’t understand why people love to shop in the first place and why they pick the busiest day to shop is even more puzzling to me. The discount in the boxing day sales is exaggerated. Only the clearance items the shop wants to get rid of have deep discount. There are indeed some hot items on sales, but they are usually limited in supply. Unless you line up early in the morning, you can never get the hot items. Never to say that you could not get any decent service when thousands of customers are storming the shops. The small saving in the sales doesn’t worth the trouble and lack of comfort to go shopping in the boxing day.
I didn’t receive any gifts this year, so I have no gift to open today. However I bought some toys before christmas and I was too busy to open them. I rewarded myself today by opening a new toy – Yamato Macross 1/60 YF-19. This toy is one of the most complex transform toys ever designed. It took me almost an hour to transform it carefully from fighter moid to battroid mode. I found a nice place inside my toy display cabinet for it.
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.
The linux box at home is completely dead. Luckily I manage to salvage all my blog entries and articles I wrote in the past 2 years. I am still painfully first zip my my files and then ftp them to my PC in linux rescue mode. I figure that I don’t have the luxury to host my webiste in my own linux server. Therefore I am going to move my website to my hosting company. Since I already paid to have my own domain, I should also use their hosting service, which is included in in the package.
I am going to make a few changes to my site. I will merge my chinese articles into my blog. Keeping the articles in a separate forum outside of the blog is not very reader friendly. If I customize my blog, add index pages for my articles, wordpress is as good as the forum. I am still thinking about how to keep the forum alive. A forum needs many people joining the discussions, and lots of interesting topics to discuss with. I have an idea to setup an internet book reader club in the forum.
The only drawback of the move is that I no longer have unlimit disk space to store my photo album. I am thinking whether or not I should post photos along side my blog. If I planned to target my blog to general audience, people do not know me personally, then I may not want to expose my private life too much. I know I am going to write about flaming social or moral issues, which will be the selling point of my blog.
