Tonight I went to visit a church friend to have some sharing about Taize. Taize is the retreat in France I visited last year before going to World Youth Day in Germany. This friend is one of the pioneer to Taize in our church community and helped promoted this form of prayer meeting. He is interested in our experience, so he inivited over to his place to chat. I had filed those memory in my brain, so I have to digged up the archived experience and feeling. I don’t have much to share since that’s not my style. Actually I won’t mind visit there again, one week is fine, an additional totally silience week is ok too. The only problem is I have limited vacation days and there are more attractive places I want to visit. At least I know I do not repulsed visit Taize once again. One thing I found quite surprising is this friend is a dedicated fans of “Storm Riders”, a HK comic. He has lots of figures and miniature weapons from the comics, he still keep adding to his collection these days. It is interesting to see the human side of a very spiritual person, as least I think he is very spiritual. A faithful Catholic doesn’t have to be a boring person, he can have normal hobbies just normal people.

My little cousin decided to quit her job and study MBA. I guess she must shared the same smart gene running in the family because she got admitted by both York and HKUST. York suppose to be the number one business school in Canada, although I remember it used to be Western. She is going to Toronto at the end of this month to check out the new school, so she called me tonight to ask for some advice about living in Toronto. It would be quite an interesting experience for her since she had been living at home all the time. It is hard to imagine my little cousin will become a “she-boss” after graduate from her MBA. Somehow I always has the impress she is a little girl studying high school. My other cousin is getting marry this week. To be exact, just having the banquet, where she had registered last year. I was surprise her dad didn’t bother to tell my mom she is married. Oh well! Complicate family business. Since I am not that good with this cousin, I am happy to save the money spend on air ticket and gifts. I guess I am getting old, although I don’t want to admit that. My age is reflected indirectly by things happens to my younger cousins. This is the disadvantage of being the oldest cousin in the family.

The company havn’t hire co-op for a long time during the down turn. The business has been slowly picking up, and the summer we have many co-ops like in good the old days. For those lives outside Canada, co-op is the term for intern in Canadian. Usually we hire university students for 4 months through this co-op job experience program.
My team got a co-op, who will be assigned to the tedious tasks that no one wants to touch. We think co-op are great slave labour, usually got fed all the boring jobs. I bumped into a friend working downstairs during a coffee break and asked him how do he like his new slave. I am surprise to find out his department didn’t get any co-op. Engineers with at least several years of experience has to do the grunt works. Not a very good use of resource. However, his department likes to outsource design works to India on the other hand. What is the logic behind oversource instead of hiring co-op. Co-op is as cheap as the Indian guys. From my experience, most of the co-ops are much better. You can work with the co-op face to face. If they have any problem, you can help them out easily. Most important, the co-op are eager to learn. On contrary, the Indian guys just want get by with minimium work and maximium pay.

Today I read a news article about Bill Gate’s comment on the future of software. He claim that in the future, all software will be sold as services instead of shrink wrap applications in a box. I am surprise this kind of nonsense come out from the person who once was a great coder. There is no difference between traditional software or software as a service. Software are just codes, method of delivery is irrelevant. No matter what form a software appears, it takes up some disk space and requires some CPU cycles to run. The questions where to store the code and where to run the code. The term software as a service really means storing and running the code on a remote server. Some application make sense to run remotely as such sales tools or CRM, which requires only a thin layer of code hook up with hugh backend database. The communication between the database and the user is the bottleneck. While most of traditional software doesn’t even make sense to run remotely. Try to image using photoshop or full-featured word over the internet. The speed, even with boardband, would be make it a pain to use. Today’s PC comes with cheap CPU power and harddisk space, while the boardband access is still relatively expensive. If Microsoft really decided to market all its software as services, I am sure the opensource folks will happy to fill in the gaps, as well as empty harddisk space and CPU cycles.

I have been spending my week nights and weekend setting up the software in my laptop. I havn’t update my software in my PC for quite a while and many are a version or two behind. It is very convinient that you can get almost all useful software on BT these days. I have concluded I have installed too many software on my computer over the years and decided to uninstall some rarely used ones. I plan to only keep usually used one installed in my laptop, since it doesn’t have many disk space. One of my bad habit is install all the software I came across, and install multiple software serving the same function. I should only install one software for each catogary, just simplily select the best one. I have also ported my bookmark and firefox extensions to the laptop, and there is a few tools to keep them in sync all the time. As for keep files in sync between two computers, I discovered a useful tool Synctoy, from Mirosoft. I will just store a copy of the files in my linux server for now. When I get my new linux box, I will setup subversion to revision control all my files.