My old bank card, which I have used over 10 years, finally stop working. I went to a bank machine today, trying to withdraw cash, the ATM machine doesn’t recognize my card. The card looks pretty weather, the front has been piled off and the magnet tapes on the back has holes. I am amazed it still works for that long. Out of all the ATM machines I could go to, I choose the one at my home branch. This makes getting a new bank card a relatively easy task. I just want up to the teller, told her my old card is not working. Within a few minutes, all the accounts on my old card is transfered to the new card. I should get a new visa card too, since the magnetic tape at the bank suffers from the same problem too. Since it is expiring soon, I hope I could still use it until the new card arrive. Wouldn’t it be convinient if the magnetic tape on bank cards are more durable?

After 3 years of service, my old router is finally reach the end of its life. I was working fine all along until last week. It starts to drop IP address every few minutes, and I have to manually restart the cable modem to let it reacquire the IP address. It is odd that it doesn’t work if I only restart the router. At first I thought it is the problem with Shaw’s central DHCP server. I called their technical support. To my surprise, the guy is actually quite knowledgable and helpful. He opened a trouble shooting ticket with a reference number for me and advise me experiment bypassing the router, hook up the cable modem with my PC directly. The connection is very stable when I don’t use the router, so I know it’s time for me to get a new one. I got a Linksys router from Futureshop with $30 rebate. Not a bad deal. I didn’t go for the post 802.11g routers, they are more expensive and not supported by all Wi-Fi nodes. Moreover, I don’t even have a laptop to use the wireless connection. I am quite happy with my new router. It is very stable for the first day and my BT download speed seems improved too. Tonight, the DNS of my router suddenly die. It was fixed after I restart the router. I hope it is just a single incident. My Linksys router has won PC Magazine’s editor choice, it gota be good.

My noise cancellation headphone arrived today. The principle of noise cancellation is using a DSP processor, generate pink noise and out of phase sounds to cancell the incoming sound wave sample by the microphone on both side. This type of headphone used to cost over $100, some high end model made by Bose even cost over $300. My headphone is made by Creative Labs, only cost me $30 ordering on eBay. According to PC Magazine, it has 90% performance of the Bose headphone. Probably the advance and cost reduce of DSP make cheap noise cancellation headphone possibly. The sound quality is pretty good, it filters out the annoying air conditionor noise at work. The only complain is the headphone is a bit hot, since it has to cover the whole ear.

Another good news for me today. I just received the notice that my paper is accetped by the IWCMC conference. I have my first, probably the only, paper published. The paper is just a truncated version of my master thesis. Both of my supervisors are the co-author of the paper. I guess the more well known names on the paper, the easier it is to be accepted. I am surprise to see the reviewers’ comments difference alot. Some say my paper is yet another of the same kind, some say it make signification contribution, and some are in between say it make a small step. To take an average, my paper is good enough to be accepted. This conference is the annual IEEE conference for wireless and mobile communication. It happened to be in Vancouver this year, so I will have less trouble attending it. The next question I have to convince my boss PMC will pay for the conference. Since it is local and I have a paper published, I think it should not be a problem. I wonder how does those conference looks like, I never been to one myself.

I am finally officially a certified ski instructor of the Canadian Ski Instructor Alliance. I just passed my CSIA level 1 instructor exam and qualified to teach beginners up to easy blue runs. I have been quite nervous about this course for the past week. I know my skiing is not perfect, so there is a chance I may fail again. I had took the course two years ago and failed. At that time, I just did it for fun companied a friend, didn’t expect I would pass. However I failed so miserably and make me itchy to fix that black dot in my life. My ski definitely improved alot in the past two weekends, and I think I barely pass the skill test, having standard rating all along. I did pretty good on the teaching portion, I got above average rating. The exam is not only physically but also mentally challenaged. The exam ended at 2p.m., I thought I could have a few more runs while waiting for the instructors writing the report card. I found I couldn’t even turn properly on the first run, I had completely drained my energy and mental power in the morning. So I joined other classmates to have beer in the pub instead. The instructors posted a list of name who had passed the exam. My heart was pounding when I am reading down the list. Luckily, I found my name at the 2nd last line. It really scared me. Since I am now a ski instructor, I plan to will give some free lessons to my friends. If any one interested, just drop me an email or give me a call.