Daily Scribble

Computer Crash

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Fortunately, I am able to recover the data from my harddisk after running fixboot, fixmbr, chkdsk /p and fdisk /mbr on the recovery console from the Windows XP CD. However, unfortunately, the OS is beyond repair, I can’t even start file explorer or even go online. To reinstall my computer, I have to find some disk space to host my data while I reformat the harddisk. So I end up buying a 200GB harddisk for backup, and since I am going to open up the case, I got myself extra 1GB of RAM. Now my system has 1.5GB RAM and 440GB harddisk space in total. I’m planning to use the new harddrive and the 512MB RAM in the MS cheap computer though. I still haven’t decide whether should I take advantage of that deal, but will see how it goes.
To save time, I’m going to install the essential software. I found I had installed way too many software that I had not even used once. It’s a painful and unproductive process that I want to go through as soon as possible.

On a side node, when I was messing inside the case, I accidentally pressed the stand-by button of the cable modem and I’m not aware of it. I called the support line to make myself look like a fool for asking why the internet doesn’t work when the cable modem in stand-by mode. While I was waiting for the tech support, the system always play meaningless messages. I find a very stupid one telling the customer who has problem with their internet access to visit their support website. Duh! If I can visit the support website, I won’t be calling this number, go figure.

Daily Scribble

Dual monitors

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Finally I received my dual LCDs at work after waiting for almost two months since I had talked to Uncle Bob. Colleagues gathered around my cube today and check out the dual LCD setting. I am not sure how to measure the productivity increase using dual displays, but it definitely much more convenient to use. The moral of this story is that you will get what you want if you keep asking for it and ask it to the right person.

My windows machine is dead and it keep rebooting itself. I suspect some files of the OS is corrupted since it won’t even boot into safe mode. The only option I have is to re-install windows. I hope the windows recovery works so I won’t lost my data. Sigh.. I don’t have much time to re-install all the software.

Daily Scribble

Selling T-shirts

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Today I spent almost the whole working on Worth Youth Day fund raising again. All those fund raising events taking too much of my time, and the amount we get back really won’t justify all the effort. Anyways, we are selling lots of stuffs in St. Mary after masses. I’m taking care of selling the T-shirts. Pat designed the T-shirt, the light color one looks pretty nice, but the dark color one don’t turn out too great. The T-shirt selling system is very confusing, so I end up have to run up and down stairs a lot to get the color people want to buy. I guess we sold almost 200 hundred T-shirts over the weekend. Since the T-shirt are donated by someone, all the money go to the WYD team. In a few weeks, we have to distribute the T-shirts, I can foresee it would be more chaos than today. From today’s experience, I know I would never want to be a sales, especially clothes sales.

Daily Scribble

faith formation

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I went to the 2nd faith formation session held by the Vancouver archdiocese for everyone who is going the World Youth Day. The topic is on prayers, presented by the Youth Ministry director and the newly ordinate deacon Anthony. Claymoo make a funny presentation, he make analogy of prayer to cell phone plans. Staring with the most basic plan cannot place out-going calls, can only able to listen incoming calls occasionally. One level up can only call 911 in the case of emergency. A higher level gives you unlimited minute on a weekend morning, but cannot place call during the weekdays. A better plan includes some minutes over the week and the best plan gives you 24×7 unlimited access but could cost quite some sacrifice . He put it in a very funny way, sorta like a salesman getting people to upgrade their cell phone plan. This kind of trick always works in preaching by trapping the audiences’ mind into pre-defined categories. I wonder in this analogy, what if I say I want to switch the carrier? Bro. Anthony talked about penance, and use his boring talk as an example. As a result I didn’t sleep in his talk this time, and offered all the boredom to God as my penance. Still, I don’t understand that why God wants penance in the first place. What good can my boredom brings to God?

Daily Scribble

Piano

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Pat will have her piano exam next Monday, so she is practicing piano very hard. To encourage her, I bought sushi for dinner tonight and deliver to her place. When I arrived, she was watching a documentary on the history of piano. The internal mechanism of a piano is an art of engineering, I can’t believe each piano has more than 2000 pieces. The history of piano is not very long, only a few hundred years old. I also known that Bach is the first piano composer. I wonder how do the musician back then learn to play piano when it was still a prototype not commonly known. After the dinner, Pat make me listen to her exams rehearsal, It is my pleasure to listen to Pat’s rehearsal (changed due to censorship), which last about 30 minutes. It is quite relaxing listening to classical music after a big meal, so I fell asleep. Pat grumble about both me and her piano teacher sleep when she plays. Oh well, maybe her music has some magic power putting people to sleep. I would like to start listening classical music to improve my taste. I had already downloaded over 100 classical CDs in mp3. The only problem is that I can’t recognize the name of the songs or the composers. It is not fun when you don’t even know what you are listening to.