During the sun rise, my camera's battery decide to deplete at the right moment (and I decided to not bring the charger with me!!) so no pics ever since, and frankly, Wilfred's camera's battery also run out (with an almost-full CF card)...

 

After the sun rise (about 6:30am), good guess for those who think I would go back to sleep (which is exactly what I did)...

 

My friends woke me up around 10, then we kindda rushed to Buffalo again (to another outlet).  With the help of GPS and the nearly-no-line-up-customs, we got there around 11....  (wow 1 hour, how nice)

 

For lunch, we went to an italian-style restaurant (again!).  The price was lower, and the food was so-so, nothing special ;-)

 

The outlet consists of both outdoor and indoor stores, and what we bought from there?  SHOES!  Man, I can say no-more, it's mad-expensive to buy shoes in Canada, period.  After exceeding $100USD for each of us, we panick'ed and remove all the boxes for shoes (since they costed the most) and wear them (and hide the old shoes somewhere in my car).

 

When we go to the customs, I made a boo-boo decision upon seeing a traffic and thinking I could get around that.......  ended up having to get on the same highway after 10 mins (yes, we lost 10 mins and the line up grew a little)...

 

The customs asked us for passport, and we started chatting ever since...  normal stuffs like "how long have you guys been in US for", "what did you guys do in US", "are you all residents of Canada", "how much of the goodies you guys bought in this trip"...  while the custom guy were holding our passports.  After all the chats, he gave back our passports and we're free to go ----  wait a min, when did he scan our passports?  No he didn't actually~

 

After passing the customs my friends finally used the DVD in my car, and passed out after the movie until arriving home~

I know I spelled it wrong (or did I spell it right?), but I do mean to spell it this way...

 

The trip was "buffy", and it has "fall", and it does pronounce as "buff fallo".

 

The trip consists of 2 days of shopping and 1 nite of staying at hotel at Niagra Falls.  I never thought staying at Niagra at night would be so much fun, so much that me and my friends didn't get to play the UNOs we brought, so much that we used up our limited battery for our cameras, so much that I never had a funner night seeing others sleeping.

 

I've never driven to Buffalo before, actually I don't remember going to Buffalo for my entire life.  So GPS is needed for me (well for us), which Vincent (my friend) bought it a few days before the trip.  The thing just works, even everytime it tells me to turn Right, I turn Left!  All it does is to adapt my way and sense of direction, and do its "Recalculating".  In turns, I get to know its way of thinking too -> No U-Turn!

 

So on Sunday (July 1), just about 2km from the border into NY state, as the last exit passed us, the traffic jam hits us.  By then I notice there's another section of the road (separated by concrete barrier) for trucks specifically, and we saw few cars stopped and try to turn back (as they realize they're in the wrong section).  We were so laughing (while we're stucked in traffic).  As we slowly approach the border (which is just 2km away), we finally saw the custom stations (an indication of we're almost there).  By the time we get to the custom station, we realize that the cars are diverted and the station WAS NOT IN USE!  We felt dumb, and at the same time, we found that the truck section of the road, which was previously separated by concrete barrier, is MERGING into our section!  GRR!  (we know we should've just taken that section!)

 

So by the time we arrive at the mall it's already 3pm, 3 hours to shop - fine!  One thing I do have to mention is that, unlike Canadians, ppl there are really working hard, and even at 6:30pm - 30 mins passed their closing hours.  They showed no sign of packing up and leave, they showed passion in helping us to find what we really need...  I was astonished.

 

We then head to our home-of-stay-for-the-night -> Hilton Hotel.  Betty (my friend) told us it doesn't have Falls-view, thus no fireworks and no sun rise.  Here's the surprises start - we get the falls view, and better yet, we get BOTH of he falls covered in the same view, and the Fallsview Hotel is just right in the middle between the Falls, not blocking any scenaries, it's just AMAZING!

 

We went for the swimming pool, and frankly I was the only one that couldn't swim!  LAWL >:O

 

After that we went back to our hotel, dress up, and the fireworks begin.  Here's another surprise, the fireworks take place near the American falls, which is right in front of us (since we could see both of the falls).  I was taking the video (though crappy) while Wilfred (my friend) was doing the camera-man, taking fast continuous pictures.  And this drained the batteries of our cameras.

 

Hmm...  wait, we're missing something - dinner.  Oh yes, so let's count the time -> 6:30pm left mall, 8:00pm check into hotel, 9:00pm swim, 10:00pm watch fireworks, so when did we take our dinner?  Nope, we haven't.  We then walked to Fallsview hotel (actually the mini-mall at Fallsview casino) and had our italian-style dinner there.

 

Stuffed belly, stiffed body weren't good for us, and we just headed back to hotel and...  sleep!

 

I actually slept quite bad that night, almost awaken for the whole night, and I managed to get to see the sun rise.  On a side note, even though I managed to take the picture when I first see the line of the red-sun, Wilfred told me the sun had risen long ago, just that we didn't get to see the sun itself (cuz there were buildings blocking and all the other craps!)

 

After that I went back to sleep and waiting for the second day (it was the second day already but anyways!) to come...

(Find info about ImagineCup at http://www.imaginecup.ca, it's a programming contest)

 

Aww, I didn't get into top-6 (actually, top-7) so no seattle and korea for me~  But this was fun already and alot of free stuffs (yeah free $$ for us to spend too).  I was only ranked at 14 out of 145 contestants there (regional qualifier so not a lot of ppl to face).  Oh well, it's good to meet alot of ppl (students) and get to meet Charles too (haven't seen him for 5 years).

 

Now I'm all tired out of all the walking and standing, and the work at my work place too!

I just found that I haven't been writing anything for months...  so here is something I wanna share:

 

DreamScene - a free component for Windows Vista Ultimate Edition, allows you to use video files as your wallpaper and play it.  Of course it wont play the sound, and it may not be very productive.  But at the technical-side of it, it's very cool!

 

This free thinggy isn't final version...  it's just a preview version so I guess there are few issues to work out.  But it looks so damn good already (see screenie below).

 

One down-side is that, if you use dual-screen you may be out of luck, as your video card may not have big enough texture size to support both of your screens.

A while ago I was surfing net for things about Zune (an upcoming new portable player manufactured by Toshiba), I came across with the following story:

 

quote from "Ryan" at Gizmodo.com

I actually saw some kid on the subway yesterday using his gigantic 15" laptop as an MP3 player.  Picture a guy walking into the train, holding his laptop in its case with the screen cracked open a few inches to prevefnt the laptop from going to sleep.  He was careful to hold the laptp with both hands an parallel to the ground.  He then proceeded to open it up fully, maximize iTunes, fiddle around wit the track and volume, then slightly close the screen again.  On the very next stop, he got off, still holding his screen open.  It looked completely ridiculous and cumbersome, and this is exactly why portable media players have a market today.

 

 

Garfield loves sleeping, so do I.  Too bad I have to wake up early every weekday now and flee to work.  Nothing really has to do with Monday.  It's not like me to eat breakfast, but I did this morning, and bited myself twice...~

 

The traffic went easy on me, or should I say it's expected.  Last thursday I went out at 7:20am, arrived at 8am sharp.  Last friday I went out at 7:10am, arrived at 7:30am; so guess what time I arrived if I went out at 7:15am this morning, and you should get it right (or else go back to grade 3 math).

 

So there are 2 things sitting on my desks with notes from my higher-ups saying they're wrong and need to be fixed, fine I'll do it.  So I found this and get it right, and save.  When the program saves it to the database it reloads it to reflect the saves, but this time, the saves aint there and it simply reverted my changes!!!

 

Stucked for an hour attempting the same thing and nothing works, and the worst of all these is that, my manager's changes are saved when I asked her to try it out!!!  So WTF!

 

edit: 10:06am the program started doing something else now - it keeps disconnecting on me!

edit: 10:09am the program somehow reverted my document about 4 versions older...  omg!  it keeps versioning and revert them back without asking me?!?!?!?!?

edit: 10:22am after fixing the versioning problem, it now added 3 new items for me randomly!!!!

edit: 10:26am just to give an idea of how long this piece of sh*t takes to save the file and reloads it (4 mins).

edit: 10:29am it freaken added another 2 random items!!!  I deleted one and saved (and see if anything else is going to happen).

edit: 10:33am loading.......  sigh!

edit: 11:00am things finally work normally...  I have no clue what happened earlier time this morning!!!  But as long as it works fine I'm cool with it.

With the new build of Vista (pre-RC1 build 5536) on hand, I guess I can say good bye to XP on my desktop.

 

So what's with this Vista this time?  Applications work fine (next to 100%), no more app crashes, no more slowness of GUI and app, no more BSOD, no more weird fundamental GUI bugs that plague the OS (ie: scrollbars turn black when you need it), etc...

 

Okay, there paradise is here, but I have a feeling that I feel this way cuz the older builds were just not as competitive as this one.  So here's the where this Vista ticks off:

 

- 550MB RAM usage at boot up

- 10GB diskspace usage for a clean install (including PFs), compare to the 7GB in build 5472 and in Japanese version of build 5536 (Why?!)

- Upgrade from XP is just too long compare to a clean install.  Upgrade: over an hour; Clean install: just 20 minutes!!!

- File Types customization is too limited.  In XP we could still change the file icon if we want to, through a little complex GUI; In Vista there isn't any GUI that does this, the option is just GONE!  (while you can still change the program association for file types in a simple GUI though)

- Not much GUI coloring customization in Vista.  Yeah surely you can change the colours for window borders, but what if you want to change the Green toolbar in Explorer, or the Blue toolbar in Windows Mail, or the Purple/Silver toolbar in IE?  Okay, maybe I'm being a bitch on these FIXED colourizations, but at least I should be able to change the text shadow of the dialog's title, especially when I changed the color for windows border to be BLACK!  Yes I can change the text to be white, but the text shadows are also white, which blurs the text into a funny looking clouds!

 

Yup, but still, I guess I can finally use this as my primary OS and really test this thing out.

update:  The lost luggage has been found and shipped back to my home.  Nice job, BA.  Just as they said the luggage would be found within 1-3 days.

 

Tonight was the most interesting/boring/pointless/hopeless/and fuck up night.

My parents are supposed to come back from vacation and arrive at GTAA at 6pm.  Yes they're from UK, yes they're from London, and yes they certainly went through the crisis there.

 

So what about here?  The flight ended up being delayed for 3 hours and guess what, the BA.com says it only delayed 1 hour.  As you may've guessed, I ended up stood there for an hour for the plane to arrive.  1 hour isn't much at all and I could live with that, I was rushing towards the airport cuz I was late, so I missed the signs that say which terminal to go to.  I called my bro since he was with my parents when they depart to UK and he said "I can't remember, but it should be the newer terminal".  Since Terminal 1 looks quite nice so I went there.

 

When I parked and got into the arrival terminal, almost all flights are from AC.  So I took the nice-looking monorail to Terminal 3 (it's also new), despite the nice looking, it was a rough ride.  It's so shaky and I almost had to grab the handle even I was sitting, but the cabin was so spacious and nicely done.

 

Arriving Terminal 3 and I found out the flight was delayed so I waited, and waited, and finally the sign changed to "Arrived" but still wait.

 

Throughout the wait I've seen/experienced alot of different things and here are some of them:

- The longest wait at airport, I ended up waiting for 4 hours in total.  My parents were stucked in there due to lost of luggages.

- The shortest skirt wore by a very good looking white girl.  Why I say the shortest, cuz it just can't be any shorter.  It was short enough to reveal part of her pantie (I do mean pantie, not P or T).

- The best appearance (look, height, etc...) white girl.

- The best appearance (same as above) japanese twins (girls!).

- The most expensive parking fee paid at Toronto throughout the 10 years of stay.  ($38+)

- The most weird phone number my phone shows (it's a normal 416 number, but it says it's not assigned when I call back).

 

My back hurts so bad now cuz of the stand-n-wait.  My eyes hurt cuz of constant attention.  My nose hurts cuz there were just too many people with body-smell.  My ears hurt cuz there was just too noisy.  My head hurts cuz of lack of sleep.  My neck hurts for no reason.  My feet hurts cuz of the standing and bad shoes.  My mind is dizzy cuz of all the good looking (and bad looking) girls there.

 

My bro came after I waited for 2 hours, really appreciated since I was extremely bored.  My parents' experiences about this flight are just as bad as ours at the airport.  But then again, as long as they arrive safely, it's all that matters.

It's really peaceful before thunderstorm comes (the weather), and today is exactly like it.

 

You know, working, long day, and boring...  just as I went back home and had some peace, saw Arthur's msg on baddie so I went.  It was really, really, intense...  especially I wore a pair of thin-layered socks, which make my shoes really really spacious (and dangerous for my toes!).

 

Tonight's play reminds me of a guy I played at Armadale...  That guy I met at Armadale was nothing more than a 5-7 foot tall, chinese guy with glasses...  but when he played against me, I was stalled completely.  I remember I was playing the game with Nelson and he was quite surprised seeing me doing nothing in the middle of the dessert....  the court I meant.  But Nelson never complains as usual.  The reason for the stalmate, as I found out later myself, was cuz of the surpriseness of the form and the shot.  Most (not all now cuz of this guy) of players I played had a pattern hitting the bird, and thus telling me where the bird is gonna go and how fast.  This guy, I had a 0% chance of guessing what he's going to do!!!!!  really, 0%.  So I stalled and don't know where to go and what to do.

 

Okay, so tonight there was a guy that does the drops which ressembles the guy I mentioned above.  But of course, other shots are predictable and observable =D and the main thing about this is that, I nearly broke my toes due to the thinner socks and the sudden-drop-shots from that guy tonight.

 

After the thunder it's peaceful again, Jon came over and watch us play and we went for timmy for tea and PIZZA!  (Timmy = Tim Hortons)  And yes, there was a PizzaPizza next door, so we went there and got a take-out and eat INSIDE TIMMY!   I was about to fill out the comment+suggestion form there thanking the staffs for letting us to eat pizza in Tim Hortons.  I guess I really should've done that.

This morning, when I woke up and check email, the first number that came across in the welcome page is this...  grrrrrrr!

I'm a very unorganized person.  I do clean up my surroundings once a while, but after a while things pile up again.  It's the same to my digital contents, which most of them are organized, but new ones are wandering around throughout my file system.

 

2 years ago, when I watched the Bill Gate's keynote in Longhorn PDC 2003, I thought to myself, "There must be a more automatic way, a more intelligent way, and a more intuitive way to organize (sort, group, categorize), manage (move, copy, delete, create, modify), and collect (search, filter, and relationship) digital data.

 

When I say digital data, I dont mean files only.  Of course, pictures, musics, video files are digital data.  But digital data is much more, such as music album, picture album, video series (tv show, anime, movie series), contacts, calendars and schedules, and much more.

 

Right now we use many software to fulfill the goals for every single type of digital data.  Each of them use their own derived formats and interfaces.  Even though their format may have their advantages, and their UI maybe so intuitive, the whole experience is rather fraction.

 

The main difference between a MacOS and a Windows is that, in Windows, you use explorer and find the file, double click to do actions to the file such as open it with a program.  In MacOS, you open a program, then tell the program to look for the files you want.  So the simple way to say is that, in Windows, it's file-based (file first, then programs); but in MacOS, it's program-based (programs first, then files).

 

But this aspect of Windows is getting destroyed by all these different software that has their own database storing everything in a single file, which makes Windows Explorer completely useless if I were to find an entry within the database (ie: finding a contact within a contact database of a program).

 

I feel more and more like I'm using a MacOS instead of a Windows just because of this and you know what, it really ticks me off and annoying.  So I started myself a data-browser-like program that will allow plugins and operates with a set of client + server software.  While I have such ideas, I do need some opinions of what other people might think about this "data management".  Please share some of your thoughts with me.  Thanks~  Below is a prototype photo of what my program look like

I would call it Bad-Tennis!  I never thought it would be so much fun with this sport, and so much different than badminton.

 

Tennis is an exact opposite of Badminton.  Here's the differences:
- You have to be at the position before you swing (at least for me right now)

- You have to use your arm as opposed to your wrist in badminton

- You have to further control your power, a big swing will make it far far far out

- Slicing is a little different than badminton

- A tennis ball costs 1/2 a badminton birddie

- I have to run much more.  I get exhausted (yeah really exhausted, can't run anymore) after 30 mins, which in badminton I can last at least 2 hours.

- The swings are slower than the badminton ones

- Must hit the ball before it pass you, since you can't use your wrist to adjust the angle of impact of the racquet and the ball once the ball passes your body.

 

As it turns out, this sport pinpoints at my weakness: stamina and concentration.  But of all those, I find it more enjoyable than badminton somehow.

I've been in Canada for almost 10 years, and for the very first group of friends I know in CGPS, he's the first (of all that stayed in touch throughout these 10 years) to leave for good.  Eric Li is going to Seattle for career, hope he'll be doing good there =D

 

The pics are taken in Philip's home last night.  Eric's flight is on July 3rd, 2006 morning (10am something)

Tonight was scheduled to do a maintenance with my coworkers at our client's place.  It was planned and we had the details so it was fine.  We were aiming to finish all the tasks in 2 hours and it seemed it was achievable.  We used about an hour doing updates, virus scanning, and other stuffs for both servers and workstations and all went fine. 

 

When we reached the last task - Image Backup for workstations, the hell started.  Apparently the size of the backup has doubled for each workstation, so the time has nearly doubled.  So normally it would take us about an hour for the backups, now it'll take more than 2 hours, which most of the time we are sitting and chat and remember - all 3 of us were waiting, while only 1 person is needed for the task.

 

So we thought ourselves that we better figure out a new way to do this.  Right now the limitations are:

- it boots from CD, which takes about 2 minutes each!

- it requires the presence of USB HDD attached to the computer when booting, so no cheating on booting time.

- it requires the presense of the boot CD while imaging, or the computer may crash/hang.

- networking is busted since no Dell's networking driver is loaded/presented.

- the speed is limited due to the USB 2.0 specification and USB HDD: 600MB/min

- only 1 computer can do this task at a time.

 

Let's put all these aside and at last - we stopped half way and we decided to go home in the mean time, as we all were getting axious and itching to go home.  So we took off.

 

On the way back to hwy 407, we encountered a road block by OPP.  It wasn't a big deal since we didn't drink and all that.  The cop just stated he wanted to check whether we have been drinking and driving and of course we answered "no".  Then he's interested about having sit belt on or not and flashlighted our sit belts.  It was nice and we just took off.  While we were leaving, apparently there's a guy busted and got his car towed.  Well it's OPP that sets this up so can't expect they'll be nice once they decided to take you in.

 

That's pretty much it for the night, as I wasn't so energetic to begin with today, I'm extremely tired after doing the report and this post.  Let me shower and sleep~

 

Attached: a photo, showing the car that's being towed.

As laptops (or notebooks) gain its popularity among students and mobile work force, so as the possibilities of what the laptop do to you.  We have heard of laptop overheating burnt skin of lap, and battery failure cause short-circuit and other problem.  While all these are rather common, this one reported at theinquirer.net here is certainly unheard-of.

 

A Dell laptop explodes during a Japanese conference.  The cause of it is unknown, and little is known about the laptop itself, such as the model, the OS and programs it was running, and the owner/primary user of the laptop.

 

It is also unknown whether Dell is aware of this incident though~

 

photos of the explosion are posted here: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=32550

 

update: Dell is aware of the news cover.  It appears the conference was being held in Osaka in Japan, and Dell spokeman stressed that "it appeared unconnected to a battery overheating problem" and is investigating the cause of the incident/accident.

Me and my bro just got a little something for my father, and wondering what do you all get for your father?  =D

 

Since the little something I got here is kindda small and I would like to get something larger, mind to share your ideas?  =D

I've been using Google Mail, Yahoo! Mail, and Windows Live Mail (Hotmail) for quite some time.  As I could finally use Yahoo! Mail beta in my IE7, here's my thoughts about all 3 beta services:

 

Google Mail beta:

- A creative way to manage e-mails and replies/forwards.  It definitely makes reply-checking and information linking much easier.

- The response speed is the fastest, including inbox/msg loading and such.

- A simple and clear (but not plain) user interface.

- First web-mail I use that has a AJAX like interface, though functionality and implementations are quite limited.

 

Windows Live Mail beta:

- Not as fast as Google Mail, but things are quite fast once the inbox is loaded.

- UI are responsive and fast.

- I liked how I double-click on an e-mail it shows the e-mail in the same window, and instead of loading the inbox again when I clicked on Inbox, it merely shows the inbox that was previously shown, to decrease loading time.

- UI is simple and plain, but not intuitive.  As most (if not all) UI elements are in flat style, it contradicts with the user interface users have been using in Windows and other OS.

- UI options are easy to access, if user ever finds the right button to click on.  Yes, the options are NOT in the Settings/Options section, which is so weird.

 

Yahoo! Mail beta:

- Finally support IE7 beta2

- The best UI of the 3 here.  The loading time for the UI graphics and such isn't long at all.

- The idea of tabs is helpful, so now I wont be opening 4-5 inbox tabs within the same IE window.

- The responsiveness of the UI is way too slow, especially the scroll bar which contents are loaded again during scrolling.

- Couple of UI bugs regarding incomplete double-click

- Ads take quite alot of space and so noticable!

- Ads get changed too often (possibly a bug), especially when repeatedly scroll up and down in inbox.

- The inability of having 2 or more e-mails opened in tabs is a minus!

 

Though the UI of Yahoo! Mail is slow to response, it's the best looking so far (to me).  Here's how it looks like in inbox.

There was a week during my exams that two of the computers (a P4 and P2) at my home went down all of the sudden.  Since I was having exams I don't bother touching them, but now I can.  The cause of dead for the P4 is yet unknown, while the P2's HDD is dead for some reason.  Since there isn't any HDD that my P2 supports nowadays, it's time to take the HDD from my P1 and -> decommission the P1.

 

The machine came a little more than 9 years ago, as a nicely package with a 15" CRT, speakers and printer.  It was my first computer in Canada, and was so much faster over my 80-386 (I still have it here!).  It's also the third time I use Windows 95, while my cousin-in-law was explaining this and that (the Display Properties).

 

I soon ditched the computer since year of 98, when my dad bought a P2, and my bro took over my P1.    I still remember there was a day I dropped my original HDD (1.6GB) on the floor and charged (fried) it.  So I had to get a 6.4GB HDD (which was $200+) for replacement to my bro :-S     I used the P2 until 2001, and since then the P1 hasn't been much used.  It had 2 HDDs, one died at some day for no reason, while the other one is now at my P2.

 

I have a question, where do I dump these obsolete computer hardware to?  Is there a place to recycle these?