Htam::Diary

This Wednesday, I went on campus for the first time after the holiday closure and ate lunch at Chandler (I was unsure of the reopening date and did not want to test out the probabilities yesterday).  While on campus, I also bought some textbooks for next term.  I am ready for school to start, yay!  (Actually, not really, I still like break.)

This Tuesday, I was reminded to clean the kitchen up.  I was reading my roommate's post of quotes this past term.  I came across quotes dealing with the stickiness of surfaces in our kitchen.  So I went and cleaned the kitchen.  It is not everywhere clean but at least it is not nowhere clean.

This Monday, I decided to test ride the bike I received on Saturday.  I was also in need of some groceries, so I went to Pavillions.  The bike ride there was very pleasant.  However, I bought too much liquid, so the load was heavy and unpleasant on the way back.  All in all, I am very satisfied with my bike.

This Sunday at church I interpreted from English to Chinese for hymns leading and announcements.  I did a very poor job.  I think I am currently not suitable for the job.  After church, I went to the gym but the gym was closed.  So I watched some movies I borrowed from O'Doms instead.

This Saturday, I went to Ernest's place in the morning.  He acquired a free old bike for me.  He fixed up the bike this morning for me, while I watched.  This bike is old and not good looking, but it should work just fine.  Now I have a bike of my own, yay.  In the afternoon, a bunch of church people went and watched Finding Nemo on Ice show at Staples Stadium, it was quite interesting.

This Friday, I went to campus to get food, but they are closed.  Because I was not prepared to cook for lunch in a few minutes, so I ate some frozen microwaveable food.  In the afternoon, I got an haircut.  For dinner, I boiled ground pork with baked bean curd, hard boiled eggs, and of course, soy sauce.  It is delicious.  I am going to call this dish Jed's Special, for I like it a lot.

This Thursday, I vacuumed my apartment.  That's about all.  Just kidding.  Starting tomorrow, Spike TV is showing 008 days of 007.  It will show five to seven films per day.  Since there are only twenty (20) canon Bond films to date, by the pidgeon hole principle, there will be repeats.  In fact, there will be films repeated three (3) or more times.  In order to choose good times to record each film (avoiding time that I would want to use the VCR for playback, say), I decided to write a visual program that I can manipulate much like the puzzle game `tents' I have become addicted to.  Yesterday I wrote most of the program, utilizing PHP and JavaScript.  Today, I finished the system and also drafted a recording strategy.

This Wednesday, I went bowling with some church people.  It was quite interesting.  This is the third time I bowled.  The first was with high school physics class in 11th grade, the second was with Ruddock at an alley challenge last year.  Of course I did not score high, but it was still fun.  Afterwards, I bought some bananas.

This Tuesday, I used the borrowed bike again.  Continuing my efforts to secure a cable for my DVD player, I biked to Target.  I was able to (mostly) find what I needed and bike back with a heavy load of food and supplies, spending a total of an hour on this endeavor.

To my delight, the supposedly-broken-so-left-for-claim-in-Ruddock-1.5 DVD player functions properly (for the most part).  I have been watching DVD's on my laptop, and when I reach higher track numbers that the (physical) player cannot read, I go onto campus and watch the rest in Ruddock.  This have given me a better reason to get lunch on campus, but it has also caused inconvenience.  Now I can watch DVD's at home on my TV, yay.

This Monday, I wanted to try out the bike I borrowed from Ziqing Zhao yesterday.  He is leaving today so he no longer needs his bike.  I am delighted that he was willing to let me borrow his bike for the rest of the break.  I rode the bike to campus, only to find out that it is not significantly faster (due to the overhead of securing and unsecuring the bike).  I also rode the bike to RadioShack in search for a cable to connect an old DVD player I found to the television, since my computer DVD driver cannot access certain tracks.  To my disappointment, RadioShack only carry high quality cables that are very expensive, so I did not make a purchase.

This Sunday, after church, I played table tennis as usual.  Today, I was surprisingly energetic so I hit fast balls.  I had to tone it down because my partner could not handle it.  I am out of shape, however, because my stamina is lower.  I got tired rather quickly and now I can barely stay awake.  I think I am going to initiate my regenerative cycle sooner today.

This Saturday, as discussed yesterday, I decided to wrote photo support for my diary mechanism.  The images are thumbnailed, yay.  Posting of images is of course limited to only by myself.  I should get some images showing up (obviously not everyday) now.  When there are enough images, I will write an interface to see all of them, or the like.  For now, you may enjoy looking at my Mabo Tofu.

This Friday, I cooked some Mabo Tofu, yummy.  It was so good that I over-indulged.  I might supply a photo of my creation some day.  Otherwise, I spent the rest of the day continuing my work on backup solutions for my many computers.  I now store many, many copies all around the globe.  Just kidding.  I store snapshots of different temporal coordinates at multiple physical coordinates.

My cable TV has finally paid off.  Yesterday, I was able to record some Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes that I have not seen but are continuation of what I have seen.  Today I watched lots of TNG, it was enjoyable.

This Thursday, I worked on my computer backup solution.  Once I read an article regarding this topic.  It told me to pay myself on the back if my last backup was within 24 hours.  So I did.  I always backup my files.  The question that remain is, where to.  I used to keep a server running at all times backing up my files.  My roommate, however, complained of the high pitch humming that keeps him awake at night.  So I have been keeping backup copies on the local drive.  This only remedies accidental deletes but not complete hard drive failures.  Thus I need more drastic measures.  Now I use rsnapshot.  Well, I've used rsnapshot for a while on a different machine, which I instituted towards the end of summer.  The test was acceptible.  So now I am using that as my primary backup solution.  I worked it out today, instead of a local computer (which has to be run through network anyways), I now backup to a server in Taiwan, half way around the globe.  Now not even natural disaster is likely to damage both copies of my data.  Should I be satisfied?

This Wednesday, I organized, catalogued, and digitalized (somewhat) my receits of the past term.  You think I am crazy?  This is stuff I enjoy doing over break.  I enjoy it.  On a side note, I've been watching more TV, it's nice.  Also it looks like I cannot keep on posting within the day for more than two consecutive days.

This Tuesday, I enhanced my script for playing shuffled music (not just random, but it will repeat only after playing every song) in a directory (and its subdirectories) to display (for a few seconds) the song name (filename and path) on the screen using on screen display.  I have wanted this for quite some time, today I finally had time and energy to attempt it.  After some trials and tweaking, I finally have what seems to be a good working solution now.

This Monday, I woke up but have really nothing to do.  Yay.  I ended up doing a lot of miscellaneous things that I wanted to do but did not have time for in the school year.  I am curious as to whether these tasks will last the entire break, or if I will actually run out of important things needing to be accomplished.  In any case, I did productive work, and I watched TV to relax; a nice combination.

This Sunday, after church, I obtained a cable splitter.  Now I can watch cable TV and have internet connectivity simultaneously (see the posts around Thanksgiving for more details).  In any case, I am now enjoying both technological benefits at the same time, yay.

This Saturday, we have special meetings at church.  Brother Jonathan Peng from Washington (not SCA) came to speak with us on Solomon and what he asked for.  We often have the impression that Solomon asked for wisdom.  But after careful examination, he asked for wisdom, discernment, and knowledge.  In the morning, we considered wisdom.  At night, we considered discernment.  Knowledge will be the topic tomorrow.

This Friday, I have nothing to do, yay.  More precisely, I have nothing that has to be done that involves academics.  I did have to write a check, eat, etc.  In any case, at night, I joined ABSK in having dinner, celebrating the end of term, and also the birthday of my former roommate, David Barmore.  We went and watched The Chronicles of Narnia (2005) afterwards.  It was quite interesting.  I was able to pick out a lot of Biblical allusions.