(2004-07-02)
 
A lot of things going on with me these days.  For all, the most important is probably the approaching of the end of my current contract.  It's not like I really hate this work, although I must admit that there's so much challenging moment all along and sometimes the cranky side of me just suddenly show up and kick the dirt in front of every colleague at work.  That was a scary. But most importantly, my full time job combines with my crazy band practice schedule (Praise team A, team B, 5 PM and Heart Production special events) and dance practice/performance sucked up 98% of my time.  And I was not a happy person when I don't have some spare time to do my personal stuff, including song writing, updating my weblog, do a little bit sketching and creative work, or simply layback.
 
Just recently I found my physical limitation.  After being totally frustrated by playing the newly setup electronic drum set during the Sunday Service (you tended play extra hard on a electronic drum set) and lack of sleeping the night before (have a night band practice), my mental and physical was exhausted to a point which I walked like a living zombie.  The worst part was that I had to rush to a dance practice and then rush back to another band practice.  So there I was walking around in the dance studio doing something so called dance when in fact was just doing the routine.  Chow sir was pissed and I was frustrated.  It was after then that I was serious consider quitting Chinese dance. 
 
I am trying to think of a strategy to solve this problem, but I really couldn't.  I am not quitting playing drum set on Sunday service, yet at least I don't want to quit Chinese dance now.  So I guess I only option left is to have a great night sleep on Saturday night, and have a relaxing Saturday in general.  Hopefully that would give me enough energy to get by the busy Sunday.
 
And that was, once again, why I was so thrilled about the end of my contract.  I can finally get a chance to realign my life and do a trial run of my stuff as if I were leaving Hong Kong right now.  This may seems like a strange, but consider that I will leave Hong Kong sooner or later; this is an essential exercise for me to remind myself not to get too kin on accumulating possession.  As much I tried to keep myself from unnecessary purchase, there's still a lot of stuff accumulating at the upper deck of my bed.  And after the reconstruction of room, that upper deck is getting pretty messing.  I am sure if I leave it along for a few more months, it will be just matter of time that the upper deck will be like a dumpster. 
 
Because of my friend Galena��s computer was infected by virus, and that I need to crank out a virus cleaning solution which I non-techky person can execute without minimum of my assistance, I spent sometime to figure a easy 1-2-3 kind of steps for cleaning virus.  And thru out the process, I figured out something:
 
            (1) Bootup up from a self-boot anti-virus doesn't work too well on XP
            Self-Boot up OS (from DOS to WinME) cannot handle NTFS, and thus even though I can boot up a Norton Anti-virus CD, it doesn't recognize all the NTFS partition, which is the default partition type for XP.
            (2) DOS (16-bit) based anti-virus tool doesn't work on XP
            I also tried running the 16-bit version of the Symantec Antivirus 9 with latest virus definition directly from a CDR once I booted a machine in XP Safe Mode.  Turns out the DOS version weren��t able to cure the infected files even after the application found it.
 
            So the only solution left is to:
            (0) Unplug the Internet connection.
            (1) Boot up the machine at XP Safe Mode.
            (2) Run that standalone virus removal application (I have 5 collected).  These are the notorious one which keep you from installing or running Antivirus application.
            (3) Run those 2 MSBlast & Sassy OS loophole patch.
            (4) Turn on XP build in firewall.
            (5) install Norton Antivirus.
            (6) Connect to the Internet.
            (7) Update the Norton Antivirus definition. And the scan and clean the machine.
            (8) Do all the Critical windows Updates.
            (9) Use Adaware 6.0 to clean all the spyware.
 
            That's it.  Man, a lot of work.  But at least these steps are proven working for many times.