My web site, DeeCay Zone, is not staying up too as it's hosting on my home machine with a shitty Hitchison Powerline based broadband service. The throughput of the line is so bad that most of the time the web site like down, which doesn't make sense as I can still see my GetRight downloading stuff from Mircrosoft web site.

It's pretty obvious to me that I have to do something before I start to insane because of this crappy ISP. I am thinking of getting SoNet, which seems to be the only choice I have because:

- I don't like ICable's share bandwidth concept.
- I don't like Netvigator's price
- I don't like HKNet's customer service (my friend Kok had first hand experience )
- I don't like Huitchson's inconsistant service.

Now it's basically my cheapness against SoNet. I may convince myself to continue tolerant my current crappy ISP service since it's "free" (or at least I already paid thru building mainance fee). Beside, I don't have a long a time to enjoy it as I was at work most of the time anyway. Time will tell what the outcome is.

I bited the bullet and brought a new harddisk after constantly running out of harddisk space. This is particularly serious a problem when now that the machine is fast enough to run VMWare smoothly. I started to create a various OS (Linux RedHat, Windows 2000 ...) for various development projects. Hopefully this will provide some sort of incentive to continue writing code. It's been a while since I start some serious program. Coding is like exercising. You gotta keep coding, or else you will lose your coding sense.

The new hard disk is a Western Digital Serial ATA harddisk, which is supposed to be faster than the regular ATA 133 harddisk. I also paid HK$100 for than a Segate one. But then I believe that all harddisks are NOT created equal, and I trust the Western Digital brand. So far WD didn't fail me.

Sleep, and I am offline now. Talk to you later folks, and let me know if you want to yell back about something I said so far. Later.

One problem with portable devices produced these days is that their batteries usually have a very short life. The battery of my laptop (Compaq Presario 1720US) was dead a few months ago, and now the battery of my Sony Clie NX70V is showing sign of dying. Not matter how long I charge it, it can never be fully charged. And when you think of the fact that I brought the Clie for last than a year, you will realize how bad the situation is. I guess manufacturers are cutting corners to a point that they just don't care about long term customer satisfication, and try to grab as much money right here right now as possible.

I am a bit frustrated by my ISP. My home internet connection was going up and down in the last 36 hours like a stormy sea. I didn't pay much for my ISP, so I guess I get what I paid for, but still >:-{ .

I think I am going to start a computer technology web site for dancers. That's right. Dancers. I happened to be a amateur dancer and a IT professional, and after being asked tons are dance related computer questions, I feel like there's a need to help dancers to embrace technology along with their artistic and creative journey. Tell me what you think about it :->

For instance, there are times that you need watch a dance videos and learn the steps from it, but you find that the steps are too complicate or being done too fast. The video player that comes with your PC, Windows Media Player, does NOT support slow motion playback. Even the new Windows Media Player 9 cannot play back MPEG file (a video format that VCD uses) in slow motion.

Solution? There are 2 ways to play back a VCD dance video in slow motion (or fast motion, even though I don't know why you want to do so). You can buy a software called CyberLink PowerDVD. You can use it play VCD and you can choose half speed playback or even frame by frame playback.

The second solution is probably the one you want to here, because it's FREE :-} . There's a software called JetAudio, which is a media player like the Windows Media Player. It support playing back MPEG (VCD) in various speed, from 50%(half speed or slow motion) to 200% (twice the speed), and the funniest is that the software actually smoothly adjust the audio so that you can still hear the slowed down music while the video is playing at half speed! I rarely seen this kind of feature in media players. So can download the this jetAudio 5.1.10 Basic at http://www.jetaudio.com/download/index.html .

Ever have a need to convert audio file from one format to another format, or change the bitrate of your MP3 files? You thought you don't have such a need until you encounter the following situation:

- You got a portable mp3 player, and found that it only support up to 192K bit rate, and you only have the 320K bit rate version of your song files.

- You have a 155Mb Lord of The Ring audio book mp3 file. Your portable mp3 player can hold 128Mb of data only, and you don't mind lowering the audio quality a bit for audio book.

- You downloaded some audio files in .wma (Windows Media Audio) format, and you want to listen to files in your portable MP3 players which does not support .wma format.

- You want to crumb more songs in your portable mp3 player and you don't mind lower the audio quality.

- You want to do some audio editing with your .mp3 files, but your audio editing application can only take .wav file.

The list can go on and on. Solution? I highly recommend dBpowerAMP Music converter (http://www.dbpoweramp.com/dmc.htm). It's free, and it's powerful. You definitely need to give it a try.

I implicitly became a madam ("Cee Nine" in Cantonese) yesterday night.

Even though I always joke about how tedious madams do to just save a penny while wasting hours waiting in line for some discount products, deep inside I have great respect to madams, for it's madams that brought up you and me. Think about it: you only have limited budget (either from your part time job or from your husband) to run a family. Providing your family member a good dinner, a clean living room or a quite learning environment is your best way to show your love to your family, not to mention the satisfaction you get from getting job well done. So madam is basically the CEO and CFO of the family, and no good CFO will causally spend money on items without evaluating all the options, bargain with the vendors (hawkers, supermarket staffs...) and pick the most cost effective solution. So next time before you poke fun of madams collaborative collect point to exchange for cookware from supermarket, or waiting in line for 2 days to get Twins (HK pop star) for their daughters, think about the love they have deep down inside.

And nothing better to understand madams then being like one of them, walking in their shoes.

That what I did last night, and ironically, after I came up with the idea poked fun on whether there will be madams to do exact what I was thinking.

And that is: will you use your Octopus card to get in and out of the gates at the same station(thus being charge for the lowest fee, which is about HK$3.8) to jack up the travel count on the card, thus qualify you to earn a free single trip ticket (worth HK$12 if you use it to take the longest trip)?

I did just that. It was Sunday mid-night 12:10 am. I was at Tsuen Wan MTR station. After checking the status of my Octopus card, I realized that my MTR traveling count is 9, one short of earning a free ticket. Suddenly an idea popup: I have a need to take the longest trip with MTR a few time per week, and it's not bad an idea to gain $12 by paying $3.8.

So there I did it. It felt corny, but from now on when madams chat about how to save nickels on soft drink from Supermarket, I can join the discussion.

Remember that I have a very bitchy motherboard which can get cranky when I mess with the DDR memory, that my whole machine was brought down the knees after installing a Pentium 4 2.8GHz because it hates my original SamSung DDR 333MHz memory? And remember I said that after I finally got the P4 CPU running on the motherboard, I was not going to touch it anymore? Well, curiosity kills cat, but I am not a cat, so this morning I was so brave that I opened my machine and mess with the Kingston DDR in the memory slot.

By the way, I am still not brave enough to put back the old SamSung. It's definitely not work with the mother+P4 after so many trials.

What I found out was something very interesting. My machine has two memory slots: slot 1 and slot 2. My KIngston was in slot 1, and p4 running great. So I tried moving the Kingston DDR to slot 2. When I rebooted, the machine started and THEN STOPPED, and the start again but unable to boot up. When I put the Kingston back in slot 1, everything worked!

So even though Kingston DDR works with my motherboard on slot 1, it FAILED on slot 2! What kind of logic is that!? It's pretty obvious that my current mother board is a stupid bitch, that one of these days (when I am ready to add more memory) I have to swap it out for something better. And no, I will not buy MSI motherboard ever in my life. Call me superstition.

The PDC 2003 Online Sessions are just great. I was learning stuff by watching the various sessions while I was cleaning up my harddisk. Sure there are some marketing hyper during the sessions, but at least they provide some technical information that is beneficial to me in long run.

I just hope that Java community has something similar.

I particularly enjoy the session which tells me some pitfall and bug of the current framework, with introduction to some tools that can help me to dignose a .Net application. Here's the list. I have a feeling that I will use some of the following tools/links very soon.

BCL Site (String, DateTime, Breaking Changes)
http://www.gotdotnot.com/team/clr/bcl/

Design Guidelines:
http://www.gotdotnet.com/team/libraries

FxCop:
http://www.gotdotnet.com/team/fxcop/

CDP Info:
http://blogs.gotdotnet.com/anathan

CLR Profiler and CLR Performance
http://gotdotnet.com/team/clr/about_clr_performance.aspx