Computer Knowledge. Gadget. Anime. Design. Dance. Hong Kong Life. Stuff like that.

9.27.2004


While I was eating noodle in a resturant last week, I found this lovely love symbol in my bowl. I took a picture of it, and thinking maybe you enjoy a peek too. Posted by Hello

9.25.2004

I am enjoying and suffering the best part and the worst part of having a baby without actually having one or raising one, as I am living with my mom and my brother, and my brother has 2 years 7 months old kid, and he is definitely a combination of an angel and a devil. Just half an hour ago, he's messy side kicked in, spilled a cup of water on my bed and it pissed me off, so I spanked him like 4 times.

To my surprise, he didn't cry. If it's his mother doing the same thing, he would have cried like hell for hours. I guess may be he figured out that crying never worked on me.



(2004-09-25)


I haven't written any new weblog for several days. Reason? Busy on studying and working on the art work for the new ACDPC web site. I have to admit that the web site thing was not going as well as I expected. I got stuck at figuring some issues related to CSS. Time to find a good book about the inside out of CSS I guess.

A man can never have too many gadget, while I am already flooded my bag with Harddisk based MP3 player, digital camera, PDA, Gameboy Advance and so on, I already started looking for a portable video player. Here's my criteria list:

- It has to have great battery life (6 hours or above), so that I can charge it everyday and then use it whenever and wherever I want to use.

- It needs to support multiple format. Divx 5 is the least minimum. Mpeg-4 is expected. The other "Good to have" formats including Quicklime, MPEG 1 and 2 and wmv.

- It should have a nice screen. I stare at it for hours, so it has to be good.

- It has to have at least 20Gb of more disk space.


And surprising, I expected to shell out big bucks for it. I don't even mind paying $6000 or even $7000 for a device if it's great. The closest one I saw so far is DVX-POD 7010 .

http://www.mobinote.com.tw/mainnews_20040609_eng.asp
http://shopping.pchome.com.tw/pnp/detail.php?pid=AHR00005

Looks very promising, but I really need to get more facts about the actual battery life before I commit on it.

Tokyo Game Show 2004 is just started, and IGN.com has some deep coverage. So go and check them out. I am very soon that after 2 to 3 weeks there will be tons of web sites popping showcasing a lot of video and picture from the show anyway.

Remember I had a bad experience with my LiteOn burner copying a DVD-5 disc? Well, yesterday I need to copy like 11 of a DVD-5 discs, and surprise I experienced no major problem. There was a hip-hop but it was mainly my fault, as I was using some application that trigger the file explorer and the system need to rescan all drives and thus hanged the machine a lot. So the lesson: don't use application that cause the system to rescan all the removable media while you are burning DVD. Well, the best solution is actually not mess with your machine while you are burning DVD, but you know me as an insane multitasking guy.

BUt now I have a dilemma as I saw a new firmware release for my drive, yet I am hesitate to update the firmware unless I have major problem burning the DVD disc. So far I found out that as long as I use 2.4X speed and with Sky DVDR disc, I should be OK.

BUt in case you are also using a LiteOn DVD driver and want to upgrade firmware, go to http://club.cdfreaks.com/showthread.php?t=107103 to learn about the latest firmware.

What's with the FreeiPod scan? (http://www.freeipods.com/Default.aspx) Well, I still don't trust it too much, and I don't think I can participate it since I am not physically in America, but ... hell with that. It still sounds like scam to me.


Tweak UI (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx) is a great free tool, but it's kind of hard from the Start menu with my tons of application. It's actually under "Powertoys for Windows XP", so check it out.





9.13.2004

It was not doubt that Futurama is one heck of a great animated show. With all the American cultural, Sci-Fi and technology reference thought out all the episodes, it pretty self-explained why geeks around the world love this show so much. NO one really understand why Fox made such a moronic mistake by making the airing schedule of Futurama so confusing that no one got to watch the show unless he did research on airtime or getting really lucky. Fortunately Cartoon Network picked up the show and it was a big hit.

I was recently watched most of the episode from the Futurama DVD 4, which contain the last season with some unseen episodes. This is no doubt a heartwarming, with tons of emotional twist spread across the whole season. That make sense since after 3 episode of forming the characters, people started to know well and care about the characters. I have to admit that there were dips of tear dropped for various moments in various episodes. Great job I should say to all the Futurama staff members! Although I won��t be so native to believe that Futurama can come back, I sure know that all you talents will be a bright and fruitful future ahead of you as your talent shown clearly here. Good luck, folks!

9.07.2004

There are so many online photo storage site these days. To just name a few:

http://www.imagestation.com

http://flickr.com

http://www.ofoto.com

http://www.shutterfly.com

They all try to make their revenue on photo printing. If that��s their only revenue stream, then they better find ways to fend off customers like me who never print photos.


Drumscore in normal convention. Posted by Hello

I was pretty happy when I brought the Jazz Drum set National Exam study material book from Shum Zhen. It��s just YMB$16.00, and it contains a lot of materials that I can use when I prepare material for the drum-set class I teach.

But today I figured out something that I should have figured out in the very beginning: the drum score notation convention is DIFFERENT in mainland China comparing with the rest of the world!!!!! I enclosed the two photos here.

Damn, I want my $16 back!

Referemce: http://www.drummingweb.com/reading.htm , http://www.drumbum.com/lessons/reading.htm


Drumscore form Jazz Drum set National Exam study material book. Notice that almost all notation are different from the regular convention. Posted by Hello

My 3D Studio Max 6 study reach to a point where instead of going thru a few sections of a chapter a day (or, at the beginning, more than a chapter a day), to which I can only finish one segment a day. The concepts are getting harder to grab and require more time to practice. This is good, that means I start to reach to the advance materials that I never get into before.

For a long while I was using VCDCutter to extract video from VCD (MPEG 1) . But today I tried TMPGEnc, and it��s equal capable to do the same job. Best of all, it��s a free app (well, at least for the MPEG1 editing capability). This is one app definitely worth trying out.

I also used TMPGEnc to enhance the audio of a VCD movie, and it��s pretty straight forward. This is how it works.

- Load TMPGEng, go to menu [File][MPEG Tools �K]

- Select tab [Simple De-multiplex]. Select your VCD (MPEG1) file as the input.

- By default it should set output files to the same directory. They are the video and audio stream of the MPEG1 video.

- Work on the audio part by open it in your favorite audio editor to do normalization. I use Sound Forge. Save the result audio file as .WAV (no compression).

- Back to TMPGMeg. Close [MPEG Tools �K] window. Now you are back to the main screen, where you can merge the audio and video stream to create a MPEG 1 video. We already have the video stream, which is the one you got in step 3. So select that .m1v file as the video source.

- For audio source, select the audio file you just manipulated.

- Select Output file name.

- Hit [Start] button. Now you will have a nice new MPEG1 file with video untouched and audio enhanced. I even throw the file into Song Clie movie converter and it worked flawlessly.

My 3D Studio Max 6 study reach to a point where instead of going thru a few sections of a chapter a day (or, at the beginning, more than a chapter a day), to which I can only finish one segment a day. The concepts are getting harder to grab and require more time to practice. This is good, that means I start to reach to the advance materials that I never get into before.

For a long while I was using VCDCutter to extract video from VCD (MPEG 1) . But today I tried TMPGEnc, and it��s equal capable to do the same job. Best of all, it��s a free app (well, at least for the MPEG1 editing capability). This is one app definitely worth trying out.

I also used TMPGEnc to enhance the audio of a VCD movie, and it��s pretty straight forward. This is how it works.

- Load TMPGEng, go to menu [File][MPEG Tools �K]

- Select tab [Simple De-multiplex]. Select your VCD (MPEG1) file as the input.

- By default it should set output files to the same directory. They are the video and audio stream of the MPEG1 video.

- Work on the audio part by open it in your favorite audio editor to do normalization. I use Sound Forge. Save the result audio file as .WAV (no compression).

- Back to TMPGMeg. Close [MPEG Tools �K] window. Now you are back to the main screen, where you can merge the audio and video stream to create a MPEG 1 video. We already have the video stream, which is the one you got in step 3. So select that .m1v file as the video source.

- For audio source, select the audio file you just manipulated.

- Select Output file name.

- Hit [Start] button. Now you will have a nice new MPEG1 file with video untouched and audio enhanced. I even throw the file into Song Clie movie converter and it worked flawlessly.

9.06.2004


Me and my dance partner on "Butterfly Love", photoed on 2004-08-28. Posted by Hello

I didn��t realize until now that the audio track on VCD is actually Mpeg 1 level 2 (MP2) instead of MP3. No wonder my MP3 player cannot play the audio I extracted from VCD. There are several ways to fix the problem. One way is by using CDex.

http://www.cdex.n3.net/

This open source application allows me to convert Mp2 to MP3 by the following simple steps:

  1. Drag and drop the mp2 file ion the CDex UI
  2. A ��Select options for dropped files�� dialog popped up. Click [Encode] button.
  3. It will create a new mp3 file in the default folder (specified in preference)
  4. Done.

What the hell LOMO? It��s a special kind of camera that constructed to take quick snapshot using film (instead of flash memory card like the digital camera). LOMO camera created a special kind of picture, and you have to see it to understand it. Those who love LOMO take using a LOMO as a spiritual journey, and for the picture LOMO created, it does have that sort of appeal. The follow links will give you an introduction to LOMO.

http://www.lomographyasia.com/lomography/about/ (Chinese)

http://www.lomography.com/about/ (English)

My mission of trying to find the simplest work flow to convert movie files into Sony Clie NX-70V format yield some progress these days. I found an application called Smart Video Converter (http://www.doease.com/). It can handle Divx and some other funky file format well. It��s mainly, to me, a .avi to .mpg file converted. But the good thing about .mpg is that once in MPEG1, Sony Clie movie converter can convert the files without too much problem.

On the other hand, there are still some problems that cannot resolve:

- movie will hang the machine if I played them from Flashcard with ANY interruption, like pause

- During video conversion, resulting files sort of created in random order

The CFMagic driver provider provided the following solution:

http://www.pdascent.com/products/cfmagic/faq.html , with the following MPEG naming instruction:

http://www.pdabuyersguide.com/feature/sony_NX70V.htm

But they didn��t work because the result video file is twice plus as big, and played very jerky on my PDA.

Guess there��s no perfect solution.

And I also found that people online kept referencing NX70V as an antique! Man, hello! This toy is still cooking!

I found a nice way to let me play movie on both the CF card and the memory stick. Just set the CFMagic so that it prefer movie from CF card, then install the Clie Movie player app from:

http://www.tompda.com/bbs/palm.asp?forumID=559693

The movie player will automatically prefer memory stick. Now I have player for whichever situation.

I didn��t realize until now that the audio track on VCD is actually Mpeg 1 level 2 (MP2) instead of MP3. No wonder my MP3 player cannot play the audio I extracted from VCD. There are several ways to fix the problem. One way is by using CDex.

http://www.cdex.n3.net/

This open source application allows me to convert Mp2 to MP3 by the following simple steps:

  1. Drag and drop the mp2 file ion the CDex UI
  2. A ��Select options for dropped files�� dialog popped up. Click [Encode] button.
  3. It will create a new mp3 file in the default folder (specified in preference)
  4. Done.

What the hell LOMO? It��s a special kind of camera that constructed to take quick snapshot using film (instead of flash memory card like the digital camera). LOMO camera created a special kind of picture, and you have to see it to understand it. Those who love LOMO take using a LOMO as a spiritual journey, and for the picture LOMO created, it does have that sort of appeal. The follow links will give you an introduction to LOMO.

http://www.lomographyasia.com/lomography/about/ (Chinese)

http://www.lomography.com/about/ (English)

My mission of trying to find the simplest work flow to convert movie files into Sony Clie NX-70V format yield some progress these days. I found an application called Smart Video Converter (http://www.doease.com/). It can handle Divx and some other funky file format well. It��s mainly, to me, a .avi to .mpg file converted. But the good thing about .mpg is that once in MPEG1, Sony Clie movie converter can convert the files without too much problem.

On the other hand, there are still some problems that cannot resolve:

- movie will hang the machine if I played them from Flashcard with ANY interruption, like pause

- During video conversion, resulting files sort of created in random order

The CFMagic driver provider provided the following solution:

http://www.pdascent.com/products/cfmagic/faq.html , with the following MPEG naming instruction:

http://www.pdabuyersguide.com/feature/sony_NX70V.htm

But they didn��t work because the result video file is twice plus as big, and played very jerky on my PDA.

Guess there��s no perfect solution.

And I also found that people online kept referencing NX70V as an antique! Man, hello! This toy is still cooking!

I found a nice way to let me play movie on both the CF card and the memory stick. Just set the CFMagic so that it prefer movie from CF card, then install the Clie Movie player app from:

http://www.tompda.com/bbs/palm.asp?forumID=559693

The movie player will automatically prefer memory stick. Now I have player for whichever situation.

Never realized that using InDesign to process Chinese can come across such obstacles.

I heard that Adobe was trying to establish InDesign as the desktop publishing standard and challenge the dominance of Quark Express, and so far it was doing pretty well. Based on a white paper I found form the Adobe web site, InDesign is capable to handle Chinese, but in order to take advantage of all the Chinese specific alignment and paragraph setting, a plug called InChinese need to be used.

So I found InDesign 2.0 (with 2 update files to update the app to 2.02) from my library and grabbed InChinese 2.51 form Overnet. As I figured out later, InChinese 2.51 ONLY works with InDesign 2.0.1, and it will actually failed to install on any version of InDesign other than InDesign 2.0.1, including 2.0.2. But this is not the most troublesome part. To me, the biggest annoying factor was that InChinese turned all menus into Chinese, which is something I hate. I only need to Chinese process capability, and not the Chinese menu. The plug-in also has problem rendering Chinese font name properly on font menu, which is a bad sign.

Fortunately, I have it installed on a VMWare OS, so at least my working OS was not being messed up, but I was being discouraged indeed. Maybe I��ll come back to this application later to see if there��s any way I can tweak to get rid of the Chinese menu.

9.05.2004

It��s not my intention to always use some industrial strengthen application to do something simple and trivial (at least form my standpoint), but it��s just that I cannot find tools that does what a want, and those powerful professional applications always have the final grain control to allow me to do exactly what I need.

Case in point: today I need to, yet again, adjust the volume of a VCD (MPEG 1) video by normalizing it as the original volume is too low for me to use it during my dance practice. The trick is that the volume-normalized video will eventually feed to the Sony Clie movie converter to concert the video to a particular MPEG 4 format so that I can view it on my Sony Clie.

I don��t know of any utility that can adjust MPEG 1 audio directly, so I tried to use Vega 3, and later Vega 5.0b. They both generated videos that looked OK on Windows Media Player, but when I put those videos in the Sony Clie movie converter, they all converted into some videos that have a lot of noise.

After a few attempts, I was frustrated, and decided to use the pro app Adobe Premiere Pro. I set the movie to the VCD PAL size and frame rate, and it created a video that Sony Clie converter can consume. So far so good. But now they Sony Clie converter failed to convert the whole video because the source video file is too huge (2G). So I have to lower to file size by using the sucky Video1 compression in order to lower to file size to about 1G (Sony converter seems to have problem with size bigger than one gig.

So once again, simple problem, complex solution.

9.03.2004

I was updating my resume while I have a bunch of old Pet Shop Boys video running at the background. It��s so strange because I am such an ��I-am-not-a-fan-but-damn-I-listen-to-everysingle-one-of-their-song-and-video�� kind of listener. Anyway, the video ��Was It worth It�� flied by. This is not like a big hit song, but to me it��s kind of catchy. Back when the song was just released, I didn��t realize they homosexual. And now that I know it, the lyrics of ��Was It worth It�� take a different level of meaning. So does the song ��Go west�� and ��Somewhere��. They are all, should I say, gay pride kind of song. I was not like a hardcore anti-homosexual (my Christian brothers and sisters must be very disappointed for what I just said). I don��t like that kind of sexual preference, just like I don��t like Twins or Joey or all the HKSPop. I was just finding it funny that the same song sounded difference now that I know the real meaning. It��s feel of ,,,, hmmm ,.,,,,, enlighten I guess :-D ?

I know I always bitch about something that is trivial, but man I just love bitching. Here��s my complain: all the DVD store and restaurant, please, please stop stretching your 4:3 TV screen ratio to widescreen. This is so extremely irritating. Just because you can stretch the regular TV signal to fill up the widescreen plasma TV doesn��t mean you HAVE TO DO IT. It really distorts the picture, making all the people on the screen FAT, and damn this is just not right. And the fact that a lot of people do exactly that at their home when they watch regular broadcasting TV signal on their widescreen plasma or LCD TV is even more fascinating. I can understand the mentality of restaurants and music stores. They are in business, they are used to take advantage of things for no good reason (greedy asshole mind set), so it��s by their nature to ��fully utilize�� their plasma TV screen. But for AV lovers who shelled out tens of thousands for the luxury to enjoy high quality TV picture, it just doesn��t make sense that they INTENTIONALLY stretch the TV picture to non-proportional way just for fill-up-the-screen. Damn, this is just like using top quality audio system to listen to Twins CD.

Damn, am I a bitch or what?

Windows XP (or may other OS using Windows 2000 kernel) has this strange problem that the system cannot delete a file when a file path is getting too long. For most case this is not a problem since you usually don��t create a file with file name ��this is a very long file name so that I can mess myself up for no good reason.doc��, but more than often I will move files inside a folder in order to organize information in a tidy away, and then maybe moving this folder inside another folder. After a few iteration, and you will get a file path that excess the 255 character limit.

Usually this happens to me when I move folders inside folders in my _2BTrashed folder (a folder that I store stuff I will eventually delete but a bit hesitates at the moment). And then when I try to delete the whole 2BTrashed folder, I got error message.

The solution of the problem is usually manually moving the folders out to the root level one by one. While this works, I hope that Windows can at least warn me when I was moving the file, and not wait all the way until I delete them.

Speaking of feature that is nice-to-have, there are also some features that I wish my iRiver iHP-140 (40 GB hard disk based MP3 player) can implement. In fact, when my iHP-140 broke down (which probably won��t happen until after a few years), I may switch to iPod for the following reason.

- normalize songs so that they all sound at the same volume level

- Ability to mark a file ��listened��. This is important for audio books.

- A more effective way to forward in an audio file. This is important when I listen to recorded radio show.

Recently, iRiver releases a firmware update (1.50). While it fixed some problem, it still doesn��t address the problems I mentioned above. In fact, I don��t know if iPod provides a solution for the complain I have above. Guess I have to wait for some media player in the future.

You know what, I bet Apple is actually working on a media player that looks like iPod but plays both video and audio. They may already have it done, just to wait for the right time and right market. Portable media player is a huge market, and judge by how good iPod does, I am pretty confident that Apple can do the magic again.

[Tech]

There��s so much to learn everyday.

First I figured out that it��s a huge hazard to my system if my hard disk is 50C or about, and I found mine running at 63C!!!! When I touched the case, it��s like something is boiling inside! So first I move a serial ATA hard from the rack to the bottom of the system. (Previously the three hard disks were stacked one above the other). And then I opened the case to let more air to go thru the system. After opening the case for an hour, the temperature dropped to 47C, and the computer case is much friendlier to touch at.

I also set the power setting so that the hard disk will be off after an hour of inactive. That should also lower the heat.

Just when I thought all is well, I started to set up hibernation on my desktop, only to found this error message:

��The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process.��

I search the web and found this advice:

http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?act=ST&f=70&t=24624

With links to:

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=330909

I downloaded the hot fix, but it doesn��t seem to work. It was mentioned in the knowledge base article that eventually I need to install WinXP SP2 to resolve the problem. Given the huge amount of negative comment on SP2, I think I better wait for a while first.


Man, AirSnare failed on the 3Com AirConnect 11Mbps Wireless LAN card I borrowed from a friend. What a blow.

On the other hand, I was recommended to use Sygate Personal Firewall instead of Zone Alarm. So I guess I will give it a try later:

http://smb.sygate.com/products/spf_standard.htm

I was trying to install WindowsXP Service Pack 2 on the VMWare Windows XP that I used to do development with. I got an error :

Windows has detected that one or more protected core system files (kernel) on your computer have been modified. The Service Pack contains updated versions of those files, which work to provide a stable environment for your programs. Due to this modification, the Service Pack will not be installed. For more information, see Knowledge Base article Q327101 at http://support.microsoft.com.

I checked http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;327101 and found the instruction, but couldn't get the problem resolved.

I ran the same installation app on my regular XP (the OS of the hosting PC) and it seems to work fine. Strange.

The new iMac G5 has been released (http://www.apple.com/imac/) and .... It looks.... OK. I actually prefer the previous lamp design :->

[Internet security]

I came across the following web site, and was amazing by how detail it scanned by Internet ports, and then provide solutions about how to secure my computer by blocking off all the unnecessary port. You should take a look on this page:

https://www.grc.com/x/ne.dll?bh0bkyd2

People were sort of surprise when I tell them that I don��t watch Hong Kong Television. Beside the fact that I intrinsically hate the format, content, host, artist, writing and so on and so fore for 99% of TVB shows, I have too much video that I downloaded from the Net that I even problem keeping up. Those shows including ��the Screen Saver�� (technology information show), ��Call for Help 2.0�� (Computer problem shooting), and all the Japanese animation.

I really learned a lot form Screen Saver and Call for Help. These shows talk about information that you can use something about using your existing hardware to do more and do better stuff, or secure your system in the better. Comparatively, when media in Hong Kong covers technology, it��s more about buying, buying and buying stuffs. They are more like a shopping guide, and that sicken me. I guess that��s yet another reason why I almost never buy Hong Kong computer magazines. Having said that, there are magazines in Hong Kong that devoted to ��how-to��, but they are more of technical people. Screen Saver and Call for Help managed to keep the content informative but not way too low level in technical detail.

For instance, I watched the Aug 4 2004 episode of Screen Saver talking about the following free application, and I was amazed by how they may improve my productivity and make my wireless life more secure.

Synergy: (http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/) lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems,

Airsnare: ( http://home.comcast.net/~jay.deboer/airsnare/) intrusion detection system to help you monitor your wireless network.

Pretty cool!

9.02.2004

Let's face it. System crash happens, and it usually happens when you are least expected and least prepared. That's why you need to learn how to discover problem before hand.

The old tools for recovering hard disk doesn't work well anymore ever since Microsoft heavily pushed the NTFS file system ever since WinNT and now on most of the WinXP machine. Most the old Window based rescure application failed to deal with NTFS.

Fortunately, the new breed of tool rose to handle NTFS. Ironically, most guru recommend Linux based tool, like the Linux Live CD boot up disk, and use Linux tools to fix partition, rescure NTFS files, and so on.

SystemRescueCd is one of those, and you can learn more about it by going to http://www.sysresccd.org/ . It's free, so you won't loss much by trying it.

There��s another commercial tool called SpinRite (6.0). http://grc.com/default.htm . Several gurus highly recommended it for recovering corrupted disk, and provided great result.

I am going to trying out the above two schemes sometime this week, and see how well they work.

In addition, the site provide some very useful information about rescure your system using bootCD: http://www.oion.net/qnd/bootcd/

9.01.2004

[TEch]

I am always obsense at Tablet computing. My ideal world doesn't not have paper, but only Tablet computers for me to read, write, capture and manipulate information whenever and wherever I go. I got part of my dream accomplished by the Sony Clie, but the screen is not big enough and the processing power if not fast enough to handle some of the activites that I want to throw at it, like putting a eBook in it.

Microsoft's tablet PC gave me som hope, but I see the following problems so far:

- Poor screen with not big enough viewable angle.
- Heavy in weight
- Poor battery life

Besides the technological concern, I have the following concern:

- The more device you have, the more time, money and energy you have to spend of maintaining those items.
- The heat generated by Tablet PC makes it uncomfortable to carry around for long hours.


Still, I am keeping my eyes close to the market. Once their a reasonable product release, I will buy it.

And you probably realize that I didn't mention high price. Yes, I realize that these gadgets are expansive, and for the benefit it provides, I think it's worth the price.

IN the meantime, check out this website, which has a lot of useful information about Tablet PC:

http://www.tabletpcbuzz.com/

Man my stomach was like hell last night. I went restroom 3 times, and each time it got more painful as I have less to excrete. This morning I had to go to restroom again, and after this round, my stomach was totally empty, and finally my stomach let me go and call a quit to restroom trip.

Sigh, and I wonder what I ate wrong last night. It was definitely not the dinner since I ate it before the Praise Team A band practice, and I was totally fine. So it seems like I can only blame the Vitasoy with the dry Mango fruit that I ate. But the mystery still hasn't completely resolved. Was it the Vitasoy that cause by stomach ache, or the dry mango fruit, or the combination. One thing for sure is that I need to stay away from both of these at least for a while.

My GameBoy Advance is my best partner in the restroom. We spent countless hours together having a lot of good time. And even when I gradually shy away from playing video game with a guilty of spending time at home playing game instead of learning graphic design software package, I have no problem continue playing GameBoy. After all, I play it only when I have problem doing other stuff, like when I was in the restroom. Besides, it's just a few minutes of fun. Playing console game is a different story, though. Once you get sucked in, especially when you are playing RPG, you can spend hours after hours in front of the console.

Somehow I am more conscious about utilizing my time more effectively now that I am jobless. This especially true after I turned down a 3 month contract offer from my old boss. The reason of turning down the offer was for having more time to focus on my study on Graphic design tools and the dance drama on Oct 18. And if you understand economy, you understand the concept of opportunity cost. Opportunity cost of doing something is the cost of giving up not doing the other things that you can do. So the cost of staying the 3 graphic design software package and the dance drama is the cost of my 3 months salary. Now even though that's not a hefty amount of money, it's still something. Plus I still have to pay the household expense to my mom. So I totally realize how expansive it is to do what I am doing now.

That said, I am totally NOT regretting with my decision. What I am doing now has a lot of long term effect of my career, as I see the IT industry continue shrink, I need to branch out my talent to something that I can uniquely offer to my market. Time will tell whether I made the right decision, but in order to have a life that I enjoy by making a living from something I do well, this is an approach that I don't think I can avoid.

That doesn't mean I am turning my back from being an IT person. IN fact, I am spend time figuring out how to set up a web portal called Dot Net Nuke which seems to be a good Open Source tool to implement a portal. I am still into technology, it's just that choosing between the contract work with nothing to learn and a opportunity to broaden my graphic design skill set, I chose the late.