Happiness as Flowers

Recently I bought a mainland TV drama: 幸福像花儿一样. My motivation is to have some quiet time watching TV with my wife. That last time we watched a complete TV series was over three years ago.

I am not a big fan of TV drama. This one interests me because of:
1. It is a love drama (the only type my wife likes)
2. Starred by 孙俪 (she is good in 玉观音)
3. The story background is Liberty army in the 80's (that's odd for a love drama)

This love drama is not as cheesy and involves more thinking. The story describes how two girl friends finding their desired happy lives. Although most characters are soldiers, their feeling, desire, love, joy, and sadness are similar to ordinary people. After all, soliders are human too.

P.S. Drama theme song in my Stickam.

Animation in PowerPoint

On Friday I finished the presentation of my school project. It is a so-call "CMOS UWB IQ Modulator". In short, it is a Radio Frequency (RF) Circuit.

I and my partner first started the project in 2003. At first we planned to do "Automatic Gain Control System". But this design was difficult and references were limited. We spend 2.5 years but couldn't got anything going. Fortunately my partner is doing RF circuit at work now. Then we change the project topic. And bang! We get it done in half a year.

I will skip all the circuit stuff here. But there is one interesting thing we learn from this project, which is using animation in PowerPoint. Our design involves some not-so-easy RF theories. In a book those theories can take a few pages to explain. So we use animation to present those ideas. To my surprise it is pretty easy to add animation in PowerPoint. And the result is good. It makes the presentation much easier for audiences to follow.

I still need to submit a long report. That I can't use animation. But with all the training form blogging, it shouldn't be too hard to B.S. all the writing.

Departing Flight

Still remember that time when graduating from high school. We, as teenagers, were so passionate. We exchanged card, photos. Sadness started to build up throughout the last months of the semester. Usually songs like "Friends", "Wish" would be K-Song hits. But as we grow older, we see friends leaving numerous time. The emotion is no longer strong. Friend's departure, it seems to be just part of life.

This time Henry is going to HK for good. His departure comes quite suddenly, really caught our surprise. In contrast, last year, another friend told everyone he was leaving but turn out staying. He didn't mean to fool us, life itself just isn't easy to predict.

Anyway, Henry continues his 奇異旅程 in HK. Good luck and God bless!

Blog. Friend.

Recently, I found a blog of an old friend, who I didn't keep in touch for long time. In the normal circumstance, I should be pretty excited to find a friend in this situation. But I have mixed feeling this time.

He was my friend throughout elementary and high school. We went to same college and were roommate for many years. However, there were some very unpleasant incidents happened to our gang of friends during college year. Then he slowly stayed away and we lost touch.

I were struggle to leave him a blog message or not. There is no big problem happened between our friendship. However I'm afraid my appearance may remind his unpleasant memory of those days. Plus he seems to meet a new group of friends and happy now. Why disturb?

Dinner Ideas

Me and my wife often have problem to come up cooking ideas. So recently I start to take picture of any new dishes we make. We plan to put all these photo in a blog. Then we won't forgot what we've cooked. It may helps us come up new dinner idea. Here are some dishes we had recently:











Went out of food at home, so just noodle mixed with soy source, plus wonton.











I were pretty hungry at that time, so cook a lot: a) Korean BBQ source on Pork, b) Egg-Flower soup with tomato and crab meat, c) Seafood pasta, d) stir fried vegetable with lots of Garlic












Pork rib soup with a Chinese herb and mixed vegetable. It taste better after putting in a frig overnight so can filter out the grease.

Scripting in Windows

I mainly work in Unix environment, so I write script quite often. I am more familiar with Perl because I used it to write CGI since I was in college.

A while ago I tried to do some script programming using my PC at home. The idea is to look-up eBay items automatically and do some marketing analysis (helping my brother because he is a professional ebay seller). Doing such task with Perl is pretty easy in Unix/Linux. In Window, it is a little troublesome. I need to install a Perl compiler. Then the program syntax need to be changed a little to fit DOS. It works but not quite convenient.

Recently, Microsoft announces it will support an open-source script language: Python. This is a good news for script programming fans such as myself. Python is a pretty neat language. Its syntax is closer to serious programming language such as C++ but can still program like a script. The things I like about Python are: 1. No need to compile 2. It is an Interpreter 3. Easier to program in Object Oriented.

Microsoft IronPython goes beta