Chan's Personal Blog

So I've been frantically trying to finish my CSC 450 network game project. I've been pulling relatively late nights working on this (relatively late considering I have to wake up at 7a.m. every morning. So tonight I finished coding all the major parts of the project with some small parts left. I went to compress the code and upload it to the school computers where I will demonstrate the game tomorrow.

I ran the following commands

chan%> tar -cf *

Which means mash all these files into one file. I forgot to give this mash file a file name ... but for some reason I thought that there'd be a file called * which would be the name of the mash file. So, stupidly enough I think, okay, lets delete this mistakenly named file.

chan%> rm *

A millisecond after, my brain goes ... oh crap! Did I just accidentally delete my entire project???? My heart stopped.

chan%> ls

I do a directory listing and find that EVERYTHING'S gone! That means a metric crap load of my time has just went down the drain.

chan%> GAH!f*ojh#ew!&()3523;K+_LSDjj!

I immediately stop everything and run undelete. (Yes, that's the command for undelete above.) Thankfully I was able to recover all my files.

In either case, now I remember why I don't code late at night anymore. Gah! Time for bed.

Here I am, rapidly approaching the finish line. There is ten days left before the term finishes. I've got two assignments, one quiz, and one final project due within those ten days. So, it's time to gear up for this final stretch of the race. I'm going to have a fun time juggling school, sleep, work, church, and relationships. In either case, if you don't see too many blog updates this week, you'll know why. Lucky me, I also have an exam on the very first day of the exam period. Let them come.

I'll end off with a short excerpt from C.J. Block again from his book, "A Letter to the Canadians: The First Epistle of C.J. Block." This comes from chapter 4. Hopefully this can bring some refreshment to the many weary souls that dare tread here.

"However, in these trials I have learned that more important to God as how much you can handle, is the question of how you handle it. When the storms of life come, do not just pray that you will make it through the storm, but pray also that you will make it through the storm with integrity, having kept your word, represented the Truth, and maintained Christ's attitude genuinely in everything you said and did. It is important to God that you arrive with integrity on the other side of the storm. This is Christianity with style." - C.J. Block

I came across this interesting article that talks about the U.S. Navy using dolphins to protect their ships and docks from terrorist attacks in the Persian Gulf.

"The dolphins, brought to the region in spring 2003, are trained to detect, locate and mark a threat swimmer or diver and alert their human handlers ... Dolphins were last used in Bahrain in the late 1980s during the Iran-Iraq war, when several oil tankers were attacked in the Arabian Gulf. At the time, six dolphins patrolled the Bahrain harbor to protect U.S. ships from mines and enemies."

Apparently dolphins were used by the military as early as the Vietnam war as well. Anyways, this is some useless news you could probably use for awkward silences in conversation.

Now if they could train some sharks to carry laser beams on their back, we'd be set.

As promised, this is a second installment of what I experienced at the Merge two weeks ago. I went to one of the truth sessions on Saturday morning, and the theme they were addressing was money. This is one of those touchy subjects that the Church tries to tip toe around, but I think it is especially important to address for young adults. A lot of us are starting to get our hands on income, credit cards, etc, and it's really easy to be sucked into uncontrollable debt.

In either case, they handed out a small book called, "A Letter to The Canadians: The first epistle of John Stevens." It is written in the style of Paul from the Bible, as a letter to various churches during biblical times. The difference is, this book addresses some of things that are specific to Canadians (the West), and uses more up to date language. John Stevens is a Canadian missionary who is currently working in Estonia. He provides a unique outsider's perspective on the Canadian church. Here is an excerpt from chapter 3 that spoke volumes to me.

"Don't be captured by greed, as those around you have allowed themselves to be. They chase with every breathe the debt that binds them to many masters. The credit card companies are quick to extend their hands filled with money to give to you, but when you cannot pay it back, the hand curls into a fist, and I tell you the truth, they will not stop beating you until the last penny is paid. It is the same with the money lenders as it is with the banks, and car dealers, and shopping centers.

Be aware! Do not define your wants as needs. Instead, ask God for your wants. It is not a sin to drive a nice car, or to live in a nice house, but when you do so outside of obedience, out of selfishness, or without genuine generosity in your life, you are a glutton. Such people buy more than they can afford, for they have not yet been generous. Do you not think the Lord loves both you and the same garbage dwellers in Calcutta with the same love. Do not ask how you can aford this or that, but ask how you can be generous and still fulfill your financial responsibilities. Do not be confused into a false sense of security, you will not be remembered for what you accumulated but for what you gave away." - John Stevens

The last sentence really resonated with me. This last month I've been to two funerals, and it does seem true, people remembered these individuals by what they gave away to others, not by how much stuff these people had. Sobering thoughts...

More to follow.

Well, today was a pretty exhausting day. I started the morning right by having two quizzes. One of them I only did okay on, the questions on it was not what I had expected.

In either case, the day got better when I walked into work. As I entered, one of my co-workers told me that the web server had crashed and that my boss asked me to start running my various repair scripts on the system. After the system was back up and running, we started looking for the cause of the crash. We identified the cause of the server crash and began planning fixes for it.

Shortly later in the afternoon one of the staff members dropped by the office saying that the calendar in our software seems to be malfunctioning, it says today's date is October 27th, 2004. I checked it and couldn't reproduce the bug, so I didn't think about it anymore. I left the office for the washroom, and when I got back, my co-workers said the boss was looking for me, something about the server again. So when I went to my boss' office, she said something bad happened to the server.

When the server died this afternoon, we had to reboot the computer, and for some reason the server didn't set its clock properly. It set the date to October 27th. We have a lot of things in our software that relies on the date being accurate. To make a long story short, we spent the rest of the afternoon going through the database searching for records that had screwed up time stamps and what not.

On top of that, I've been waiting for an important phone call for the last two days, and it's like a splinter in mind driving me insane.

So.... that summarizes an awesome day I had today. Good times good times . I'm off to bed, the battle starts up again tomorrow.

Today after church I was talking to my godmother. She was asking how my school was going in general, and I told her I was moving on to a masters degree in January. One of her friends was listening as I was explaining myself, she was an older Chinese lady. My parents came over to join the situation, and the older lady was commenting how proud my parents must be, etc, etc.

Then she said something that seemed caught my attention. She was saying oh how great it must be to have such successful sons unlike my daughters. From what I gathered, one of her daughters worked at BC Hydro with a decent job, and another had finished a degree at SFU. How ever she was hinting that because they were girls they weren't making as much money, or they weren't as smart so they couldn't go further on in school. She had the notion that if she had sons, they'd make more money, and be able to get more education because they'd be smarter and stronger. After she finished explaining that, she seemed teary eyed because all she had were daughters.

I always knew there was a sense in traditional Chinese culture that sons are preferrable to having daughters; however, I thought that was more of an older school of thought in China. In Western culture, gender is equal, and I thought that might have rubbed off on that lady, being Canadian and all.

Anyways, after the lady finished her rant, my godmother was saying how great daughters were, and there really isn't any difference, all children are blessings from God. My parents also mentioned that they always wished they had a daughter, but all they got were all sons.

In either case, I think this underscores a disturbing attitude that Chinese people have; this is especially true in Communist China where they have the one-child policy. People are performing gender-specific abortions if the child to be is a girl.

This article from the Washington Post paints a pretty good picture of what is happening in China with respect to their one-child policy.

Here's a small excerpt:

"Last year, 20 children were born to the women of Xicun. Sixteen were boys. The year before, 24 were born and 19 were boys. There is a reason for the preponderance of males: In 1999, the medical center that serves Xicun bought a cheap, Chinese-made ultrasound machine that allowed doctors to determine the sex of a fetus. Sex-selective abortions followed. And now the town, like hundreds of others in China, is facing a boom in boys."

China will face some very awkward demographic problems in the future. As these boys grow up, men need wives ... and these practices lead to a massive shortage of women in the future. (I think I'm going to invest in some mail order bride company futures now actually.) From experience, it's hard enough to find a girlfriend, but looks like it's going to get harder.

Thoughts? Comments? Is there a sense of sons being superior in other non-Chinese cultures that you've observed?

Whether you see Yassir Arafat as a terrorist or a politician, his death yesterday marked an end to an era. A little backgrounder for people who didn't know who he was, Arafat was the leader of the Palestinians who became very ill in late October. He was flown to a military base in France for treatment for a mysterious illness. He fell into a coma and died as his organs failed. He was 75 years old.

In either case, the Christian Science Monitor has a pretty good article about these events. There's also an interesting story here about Former President Clinton's reaction to Arafat's passing. (Clinton helped bring the Israelis and Palestinians on the brink of peace during peace talks.)

CNN has an article about the world's reaction to the passing of Arafat. The opinions differ greatly.

"The tragedy was that Arafat, who had the power and prestige to move his people to peace, instead moved them and us into a terrible war of terror that cost thousands of lives, Israelis and Palestinians alike. This is the man who also pioneered international terrorism, the art of hijacking planes, ships, kidnapping and seizing of hostages and you name it. Which gave birth, of course, to other terrorist groups who emulated him, including al Qaeda." - Israeli Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

"[Arafat was a] man of courage and conviction who has incarnated, for 40 years, the fight of Palestinians for the recognition of their national rights." - French President Jacques Chirac

The coming weeks should be interesting as new Palestinian leadership comes to power. We'll have to see if the leadership becomes more radical or moderate. Some analysts fear that there will be a civil war between the various factions that are trying to grab power.

Hopefully a more moderate leadership emerges and the peace talks can continue. Arafat was shunned by the Israelis and Americans because they saw him as completely incompetent in disarming his own terrorists. There's also a sense that Arafat didn't really want peace because during the peace talks in the 90's, Israel had offered the Palestinians 99% of their land back, and Arafat walked out on the talks.