Seatac airport removed X’mas trees in respond to a Rabbi’s request to place equally big menorahs next to the Christmas trees. Frankly, I was a little offended by the Rabbi. Who the hell still regards Christmas trees as religious symbols? You can practice your freedom of religion in many ways. Ruining other’s holidays doesn’t have to be one of them.

I have been following the lost family story on Seattle Times for a couple of days. They were travelling along I-5 in Oregon. They missed the exit to Highway 42 and took a shortcut along the Rogue river. They got stuck in the snow near Bear Camp. The wife and kids stayed in the car while the father went out seeking help. The rescue team found the wife and kids safe. Unfortunately, the father, James Kim, was found dead yesterday. It’s a heart breaking story. Now the lession for the rest of us is to stay on main roads all the time, and whenever you get lost, stay in the car and wait for rescue.

It’s a brand new month. But the rain didn’t just stop for December. It looks like Northwest has a new record for November. The storm last week was incredible. So many people were stuck and stranded on their commute Monday afternoon. Some spent 9 hours. I was lucky enough to leave early and spent only 2 hours on the road. Microsoft campus was mostly closed for 2 days. Mt Baker has seen 12 feet of snow in the past week. They are looking forward to breaking their own world record set in 1998-1999 season.

I was listening to KUOW this morning in my car. It said that the storm made to New York Times. There was even a 2-minute feature on TV in Barcelona. The publicity was partly due to the Seahawk game televised nation wide. Our friend Sharon also knew about the storm from the game and emailed us asking about it (the storm hit Oregon a bit later). That was quite interesting. The federal government has declared three major weather disaster in Alaska since August, yet no one cares about it. Several inches of snow in Seattle and it’s hell.

Pacific Northwest is seeing the wettest November. Snow is great on the mountains. We went to Mt Baker on Thursday and Crystal on Saturday. Baker is far and small. Crystal is pretty good, about the same level as Bachelor.

There must be something special about Seattle. I’ve always been feeling it. But I can’t tell. It was summoning me, “come, as you are, as you were, as I want you to be … “. It must be the spirit, the spirit of liberty, the spirit of anger, the spirit of Nirvana.

My Sony SDM-X82 LCD monitor is giving me troubles again (this is the 4th time). It has just passed the warranty. Well, even if it is still under warranty, I wouldn’t bother calling them. They just keep sending you refurbished units that are worse. In fact, the current one was a refurbished unit they sent when the old one died. It had problems when it first arrived. But now it’s becoming worse. Basically, the image would sometimes suddenly go off. I had to turn it off and one again. Sometimes I have to do this multiple times. This was exactly the same problem the 3 times before. They simply didn’t do anything to fix it!

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If you are like me who manages headless Windows boxes from remote desktop, you would sometimes find it necessary to shutdown or reboot the box. The shutdown button wouldn’t show up in the start menu, however. You can write a small program, or activate Task Manager by Ctrl+Alt+End and shutdown/reboot from there.

Hardware:

ATI Radeon 9600 with TV-out
Hauppauge PVR 250 w/ FM
Zalman HD 160 enclosure + remote

Software:

Windows MCE 2005
nVidia Purevideo (for mpeg2 codec)
DVRMSToolbox
mceWeather
GameEx + mame32

Paul proposed implementing a syscall as a first exercise. I am digging a little myself and found that most online documents (including the textbook) are not up-to-date with 2.6.16. So I am trying to document a little bit of my own.

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I wanted to add a footnote to the chapter title in my thesis. You might think this would work:

\chapter{blah footnote{blah}}

But it actually does not. I figure this out:

\chapter{blahprotectfootnote{this is a footnote.}}

But this also puts the footnote in the TOC. If this is not what you want, you might do this:

\chapter[blah]{blahprotectfootnote{this is a footnote.}}