We have been working very hard on the leftover in the fridge these days.  Finally, stomach is very full and packing is almost done.  It seems all left to do is to set the alarm clock at 3AM and rest ourselves in bed for a while. This time tomorrow I will say hello to you from Ms. Zuiderdam.
Today, during the dessert time, I asked Ron to boil some water for the tea again. He got very suspicious and asked whether this was a trick. But he still went to the kitchen, filled and turned on the kettle. After that, he sat back with us.  Two seconds later, he stood up and went to the kitchen to check the kettle, “Did I turn on the kettle?” …..
Today I read an anticle forwarded by one of our co-ops in the team. I like the last sentence. 😀
Electrical Engineering vs. Computer Science
Once upon a time, in a kingdom not far from here, a king summoned two of his advisors for a test. He showed them both a shiny metal box with two slots in the top, a control knob, and a lever. “What do you think this is?”
One advisor, an engineer, answered first. “It is a toaster,” he said. The king asked, “How would you design an embedded computer for it?” The engineer replied, “Using a four-bit microcontroller, I would write a simple program that reads the darkness knob and quantizes its position to one of 16 shades of darkness, from snow white to coal black. The program would use that darkness level as the index to a 16-element table of initial timer values. Then it would turn on the heating elements and start the timer with the initial value selected from the table. At the end of the time delay, it would turn off the heat and pop up the toast. Come back next week, and I’ll show you a working prototype.”
The second advisor, a computer scientist, immediately recognized the danger of such short-sighted thinking. He said, “Toasters don’t just turn bread into toast, they are also used to warm frozen waffles. What you see before you is really a breakfast food cooker. As the subjects of your kingdom become more sophisticated, they will demand more capabilities. They will need a breakfast food cooker that can also cook sausage, fry bacon, and make scrambled eggs. A toaster that only makes toast will soon be obsolete. If we don’t look to the future, we will have to completely redesign the toaster in just a few years.”
“With this in mind, we can formulate a more intelligent solution to the problem. First, create a class of breakfast foods. Specialize this class into subclasses: grains, pork, and poultry. The specialization process should be repeated with grains divided into toast, muffins, pancakes, and waffles; pork divided into sausage, links, and bacon; and poultry divided into scrambled eggs, hard- boiled eggs, poached eggs, fried eggs, and various omelet classes.”
“The ham and cheese omelet class is worth special attention because it must inherit characteristics from the pork, dairy, and poultry classes. Thus, we see that the problem cannot be properly solved without multiple inheritance. At run time, the program must create the proper object and send a message to the object that says, ‘Cook yourself.’ The semantics of this message depend, of course, on the kind of object, so they have a different meaning to a piece of toast than to scrambled eggs.”
“Reviewing the process so far, we see that the analysis phase has revealed that the primary requirement is to cook any kind of breakfast food. In the design phase, we have discovered some derived requirements. Specifically, we need an object-oriented language with multiple inheritance. Of course, users don’t want the eggs to get cold while the bacon is frying, so concurrent processing is required, too.”
“We must not forget the user interface. The lever that lowers the food lacks versatility, and the darkness knob is confusing. Users won’t buy the product unless it has a user-friendly, graphical interface. When the breakfast cooker is plugged in, users should see a cowboy boot on the screen. Users click on it, and the message ‘Booting UNIX v.8.3’ appears on the screen. (UNIX 8.3 should be out by the time the product gets to the market.) Users can pull down a menu and click on the foods they want to cook.”
“Having made the wise decision of specifying the software first in the design phase, all that remains is to pick an adequate hardware platform for the implementation phase. An Intel 80386 with 8MB of memory, a 30MB hard disk, and a VGA monitor should be sufficient. If you select a multitasking, object oriented language that supports multiple inheritance and has a built-in GUI, writing the program will be a snap. (Imagine the difficulty we would have had if we had foolishly allowed a hardware-first design strategy to lock us into a four-bit microcontroller!).”
The king wisely had the computer scientist beheaded, and they all lived happily ever after.
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Is anybody bothered by Ron’s memory capability?Â
Yesterday, my friend Helena came over and we had a nice dinner together. Some random topics came up. One of them was about pregnancy. Helena is a young mom, she said she feels herself dumber after she had the baby.  She can not remember things as well as before. (I have heard others said the same thing, oh poor women, always suffering).  Ron said immediately after… if he was a woman and had a baby, he probably couldn’t remember his own name anymore. oh right, I totally agree with that.Â
If somebody wonders why, here is one thing happened afterwards. I asked Ron to boil some water in the electric kettle to refill the teapot.  I saw him filled the water, turned on the kettle and sat back to the table. Perfect! We kept talking and probably five minutes later, the kettle turned off by itself — water was boiled. I asked Ron to bring the kettle over to refill the teapot. He went to the kitchen — good boy! Then he yelled and turned on the kettle again ” Damn, I forgot turning on the kettle!”
……
As people say, it has been broken for years.  But there are some really exciting progresses recently.  After some endless shopping experience in homedepot, last Sunday,  our shower finally got a layer of tiles! Although it still needs quite a bit effort to be a fully functional shower, it does look like a shower now! Tiles are so crucial to the shower’s definition.Â
Tiling on the shower is an exhausting process for two ppl who split 24 hours as sitting in front of the computer and lying in bed.  I didn’t think it would be so tough, tiling… just put some squares on 8*8 square feet wall… plus Ron planned everything so well that he drew the shower plan and calculated every detail of a tile how it should be put…and we got everything ready… It appeared that I was just too naive.
We worked from Sunday noon till 2:30AM Monday straight.   I believe that we both are people with strong will ( Let’s not think the reason we have to work hard is that we have to return the tile saw as soon as possible since we don’t want to be charged badly),  we were both defeated at the time that only one last row of tile are left not done in the late night. I told Ron:” Forget about returning the tile saw in time, I just want to lay myself flat.” Ron had the same thought.  Ron usually will not say give up easily but I know that he has been working very hard on the shower and he is really depleted.Â
We went to bed and got up around 11 in the morning and finished our last row at the bottom of the shower. The last row was most unpleasant to work on, since it involved lots of cutting and we had to worked all bent.   Oh… our poor bone…