There I spent my early school age

Mom and I went back to my grandparents’ home when I gotta get into the third grade in primary school, while dad was sent to Burundi by his company. (I didn’t realize the reason why we must move there until recently.)

At that time, I was totally absent to the “odd” names and directions of the towns in the surroundings. Now it’s clear. In fact, their topological positions never change. The only thing that has changed is my perceivings – I could view them from outside for now.

Experiences of life in villages is always worthwhile for a child.

You could never press save button too frequently

Most programmers might have experienced the vexation after losting hundreds of lines of code, without saving to files. The causes can vary from unexpected OS crash to hardware failure, or even a naughty cat.

This morning I just found Wikipedia, likewise, also placed such a placard on its website:

Power corrupts. Power failure corrupts absolutely.

We’re currently recovering servers from a power failure in our colocation facility. This means backing up 170gb of database on several servers and running recovery. Back soon…

Wikipedia uses InnoDB. A sudden power failure often corrupts some data files and sets the database state into unrecoverable. Sure they have backup and redo log files. But it still takes time.

With an eye to the accidents with LiveJournal and Blogsome a few days ago. My suggestion for you guys is definitely DO MORE BACKUPS. And take care.

Watching Spring Festival Gala Live Broadcast online for now

CCTV.com provides 1 link entry for domestic users and 3 for abroad. Having inspected each one patiently, I found out that the only one I could both hear and see it through was Abroad Entry 2.

The sound effect is rather nice. But the mosaic in the Media Player window can easily prevent me from clearly seeing the subtitles and faces of the hosts and hostesses.

Gotta know which is my next plaything? Skype! Skype through GPRS! Count on the coming story.

Wandering the Vacant City

It’s still a 24ish hours way to the Rooster Year. At this point, this north capital city is just half empty! Many people were making short or long journey to get home for family get-togethers. So as one of my colleagues had put it, like, half of the country’s population were on the way. Spring festival is a time of “floating” for the whole nation. I knew this when I took bus from Zhongguancun Crossroad bus stop back to Tuanjiehu. If it were not spring festival, the compartment of bus No. 302 should be EXTREMELY crowded, and the traffic should be EXTREMELY heavy. But today there were still empty seats. Actually I took a cozy nap sitting on mine.

Though it is forbidden to play with fireworks within the 5th ring road of Beijing. I can still indulge in the festive atomosphere. There will be just a few of ppl going to work tomorrow. I mean, I’m also planning to get back to my parents’ place in the morning, a while after presenting myself in the office. (I’m diligent enough, really.)

So just celebrate the holiday with your parents, beloved ones(young couples have another festival during this special season ;-)), call old friends, breath some fresh air, and have a good rest.

Happy new year, guys!