Do not Take Driving Test at Marrickville RTA

Do not take driving test at Marrickville RTA, NSW.
I booked for a test a while ago. Then I check online for test route information. Unfortunately, I found that this RTA has a very bad reputation on some discussion forums. Generally, people who can have an easy pass will fail there, and some one even failed 5 time there before got a pass at another RTA. But I have booked there; so I have to wish myself good luck.
I didn't have a good luck yesterday. Failed because of two minor problems. 1. Didn't have enough observation at cross road. I understand that is my problem for long. I just don't want to shake my head like some drug addicted. When I passed the driving test and got license in Hong Kong (that was a one-shot success, and my driving skill was much much worse), the test officer told me I should improve on that. 2.Speeding. This is really ridiculous. I was constantly driving under 40km/s on a road with limit 60km/s. Yet I was called speeding. And his point is I didn't keep 3-sec distance to the car ahead. Come on, other cars kept on sneaking in my lane as I was slow. If I am driving under 30km/s, I am a hazard on the road and that's the concern.
After this experience, I believe that RTA is a money-making machine. They have been taking millions and millions of fine money from innocent people; and they are charging excessive test fees by just simply fail testers again and again. Better yet, the road is never a safe and convenient place for us.

Listening face

Watching Master Chef recently, and found one of the commercials is really hilarious.
Here is the link to the Ad on Youtube.
Here is the subscipt:
I love to multi-task, and I love to listen. And if I have no woman to listen to, I practise my listening face: "I love to listen with power. I love to hear of the problems of your friends. Tell me more…"

Is listening (or listening face) really an essential attribute of a perfect man?

SQL updatet with inner join

SQL update statement doesn't like to include an inner join clause -- although it is doable with a little modification. (Goo it with the keywords.) -- it definitely doesn't like to include an inner join and an aggregate clause at the same time. For example, the following does NOT work.
Update tableA
Set Flag = 1
From tableA
Inner Join tableB on tableA.ID = tableB.ID
Where ...
Group By tableB.ID

In this case, the option left is to use nested select statement.

Finally my Discrete Math class pay off

I am writing a long and complicated stored procedure. Basically it is like
"if A is true, then
  SELECT blabla FROM bla WHERE (B = true)
otherwise,
  SELECT blabla FROM bla WHERE (B = false)"

I don't want to write CASE WHEN; and I don't want to repeat the common SELECT stuff. So this is what I do:
"SELECT blabla FROM bla WHERE (A = false OR B = true)"
 This is because "if X then Y" is logically equivalent to "not X or Y". 

刮骨疗毒

话说，关羽手臂被毒箭射~~~中。华佗为其刮骨疗毒。关羽问华佗：“大~~~夫，这次手术的成功性有多大？”华佗说：“我已经做过99次同样的手术了。”关羽道：“那我就放心了。相信你会成功。”华佗道：“谢谢谢谢！我想我也该成功一次了啊！”

话说，关羽手臂被毒箭射~~~中。华佗为其刮骨疗毒。关羽突然跑了。刘备见状，问关羽：“你跑什么啊？”关羽道：“刚才华佗的徒弟说‘勇敢点！别害怕！这个手术很容易！’”刘备：“容易你怕什么？”关羽道：“但是这句话是华佗的徒弟说给华佗听的啊，大哥！”

话说，关羽手臂被毒箭射~~~中。华佗为其刮骨疗毒。华佗安慰关羽说：“别怕，一点都不痛的，一会就好……”关羽打断道：“呵呵！别说了，我以前也做过两年郎中的！

话说，关羽手臂被毒箭射~~~中。华佗为其刮骨疗毒。当华佗拿出刀子，关羽害怕了，不让华佗动手。于是，华佗叫人倒了一杯酒给关羽，喝后，问关羽：“有勇气了吗？现在还怕吗？”关羽道：“还有一点怕。”于是，又给关羽喝了一杯。关羽还是害怕。就这样不停的喝了几十杯。华佗又问：“现在是不是勇气十足？”只见关羽昂首挺胸，跳到了桌子上，大声叫道：“我倒要看看，谁xxxx敢动我的手臂！！”

A test on scheduled SSIS job

I have create an SSIS package that monitors an FTP and imports incoming data sets as flat files to the SQL server. (BTW, importing directly to an SQL destination is much faster than importing through ADO connection.Guess why?) It is deployed as a scheduled job on the server. The problem is: what should be schedule interval -- given that the job should be run as often as possible while the timespan to run an importing is indefinite.

I was afraid that the scheduled job would be pre-empted when a new schedule starts. That would cause a disaster -- 'cause no one knows what will happen when importing is stopped in the middle. So I conduct a test: I create a 2-min importing job, but schedule it as run every 1 minute. The result is: the next schedule will start only when the current one finishes. Mercy.

Cantonese Tones