The lucky number 7

April 7th, 2008 by duongnt

Some people consider 7 as a lucky number and for me, it is Today is the 7th, exactly 37 month since I started working at BT and 2×7th aniversary of our engagement ceremony, I have received the news from my head of center that I have passed my interview, ending a long month of waiting. The result is that I will be promoted to senior position effected from the first of July (another 7 ). Thank you honey for helping me with the preparation and make me feel confident and enthusiastic throughout the time

I have been working here in BT for quite a while, more than 3 years already, enough time to do another PhD although I for sure will not attempt anything like that again. Lot of changes have happened during those 3 years and they all have fundamental effect in my lives. Looking to the future, I cannot predict what will happen but I hope my Thao will finish her study and ready to enter the world.

It is 14 month since we engaged. It can be either long or short, subjective to different person. For us, it has been not the perfect ride in any mean. It was more like a intra-continental travel with a bike in the motorway in the famous English winter weather. Nonetheless, we are getting there and we will get there

Today is my happy days and it started from 4am when some unexpected event occurred. I hope it will end in the similar fashion and everything will get back on track again. But for now, it is enough ranting and time to back to work

With love to my family and especially my lovely wife,

Our marriage videos

March 14th, 2008 by duongnt

After a couple of days wondering around Premiere Pro I have finally managed to compact our marriage video into something smaller that can be uploaded to YouTube. The original goal was to make a single video but it turned out to be quite awkward to achieve since there are quite a number of events included. Thus, the optimal solution is to turn it to 2 parts and here they are.

Part 1: start from the groom family, marching to the bride family to formally ask them to accept me as their son-in-law and heading back to the groom family for my family to have Thao as the daughter-in-law.

Part 2: start from the groom family, going to the hotel where the major of the ceremony is held. This is the place where all of our family relatives and friends are welcomed and they went here to congratulate us.

Good luck to you my love

January 19th, 2008 by duongnt

Today is your big day. All the preparation and practice will be put under fire. I know you are nervous but thing will be fine. You will nail it I am sure. So, all my fingers will be crossed for you today and I can wait to hear the good news from you.

With love ,

NTD

Overclocking

January 18th, 2008 by duongnt

I did my first real overclocking last night with my new PC. Well, in the past I did get my hand in overclocking a few times but those are realatively minor. Yesterday, I did get into serious bit of the business and surely why not! Core Duo 2, especially E6750 is really famous for their overclockability, even using the supplied Intel HSF. However, it is a bit noisy and might not give the best performance so I decided to replace it with the Arctic Cooling Freezer Pro 7. I got a free delivery offer from Scan so I ordered it and it arrived yesterday. Installing the fan was easy and straightforward, took less than 5 minutes in total and it is quieter and much better than the Intel one. The main source of noise now is the fan from the PSU (I think).

Getting to the serious business. After reading few guides in various forums, I decide to overclock my CPU from 2.6GHz to 3.2GHz, getting about 20% increase for free. In order to do that, I have taken the following steps:

1. Getting into BIOS, change the AI overclocking from Automatic to Manual

2. Setting the DRAM frequency from Auto to DDR2 - 667MHz. This is to ensure the ratio between RAM and CPU are 1.1 and when FSB is increased to 400, my RAM will run as DDR2-800MHz, which is its native speed.

3. Change the CPU multiplier from Auto to 8

4. Change the FSB from 333MHz to 400MHz

5. Change the vcore from Auto to 1.35, this to ensure that my CPU will have enough power

… read the rest of this entry »

11th month anniversary

January 7th, 2008 by duongnt

Today mark the 11th month anniversary of our engagement, nearly a year already! Only a month and a half into our marriage ceremony I would never have thought that marriage life is simple and will be straightforward and I was right. For the period of nearly a year living together, we really did fight a lot and some of the fights were really long (more than a day :p

As usual, there are plenty of things that I am regret that I have not done. One thing, I am sorry that I did not take you to Lake District or Cornwall in 2007 but I promise you that we will be there this year. I also hope we will have a better year to come and our troubles will fade away. Besides, I will try to be better (as usual) but I really mean it this time. We might have to relocate but it will not be a problem and we will find a way to deal with it. I hope you will be able to start your study real soon and I will help you with all that I could.

At the end of the day, I love you and I always want you to be happy. I will try my best to do everything I can I promise and I wish us to have more and more happiness together

Love you

NTD