December. Holiday spirit is ubiquitous. Even my working environment has slowed down a bit. Today I was debugging this L2 design which was started exactly a year ago. Although it's a design built from scratch and has improved over months, I feel like i got stuck at the same thing for too long. An experienced colleague of mine assured me that it's more than common to work on the same stuff over years. Imagine verilog and waveform for the next 20~30 years of my life? Doesn't sound too fun to me.

My vista PC started acting weird last week. Suspecting some incompatible updates corrupted the OS, I tried to restore it back to previous system configuration via the built-in recovery function. No luck obviously.

Googled "Catastrophic failure 0x8000ffff" and apparently so many users got that cryptic message and there's no clear solution for that. Pretty catastrophic indeed that I have to reformat the whole hard drive. Lesson learnt, never put high hope in MS system recovery.