Small world

It is indeed a small world after all. Yesterday I met a guy in my dancing class, literally, he is a friend of a friend of a friend of Pat, friend to the power of 3. Anyways, I didn’t pay much attention to him and we didn’t even introduce ourselves to each other. Today, when I was in the cafeteria at work, I met this guy again. It is kinda embrassed I couldn’t remember his name and have to peak his badage. It turned out he just started in PMC last week! What a small world, every people is inter-connected. Since he is also from HK, our lunch group can use new blood as it is getting smaller and smaller. I am going to drag him out this friday to have lunch with our group. Somehow I have a feeling he will make a good friend with Jenny, because they are both devoted Protestants. Sometimes I wonder, how many more this kind of people I will bump into again in course of my life? We met some time again, and then met again in an totally unexpected way. I guess it would be more odd if I somehow bump into a friend I have on the forums I hang out in real life. The only question, we normally won’t tell people what website we visit, and the only identification there is a nickname not used in real world. How do we know we already know each other?

24″ LCD and the art of hotpot

Today, the 24″ widescreen LCD I ordered from dell has arrived. It is fantastic. I have almost the same screen area as 2 19″ LCD, with about the same price. The Dell 2405FPW is highly recommanded from computer review and is selling like a hot cake. I am very satisfy with it. I not used to the new ultra high resolution and widescreen ratio yet. In the past when I have two monitors, I tends to use the 19″ as the main monitor and put auxillary windows in the 17″. One thing for sure is I will rarely open windows using the full screen width, except maybe watching movies. I havn’t come up with my scheme on how to setup the windows yet, so far my perference is letting the browser have the right half of the screen and everything else on the left half. However my auxillary windows is slightly overlap with my browser window, something I will have to sort out. I am just thinking about add an extra 19″ or 20″ rotated 90 degree on the side to solve this problem. Maybe I will get it with my next PC upgrade.

Check out photos of my new LCD here

Tonight I was having hotpot at “little fat lamb” with friends at work. We wanted to go to this resturant for quite some time, but either it is too busy or my reversation is over booked. The food there is really good, the meat are fresh and lots of variaties, uncommon in all-you-can-eat buffer hotpot. I am sure I have ate too much tonight, probably triple the normal my dinner in-take. I found my friend, Jackson’s style of eating hotpot is a bit annoying. He like to dump everything into the pot and kill the boiling bubbles. He claims it is most efficient, which I highly doubt the end result. For putting too many stuff in the pot, he is idling while waiting for the water to re-boil. He eats in bursts when the food is cooked in batch and we all know eating in bursts actually makes you full faster. When he dumped the food into the pot, he mixed beef and pork, even seafood and vegatable. He end up cooking the beef far longer the optimal time and ruin the texture. In short, he just eats like a barbarian or an African refugee. A civilized person will only cook meat, especially beef, one piece at a time. Dip the beef slice into the boiling water, count 5 to 10 seconds depend on cook perference and it is ready to eat. Food takes long time to cook are placed into the pot bit by bit continuously without overloading the pot. The goal is to keep the water boiling all the time while throttle control the food in-take at a consistance pace. That is the art of eating hotpot.

Outlet Shopping

Today I went to the Premium Outlet Mall in Seattle for the first time. Actually it is my first time shopping in an outlet mall. I have experienced some time very unusal when I crossed the border this morning. Normally, the US custom just waive you pass the border. I got pulled over today and ran against a radiation detector. It was because Pat’s dad had a heart scan yesterday and the detector picked up isotope residual in his body. I guess the custom must had suspected us smuggling nuclear bomb into the States. Anyways, after tons of questions, search of the car, we are free to go after an hour delay. So we have to scrafice the Costco visit to keep the schedule.

Pat had bought quite some stuffs from the outlet mall, but I am the one who walked away handfull. I bought a pair of hiking boot from Nike and the long dued new suites. It is really a headache to pick clothings as there is no specification or preformance review for guidance. Most often the first item I pick is doomed to be rejected by Pat due to my poor taste. Then when I lower the requirement to absolute minimium of just being comfortable and let Pat pick the colour and style, she would complain about my lack of opinion. Even worse, she can somehow make a linkage to doubt my reason of picking her as girlfriend. Luckily, Pat’s brother is with us this time and he has good fashion sense, especially in the Central look. This solve my problem of picking the right clothes. I simply let them dress me, pay the bill before working away with the new clothes. From an engineer’s perspective, I still don’t understand what make one piece clothing better than another in term of fashion. One day, I will study philosophy of aesthetic to find out the answer. On the other hand, buying sports wears is much simplier. I only have to consider whether the clothing serves its design purpose well, is the price reasonable, and not in gay colour. Damn those evil fashion magazines, they had corrupted the mind of woman to make man’s life miserable just to pick the right dress.

Queuing theory

Today I went up to SFU to pay my tutition fee. I arrive at about 4:30p.m., the line up is insanity long and only two counters is opened. I standed in the line for about 2-3 minutes, I decided to apply queuing theory I had learn in my communication couse to decide whether I should wait and how long I have to wait. Based on the service time (time each student at the counter), the queue length (number of students in the line), the arrival rate (new students coming to the line) and drop rate (students don’t bother to wait), I concluded I better leave now and come back in half an hour. I then went to the bookstore get the textbook, went to the library read today’s newspaper and come back to the register office at 5:00p.m. I find that the girl in front of me before I left is the 2nd one in the line. There is only 3 more people behind her. I only have to wait a few minutes to get my tutition paid. I really feel sorry for that girl who standed in line for half an hour, where she could use her time more wisely somewhere else. Engineering knowledge is really applicable in daily life.

Engineer Culture

I was talking to a friend at work today, who happens to be a non-male engineer, about the engineer culture. She complained about the lack of respect to woman in engineering in general. I kinda disagree with her. In my world, all enginners belongs to the same bleed, althought some may have a different appearence. Normally when a group of engineers treat each other some certain way, none in the group would consider that as a harassement. I don’t understand why a female would think different and consider she is being mistreated. To make puzzle more complicate, I also can’t understand why any one with a right mind would treat a non-male engineer as a flirting target. We all know the mind of non-male engineer works more or less the same as a male engineer, they are not the same type of woman you meet at bar, clubbing or any other social activities. It will never have the right chemistry to click between two engineers, unless romance is taken out of the equation and they click on something else.

I came across a book in the SFU library today talks about the philosophy of engineering. Engineers are indeed a very unique creature. To everyone’s misunderstand, engineer is not a hybrid of scientist and technician. It is interesting to know that the word engineer is origined from French. It is first refered to the military unit in Frech army that accoumulate knowledge, skills to make weapon or building projects run more efficiently. Later, this unit is brenched out into the civilian world to take care of implementing all complicate projects. Thanks to the education and training, engineers tends to think in an unique way different from normal people. Engineers strive for efficient and like to optimize things with measurable standards. In the design process, we like to minimize the manual work and incorporate as much intelligent into the system as possible. We are trained to elimiate the routine and trivial tasks, or turn most tasks into boring routine tasks for the lowly non-engineers. We are highly focus on praticality, most the time the ultimate goal is get the thing works. No wonder we engineer are so bad and handling woman or being romance, those are the things exactly opposite to what we are trained for.

Game is for fun

At the foostable at work, someone always spoil the laughters and fun. Playing games are suppose to be relaxing and joyful, somehow one person in the group take it too seriously. He would trash talk when he score, swear when he is scored and really grumppy when he lost the game. He is one of the best player around, it is absolutely no fun to play against him, even with him. It is not that we are out of luck and lost big time, but rather he create a bad mood around the table. Sometimes I become quite serious during the game, especially when it’s passing back and forth for a long time without any goal. However once the someone scored or the game is finish, we make fun of each other and joke about the game, we won’t wear the tense face for long. That room is setup for creational purpose, we don’t need to give ourself more stress by creating unnecessary competition. I am just thinking, isn’t this lesson can apply to other aspect of life as well? Why stress out yourself with merely a game? Play a game seriously is a respect to your opponents, but it doesn’t mean you have to take the winning or losing of the game seriously. The question is how to distinguish what is for fun and what is not.

Holidays end

Today is the last day of the week long christmas holidays. I feel I am having the holiday syndrome, feeling sad about having to go back to work. My christmas holidays is absolutely unproductive, havn’t touch my school work once, and I am still preparing my toastmaster speech for tomorrow. However, one of my gains in the holidays is I came out from the shell and initiate contacts with my old friends. Other than my best buddies in Waterloo visiting me, I had sent out e-cards to all of my friends and heard many response. It is surprise to receive many warm greetings and updates from old friends didn’t keep in contact. I will try to keep in touch with them by writing them an email at least once a month. Although I feel a bit let down by some of responses, just one simple line with an unsincere thankyou. Some are not smart enough to gave me their email address even I hinted I had lost it. Anyways, a short reply is better than no reply. I can see which person can be written off from my friends list. It is very true that when one grows old, it is harder and harder to make new friends, so we have to treasure our old friends.

Boxup to Coxoo

Boxup is the source of all my mp3, I have been downloading mp3 from it for several years. Its service is excellent, with large songs collection, prompt updates and reasonable price. However, the good deal finally has come to an end. Boxup is closed forever after shutting down for almost a month. My remaining membership got transfered to a new service Coxoo. Instead of http based download, coxoo use p2p methods and I have to install a p2p cilent. Coxoo has been around for a few months, with links from the front page of boxup. I have been suspecting coxoo is the next evolution of boxup, and it seems my guess is right. It would be more efficient to provide p2p service with reliable seed than hosting all the mp3 in dedicated servers. When I installed coxoo last week, the program is so crappy that it is next to useless. Today I gave it a second try, download and install the lastest release. I found service of coxoo is comparable to boxup, maybe even more convinient. One of my major complain is the song library of coxoo is not as well organized as boxup, although they are fairly up-to-date with most of the new songs. I hope coxoo’s library interface will improve over time or simpily re-use boxup’s. I am wondering what are the links between boxup, coxoo and myttf. It is very obvious they have close ties, but how they are related is unknown to me. It seems problem of finding mp3 is solved temporarily, until I have to find a replacment for coxoo.

New Year Resolution

Year 2005 is over, welcome to year 2006. In the past, I havn’t made any new year resolution or new year wishes. Therefore, I don’t have any review for my last year’s resolution or wishes. This year, I would like to make a list of things I want to do in the next 265 days. This year, I will be turning 30 and officially become a middle-age man. I have to think about my career plan and the path I want to take in the future. There are a few options I am considering after having my master fully completed and get the P.Eng title. Switching jobs or moving back East is an option, going back to school to switch field is another option. I may considering staying in PMC for a few more years if I land on an interesting project with learning opportunities and prospect to get a promotion. I don’t want to feel like stucking in a dead end at work. If I am leaving PMC, I want to complete my toastmaster CTM certificate.

I have been keeping up well in writing articles and blogs, I will definitely continue this effort, I found it is very rewarding in term of consolidating my thoughts. I have spent too much time watching anime and movies, and end up writing too many reviews. I want to work on more serious articles on religion and social values. I want to read at least a book a month, and finished the books I have purchased but havn’t read. I’ll see whether I have time to pick up learning piano again, that would mean at least 30 minutes practice per day to make it meaningful.

I will keep my promise to Pat of going to church every week with her. In my opinion, I am already a very spiritual and faithful christian, although no one seems agree with me. I will also continue on the ball room dancing lessons, as I have already pre-paid the fee. Playing badminton every week gives me the excerise I need. I want to ski more often in Whistler and if Cypress’s condition is good, I would buy some day pass from Ian to take more ski lessons. I want to know whether I am good enough to take CSIA level 1 again.

I want to move closer to Pat, the perfect location would the rental apartments at Joyce station. I need to refresh my home to keep myself more energized. The only problem is I am not even start looking at places. I will start looking once I get the defense out of my way.

I want to get a new computer to replace my existing desktop machine, then flush it for linux to upgrade my web server. This time, I will document the steps I took to setup my server, probably with minor extra efforts and turning it into a tutorial. If I don’t writing things down, it will take me much longer to recall the memory, or basically I have to relearn the skill. My CRT monitors system is very out of date, I will upgrade to LCD displays. If the price of LCD price drop low enough, one 24″ with two 19″ is the best solution. I may consider buying my first laptop, but I will try to get one form work first. Leon had pointed out a very good point, I have to decide which kind I want. Since I am not using it as my desktop replacement, I will probably get a light and protable one. iPod video and flight sim controls would be nice to have items, but I don’t really see the need of them, so I will probably put them off until I can afford them money-wise and time-wise.

Looks like I want to accomplish too many things next year, probably some items in my list will overthrow to the year after. I only have to set the priority right and try to get as many things done as possible.

Lastly, Happy New Year to whom may read my blog. Thankyou for your patience in following my poorly throught out mubbling every day.

Friend visit

I just drove Andy and Leon to the airport and they are on their way back to Toronto. I realy enjoy spending the past few days with old friends. I found that if someone visit you and staying in your place, not only they are having a vacation, you are also having a vacation at the same time with them. My normal daily routine is changed, instead I have having being a tourist in my own city. It is surprising that there are many things I havn’t seen even I have been living here for 5 years. In this vacation, we went to Whislter two times, and mindlessly tour the city for the other two days. When old friends get together, it is natural to talk about the old days. Old memories tends to clash with each other, somehow my version of what had happened is quite different from others. Me and Leon spent lots of time arguing what really had happened back then, as well as almost every single issues ranging from which LCD monitor is better to renewable energy technology. Both of us enjoy arguing itself, regardless the topic involved nor the outcoming, since most of the time is inconclusive. Now, my life is getting back to normal until my next vacation.