Probably Jimmy Chan is the most famous person in Vancouver among Chinese. He opens beauty salon and run commercial featuring himself. You can find him doing anything you can think of in the commercial, ranging from flying, swimming, running, driving race cars to dancing in the latest one. Today he became the topic of our lunch group when Pat called me she met Jimmy in a resturant. For those of us who are learning dancing all cursed him spoiled the image of dancing. Pat trying to analyze the psychology of his weird behaviour. To me, he just makes no sense. Even though he is rich and he want to be famous, there are many other better ways then buy air-time to let people make fun of himself. I seriously doubt anyone will go to his beauty salon, don’t they afraid to be laughted by their friends? One of my other question is that he claims he is a Dr., I wonder where he get his degree from.

I brought Pat’s family to have oyster in Longsdale Quay today. The oyster bar is introduced by Leon, who visited me over the Christmas. He had really good oyster there a few years ago in Vancouver, it tastes so good that he can’t forget it all those years. The oyster bar in the Longsdale Quay is really good, cheap deal with high quality. Half a dozen of oyster shooters only cost $10. I like using the word shooters to describe fresh oyster. You can really shot the oyster down your throat like a drink. I don’t like oyster much, and somehow I always suspecious about I am allegic to it or not. I remeber I used to eat dry oyster congee when I am small. So I tried half a oyster and see my reaction. I think I am ok with osyters, I don’t feel anything wrong, except have to go to washroom after a while. Maybe I will try eating a fresh oyster nex time, everyone seems to enjoy it so much.

I have submitted my first paper to the Internetional Wireless Communication and Mobile Communication Conference. The content of this paper is directly from my master thesis. Before the christmas holidays, Dr. Tejinder told me about this conferenece and he think I should give it a try, so I reformated my thesis to the IEEE paper format. On thursday’s research meeting, when Dr. Hardy saw my paper, I can see his is really happy. I bet the main reason is he has his name on it as a co-author. I think he deserve his name on the paper athought I came up with most of the idea and done all the work by myself. Dr. Hardy reviewed my paper in a night, proof-read all the typos and mistakes in the paper. I never seen him work so hard since he has been my supervisor. Normaly, he would leave the work until the next research meeting. I only get very general guidance from Dr. Hardy in the beginning for choosing my topics. He gave me many areas to choose from, and I narrowed the topic down to something I can managed all by myself. It seems my research meeting with Dr. Hardy is all about I told him my ideas, and he evaluate which one is plausible. That is very different from other professors I heard, they told you directly what you have to do, you more or less just the implementating their research. Even though my paper may not be very significate, but I can feel that it is my own research. I will know whether the paper is accepted in Apirl. If it is accepted, I will have the chance to attend my first conference. It is so convinient that the conference this year is held in Vancouver. I am also thinking about deriving another paper from this work if I have a publication on the belt. The marginal cost of evaluating another traffic model is not very high. Have a paper published would really worth the effort I have spent in working on my own thesis, instead of turning an company document into another me-too m.eng. project.

I have my first philosophy class tonight, PHIL 300, introduction to philosophy. I have interest in philosophy for a few years. First I started with questions on religion, then slowly it branch out to all major fields in philosophy, as I found theology is just a sub-set of philosophy. I have read a few books on philosophy, the best of all is Sophie’s World, probably many people’s first philosophy book. Although I tends to forget the philosopher’s thoughts and their names, but at least I can recongize their names. This course is my first formal training on philosophy, it comes with eassy assignments and exam. With these external pressure, I hope the stuff I learn would stay longer in my brain this time. After the introductory course, I want to read more on ethics and moral theory, and aesthetic. I believe in the economist darwinism theory on the first one, just want to check out other previous theories so I know how to counter them in case of challenage. The later one is a question always puzzles me, hope I can find some answers in the course. I am thinking about taking part time graduate studies in philosophy, have talked to the advisor in philosophy department once. My main concern is philosophy may turn out not as interesting as I have expected. Maybe I will try a couple grad course to begin with, if I can reclaim the credits towards my degree later on.

I have a dentist semi-annual appointment today, it is just a regular clean up. Many people scare to see dentist, but I am not one of them. I never afraid of dentist, probably it is because I never had really bad toothache nor bad experience with dentist in childhood. I don’t mind the mild pain in dental check up, in some sense I actually enjoys it. Scraping my teeth to make it free of plague makes me feel good. I don’t really like whitening of the teeth using the mini-grinder, it is the sound that irritate me. I have been pround of having no cavities for many years, but finally I have to get some filling last year for bad teeth. One thing that always worries me is my wisdom teeth, I still have them embedded in my jaw. I had seen how terrible it is when my friends have to pull them out over the past few years. My only comfort is my wisdom teeth seems sleeping happily, with no signs of coming out. I hope I can just leave them alone forever. Next time when I call my dad, I gota ask him whether he had his wisdom pulled. I sort of remember his wisdom is not coming out as well. Maybe it runs in the gene line for not having wisdom teeth problems.