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.

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 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.