I went to Canucks game tonight. I am very disappointed that they lose this important game to Sharks. Canucks probably cannot get into the Stanley Cup play off this year. In the first period, we were leading 2-0, I thought it would be easy game to win. Then Sharks tie the score within 2 minutes at the end of first period. In second period, Shark score first and we are behind for a while until we score one goal. We have a lead 4-3 on the 3rd period all the way until the very end, and end up having to play over time. It happens very quick, we just lose to San Jose a few minutes into the over time. The whole stadium is dead silence, everyone looks sad on the way out. This is Pat’s first hockey game, she actually find it quite exciting. It is very different to feel the atomsphere in person than watching it on TV. She won’t mind watch it live once a while. Oh well, the beer and popcorn helps to enhance the experience too. I bought her a souvneir from the Canucks shop, it is a stuffed hockey puck. She wanted a cap, but too bad it doesn’t look good on her. Maybe I should watch one hockey game with Pat per season starting next year, if I could find cheap tickets.

I love the lowest price guarantee at Future Shop. I bought a Linksys router last week at $70 after rebate. This week, the same router goes on sale in Bestbuy for $60 after rebate. It is a $10 difference, so I took my receipt and the Bestbuy advertisement to Future Shop to refund the difference. The customer service line up is a bit long, but still acceptable. The refund process is very straight forward, the difference is deposited back to my credit card after a few signatures. Up to this point, the service is just good but not great. Pat is using the a SMC router and it crashes once a while like mine old one. Since I am quite happy with my Linksys, and she will complain if I buy her a cheaper replacement. I decided to pick up another Linksys from Futureshop, which is $100 not on sales. I took the router to the cashier, and present her with the Bestbuy ad, the cashier was busy chitting with a guy, she mis-read the price in the ad. She thought it is $59 before rebate. Since Futureshop has a police of beat the competitor by 10%, she charge me $54 for the router, then on top of that I still have the $20 rebate. Can you believe I got a Linksys router for just $34? Isn’t Future Shop a great place to shop at?

I have converted all my Yukie Nishimura CDs into mp3 format. I have every CDs Yukie Nishimura has released, 28 in total, from 1986 to 2005. It is a project I wanted to do for a long time. I don’t like playing play my original CDs since I afraid that will wear out the CDs. Normaly I burn a backup copy to use in car or anywhere. Ripping the CD into mp3 let me enjoy her music even more conviniently. If there is any Yukie Nishimura fans out there, please drop me an email. I am glad to burn you a DVD with all her music in mp3. I like to share good music with my friends. Moreover, some of her older CDs is next to impossible to find these days. It took me quite some effort to hunt for all the CDs. I have to order some of them directly from Japan. Here I have one delimma, when I inspecting my CDs, I found that 1 out of the 28 CDs is not an original Japanese version nor official HK version. It is a Taiwan unlicensed version. I can see the printing of the booklet is not as good as the others. The question is should I order the original copy of that CD from Japan, or I should be satisfy with the Taiwan version.

Tonight I was having dinner with church friends. One of them is working in a satellite company doing business with the US Army. He didn’t went to go to Iraq to install satellite equitments, but his colleagues did and came back alive with many stories. The poor engineer has first flew to Kuwait, from there he took a US army transport into Iraq. Once he boarded the plane, he was given a bullet proof vest. He was told not to put on the vest, instead he has to sit on the vest. The crew explained it is for random gun fires from below. The flight has no air hostress too. With some luck, he touched down and arrived in the army base in one piece. Upon arrival, he is advised not to go outside the base as his safety cannot be garunteed. When he need to go from the base to another base 10 minutes driving distanace away, he has to wait for the helicopter scheduled on the next day. The street is so dangerous that it is wise to ride a Blackhawk instead. He stayed in Iraq for almost a month, got the work done then came home. It is really the kind of engineering work not for a fainted heart. I would think twice before signing up for such job, it is like signing a life waiver. On the other hand, the job should be relatively safe and it is really an once in a life time experience.

Today I can declare my moving is finally completed. I have cleaned my house the first time since I have moved in and everything is well organized. I still have some toys I want to sell stacking up in a corner, hopefully they will be gone soon once I post them on ebay. I use the space underneath my futon to hide my board games, so the top of my desk looks more normal. I have re-organised my bills, bank statements and paper traces in the new wheeled cabinet. I am going to throw out documents older than 2 years. Since those paper has personal information, I can’t just throw them out to the garbage room downstairs. I am going to bring them to work, throw them away in the shredding box for confidential documents. My place is now presentable and I can start thinking about inviting friends over for the house warming party.