My new home is almost finish all the arrangment. I have bought some new furnitures and make the place pleasent to live. Pat has complained that my place lack a personal touch. She said it is too boring without colourful decoration and lack of personal style. I don’t want to argue with her but I think my new place has my own style and it is pretty good. I won’t object if she add things with her style to my place, just don’t make me change my style to suit her taste. I don’t understand why woman always complains man don’t have artistic style. Only gay man cares about artistic sytle. My style is totally pragamatic. In my ideal home, everything should be placed behind glass or inside a cabinet in a well organized maner. This way I can minimize the time I spent on dusting and able to locate all the things quickly. I don’t care much about the colours. It just happen to be plain colour stuffs are usually cheaper than colourful ones. Moreover, plain colour can never go wrong with each other, while mixing bright colour stuffs can look really bad unless you plan well ahead of time. I don’t think stylish decoration or furniture can truely reflect the owner’s taste, since the design work can simply be contracted out to the professionals. The only things in a home can truely tells the characters of a person is his bookshelf and his collection. These two things are not some one time job that can be done and forget, it takes time to build up the library and display case. Of course, I have to assume the person read the books he buys and treasure the items he collects. It would totally off if someone just buy books for decoration and collect items for investment.

I have came to the final stage of moving to a new place. The only thing left to make my home complete is take my toys out from the box and put them in the display cabinet. I used to have one display cabinat from Ikea and it ran out of space before I moved. So I bought a billy bookcase with glass door as my second cabinet from Ikea. The first criteria of a display cabinet is that it have to keep out the dust. It would be a lot of work to clean up the toys provided my place usually is very dusty. It took me almost a week to setup my first cabinet. I only unbox a few piece every day, since I would feel bored if doing too many boxes in one go. I have started setting up my second cabinet, done the upper two most shelf so far. The only items left are the Gundam fix and Hcm-pro series. One of my problem is decide which toy boxes to keep and which I can throw away. Putting back the toy into original boxes save lots of problem when moving, the only concern the boxes takes up lots of space. I have decided to put the unnused accessories of each toy into a seperate ziplock bag and then put the empty boxes in the locker downstairs to save space. With my new display cabinet, I think it has enough space for the growth of my toy collection for another two years.

This weekend I didn’t went to Whistler, instead I went to Cypress Mountain today. Me and my ground of friends went to Whistler for a few consecutive weekends already, we really need a weekend to relax a bit, without having to wake up early in the morning and exhausted for the whole day. My cousin suggested that we can go to Cypress in the afternoon. Althought it is not as good as Whistler, I can use some excerise this week. The snow in Cypress is not bad today, provided that it got some fresh snow over the week. I am afraid this is probably the last weekend Cypress with good snow, Spring is coming. I took a lesson as usual although I didn’t expect much to learn. The level 6 in Cypress is easier than level 5 in Whistler. I have a present surprise in today’s class. When I mention I would like to take CSIA level 1 next week and ask the instructor to take a good look at my skill, I found out the instructor will be the examiner next week! At the end of the class, he said he cannot tell me whether I will pass, but he tell me to give it a try. It is really an encouragement. I sent in the registration form once I got home. Now, I hope the class is not full yet.

Today after work, me and Pat brought Charlie to vist Rocko for one last time. Charlie and Rocko are both golden retrivers, they have spent many times together when either one of the family went to vacation as the other family will take care of both dogs. The owner of Rocko is moving back to HK for good and going to give Rocko away. Rocko is jumpy as usual, seems doesn’t aware of his change of fate lying ahead. It is very hard to make him calm down and take a good picture with both dogs looking at the camera. We walked the dogs to a near by off leash area, let them play with each other for a while then walked back home. Charlie is happy seeing his friend. Before we left, we gave the dogs an expensive dog cookies that looks like a slice of pizza. I doubt whether the dogs know how to appreciate the different between a $1.5 cookie and normal cookie. They seems don’t really care what is given to them and finish eating in no time. Maybe the premium charged of having a nice looking cookie is more for the amusement of the dog owner than for the dog.

Tonight I have lots of questions in my philosophy classe. At one point, I have asked so much questions that the professor couldn’t handle some of my totally out of the box thinking and became so frustrated that he frightened to leave the classroom. Thanks to the eassy due in this class, I have to read ahead in the textbook about the philosopher the prof is teaching today. There are three options in the eassy assignment corresponds to three different philosophers. I feel like picking the one not yet covered in the lectures since it seems this his work is actually easiest to write. When I was reading the textbook, I am totally convinced by the thoughts of this philosopher, I couldn’t find anything wrong about his ideas. However, when the prof presenting the same idea in class, suddenly I see all the holes in his theory. In fact some of my insights are correct and the same questions are challenaged by later philosophers. I think when I am reading the text, my brain work 100% on absorbing the material. This is a CPU bounded process since my brain cannot keep up with my eyes. However when the same material is given in a presentation, it becomes a I/O bounded process and my brain has spare cycles to examinate the context. That’s why I can spot the problems in the theory and even have time to formulate the challenages. This technique can apply to toastmaster or presuasion. Your are goal is to feed your target audience at the right data rate so that they can fully understand your points but don’t have spare brain power to criticize them. Once the idea sinks into the brain for some time, there is a tendency for people to take it for granted. In another word, lower the guard of gate keeper of other people’s mind is very important when you want to convince someone.