Everyone around me is sick. Both of my coworkers sitting to my left and right are having a cold. Pat has a cold. One of the guys I go out to have lunch has a cold. I think I got a cold from one of them. I think my cold symptom is not very serious. Sleep more and have some good excerise in Whistler tomorrow should cure my cold. Cold is caused by common virus that many people have to have it at least once every year. The good thing is once you have it this year, your body is immune to this year’s cold virus and you are safe until next year. Normal medicine or antibotics doesn’t work on cold. I think the scientist should invent some kind of nano bot that can identify and kill all the cold virus inside our body. Think of it as artificial white blood cell. All the nano bot are linked to the central database on the web, they can download and identify the latest virus pattern and fight them efficiently. Unlike natural white blood cell, it takes times to adapt to the new virus. I just have an idea for my next sci-fi murder mysterous. Someone hack into another person’s nano bot and turn them against his own body. Now I just need to come up with the twists and other details of the story that attract readers.

I am unpacking my CD collections tonight. I threw away lots of old pirate CDs, as those CDs has no collection value. I have consolidated my CD collection down to approximate 120 CDs, nicely fit in the Ikea Jarna CD case with glass door. To many people’s surprise, I do own original CDs despite my argument for mp3. My CD collection has the following catagories: my collection of Yukie Nishimura, movie soundtracks, anime soundtracks, easy listenings and a few chinese CDs. I got some of the chinese CDs cheap from 2nd hand market when I went back to HK a long time ago. I borrowed from someone three of the chinese CDs but never return. I couldn’t remember whom I borrow the CDs from, probably someone from Appleby. If you happen to know I own you a CD, please email me and I’m glad to return it to you. I actually got out of my mind and bought 5 chinese CDs, 1 Ukuleelee, 1 Tracy So, 1 Leo Koo and 2 Ekin Cheung, none of them except the Ukuleelee are worth the money. Yukie Nishimura is the only artist I am willing to pay for her CD these days. Since I am organizing my collection, I decided to order her latest CDs online to update my collection. I know I could probably download the music online, but it is different from owning the CD and display them as a complete collection.

Ever since Lee An won the best director at Oscar, his movie Brokeback Mountain became the hittest topic these days. I keep hearing everyone talk about this movie, either at work, in the radio, in the newspaper or in blogs. This afternoon I overheard some colleagues about it happening in the cubicle next to mine, and I joined the conversation. I havn’t watched this film and I am not going to. I am only interested in action movies or maybe comedies. When I make this comment, one of the colleague reply him with a grin in his face sayting that Brokeback Mountain has lots of “actions” too. Apparently he has watched the movie and able to appreciate its artistic value. Another guy shares the same 100% male oriented engineer mind set as me, also make his stand that he will not watch it. It’s not really about feeling uncomfortable about the gay thing or being homophobia. It is just that normal men dislike boring movies. We all agree that the writer of this movie is a genius with creativity to combine two old concepts into an catching one. Gay is nothing new and cowboy also is nothing new, but gay cowboy kinda interesting. This creation inspires me on a theme for the next blockbuster. Let’s say combining Startrek with gay, to become a gay captain for the next starship Enterprise. It would be interest to see how the gay captain go boldly where no man had ever gone before, to discover gay aliens. It would be interest to see how the relationship evolves between the gay capation and his Vulcan 2nd commander, persumably a male. Can a Vulcan justify homosexual by logics, that is a philosophical question demands an answer.

I have received my compensation package today. I am very happy with this year’s adjustment. I got a raise, a not too bad bonus and some useless options. I can finally afford living a moderate life with the adjustment this time. Since a large portion of my salary is used up in fixed living cost, the marginal gain in disposable incoming of the raise is relatively large. To treat myself, I am going to replace all the cheapy plastic furnitures I bought when I first come to Vancouver with more decent wooden furnitures from Ikea. I need to upgrade my computer, but I am still waiting for the price of AMD 64 X2 comes down a bit more. I am thinking about buying a cheap laptop from Dell since I don’t have a laptop, it would be convinient able to carry it around. iPod is under consideration, but I think I can resist the temptation as it is not very useful. I promised Pat to buy her a gift with my bonus, so that she can’t complain any more on my bad taste in choosing her valentine’s day gift. Maybe I should buy a few pants. My old pants are a bit tight after I have gained some weight in the past few years. The only problem is that I have a phobia of buying clothes.

Another friend from work is leaving the company. He is moving back to HK for good. He seems have found a better oppertunity in Shenzhen, China. I wonder how come his girlfriend let him work in Shenzhen by himself. I have heard many stories about all the temptation in Shenzhen to young single male from HK. To make him more attractive, he even have a Canadian passport. We gave him a two part farewell. We had dinner last night followed by soccer game and went to Kirin to have dim-sum again today. However, we will see him once again at lunch on thursday if he has nothing else to do. I don’t really want to go to the soccer game last night, I was really tried after skiing on Saturday. However, since I have promised to come, I don’t want to eat my words. I feel that I am really exhausted today. My place is still full of boxes, I am still slowly unpacking my stuffs. The only problem is I have to buy new bookshelves and cabinates from Ikea to better organize my stuff. The old shelves doesn’t fit well to the layout of my new place.