Today, I went to watch a game of Harlem Globetrotter, the famous comedian basketball team.  Pat got two free tickets from her school for seats far away, but the stadium is only half full, so we moved down to the first row to get a closer look.  The show is really fun for the children and adults alike.  It is more like a staged comedy than a real basketball game.  The Harlem is playing against Washington Globe, which is a fake basket team that is part of the Harlem tour.   It is a very close game, the two teams always have tie their score to keep the game interesting.  Obviously, Harlem won at the end with a slight lead.

There are lots of funny basketball move and tricks never appears in NBA games, such as shoot the ball with their heads, their trade mark fancy slam dunk, pull down the pants of other players, pull an audience into the court in middle of the game, throw pop corn, water bottle, and water bucket all over the court.  One of my favorite move is the player stuff the ball inside his own jersey.  There is another good one.  A Harlem player somehow get a handbag from the audience, then he stole the ball from the other player and gave him the handbag in exchange.  It is really funny see the player holding a basket in one second and swapped with a handbag the next second.

The show is very entertaining and full of laughters.  However I think a 2.5 hours show is a too long.  There are some boring time in the middle of the game.  The Harlem has to repeat their tricks from time to time.  It would be just right if the show is condensed into 1 hour.  When I watched Harlem’s on TV, they only show clips last 10-15 minutes.  No wondering Harlem on TV is much more exciting and action packed.

I went to work at 8a.m. this morning, because I have a conference call with the Indian design center. The different in time zone make communication between the two sites really inconvenient. I have two options when to have the meeting, 8a.m. in the morning or 8p.m. in the evening. None of them fits my usual schedule. I pick the early morning from the lesser of two evils.

I can understand why different places have different the time zone, the world is not flat after all. However I am kinda surprise to find out India is 13 hours and 30 minutes ahead of Vancouver. Pacific stand time is GMT-8 and the India time is GMT+5.5. Where the extra 0.5 hours come from? It won’t make much different using a round number for time zone, since the time zone is not divided evenly anyways. Some part of China is right above India and the time zone is GMT+8. It would not save any power for lights by shifting a mere 0.5 hours. Why can’t the Indians use a nice round number relative to the Greenwich Mean Time?  Hold on a sec, before saying Indians are silly to have an half hour time zone. We the Canadians are equally stupid, Newfoundland has GMT-3.5.

I made some interesting observation from the time zone chart. Time zone GMT-11 does not exists anywhere! There is no place on earth has their clock set to 11 hours slower than the Greenwich Mean Time. We have Tonga Island has GMT+13 thought. It is another mystery why would they use GMT+13 instead of GMT-11. When I first know Indian have a 30 minutes time zone, I was joking why don’t they make it a 15 minutes time zone to have it more accurately. Actually there exists a place super stupid enough to use 15 minutes time zone. The Chatham Islands has GMT+12:45.

Maybe the UN should fix the time zone chart, get rid of all the 0dd ball time zone to make things less confusing.

Legal languages often doesn’t make any sense, here is a good example.

The APEGBC, the self governing body of BC professional engineers, is asking its members to ratify a bylaw amendment.  Recently, the court declared the section regarding the experience requirements of registering as a professional engineers is invalid, since someone who failed to register as a P.Eng take it to court to challenge the 51 years old bylaw.  The court require the associate to fix the bylaw, provide sufficient detail on experience requirement in order to registering new members.

The original bylaw has just a short paragraph.  In my opinion, it clearly states the experience requirement in plain English.  It has been using for 51 years and no one is confused about the experience requirements to register as P.Eng.   Somehow the judge think the bylaw is not detail enough, so the association hire some lawyers to encrypt the paragraph into 2 pages of legal language.   I tried to read the new bylaw.  I think is actually more confusing than the old one.  No lay person really know the true meaning of those legal terms.

The whole exercise of rewriting the bylaw does not change how the association registers new engineers.  The registration and review process is business as usual and the experiment requirements stays the same.  Everything is exactly the same as before except the bylaw is 2 pages longer and less readable.