Me and Pat signed up for a cooking class with Chef Eric tonight. The course is on french cruise, a very delicous 6 course dinner. I even send out the course information to my friends, trying to convince them to join us. Other than Verona, none of the guys is interested. They all think the course is too expensive, they could have someone serving the dinner at a nice resturant paying the same price. Oh well, this cooking course is not just to learn how to cook, it is an activity to spend sometime with your other half. All the ingredient are prepared for you. After the dinner, you don’t have to clean up all the mess. You can just enjoy the fun of cooking and the good food. Ok, it maybe not so good if you screwed up. Unfortunately, this morning the cook shop called us to inform us Chef Eric is sick, so the course is cancelled. I am very disappointed, since I am so looking forward to my first cooking class. I end up paying about the same amount to have someone served me and Pat a nice dinner. Heron in Waterfront Fairmount Hotel is highly recommanded, plus they accept the entertainment book, so one of the entree is free!

Visiting internet forum is my daily habbit. I first heard about TTF throught boxup, the mp3 download site that I get all my mp3 from. Boxup started TTF, later on TTF is spinned off as an independent forum, but they still have close relationship with links to TTF all over boxup’s pages. I have been with TTF for over 5 years, and it is where I get my interest of writing articles. Today I just became a moderator of TTF for their new Anime board. I don’t know why I take up this role, they are asking for moderators for the new Anime board, which is my interest, and I know the super moderator there thru Anime related discussions. So I agree to help him out on the Anime board, and I become a moderator myself. Being a moderator is not much different from a normal user, except a moderator has to delete advertisement, give marks to good posts and participle in the forum, which I do it normally. The only benefit of being a moderator is it satisfy my curiousity, I am finally able to enter the moderator board. To my disappointment, there is nothing interesting to see, mostly are forum businness.

Today the IT department took back my dual 19″ LCD monitors. They would like me to evaluate the difference between a 24″ widescreen LCD and two 19″ LCD monitors. Costwise, a 24″ cost $1000 while two 19″ cost $900. The resolution of the 24″ is 1960 x 1280, while a 19″ is 1280 x 1024. Two 19″ has more screen area, but it has a stripe right in the middle. My initial feedback depends on what application I am using, each setup has its advantage. Two 19″ is good for using Linux side by side with Critix, since the two monitors are two seperate virtual desktop. A single 24″ is best for viewing waveforms, such that I can see longer period of time in a single screen. Writing code or document doesn’t make a big difference as long as I pull up the reference on the side. It is really a tought call on which setting is better. I am wondering how about a 24″ with a 19″ on the side? I guess that would be asking for too much.

The CEO of my company just ordered a full shipment of Jack Welch’s latest book, Winning, and distributed it to everyone who bother to read. I am always happy to get a free book, especially the book is on the New York Timers best seller list. The book is Jack’s writing on his management philosophy, I just start reading, so couldn’t comment much on it. It is always a good sign for the company to encourage its employee to learn. From the few sections I had already read, I can sense PMC is anything but what is described in the book. By giving out the book to everyone, the CEO trys to revolutionalize the company to the right way. My only doubt is how well will the executives and middle managers support the ideas praised so high in the book. It may end up like all other efforts we had done before, become some nice but useless decoration on top of the ugly messy underneath.

I signed up for the role of joke master in tomorrow’s toastmaster meeting. So I have to look for a joke today. Since it is the last meeting before christmas, I would like the joke related to christmas. It is hard to find a good christmas joke, especially it has to be clean, non-religious, appeal to people from different cultureal background. When I search on the web, the same few jokes always show up in the search result, and most of them are one-liners, letters to Santa, some sort of top 10 list or funny lyrics for old christmas songs. Those jokes only funny on paper, but the laughter is lost in a speech. I then focus my search on stories about kids and Santa Claus, and christmas shopping. I have came up with a few good ones, and havn’t decide which one to use tomorrow. Here are some funny ones I came across in my search:

There are three stages in a man’s life:
He believes in Santa Claus
He doesn’t believe in Santa Clus
He becomes a Santa Claus.

When people recevied toys for christmas gifts, it usually say that batteries not included on the package. How about giving out battery as christmas gift with a note saying toys not included?

If there were three wise woman instead of three wise man. They would ask for direction and arrived on time, helped to deliver the baby, clean the stable and bought pratical gifts.