Tonight we have hot pot dinner at Jason’s place to celebrate the Santa Clause Festival, the politically correct name for Christmas. As usual, I brough some board games to the party. Some of us played Monoploy and some of us played Risk. Somehow Jackson like to change to official rule of Risk, and claimed it will speed up the game. Instead of getting at most one card per turn, a player can get one cards each territory he conquer. There are two consequences of this house rule, first we run out of card fast, and it really tips the balance of the game. It makes the strong player even stronger when he trade in his cards for armies and start a battle tour. This rule ensure him in a big army in every following turn. It is almost impossible for the weaker players to catch up once someone has cashed in an big army. Poor Doug being the last player to start, he got wiped out early in the game because of this rule. In short, Jason’s rule makes the game less fun.

I did some research on the mathematics of risk after I came home. As I suspected, there is a slight advantage to the attacker. The probability of winning a battle favours the attacker if both side has equal number of units, if it is more than 5 units. The odd expected lost for the 0.9 of the attacker to 1.1 of defender. It is interesting to know that the defender has better odd to have even number of troops in the all his territories. Deploying 2 and 4 troops in two territories has better odd than deploying 3 and 3. In the Risk FAQ, I came across a house rule on rolling the dice. The defender can choose to roll 1 or 2 dice after he saw the roll of the attacker. This rule give an advantage to the defender by minimizing his lost if they attacker got 2 high numbers. The expected lost ratio is closer to 1:1 in this rule. The only drawback is the game takes longer to play.

To speed up the game and make it more fun, we should play the official rule, and use the mission card next time. Instead of have to conquer the world to win, the player first conquer two contintents or number of territories stated in the mission cards wins the game. It will force the players to fight over the same contintent.

Tonight I went with Pat to a christmas gathering of her church friends, and I am the only guy there. If I knew that ahead of time, I will choose not to go. It is not a pleasent experience to be the only guy in a group of girls, because most of time you are not interested in their conversations. I expected some guys I know from that group will show up, but it turn out the host didn’t invite them. There is a girl in the group going to get marry in the summar, too bad that her fiancee can’t come. Other than this girl, the rest are all single, so they have no one to bring along. Sometimes I wonder, how come so many of Pat’s friends are still single. Maybe I should start hooking up the single guys at work with them. The only problem is I can’t think of a way to introduce them to each other without embrassement of match making them intentionally. Probably that is the reason why they are single in the first place, I can’t think of any activities they like or will enjoy, and at the same time also allow them to make new friends of the other sex outside their own social circle. In short, both of them are quite boring.

Tonight Pat sang christmas carolling for her chuch. The different choirs from all masses put together a carolling concert. Each choir sing about 10 minutes, and there were 8 of them in total. St. Mary is really a big church that runs many services every week. The first choir to perform is the children choir from St. Mary elementary school. The kids are so cute, especially when they are dancing up and down. Pat’s choir sang second, she had a solo part in one of the song. I took lots of pictures for her. It’s so funny when everyone’s mouth is opened in big O shape singing the “Oh Gloria”. This two choirs are the only performance interested me, then I slept through almost all the rest. Christmas songs are best to put people to sleep, especially after a long working day. I recongize the audience of the concert are mostly friends and families of the choir members. I think the carolling concert is a good event to build community spirit for the church, have a function that everyone can enjoy.

Carlee is a well known brand of potato chips in HK. It is originated from Japan. I think it is the best tasted chips after I had tried so many different brands. Today I just tried a new ramen flavoured chips from Carlee. Well, it taste like shoyu ramen, to be specific, the shoyu soup. There are so many exotic flavours of Carlee chips, unlike local chips made here in Canada, only have the those old boring flavours. The classic Carlee is bbq and curry flavour. Later it introduced other flavours spicy, seaweed, pizza, okonomiyaki, chicken, ketchup, light salt, etc. It also have time limited edition, like the ramen I just had. Carlee not only taste the best, its texture is very prefect. The chip is not too hard nor too soft, it is fired to have the right cripyness. The only other honourable brand is Pringles, the rest of potato chips bands lacks the charm of Carlee, not even close.

I am going to black list any sellers using UPS to ship their items. I ordered something from eBay, the item itself is not very expensive, but the seller insuranced the item against my instrution and I end up have to pay a small duty fee to the custom, which it’s fair. It’s just 7% GST, and cost me $2 anyways. Then UPS charge the ridicously high handling fee, $17, just for collecting $2 from me. What a rip off. Sometimes I wonder, what did had our government done in the NAFTA treaty. Shouldn’t we had already scrape all the traiff between Canada and US? This makes me start thinking about the WTO meeting happening in HK. In an ideal world and classical economy theory I firmly believed in, all traiff are evil. The WTO suppose to reduce the cost of trade between countries, but it end up hijacked by beneficial groups setting quotas to protect their own interest. I am sure the Canada post is the one most object free cross boarder shipping between Canada and US most. When can we Canadian enjoy the same cheap deals most US consumers enjoy?