I can’t believe me and Anson got into playoff round of the foosball tournament. We joined the novice league and to our surprise, we ranked number 4 out fo 12 teams. I had never play foosball until PMC has installed one in the game room. For the past few months, I have became quite skillful by playing a game or two almost every day. Although my level is still far behind those experts, but I had made significant improvement. My weakness area is the ball handling skill, I still can’t stop and gain control of the ball. My shooting and aiming is average, I can do a push shot pretty well, but need to work on the pull shot. My most pround skill is the 5-bar shots. Actually I think I am the first one who start using it regularly in PMC. I got the idea from the debate whether or not make the 5-bar goals illegal. If it is something almost illegal, it is something worth to look into. Since I piloted the use of 5-bar, people start copying this technique. Someone even develope strategy to block 5-bar shots and make it less effective. I have to think about how to put a new twist in the 5-bar shots.

The morale of the day is never act stupid at work, or within a day the whole company will know about you. Today there is only one topic among my friends at work, both the cantonese group and the CBC group I hang out with. I will not mention the incident here and removed any trace of it in my blog upon the request of those who are involved. For those who already known what I talk about, it is really funny indeed. I have always keep a very simple rule about my secrets. If it is something I truly don’t want anyone to know about, I simply won’t telling anyone about it. As described in the 2nd law of thermal dynamics, energy tends to spread out naturally. The larger the surface area, the faster the heat dissipate. We all know information is a form of energy and energy can be expressed as heat. On a second thought, maybe this incident is not meant to be a secret, maybe it is a story that should goes around and give people some enlightenment. I even post the story as an example of how to ruin a date on the internet forum I go to.

When I wake up this morning, it was snowing heavly outside. Since I have to work on my thesis, I didn’t plan to go outside at all today, the snow doesn’t affect me. However I do feel better that I know many people will also trapped at home due to the snow fall. Pat had planned to come over to have dinner together. But due to it is very dangerous to drive in this road condition, she better stay home. I am not very productive today, just managed to write another 4 pages. I still have one more week to finish my thesis and hand it in to be reviewed by Dr. Hardy. I found writing thesis is quite painful especially on how to condense 20+ papers into 4 pages in a meaningful way. Anyways, let’s pray I can finish the thesis and graduate early to end this painful process of writing thesis.

Last night was my company’s annual christmas party. Even though it said annual, it’s the first time since 5 years. During the downturn, the company simply cut all the unncessary expense, and the party is one of them. The official name is called winter party, to be politically correct and not offending other religion. I think that is totally fart with pants down. I doubt anyone will be offended by using the word christmas. Just turn christmas into a secular festival like halloween, make Santa Claus and Rudolph the red nose raindeer rather than Jesus as the center character of hristmas should be sufficient, no need to replace the word christmas with something else.

I always the like the idea about beating the system, finding clever ways to exploit the loopholes to your favour. Today, I find a very inspiring story on the news. There is a Canadian guy spent $7000 on a North America unlimited pass with Air Canada, then continuously fly for two months and end up earning $70000 worth of airmiles. His daily routine starting at 10a.m., flying back and forth between Vancouver and Victoria 6 times, then before the airport is closed, board an over night flight to Toronto and come back right away. He basically earned ten times of return in two month and they are all tax free! I think Air Canada will soon fix the airmile system. I just wonder, what he does on the plane to pass time?