Last night was Halloween, and I was stuck at home working on my CTM#3 speech. No halloween party for me this year, I guess I am already too old for that.
My speech today is not too bad, the title is “Say no to package tour”. In the speech I first outline the bads about package tour, then offers three tips on how to plan your own vacation. First is try not to pack too many cities into the schedule, second is get a good tourist book, and third is learn the language. I tried not to use the notes, but due to lack of practice, I forgot some of the points when I was up there. I have cut down alot on my the um and ah, but still need to work on pauses and repeat sentence. My hand gesture and eye contacts seems ok, just have to remember be more relax next time. I found that I will start getting nervous when I begin to forget my next line. This problem can be lumped with the lack of pratice. The biggest improvement I have made is on timing and speech organization. Three pages of draft is about right for a five minutes speech.
I am one of the keeners keeping up with the progress of my toastmaster program. I want to keep up with the the leading pack in completing of my CTM speeches. No one had make their CTM#4 speech yet, so my goal is not to fall behind too much from the most advanced person.
Today PMC has announced that it will spend $4 million to acquire the storage division from Aglient. This news explains why we have to lend $2 million in the quarter result last week. Borrowing money to expand the company is a normal business pratice, but I still think kinda uneasy using up all the cash reserves to add another 300 head counts to the payroll. Still, it is nice to know the company is back on growing mode, only if this acquisition works out. I am not in the storage division, this news doesn’t impact our consumer product division much. However I could image my friends down in first floor can feel the shockwave. The storage division is running off from Allantown before the acquisition, the Burnaby team always feel like they are mistreated. Now with the extra headcounts, ESD people in Burnaby will recieve even less attention. I guess the morale of the Burnaby ESD team has just dropped to the lowest point. I wonder does Harvard Businnes Review has case studies on acquisitions. Gota remember to check out the lastest issue from the library tomorrow.
Pat always complains I am a very boring guy, a typical engineer who knows nothing about romance. She have been trying hard to get me understand the concept of romance. So far I the aspect of romance I can get includes the element of surprise and the appreciation of arts together. Somehow sweet talks, which always think is romantic, is not part of the equation. She only think I am acting funny and turns her off. I always try my best to practise romanance even though I had limited understanding of it. I impressed Pat today by showing her my romantic level has improved. This afternoon we I buy lunch for her, I bought an exta chicken leg, which she love since childhood, as a surprise to her. Then tonight we went to a lounge resturant with live music for our halloween dinner. We sat, chatted and enjoyed the oldies songs for 3 hours. The dishes are very satisfying, it’s a fining dining resturant in Richmond opened by Chinese. The food has elements of fusion, the presentation is in the form of western cruises, but the cooking is tailored to the appetit of Chinese. The atomsphere is very comfortable, suitable for quiet chats with friends.
Normally, I won’t join my colleagues for their poker games, but today is an exception. It is Daniel’s birthday, who usually host the game. The big group first have dinner together at Abadeen Center, then head towards daniel’s place. Me and Pat went to Mondo to have icecream after dinner, Verona has a sharp eye and spoted Mondo offers free icecream to birthday boys. We phoned Daniel to tell him the good deal. He did not believe there is such a good deal, but came down anyways and got the icecream for his wife. At Daniel’s place, some of us played poker and had red wine, a very spoiled life style. Some others who don’t gamble played a much more educational game, scrabble. The poker game we play is a variation of 7 cards hi-low stub, with an option to choose go high or go low after the last card is deal. I am lucky tonight and won a small amount, but Pat taxed 50% of my profit. I start to understand the trick in this game. Going low is always better than going high, which it the reverse of other poker games. You can’t calculate your opponent’s hand when you go high, but you can easily see your odds when going low. Since the pool is split evenly between the high and low winner, the risk of going low is actually smaller. When in doubt, and your cards on the table permits, always go low. The other key is know when to fold, never chase any card. In fact you don’t need to chase any card when you are going low. Gambling is not very good after all, so I only allow myself play at most once a month, probably on the monthly long weekend gathering of the group.
I have been using no-ip.com for my DNS redirection for many years. It basically maps the my domains (www.horace.org and trishama.no-ip.com) to the IP address of my webserver at home. It is a free service and very reliable. I don’t expect my free account will actually expired. This unexpected link failure disturbed the service to my website for a few hours today, until I figure out the problem. I know there is no forever free lunch. It seems the no-ip service require the user reactive their accounts once a while. If it becomes too much of an annoyance, I think I will pay $20 to upgrade to the enhanced service to save all the troubles. I even briefly think about moving my main domain, horace.org to no-ip.com for the $25 package. Although it is $75 cheaper than the hosting service I am using, no-ip.com doesn’t provide webspace nor mail service. It costs another $45 to add a mail server to the package, and only comes with 20MB storage space. My deal at readyhosting.com is pretty good, 500Mb of mixed use space, unlimit email account, umlimit data transfer, web email access. The only obvious drawback is SQL database not included, an extra $25 for the database is more than I am willing to pay. I think the best solution is keep everything as it is. Continue to host the website in my linux box at home, and use the static domain just as a front channel all the traffic to my home server. I am lucky to have my own toplevel domain. I noticed horace.com and horace.net is up for sale and the seller is asking for over $1000. It seems these two domain is owned by cyber squatters at the moment. Those companies accumlate common expired domains and hoping to cash them out some day. I used to know the owner of horace.com, even asked to buy his domain. I wonder whether he sold the name to those cyber squatter or he simply forgot to renew his domain register. If I knew he will give up on his domain, I may ask him again. I guess I am willing to spend up to $500 for that name. Isn’t it ironic that you have to acquire the right to use your own name in the cyberworld?