Today when I was reading Economist, one of the colleague walked by cube, peaked his head and asked me what makes me read the Economist. That gets me start thinking how did I get start in this magazine. I have been known as the sole reader of the copy subscribed by the company library for a long time. Actually, tell you all a little secret, I also know the company’s password of the online account to access the Economist’s website. I first encounter with the Economist back in high school, I believe we are required to research on an article for the history course. Maybe my memory is a bit flickery, what does history has to do with the Economist? I start picked up reading it regularly when my dad had a subscription. At first I found the English of it a bit difficulty, not a surprise since it’s a London based magazine. After reading it for so many years, I had been accustomed to its style of writing. Presumably, if I’m given two paragraph from two different magazine, I could probably tell which one is from the Economist. One of my long term goal is to write like the Economist, a style that is clear, concise and yet sophisticated. Despite of the name of the magazine, it only has about one third of contain on business and economy. Its nature is a news magazine, with comments and analysis from the view point of an logical minded economist. The articles are more in depth than Times or Newsweek, with focus on the cause, reason and effects of current events than what had happened. Each article is well edited that takes me only 5-10 minutes to read. On average, it takes me 2-3 hours to finish an issue, depending on whether it has an interesting survey. There are so many good magazine out there, I used to read more periodic in university days when I lots of time. Now I can barely keep up with reading one magazine a week. My ideal reading list of each week would be, the Economist, IEEE Spectrum, Scientific America, National Geographic, New Yorker (I haven’t start on this one yet, due to its English is even more scary), PC Magazine, Next Magazine (chinese), Harvey Business Review, IEEE Computer, IEEE Communication, and last Computer Gaming World
All posts by hevangel
Beauty and the geek
There is a new reality show on TV called Beauty and the geek, which I found the idea is quite genius. It’s a mix of blind date and competition game show. The show pairs up several teams of hot girls and nerdy geeks. Each partner in the team has to use their strength to help the other one overcome challenges targeting his or her weakness. For example, the tests includes car repair for girls and ball room dancing for the guys. It’s funny to see how people in the two extreme ends of social spectrum cooperate to win the grand prize. I guess to make the show more interesting, the participants are chosen in a way that they are typical stereotyped blonds and geeks. Indeed I found the mind of man and woman ain’t the same, the show just exaggerate the difference and present it in a very funny way. I’m just thinking of a similar reality show for the Canadian market by pairing up a English speaker who know little french with a french speaker who know little English.
Overwhelmed
Recently, I got overwhelmed by church activities. There are too many meetings and events going on, and I am stressed out since it eats into my private time. Preparation for Worth Youth Day is good, but do we need to spend so much time doing all these things? Someone may prefer better prepare themselves spiritually, while someone simply don’t have such a need. Why force everyone follow the same path on spiritual quest? Tonight I had wasted 3 hours in yet another tumid meeting regarding the up coming St. Mary fund raising event, which should last no longer than 1 hour. I feel that we have way too many fund raising activities and it really bothers me. I rather spent the time working on my thesis or even sit back to relax a bit. All church activity should be on volunteer basis. Once someone committed the minimum effort, others should not push more works onto his plate than he is willing to take. Making everyone share the equal amount of work doesn’t make sense at all, since everyone’s expectation is different. Some people always complain they had did more work than others. But they gladly signed themselves for the job at first with no one forcing them. They never consider the option of doing less, which is perfectly fine with most people who want less work. Church stuff is not like real work, people don’t get pay for their service and there is no measurement on deliverable. I’m sure God doesn’t care how much time we put in, as long as we had made some effort. Serving God more may indeed accumulate more treasure in the heaven. The question is suppose that every resident of heaven is equally happy eternally, then what is the use of having more treasure if it can’t buy you more happiness?
library
The library at work was closed down and the librarian got fired last week while I was in Saskatoon. Not many people will miss the library, as they all think it is just a waste of resource to hire someone to order books and keep track of magazines. I’m among one of the few customers of library, who feel sad that it’s closed. I do agree the librarian is kinda redundant and useless, but the library is where I get my weekly magazines from. Now when the library closed, it fetters me from getting my Economist and Harvard Business Review. I hope the company will hire a junior librarian or even a co-op student soon, so that the library can go back to business.
I am the table topic master in today’s toast master meeting. The topic is “Beautiful BC”, which the chairman assumes BC always stands for Birthish Columbia. I put a twist on the topic and use BC as an acronyms. The speakers and club member had fun and lots of laugh, and I think I did not a bad job. My hand gesture and flow of words still need more improvement. Gota remind myself avoid clapping my hands in my speech. The word of the day is Effulgent, it an adjactive with the same meaning as bright. I tried to use Effulgent in my speech, but I don’t make it bend in with my speech very well. However, this excerise give me an idea. I just subscribed to the dictioary.com word of the day mailing list. I’ll see how can I use the daily word in my blog starting today.
speech preparation
Today is quite unproductive at work, not only I had 3 hours of meeting straight from 11:00a.m. to 2:30p.m., I did a brain dump to another colleague of what I had learnt in Saskatoon in the afternoon. The meeting in lunch time is not project related, it’s a mini seminar organized by the Toastmaster club on how to prepare a speech. The speaker is Marget Hope, a specialist on speech from SFU. I believe had I attended similiar seminar taught her before, but obviously I had forgot everything I learnt last time. Giving a speech is very different from writing an article. When writing an article, people usually use fancy words and complex sentence structures, but in a speech, simple sentence is usually the way to go. First she introduced the bubble diagram to brain storm ideas, then briefly on the technic of walk thru, talk thru, real rehersal and mental rehersal. After the seminar, I felt I am more prepared for the ice-breaker speech I have to do in Toastmaster, so I signed myself up do it the week after.
I think my chess skill really had improved, I slaughtered Gordon with a major advantage. Moreover, I tried the Sicilian defence dragon variable and really appreciate its beauty. I decided to focus on this as my main defense strategy in king pwan openings.