Recently, Pat digged out her Super NES console and try to finish the Mario Land game pending over 10 years. This get me into conversation about emulator of console on the computer. I tried hard to explain what is an emulator to Pat, but it seems she couldn’t understand. I think the best way to explain is show her what is a emulator. So I downloaded the N64 emulator with over 150 games in ROM. I just tried out some of the N64 games tonight, such as Mariokart, Mario tenis. I found that I can still enjoy the games despise those games are 7-8 years old and the graphics is dated. In fact, in some sense those games are more fun that the overly complicated games these days. I wonder what progress has the gaming industry made in all these years. All they have done is just remaking the same game with better graphics. There is no new type of game play emerged since real time strategy and online RPG games. If the gaming industry don’t start having more innovation, I can see the end of gaming is coming. Why pay for similiar games again and again, year after year? Why can’t we just play the old games we had never played before?

I have my first and last exam of this term today. It is the final exam for my philosophy course. I didn’t spend much time studying it. Just start late in afternoon yesterday and finish before midnight. In the final we have to study 7 philosophers. Since we already know the questions ahead of time and we know we have choices in the exam, I have the luxury to give up a few more differcult philosophers. Althought I still try my best to understand their very confusing thoughts in my review. The exam in held in one of those dark lecture hall with armrest size writing surface. I just hate having an exam in this kind of room. We only have to answer 3 out of 6 questions in the paper but we got 3 hours. I finished my paper in 1 hour, wrote down everything I remember about those three dead guys. I have a feeling I will get a C+ again this time.

I have just installed Mediawiki to my webserver. Mediawiki is the wiki program behind the wikipedia. I would like to give it a try and use wiki to create a library section in my website. I found blog and forum are not very suitable for static pages with regular updates. There is a very steep learning curve in using Wiki. The concept of Wiki is very different from normal webpages we are used to, it is completely dynamic. I am still figuring out what is the best way to present my information. One thing I have to be very careful about is user permssion. I notice Mediawiki doesn’t have very fine control over what user can and cannot do. I have to strike the balance between letting reader intractive with me and preventing spammer clogging up the website. On top of that, Mediawiki is not very good for customization, which is something I wish to have, but probably won’t have time to execute.

This is the first time I have fire alarm since I had moved into my new place. I was waken up by the alarm suddenly while I was sleeping. It took me a while to realize what’s going on, and get changed quickly, grab the keys and start going down stairs. I semlt some burning smell once I get out of the door, so I know the alarm is for real. It took me quite some effort to walk down twenty floors, especially with sour legs from skiing yesterday. I can find at least one advantage of my old place, it’s at the 4th floor. When I finally got down to the ground floor, I saw the firemen are already here and put out the fire. It’s probably just some stupid person over cook his midnight snack. There are lots of chinese or asian faces living in the building, almost 70% of the people gathered in the front yard. Not long after I went down, the firemen turn off the alarm and let us go home. It is another long walk, and this time is even worse to walk up twenty floors. I have to stop a few times on the way up to catch my breath. While I was on my way down, I think about the worst case scenario what if my place really burnt down. I found that actually I don’t miss anything, except some personal data in my computer. Nothing is irreplacable, including the passport and the identifications. The good thing is I have backup my emails at gmail, so my contact is safe. The only thing I need to do is the database of my website. When I setup the my new linux box, I gota write some script to schedule regular backup.

Today I went to Whislter first time since I have became an instructor. We have a solid day of all black runs. I found that black runs is not as hard as I thought before, although it still quite tried coming down on a black run. The snow is really good this weekend, probably the most fun weekend this year. The runs at the side Harmony has lots of powder, and we can ski all the way down to the bottom. Since black runs consumes lots of energy, we call it the end of the day at around 2:45p.m., and ski down slowly. We left Whistler at 4:00p.m., came back to Vancouver before 6:00p.m. This is probably the last ski of the season, unless there is some more big snow dump next week. Tonight I went to the Easter virgil at CMCC. It is also Pat’s god daughter’s baptism as well. The virgil is really long, lasted almost 3 hours. I think I had slept though at least 2 hours. After the virgil, there was food and people chat with each other, I was so tired that I can merely stand there following Pat.