Today is the first day of the Easter long weekend. According to the Christian tradition, Jesus suppose to be crucified on the cross today, died and took a break for three days before resuming his duty as the Messiah. As a good Catholic, I go to the church tonight with Pat to walk the station of the cross. Station of the cross is a common fixture in every Catholic church. It is a set of 14 pictures portraiting 14 scenes of the last moment of Jesus, from being judge to carrying the cross, PKed 3 times, died on the cross and buried. In some large churches, they have scultures instead of pictures for the station of the cross. I just had a vision about a high-tech version of the station of the cross. Instead of same old boring pictures, we can use hugh LCD displays playing the same scenes from Mel Gibson’s movie Passion of the Christ. I think this new station of the cross is more interesting than the most familiar one. Actually, if we can borrow 14 laptops, we can setup one in this year’s WCCCLC camp. What a gimmick!

Tonight I have a small advantage to try Afghan cuisine. The resturant is next to Rasputin on Broadway and Cambine. I have passed by this resturant many times and wonder what’s inside. Looking into the door, it looks pretty normal, just like any other small family resturant. When we arrived, the place is quite empty, but we were told almost all table are reserved. We couldn’t sit inside the Afghan style room with low-raise table and cushions. The menu is in English, so at least I know what I am ordering. The food is very similiar to Greek food, with lots of lambs. Since Afghan is a Muslim country, no pork is served. I have ordered a platter to share with Pat, it has a little bit of everything. The taste is ok, but I still prefer Greek better, these two are pretty similiar anyways. The service is sub-par, the waiter at the reception looks kinda scary, and they didn’t refill water for us often enough. I am a bit disappointed they don’t have horse meat in their menu. I was told horse meat is a famous cuisine in Afghan. Maybe I will try another Afghan resturant with horse meat next time. However, I suspect that is probably the only Afghan resturant in Canada.

I went to Canucks game tonight. I am very disappointed that they lose this important game to Sharks. Canucks probably cannot get into the Stanley Cup play off this year. In the first period, we were leading 2-0, I thought it would be easy game to win. Then Sharks tie the score within 2 minutes at the end of first period. In second period, Shark score first and we are behind for a while until we score one goal. We have a lead 4-3 on the 3rd period all the way until the very end, and end up having to play over time. It happens very quick, we just lose to San Jose a few minutes into the over time. The whole stadium is dead silence, everyone looks sad on the way out. This is Pat’s first hockey game, she actually find it quite exciting. It is very different to feel the atomsphere in person than watching it on TV. She won’t mind watch it live once a while. Oh well, the beer and popcorn helps to enhance the experience too. I bought her a souvneir from the Canucks shop, it is a stuffed hockey puck. She wanted a cap, but too bad it doesn’t look good on her. Maybe I should watch one hockey game with Pat per season starting next year, if I could find cheap tickets.

I love the lowest price guarantee at Future Shop. I bought a Linksys router last week at $70 after rebate. This week, the same router goes on sale in Bestbuy for $60 after rebate. It is a $10 difference, so I took my receipt and the Bestbuy advertisement to Future Shop to refund the difference. The customer service line up is a bit long, but still acceptable. The refund process is very straight forward, the difference is deposited back to my credit card after a few signatures. Up to this point, the service is just good but not great. Pat is using the a SMC router and it crashes once a while like mine old one. Since I am quite happy with my Linksys, and she will complain if I buy her a cheaper replacement. I decided to pick up another Linksys from Futureshop, which is $100 not on sales. I took the router to the cashier, and present her with the Bestbuy ad, the cashier was busy chitting with a guy, she mis-read the price in the ad. She thought it is $59 before rebate. Since Futureshop has a police of beat the competitor by 10%, she charge me $54 for the router, then on top of that I still have the $20 rebate. Can you believe I got a Linksys router for just $34? Isn’t Future Shop a great place to shop at?

I have converted all my Yukie Nishimura CDs into mp3 format. I have every CDs Yukie Nishimura has released, 28 in total, from 1986 to 2005. It is a project I wanted to do for a long time. I don’t like playing play my original CDs since I afraid that will wear out the CDs. Normaly I burn a backup copy to use in car or anywhere. Ripping the CD into mp3 let me enjoy her music even more conviniently. If there is any Yukie Nishimura fans out there, please drop me an email. I am glad to burn you a DVD with all her music in mp3. I like to share good music with my friends. Moreover, some of her older CDs is next to impossible to find these days. It took me quite some effort to hunt for all the CDs. I have to order some of them directly from Japan. Here I have one delimma, when I inspecting my CDs, I found that 1 out of the 28 CDs is not an original Japanese version nor official HK version. It is a Taiwan unlicensed version. I can see the printing of the booklet is not as good as the others. The question is should I order the original copy of that CD from Japan, or I should be satisfy with the Taiwan version.