I have my first philosophy class tonight, PHIL 300, introduction to philosophy. I have interest in philosophy for a few years. First I started with questions on religion, then slowly it branch out to all major fields in philosophy, as I found theology is just a sub-set of philosophy. I have read a few books on philosophy, the best of all is Sophie’s World, probably many people’s first philosophy book. Although I tends to forget the philosopher’s thoughts and their names, but at least I can recongize their names. This course is my first formal training on philosophy, it comes with eassy assignments and exam. With these external pressure, I hope the stuff I learn would stay longer in my brain this time. After the introductory course, I want to read more on ethics and moral theory, and aesthetic. I believe in the economist darwinism theory on the first one, just want to check out other previous theories so I know how to counter them in case of challenage. The later one is a question always puzzles me, hope I can find some answers in the course. I am thinking about taking part time graduate studies in philosophy, have talked to the advisor in philosophy department once. My main concern is philosophy may turn out not as interesting as I have expected. Maybe I will try a couple grad course to begin with, if I can reclaim the credits towards my degree later on.

I have a dentist semi-annual appointment today, it is just a regular clean up. Many people scare to see dentist, but I am not one of them. I never afraid of dentist, probably it is because I never had really bad toothache nor bad experience with dentist in childhood. I don’t mind the mild pain in dental check up, in some sense I actually enjoys it. Scraping my teeth to make it free of plague makes me feel good. I don’t really like whitening of the teeth using the mini-grinder, it is the sound that irritate me. I have been pround of having no cavities for many years, but finally I have to get some filling last year for bad teeth. One thing that always worries me is my wisdom teeth, I still have them embedded in my jaw. I had seen how terrible it is when my friends have to pull them out over the past few years. My only comfort is my wisdom teeth seems sleeping happily, with no signs of coming out. I hope I can just leave them alone forever. Next time when I call my dad, I gota ask him whether he had his wisdom pulled. I sort of remember his wisdom is not coming out as well. Maybe it runs in the gene line for not having wisdom teeth problems.

It is indeed a small world after all. Yesterday I met a guy in my dancing class, literally, he is a friend of a friend of a friend of Pat, friend to the power of 3. Anyways, I didn’t pay much attention to him and we didn’t even introduce ourselves to each other. Today, when I was in the cafeteria at work, I met this guy again. It is kinda embrassed I couldn’t remember his name and have to peak his badage. It turned out he just started in PMC last week! What a small world, every people is inter-connected. Since he is also from HK, our lunch group can use new blood as it is getting smaller and smaller. I am going to drag him out this friday to have lunch with our group. Somehow I have a feeling he will make a good friend with Jenny, because they are both devoted Protestants. Sometimes I wonder, how many more this kind of people I will bump into again in course of my life? We met some time again, and then met again in an totally unexpected way. I guess it would be more odd if I somehow bump into a friend I have on the forums I hang out in real life. The only question, we normally won’t tell people what website we visit, and the only identification there is a nickname not used in real world. How do we know we already know each other?

Today, the 24″ widescreen LCD I ordered from dell has arrived. It is fantastic. I have almost the same screen area as 2 19″ LCD, with about the same price. The Dell 2405FPW is highly recommanded from computer review and is selling like a hot cake. I am very satisfy with it. I not used to the new ultra high resolution and widescreen ratio yet. In the past when I have two monitors, I tends to use the 19″ as the main monitor and put auxillary windows in the 17″. One thing for sure is I will rarely open windows using the full screen width, except maybe watching movies. I havn’t come up with my scheme on how to setup the windows yet, so far my perference is letting the browser have the right half of the screen and everything else on the left half. However my auxillary windows is slightly overlap with my browser window, something I will have to sort out. I am just thinking about add an extra 19″ or 20″ rotated 90 degree on the side to solve this problem. Maybe I will get it with my next PC upgrade.

Check out photos of my new LCD here

Tonight I was having hotpot at “little fat lamb” with friends at work. We wanted to go to this resturant for quite some time, but either it is too busy or my reversation is over booked. The food there is really good, the meat are fresh and lots of variaties, uncommon in all-you-can-eat buffer hotpot. I am sure I have ate too much tonight, probably triple the normal my dinner in-take. I found my friend, Jackson’s style of eating hotpot is a bit annoying. He like to dump everything into the pot and kill the boiling bubbles. He claims it is most efficient, which I highly doubt the end result. For putting too many stuff in the pot, he is idling while waiting for the water to re-boil. He eats in bursts when the food is cooked in batch and we all know eating in bursts actually makes you full faster. When he dumped the food into the pot, he mixed beef and pork, even seafood and vegatable. He end up cooking the beef far longer the optimal time and ruin the texture. In short, he just eats like a barbarian or an African refugee. A civilized person will only cook meat, especially beef, one piece at a time. Dip the beef slice into the boiling water, count 5 to 10 seconds depend on cook perference and it is ready to eat. Food takes long time to cook are placed into the pot bit by bit continuously without overloading the pot. The goal is to keep the water boiling all the time while throttle control the food in-take at a consistance pace. That is the art of eating hotpot.

Today I went to the Premium Outlet Mall in Seattle for the first time. Actually it is my first time shopping in an outlet mall. I have experienced some time very unusal when I crossed the border this morning. Normally, the US custom just waive you pass the border. I got pulled over today and ran against a radiation detector. It was because Pat’s dad had a heart scan yesterday and the detector picked up isotope residual in his body. I guess the custom must had suspected us smuggling nuclear bomb into the States. Anyways, after tons of questions, search of the car, we are free to go after an hour delay. So we have to scrafice the Costco visit to keep the schedule.

Pat had bought quite some stuffs from the outlet mall, but I am the one who walked away handfull. I bought a pair of hiking boot from Nike and the long dued new suites. It is really a headache to pick clothings as there is no specification or preformance review for guidance. Most often the first item I pick is doomed to be rejected by Pat due to my poor taste. Then when I lower the requirement to absolute minimium of just being comfortable and let Pat pick the colour and style, she would complain about my lack of opinion. Even worse, she can somehow make a linkage to doubt my reason of picking her as girlfriend. Luckily, Pat’s brother is with us this time and he has good fashion sense, especially in the Central look. This solve my problem of picking the right clothes. I simply let them dress me, pay the bill before working away with the new clothes. From an engineer’s perspective, I still don’t understand what make one piece clothing better than another in term of fashion. One day, I will study philosophy of aesthetic to find out the answer. On the other hand, buying sports wears is much simplier. I only have to consider whether the clothing serves its design purpose well, is the price reasonable, and not in gay colour. Damn those evil fashion magazines, they had corrupted the mind of woman to make man’s life miserable just to pick the right dress.