I have a dental appointment today. After visiting the dentist, my mouth feel funny for the whole afternoon. I used to be quite positive seeing dentist, but it changes when I had my first bad teeth last year. I used to be very proud of my good tooth. Since my teeth no longer 100% organic, everything I visit the dentist, I worry when I’ll have to have another filling. In addition, because of I still haven’t take out my wisdom teeth, I also have to worry when it will come up. The cleaning of the plague is a bit painful, but I don’t really mind that. The worst part is teeth polishing, which is done by the dental technician instead of the dentist. I always suspect they are not doing a very good job. I’m still waiting for the technology advancement to the cleaning of the teeth mechanically obsolete. I can foresee in the future, laser or ultrasound will replace the metal scrapper as the dentist’s tool. The teeth will clean just like how the archaeologist clean those ancient scriptures.
Category Archives: Daily Scribble
My random thoughts of the day.
German 3
I finished my 8 lessons of German 3. This is a semi-private course at the teacher’s place. I think it is much better than the classroom course offered at the Vancouver school. The class is smaller, each of us get more time. The environment is less formal, that encourage us to speak freely. The level 3 of German stop at after introducing the pass tense. My pronunciation is still not very good, but I am getting better not to pronounce the words in the English way. I understand all the grammar rules taught so far, but sometimes forgot when to use them. The vocabulary is my weakest area, unlike other students who has a German speaking other half to practice with, I know no Deutche speaker around me. There will be two more extra classes before I go to German. I’ll decide whether I want to continue the lessons after I come back. I couldn’t find too much of use of learning German, but it’s kinda waste giving it up after a year of learning. Language is something you quickly forget if you don’t use it every once a while. I had set up another rule for myself that if I decide to travel somewhere, I will at least start learning the basic of that language a year ahead of time.
42
I haven’t done a table topic in the toastmaster meeting for quite a while, so I volunteer myself today. Today’s toastmaster meeting is more special than usual, because it is the club got chartered. We invited the district governor to present us the certificates, and PMC provided free lunch. The topic I got is a quote from Pablo Picasso, “Computers are useless. They can only give answers”. I think I did ok in the table topic, except that I totally forgot to mention 42 until I went back to my seat. For those who had read the Hitchhacker’s Guide to the Galaxy, you should know 42 is the answer to all the questions of life and universe, except that the question is not known. Later on when I mention that to my colleagues, almost everyone agree that I had totally missed the point of that quote. One of them haven’t read the book and seems puzzled about the importance of 42. The rest of us question his identity of being an engineer, we even threaten to take away his iron ring. I think I should download and watch the movie version of that book to reinforce my engineer nature.
Futureshop Warrenty
When I bought my palm pilot a few years ago, I knew it is going to break down when the manufacturer warranty expired. So I spent $50 to buy the buyer protection program of future shop, hoping to get a new unit when my palm is beyond repair. The no lemon garuntee of the program suppose to give me a new one or goods with equivalent value if it has been repaired more than three times. My idea was to break the palm before the extended warrenty expire so I can get my money back. My palm has broken as I expected, probably due to statics on the interface IC. It turn out the warranty program of Futureshop is really user unfriendly. The repair time is unreasonably long, it takes them almost 2 months to get it to repair. The worst is the fine print of the non-lemon guarantee, it will only get replaced if it breaks down on the same problem three times, not just any three problems. So I have been end up visiting Futureshop almost once every few months to send my palm to repair and picking it up. Today I pick up my palm again, and I’m still one repair short from getting a new unit. In order to get my money spent on the extended warranty worth, I have to break the palm again. The best way to break any electronic device is apply the wrong voltage and current to burn out the IC, and you can always blame it on power surge. Since I don’t have a palm for such a long period of time, I get used to live without a palm already. I remember at some point back then, I thought I couldn’t function without a handheld device. So I’ll probably get something else with the reimbursement from the extended warranty. Does it really worth going thru all these trouble to get the worth of the extended program? Probably not, so I had decided I will never buy the extended coverage from future shop again.
Carwash
I am very exhausted today. After the auction dinner last night, I have to get up early at seven thirty this morning for another fund raising event, car washing at St. Paul. I think the word volunteer work or WYD promotion as a more appropriate description. The money we made today is nothing comparing to last night. We worked for the whole morning, and only washed 30 cars while people were attending the mass. Divided up the donation we got and the man hour we had spent, it is about the same as the minimum wage at McDonald’s. It could a team bonding event, but we are already seeing each others too often. St. Andrew is a pretty small church, the mass is not even half full, and most attendants are seniors. I worry that the church may get close when those old folks pass away. I didn’t fall asleep during the mass, probably it is because my body was still in working mode in between the car wash. Instead of listening to the homily, I was think about the idea of car wash as fund raising in general. Car washing is the most inefficient fund raising event I had participle so far, the return simply doesn’t justify the hard work. However I can see the other side of this event. It give the kids some outdoor exercise, working really as a team instead of having separated roles, and it seems always fun to play the water hose. I guess I’m too old for all of that and the manual work is too demanding. The worse part is I can’t stand the dirts on the car once I start cleaning it. The people should only get what they pay for, not the as my own car type service. Thus we end up spending a lot more time making the car really clean than doing a supposedly half hearted job. Yet, I think car washing could be a good idea for teenagers trying to do something together. If I have kids, I’ll encourage them to suffer in at least one of those events. Out of all these fund raising events I had went through, I start to appreciated the value of higher education. It is a good lesson to learn how the less fortunate people make their living in the hard way. I think it is just immoral in the society let people do all these lowly works. In my ideal world, all these unrepresented tasks should be taking care of by robots and computers. Humans are left to work on the most important and most value-added jobs, the advancement of science and technology.