Finally I received my dual LCDs at work after waiting for almost two months since I had talked to Uncle Bob. Colleagues gathered around my cube today and check out the dual LCD setting. I am not sure how to measure the productivity increase using dual displays, but it definitely much more convenient to use. The moral of this story is that you will get what you want if you keep asking for it and ask it to the right person.
My windows machine is dead and it keep rebooting itself. I suspect some files of the OS is corrupted since it won’t even boot into safe mode. The only option I have is to re-install windows. I hope the windows recovery works so I won’t lost my data. Sigh.. I don’t have much time to re-install all the software.
Today I spent almost the whole working on Worth Youth Day fund raising again. All those fund raising events taking too much of my time, and the amount we get back really won’t justify all the effort. Anyways, we are selling lots of stuffs in St. Mary after masses. I’m taking care of selling the T-shirts. Pat designed the T-shirt, the light color one looks pretty nice, but the dark color one don’t turn out too great. The T-shirt selling system is very confusing, so I end up have to run up and down stairs a lot to get the color people want to buy. I guess we sold almost 200 hundred T-shirts over the weekend. Since the T-shirt are donated by someone, all the money go to the WYD team. In a few weeks, we have to distribute the T-shirts, I can foresee it would be more chaos than today. From today’s experience, I know I would never want to be a sales, especially clothes sales.
I went to the 2nd faith formation session held by the Vancouver archdiocese for everyone who is going the World Youth Day. The topic is on prayers, presented by the Youth Ministry director and the newly ordinate deacon Anthony. Claymoo make a funny presentation, he make analogy of prayer to cell phone plans. Staring with the most basic plan cannot place out-going calls, can only able to listen incoming calls occasionally. One level up can only call 911 in the case of emergency. A higher level gives you unlimited minute on a weekend morning, but cannot place call during the weekdays. A better plan includes some minutes over the week and the best plan gives you 24×7 unlimited access but could cost quite some sacrifice . He put it in a very funny way, sorta like a salesman getting people to upgrade their cell phone plan. This kind of trick always works in preaching by trapping the audiences’ mind into pre-defined categories. I wonder in this analogy, what if I say I want to switch the carrier? Bro. Anthony talked about penance, and use his boring talk as an example. As a result I didn’t sleep in his talk this time, and offered all the boredom to God as my penance. Still, I don’t understand that why God wants penance in the first place. What good can my boredom brings to God?
Pat will have her piano exam next Monday, so she is practicing piano very hard. To encourage her, I bought sushi for dinner tonight and deliver to her place. When I arrived, she was watching a documentary on the history of piano. The internal mechanism of a piano is an art of engineering, I can’t believe each piano has more than 2000 pieces. The history of piano is not very long, only a few hundred years old. I also known that Bach is the first piano composer. I wonder how do the musician back then learn to play piano when it was still a prototype not commonly known. After the dinner, Pat make me listen to her exams rehearsal, It is my pleasure to listen to Pat’s rehearsal (changed due to censorship), which last about 30 minutes. It is quite relaxing listening to classical music after a big meal, so I fell asleep. Pat grumble about both me and her piano teacher sleep when she plays. Oh well, maybe her music has some magic power putting people to sleep. I would like to start listening classical music to improve my taste. I had already downloaded over 100 classical CDs in mp3. The only problem is that I can’t recognize the name of the songs or the composers. It is not fun when you don’t even know what you are listening to.
In today’s German class, the teacher offered us some bubbling wine to celebrate her admission to UBC education program. It seems that we have alcohol in every one of the past few German classes. It’s nice to have beer or wine and learn at the same time. The environment is really friendly, much better than class room style of teaching. We held lots of conversation in German, but due to my lack of ability, I can barely follow the talks, never mind taking part in it. I read out allow my composition and had it corrected by the teacher. I made lots and lots mistakes, especially on word order and the use of preposition. My vocabulary is still very weak, really need to memorize more verbs, nouns and adjectives. I can understand all the grammar rules well, just often forgot to apply them in my sentences. My pronouncation is the worst of all, but I couldn’t really help on that part, I have no one to practice German with. Hope with my beginner level German, I can survival the two weeks World Youth Day trip in August.