Every year around the summer season, Vancouver has its annual firework competition. Teams from 3 countries put together 4 spectacular shows within two weeks. I am not a big fan of firework and didn’t watch firework for the past few years. The firework show is always the prefect excuse to organize a social gathering to keep in touch with your friends.

We meet at Kitsilano Beach after work. Some of our friends already went there early and save us a good spot. The beach is not very crowd when we arrived at 8:00p.m. People were still enjoying the last bit of sunlight before sunset. Our spot is quite nice, close to the restaurant and real washroom, not those stinky portable ones. There were two people playing Jazz with guitar and saxophone just a few meters away. We enjoy the music, chit chat with each other, play card games to kill the time during the wait for the firework show. The firework starts at 10:00p.m., some friends are so smart that they brought along portal radio. So we can listen to the theme music of the firework. The firework is pretty good, but not really exceptional. Tonight’s show is preformed by the Chinese team. I heard earlier in the radio that there will be a special firework in the Olympic five rings pattern. I was eagerly looking forward to the rings in the sky, but I was disappointed. All I saw was some random rings. Maybe the wind disturbed the pattern or maybe we were just sitting in the wrong viewing angle.

The show ends at 10:30p.m., everyone leaving at the same time makes the traffic totally packed. It took us almost an hour and half to get home. I wish I can post some pictures with this blog entry, but I left the camera with Pat. Maybe I will upload the pictures later when I copy the files form Pat.  The final show is on this Saturday, it is the last chance for those who want to enjoy some fireworks this summer.

This is a speech prepared for my toastmaster ATM#5.

How many of you have taken a IQ test? Please raise your hands. Don’t worry, I am not asking any IQ question. Today I going to tell you a story about Lewis Terman, the father of IQ, Intelligent Quotation.

It was year 1923. Inside an office in the psychology department of Stanford University, Professor Lewis Terman was preparing his lecture tomorrow. Back then, Stanford was a still new unknown university in the West, surrounded by the farm land in Palo Alto. Look outside his office, he can see farmers busy harvesting the crops. (Side note: Lewis’s son, Fredick Terman, the chairman of Stanford physics department, was the founder of the Silicon Valley, but that would be another story.) Terman was relaxing in his arm chair, thinking over his archievments in promoting the IQ test since he joined Stanford.

Terman always has passion for intelligence. It was his life long career to establish an objective measurement of human intelligence, which is the ability of abstract reasoning. Shortly after he joined Stanford, he improved an intelligent test developed by French psychologist Alfred Binet. However Terman put a twist into the original test, which is designed to identify slow children that require special help. Instead Terman turned the test around to identify the gifted children. Since then, the Stanford-Binet test and its variation are popular among schools to identify bright student and give them challenges.

Suddenly, a knock on the door interrupts Terman’s thoughts. It was his research assistant. The assistant received a letter from a young fellow named Edward Dmytryk asking for help. Dmytryk was running away from his abusing father who force him to work in a coal mine instead of continue his education. He was in the care of social welfare department right now, but the court was about to send him back to his dad. Terman recalled the interview with Dmytryk, he was a participate in the genetic study of genius project. Terman started up this project to keep track of the life of over a thousands of children identified with IQ score over 135. In those days, people has prejudice against smart kids, they think them “early ripe, early rot”. Terman wants to prove intelligence leads to a better life quantitatively with this life long scientific research project.

Terman always has a heartfelt for the gifted children, he wanted to help them to realize their full potential. He is struggled whether or not he should help Dmytryk. On one hand, he know Dmytryk will be ruined if he was sent to work instead of school. On the other hand, as a scientist, he should not meddle with the life of his test subjects or the result will be biased. He debated the pro and con of helping Dmytryk with his assistants all day long. At the end, the human side of Terman won the argument, he felt obligated to save the child. He wrote a letter to the judge, explaining the situation with his respectable reputation in childhood education. Dmytryk was put to a good foster home. Many years later, Dmytryk became of one of the most famous director in Hollywood.

Terman’s work no only change the life of little Dmytryk, it also inspired how school around the world treated the gifted children. They have more challenging curriculum, enrolled into enriching school programs. This is all thanks to Lewis Terman, the father of IQ.

Blogging has been a popular phenomena for the past few years. Before blogging, there was personal homepage, similar idea but less convenient to use. Just like any trends, bloggers come and go after they have lost their interest. I witness may blogs suffer a slow death, as the blogger post new entries less and less often. At the end the blog stop all updates and die. One reasons why the bloggers stop writing is they move on to the next stage of life and could not afford the time to write anymore. It is sad, but there is nothing they can do. Time is in scare supply after all.

Another reason why bloggers stop writing is they run out of new ideas. They complain they couldn’t find new things to write everyday. If this is their problem, then they are just not trying hard enough. We have come across so many thoughts each day. We just have to catch any one of them, organize the thought a bit and making it more presentable. Voila! Now you have a nice blog entry. The mind of man is a like never empty treasure chest, you will always find new things if you care to look inside. The only way a man to run out of new idea is that he stops thinking. As long as we keep think, new ideas will appearing in front of our eyes to surprise us.

When planning for a wedding, the two most important thing is the church and the banquet.  We booked the church for the ceremony with no problem, but finding a good restaurant to host the banquet at night is proven quite stressful.  We are looking for wedding date in next August, yet many restaurants are already booked, almost 1 year in advance.  I called many restaurants last week, they are already booked on the date of our choice, except a small restaurant.  I can only put down my name on the waiting list.  Pat keeps encourage me saying that we have to faith in God and things will work out and it did!

Kirin is the default restaurant for wedding banquet among my friends at work.  We checked the Kirin in Cambie and Richmond, but both of them are already booked.  Yesterday, Pat was looking for a place to have diner with a family friends in the newspaper and release there is also Kirin in downtown.  She called the downtown location and learned that although someone has the date on hold, they haven’t put down any deposit.  We went there for dinner at once, with cash in hand and determination to bump out the other party.   The restaurant called the other party as a courtesy giving them the opportunity to commit.  Probably it was guy who can’t make the call answering the phone and he cannot confirm without asking his fiancee, so we got the restaurant.

Now, I don’t have to worry about the venues of my wedding.  It can go ahead as planned on August 16, 2008.

Last year, the destination of our summer get away is Tofino, this year we picked Salt Spring Island. We didn’t finalize the plan until the very last minute, a little bit more than 2 weeks from the vacation day, as a result we have a hard time booking place to stay. Salt Spring Island is a small resort island next to the Vancouver island. All the inns, resorts or B&Bs are run by small independent owners. I have to call around to find available rooms. I called over 20 places before I can find rooms for the date we plan to stay.

Most places only have a static webpage for information and photos. Some places are more advance and have a web reservation system. Looks like there are two major providers of the reservation system for hotels in the island. However reservation system of each individual hotel is isolated. I have to search rooms one place at a time. It would be to have a tourist friendly update in the system if I can just just type in the date and got all places with available room. Last minute hunt for hotel room is tedious and frustrating, that’s what put people off doing last minute trip. Streamline the hotel booking by making it easier, will attract more visitors and improve the tourist industry of the island.