Tonight I am having dinner with an old friend whom I have known more than 20 years.  I talk to him about I am having a mid-life crisis, try to find my identify and place in the world.  My friend have trouble understanding my problems, not that he thinks I am thinking too much.  He can’t even grasp the concept of mid-life crisis,  since he never think about this questions at all.  He is pretty much living a worry free life all these year.  This friend is also an engineer, but he seems living in a totally different world.  He has been a straight A student in school since the day I know him.  The highest rank I ever have in primary school is the 10th, but my friend always stay in the top 3.  Now he is working for a crowned corperation with 100% job security.  He career path is straight ahead for him.  Since his company havn’t hire engineers for a long time before he join, all engineer above him will soon retire.  He just have to hang in there long enough and eventually he will be the chief engineer leading the whole division.  My jaw drops when he told me his net worth is more than half a million.  I can’t make that much money all my working years combined even I don’t have to spend a dime.  The only thing that trouble him is that he is still single, which something I can’t explain.  He is tall (over 6 feet) and good looking (ok, he does look geeky, but that can be easily fixed).  He has lots of money in the bank and have a job with great persective.  He should be a girl magic, a diamond bacholer.  I am very keen to introduce my single female friend to him.  Sometimes I really envy his simple life, so I don’t have to worry about my mid-life crisis.  On a second thought, if I were in his position, I will probably feel very bored.  Then I would start looking new that will bring me back all the troubling thoughts.

In the early days of computer, software is self contained in its own directory. When you need to upgrade the computer, just copy the directory to the new harddisk and you are back to business right away. Then comes Windows, software is chopped up into bits and pieces and the data is hiddened somewhere inside the registery and application data. That makes moving the directory of the software a nightmare since you have no idea what stuff you need to backup. If you don’t have to adminstrater privilage in the computer, you can’t even install the software since you have no write access to the registery file. It only make software more inconvinient to use. Finally, someone had enough with this stupid idea of registry and port many commonly used opensource software tp a portable version. You just have to download the software package from their website, unzip the files into the directory and you are ready to go. You can copy the files from one hard disk to another and use the software without any problem. It is good to have a copy of your commonly used software stored in a USB drive for carry around and in case of emergency. I can also get around of the installation limitation of the Critix account at work to install Firefox. The portable applications can be downloaded here.

When I was fixing something with a screw driver yesterday, my hand slipped and I have a long but shallow cut on my wrist. Today I show the cut to my friends, joking that I was trying to commit suicide by cutting my wrist. My friend point out at once it can not be a suicide attempt. She reason that when someone try to kill himself, he would have to cut his wrist a few times before he can slide open his artery. Just think about the mental stress and pain one has to go through before killing himself, it would be surprise if he cut it right the first time. I asked how come she know all about this. She said she learn it from watching CSI. In one episode, the police concluded the victim is murdered instead of suicide from a clean wrist cut. Now I know if I want to murder someone and pretend it to be a suicide case. I need to cut the wrist a few more times to make it more real.

I haven’t played badminton for almost a year. I used to play every week some colleagues from Mainland China, but I have to stop due to conflict of schedule with my philosophy class. Last night I have a badminton game with some other friends from work. We went to a really nice badminton center in Richmond. It is modified from a warehouse. It is very large, with more than twenty badminton courts. The lighting is every even and the walls are painted green, so the birdie is easy to see. The court floor us professional non slippery badminton court material, much better than the usual gym wooden floor in community center. Best of all is it only charges $13, only $1 more expensive than renting a court in community center.

I have been playing badminton since high school, but I never have any formal training. My skill cannot improve no matter how often I practice without knowing the right foot movement and the right way of holding the racket. There are group lesson offered in that badminton center, $99 for 8 lessons, not a bag deal. When I sign up for the lesson, the coach gave me a badminton test. We played for 10 minutes, actually I was played by the coach who made me running back and forth to return the birdie. The coach said I am good enough for intermediate lesson, so I pay the tuition fee at once to reserve a spot. Let’s see how much will I improve after 2 months of badminton lessons.

I finally played Wii first handed. Since Wii has released in November, it has became the hottest selling console. Everyone, from newspaper to computer magazines to people’s blogs, all hail to this little white machine. You can read as much as you like about how great it is, but you just have to experience it yourself to truly appreciate Nintendo’s innovation.

I played three different games today, got a very good example on the game plan. We started with the Wii Sport, which comes with the console. Everyone loves this game. Swinging the remote as golf club, tennis racket or baseball bet to play is very intuitive. We found a bug in the tennis game. If you return a serve in a certain way, the other side can never hit the ball. Other than that, the game control is excellent. The bowling game is a bit silly, so we didn’t spend much time on it. The most fun game is boxing. The game is so vigorous that I was sweating from the exercise. I also created my Mii character and have some good laughs. Everyone else created their character trying to resemble how they look. Instead, I created a funny looking one, with hat, sleeping eyes, fly-shape sunglass and a big grin on the face.

The other two games are party games with lots of mini-games.  Most of those mini-games are fun on the first try but get bored quickly.  I am very impressed on how those mini-games use the remote control.  The motion sensor really opens up a new way of game plan, the possibility is only limited by your imagination.  Even the girls who usually not game players enjoy playing Wii, no wonder it is a run away success.  The only complain I have about Wii is the graphics is a bit dated.  The 3D games are very smooth, but you can see the polygon counts is quite low.  Most of the mini-games are made in 2D and the quality is just like the flash games on the web.  Reading from the spec, Wii’s graphic power should cannot match PS3 or XBox360, but it still improved a lot from Game Cube.  I am eager to see a game use its graphic chip to the full potential.  Now I am really interested to try PS3 games, so that I can compare all three 3rd generation consoles.