I have been planning renovating horace.org for a long time, but I never have time to carry out the project. Since I moved to the new hosting service, I have been using the stocked blogging software, which lacks certain features I like to have. My plan is to rebuilt my website using the wordpress infrastructure. I am going to implement the changes bit by bit over the following months, so it would affect the daily operation of my website.

The goal is to make my website more reader friendly and eye ball attractive. I want to attract more visitors come to my blog, so my articles will have more readers. In the internet, everyone can have 15 minutes of fame, I hope I can grasp my 15 minutes becoming on of the ranked blog in HK. Well, of course I will also have to improve my writing and find a niche market for my articles. For now, I will first focus on the technical aspect of the website.

The interface of my blog will include the following changes:
– Include a custom made artistic header on the top
– Using 3 column formats
– List of recent articles
– List of recent comments
– Index of articles sorted by categories
– Drop down menus for categories, about and library pages
– Plug-in to cross post blog entries to other blogging websites.
– Statistics
– Museum for horace.org version 1 to 3

This term I am taking the philosophy of arts and tonight is the first class.  As usual, there isn’t any Chinese face in the class.  Ok, there are some CBC, but definitely no one looks like coming from HK.  The professor working full-time in Kwantlen College and teaching part-time in SFU.  It seems all the 200 level philosopher professors are out sourced to Kwantlen College.  Maybe the lower level students are not good enough to deserve a tenured professor.

This class is a lot harder than I expected, not because of the aesthetic theories, but because almost I had never heard of all those artists.  I feel totally lost especially when the professor using some contemporary artists with reference to films, painting, visual arts, or simply junk arts.  The professor challenged us on the definition of arts by giving us controversial examples.  Is a signed urinal art?  Is 4 minutes 33 seconds of silence a piece of music?  What about a frozen shark in a bath tub?  In my opinion, those are just garbage.

I feel more like home in the second half of lecture.  The professor start talking about the 3 major art theories: representationalism, expressionism and formalism.  Representationalism dated all the way back to Plato and Aristotle.  Then expressionism comes in the 18th century due to the popularity of music, something representationalism cannot explain.  Then again in 19th century, formalism comes in and gave a paradigm shift on the definition of arts.
Maybe we can simply explain arts away by claiming it as a catalogical error just like the mind in the mind-body problem?

I have been hearing the term “pineapple express” a lot from the radio in weather forecast.  I don’t have a clue what the meteorologist talking about and this term sounds so funny that it makes me curious.  Thanks to Google and Wiki, I learn a new term in a just a few clicks.

Pineapple express is the stream of wind carrying warm and moist air coming from Haiwaii.  I must say the person who coined the term have some sense of humor.  It all makes sense once you made the connection from Haiwaii to pineapple.  When the air from pineapple express meets with the cold air from the arctic circle, the moist in the air condenses and turns into rain or snow.  No wonder Vancouver is having a wet winter, it all thanks the the pineapple express.

Today is the first working day after the long Christmas holidays. I have to drag my reluctant self out of bed and drive to work this morning. The office is quite quiet, since many people are still enjoying their extended vacation. I spent the morning walking around and chatting with friends. Someone said I look younger than usual today. I figured that it must be my new clothes. Pat always complain my clothes are really out of fashion, so she forced me to get some new clothes during the boxing week sales. Another friend agrees that we don’t need better looking clothes, we are engineers after all. Luckily his wife take care of buying his clothes, but Pat try to make me pick my clothes myself.

I found buying clothes, especially fashion, give me most headache. I can check out at the specification and buy sport clothings without any hassle. However there is not objective set of guideline help me to select fashions. Somehow, Pat thinks that my pick of clothes always does not good, but it seems alright to me. Taste is something that engineer cannot handle. Fashion magazine is useless, since the description about the fashion of the season is so vague that it does not provide any useful information. To make it worse, it is impossible to generalize the clothing photos in the magazine to deduce a trend. The clothing styles are hopeless confusing and contradictory with each other. I wonder, maybe there is a niche market to publish a fashion magazine, more like a buyer’s guide of fashion in disguise, targeting engineers. The magazine only need to have a few selection of clothes from a few major fashion labels in each price range. Limiting the choice to the most popular one will make the selection easier. It is wise to leave the task of picking clothings to the fashion experts. Then the engineers can spent their time in picking other things they are good at, such as computers, tech gadgets, cars, hi-fi etc. This is called the division of labor, which increase the productivity of everyone.