Today I gave my first ATM speech in Toastmaster.? The purpose of this speech project is to entertain the audience.? It is very different from the last few speeches I worked on, which is focused on deliver something to the audience.? This kind of topics well suit a casual speech used to kill off dead air.? The speech manual suggest use personal experience to begin us, add some small twist to the story and use vivid language or even act out some dramatic scenes.? The speech don’t have to be out right funny, as long as you can grab the attention of the audience without letting them feel bore.? I didn’t prepared the speech well.? I had the topic in mind for a few weeks, but didn’t write it down to organize it.? Last night I even though of giving up, skip today’s speech.? I am glad I didn’t call it off at last.? I sat down and divide up the speech into sections 1-2 minutes in length, then I can find points to fill up each section easier.? I had the speech layout in my mind before I go to bed, but I didn’t practice it.? I pratice for half an hour this morning at work.? I practiced section by section, pick the right wrong to use in each sentence and think about where to drop in some sense of humor.? Due to the lack of time, I didn’t dry out the whole speech once before I go in.? Big mistake.? Since I worry I may not have enough material, I end up dragged on too long in the first half of the speech.? When the green lights come on, I am only half way done.? So I have to cut down the materials in the second half to stay within the time limit.? In a short 5-7 minutes speech, don’t waste precious time in dragging a few points.? Don’t worry about not having enough material.? It is easier to extend the speech than rush it to finish.? You can always prepare a bit extra material in case there is? time.? From my experience, a speech more likely run over time than not long enough.? Other than grammer, I should focus on making every sentence counts.

My friend Michael raise an interest question on the latest cover story of the Times Magazine titled “Does God Want You To Be Rich”.? He sent me a link to the article and commented it is wrong for the church telling people to get rich.? Actually this phenonoma is not new, it has been around for at least a few decades.? Probably Times runs out of better news stories and decided to pull it out from the archive.? This version of the success gospel is very different from the traditional gospel that teach thu shalt love thy neightbour.? It is more like a self-help program in a religious package.? Many mega-churchs in the States are built on this version of the gospel.? I don’t see that many here in Canada.? Probably Canadian are more intelligent, so we don’t need God to tell us do the right thing or get rich, we can do it ourself.? To make Michael feel a bit more easy to this new religious movement, I pointed him to read more on Max Weber and Protestant Ethics.? According to the grand father of sociology, it is indeed God want us to get rich.? This ideology drove the birth of capitalism, the industry revolution and all the great progress of human kind in the past two hundreds years.? I don’t have enough knowledge in sociology to critize whether Weber is right or wrong, but this point of view definitely have some credibility.? Put aside the economy aspect of the protestant ethics, actually I found the successful gospel is easier to sallow than fundamentalist or evangelist talk about salvation or rapture all the time.? It is impossible to rational with someone who seek reward outside this world.? Some of them maybe saints like Mother Teresa, but more of them are just plain stupid religious zealots.? Those christians want to get rich maybe not saints, at least they are reasonable and their mind are bounded by the reality.

[thumb:1830:l] It is one of the unusual Sundays that I wake up early in the morning. The whole family, including me, Pat, her brother and the two dogs went to SPCA walkathon. We were there on time but we couldn’t find the registration so we end up late to the walkathon. The dogs already left so we followed the trail to catch up with them. We met them on the half way when they are coming back. We were managed to join the line up for the final quarter of the walkathon. There were many fun activities after all the dogs came back. As usual, there were many exhibition booths from various dog supply shops. There were agility courses and dogs race against each other. We had a good time and left after watching a few shows. Charlie is really tired after a long walk today so he was really quiet on the way way. It is fun to have some excerise on Sunday morning and see many cute dogs. Too bad that this walkathon is not as big as the one I went last time.
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In order to renovate my website, I have to make a few though decision.? One of them is which language should I use.? No, I don’t mean English or Chinese, I mean programming language to server dynamic content.? Using PHP is one of the obvious choice.? However I feel that PHP is just a hugh collection of libraries.? There is not much learning value since anyone can be a PHP programmer if he is armed with the reference manual.? ASP or JSP is another candidate, they are similiar to PHP, but since I am not using IIS nor Tomcat, it is too much trouble to setup the environment.? Writing CGI in Perl or C++ is so old fashioned plus it is really inconvinient, so it is out of question.? I have considered tcl, which is the language I most familiar with.? However I think I should learn something new instead, plus I am alreadying writing too many tcl code at work.? Then one language comes to my mind, Ruby.? It supposes to be the most powerful object oriented scripting language with the best of everything, maybe except speed.? I read that with the Rails library, it allows very rapid web development using the built-in SQL data structure.? I decided to embrace this language.? It seems to the be work horse behind web2.0 and is endosed by O’Reilly.? I think Ruby could be the white knight saving the web from the evil .NET proposed by Microsoft .? I just start reading the tutorials and wrote the “hello world” excerise.? I hope I will have a better idea in a few weeks after I had learnt more about it.

Finally I have finish migrating all the softare in my old web server to the new linux box and upgraded to the latest release. I have installed phpbb to keep track of my articles, coppermine to organize my photos, wordpress to blog and mediawiki to catalog my things. It took me almost week to setup my webserver. The only thing left to do to install a small hit counter. It is much faster now, especially when I am uploading photos. It doesn’t have any fancy feature, only the out of box opensource programs with a few useful plugins. I think I will keep those software as it is for the timing being. I always want all programs in my webserver share a unified look and feel. It would me quite some amount of work to craft the skins of each of the program. I would probably settle with a nice looking front page that can pull and merge data from all programs using some cool AJAX interface. I still want to write a quote database myself as an learning excerise fo ruby on the rails and MySQL. That would be my side project after my project at work is finished, so that I have some more free time.

P.S. I installed the xanga plug-in for wordpress. In the future, my blog will be cross posted to xanaga if it works as advertised.