I have a friend who is extremely annoying. He can manage to get on your nerve on every single sentence he says. I am not the only one feel like this. His best friend from highschool, his ex-housemate, almost everyone around him feel the same. I was sort of used to him annoyance when I hang out with him every week back in Toronto. Since I have moved to Vancouver for a few years, I havn’t been bugged him that much and I slowly lost my immunity toward his rudeness. When I have to spend a weekend with him, I almost hit the breaking point of my temper. You all know I have mild temper with good patient, so you can imagine how untolerable my friend is. I was talking to two of his good friends the other day, we all wonder why we bother to be-friend with him. The only logical conclusion is to explain it by karma, we must have owned him from the previous life. I can 100% guarantee, if I know this guy today, he have no chance be my friend. It just happened that I know him over 10 years, so I manage to accept him. Oddly enough, he is one of my best friends. I guess life is always full of mystery.

Onenote is part of the Miscrsoft Office 2003 package. I havn’t use this software at all, since I don’t see any use of it. Finally, I have figure out what this program is intended for, surprisingly it’s quite good. In my philosophy class, I use Word to take lecture notes. I notice the guy sitting next to me use a different software, which is Onenote. The function of onenote is very limited, it allow user to put text blocks anywhere on a page, and draw lines on top of it. The user interface is quite simple, unlike other bloated microsoft products. Probably it is because the program is first introduced in Office 2003. In the first release, the program are some serious flaw. Users cannot change the date and time stamp of the note page. I have to download service pack 2 to get this commonly use feature. One other thing I am not very use to is you don’t have to save any file. The program automatically save the content when it exit. I always have to habit to press ctrl-s after typing a few lines. This action bring up the password protection screen which is a bit annoying. Overall, I have discover something useful. Word is a word processor, it is not design for note taking. It would be nice if there is a online version mirroring the data of this program .

My linux server is reaching its end of life time. I have turned my trusty old P3-733 machine into my own web server. It was working fine for the past couple of years and I think it had reached its limit eventually. I was uploading the pictures from my San Jose trip to the web album and the server crashed twice due to the heavy workload in resizing the image. I can see the harddisk light flashing and heard the grinding sound of the harddisk. The server is crawling painfully when I try to open several pages with photos at the same time. The resource to serve text only pages is not as demanding to serve graphics intensive pages. It is also about time to upgrade my blog and forum software, they are a few revision behind. After I had finished write up my P.Eng application, I will start looking into getting a new server. Accepable performance with large harddrive is a must. I can probably get by with the most basic graphics card since it is not intended to be a game machine.

Last weekend I went to the wedding my housemate when I was studying Waterloo. I cannot take vacations from work so I can only spend a weekend down there. I am glad to see many old friends and catch up with them.

UA flights
My flight down is not very smooth. My flight is delayed for two hours, due to the incoming flight from Chicago is delayed. The time I spent waiting in the airport is actually longer than the time I am flying in the air. I had booked my flight throught AC, I end up riding on a code shared UA flight. However around the same time, there is a AC flight going to SFO without any delay. I should have book that flight instead. Everything I fly with UA gives me a bad experience. Gota remember to book AC flight with 3 digits flight numbers next time, the 4 digits flight number are code shared rote.

Old friends’ talks
I arrive pretty late on Friday. Kendrick is really a good friend that he came out for a drink to chat with us even it’s very late at night. I havn’t seen Michael and Kendrick for a few years. They havn’t changed much. I have seen Leon last X’mas, so there is nothing special about him, just that he is as annoying as usual. Michael is part of the official wedding team, so he left early in the morning on Saturday. That left me and Leon going to the ceremony later by ourself. We met up with Yat Loong and Peter to have lunch, walked around Stanford then head to the church. I found that my conversations with my Waterloo friends are pretty much the same. Exchanges news about friends not here, complains about the work and life in general, chit-chat on technology or stock market trends. I feel I have middle age crisis, start losing direction and some of them agree with me. Unfortunate, none of us have any solutions except repeating the same talk again and again.

Organ
The wedding is held in the Stanford memorial chuch. I heard it is really expensive, costs over $1000 for just 2 hours of booking. Despites of the costs, it is still fully booked. There is another wedding before of Kendrick’s and one follow immediately. The church is really nice in American standard, with pretty colour windows, decorations and a hugh pipe organ. Leon hasn’t listend to organ before and took me a while to convince him the music doesn’t come from speakers. It is interested that something I have always taken for granted may seems totally alian to someone else. I guess it is not common for a person to listen to organ after all. It just happen that my primary school has one of the few organs in HK and later I associated with organ-loving Catholic church. I think Organ probably has the best sound among all musical instruments.

Ceremony
The ceremony is the shortest wedding ceremony I have seen, the whole thing is less than 45 minutes. The Stanford church has a priest hosting the ceremony, whom is a woman! It is the first time I see a woman priest in action. Although I am ok with woman priest theologically , I still feel it kinda weird having a woman standing in front of the alter. The homily is given by the priest of Kendrick’s chinese church. Luckily that priest is probably not very good in English, he keeps the homily fairly short. Like all other church ceremony, it has readings from the scripture. The way they choose the Bible reading is kinda odd. They pick one paragraphic from one book, then 2 lines from another book, and at last half a verse from a third book. I feel the pieces are awkwardly snitched together. I just can’t help wondering why they have to drop the second half of the verse. It raise a suspicious point of twisting the meaning of the teaching. After the ceremony, there is the photo taking section. Somehow all university friends from Waterloo and Stanford are grouped into the miscellaneous group under the heading friends of bride and groom. After taking the picture, we protest our group didn’t get its own group picture. So we just take over the stage, took the bride and groom as hostage, until the photographer take a picture for us.

Banquet
The banquet is held in a local resturant later at night. According to my friends, it suppose to be one of the better one in the Bay Area. My conclusion, the chinese food in Bay Area can’t compare with those in Vancouver. The banquet itself is quite boring, probably it is because the night is ran by the newly wed’s church friends. The MC ignore on our request for make the bride and groom kiss and there is only prepared one game officially. The game could be fun but somehow they manage to water down it to the point of bordom. Our table is the non-church friends from Waterloo and Stanford, we came up with two standard, healthy games to cheer up the party. The MC is so relunctant to host the game, they told us either host it ourself or wait until the bride and groom come to our table during the toasting. Of course we gladly took over the stage and bring joys to everyone. During the toast, we fill a full glass of wine for the groom, but the groomsmen took it the glass claming he will drink it but didn’t. We let the groom go easily with just half a glass after the mom interfere. However, the groom couldn’t escape at the end. Our table is closest to the entrance and we took him hostage on his way back from the tiolet. The banquet ended quite early, so a few of us went home and chat more for a bit on the usual topics

Life in SJ
I didn’t sleep well and woke up early on Sunday morning. Michael just came back from driving Leon to the airport when I woke up. We decided to go out and have a nice breakfast. Unfortunately, everything is closed in Sunday morning in San Jose. Couldn’t find any dim sum, noodle plase or cafe open. We end up went to Denny’s. No only that resturants open late in San Jose, they close early. Starbucks close at 6p.m. in San Jose. No wonder everyone says San Jose has no life. I can understand Michael’s choice of fleeing back to Toronto. Making big money doesn’t always automatically translate into a high living quality.

Lasalle friends
I spent my time with my Lasalle friends in the afternoon. Lenny picked me and have a really relaxing afternoon at Derek’s place. We just sit in the living room and chat, again on the same old topics, while watching Derek’s daughter play. Lenny brings a friend along to join us. I am surprise that all three of us are regular readers of the Economists. I found it quite enjoyable talking to another fellow Economist reader. Since we share some background souce of knowledge. Once again confirmed the theory what ones read shapes ones mind. The afternoon passed by quickly and Lenny dropped me off at the airport to catch my flight

Small world
I met a new friend in the wedding who is also coming to the wedding from Vancouver. I met again him in the airport during check in, which is quite probable since everyone check in around the same time. What is really a coincident is I am sitting right next to him provided that I had booked my seat a few weeks ago. I was chatting with him on my flight back. He loves watching anime and collect toys too! Can’t imagine I can bump into another rare breed of my kind this way. We have exchanged contacts and I have made a new friend who share a common interest. Maybe both of us looks suspecious, we got pulled over by the custom to have a luggage check on our way out. Both of us flew down just for a weekend for the wedding, don’t have time to buy anything, the custom must be very disappointed that they couldn’t find anything except dirty clothes.

I have been trying to persuade my friends at work joining Toastmasters, so far the response is pretty negative. Other than a few co-ops and new grads in my team, I can’t convince a friend form the lunch group just to show up in the meeting and try it out. They are not interested in the joining mainly due to they think it is a waste of time. You have to sacrifice a hour lunch time a week and also the time spent in preparing the speech. They think giving mockery speech is useless. Public speaking is like playing sports, the more you practice, the better you will be. Most of us engineer don’t require to give presentation in daily work. We don’t have much chance to improve our practice presentation skill unless work on in explicitly. For most of us in the group, English is our secondary language. The best way to build up the confidence in giving speech in English is to practice on the topics you are familiar with. I have two more speech to go to complete my CTM. I can see the improvement I have made since I joined Toastmasters. Moreover, the membership fee is free! It is paid by the company. Why not give up chit-chat, ping-pong or foosball once a week to improve yourself?