Tonight I have played a modified version of monploy with my friends. In this game, we use two sets of monopoly and play by the house rule. The game play is similiar to monopoly, just we had doubled the boards. We have ten players and the game is very heated, both in term of excitement and literally. Like normal monopoly, it is a game tends to drag on for too long. After playing a couple hours, we decided to merge player and the game board to speed up the game. The game stops at the first player went bankrupt. By that them it’s getting pretty late and all of us are very tried. We had lots of fun tonight. We use our creativity and proposed many variation monopoly during the game. Some suggestions sounds quite interesting. We can write our own “chance” and “community” cards, to add new elements such as gambling or dual mini-game. My favourate idea is riskopoly. Instead of move with a token, each player move with his army. When land on a place owned by someone, the user can choose to pay the rent peacefully or attack the owner. If he kill all the guards stationed on the land, he can win over the land form the owner.

I was watching Initial D stage 4 last night. I don’t expect I will find some inspiration about lesson of life in an anime. In racing, there is always an optimal lane in the racing course which gives the shortest distance between turns, hence also gives the best time. Many drivers set their goal to follow this lane to get their fastest time. There is an ace driver in the anime who has a totally different theory. The control of tire grip and acceleration is the key to fastest lap time. The optimal lane is simpily the path gives perfect tire grip and acceleration control. The optimal lane is the end result but not something to aim for. That gets me start thinking about using driving as an analogy to life. Many people set a path of success and blindly follow it, without thinking why they have to choose such a path. I think having a successful life is merely a result of making perfect execution of many other aspects in life. Don’t run after the path, just do your best and the path will follows.

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.