We have another farewell lunch today. The boss has joked it has become a monthly feature and he even nominate the lesser boss for next month’s farewell lunch. Sometimes I really doubt what is the point behind farewell lunch. In the lunch with a big group of people, you won’t have much chance to talk to the one who is leaving. You end up talking to whoever happens sitting next to you. People comes mostly because they can’t think of a reason not to come. I see it as a occasion to socialize with other colleagues, especially I have lunch with my own group of friends instead of people from the same project. The guy who is leaving belongs to my lunch group, so we will have another farewell party with him tomorrow. This will be a real party and we will have fun, unlike today’s formalized bussiness lunch. Today before I went home, I turned the cubicle of this guy, who sits next to me, into a racing track for my Bit Char-G. The only problem is my other 2 Bit Char-G havn’t arrived yet.

Today at lunch, I heard a rumour from the usual source of all information. The rumour is about a secret admirer to another girl. According to the rumour, there is guy thinks that the girl likes him, because he found she glanced at him many times. The girl seems to have no impression about that guy, neither do us. Whether the rumour is true or not is not my concern. I would like to point out one obvious fact. If the guy is not looking at the girl, how does he know that she is glancing at him? If glancing imply a crush and from the fact that the guy glanced at the girl, it implies the guy likes the girl. It is natural for man to fantasy about girls. He may imagine his crush actually likes him, try to read traces from thin air to justify his emotion. It is acceptable if he hide all of this in his heart or take action to turn it into reality with his own hand. However, what good can it do by telling this to a friend of that girl? Unless the guy is a total loser in love, it makes absolutely no sense to confirm whether the girl likes him or not from a third party. I think this rumour is just a creation aims to bring us some good laughs.

Recently, Pat digged out her Super NES console and try to finish the Mario Land game pending over 10 years. This get me into conversation about emulator of console on the computer. I tried hard to explain what is an emulator to Pat, but it seems she couldn’t understand. I think the best way to explain is show her what is a emulator. So I downloaded the N64 emulator with over 150 games in ROM. I just tried out some of the N64 games tonight, such as Mariokart, Mario tenis. I found that I can still enjoy the games despise those games are 7-8 years old and the graphics is dated. In fact, in some sense those games are more fun that the overly complicated games these days. I wonder what progress has the gaming industry made in all these years. All they have done is just remaking the same game with better graphics. There is no new type of game play emerged since real time strategy and online RPG games. If the gaming industry don’t start having more innovation, I can see the end of gaming is coming. Why pay for similiar games again and again, year after year? Why can’t we just play the old games we had never played before?

I have my first and last exam of this term today. It is the final exam for my philosophy course. I didn’t spend much time studying it. Just start late in afternoon yesterday and finish before midnight. In the final we have to study 7 philosophers. Since we already know the questions ahead of time and we know we have choices in the exam, I have the luxury to give up a few more differcult philosophers. Althought I still try my best to understand their very confusing thoughts in my review. The exam in held in one of those dark lecture hall with armrest size writing surface. I just hate having an exam in this kind of room. We only have to answer 3 out of 6 questions in the paper but we got 3 hours. I finished my paper in 1 hour, wrote down everything I remember about those three dead guys. I have a feeling I will get a C+ again this time.

I have just installed Mediawiki to my webserver. Mediawiki is the wiki program behind the wikipedia. I would like to give it a try and use wiki to create a library section in my website. I found blog and forum are not very suitable for static pages with regular updates. There is a very steep learning curve in using Wiki. The concept of Wiki is very different from normal webpages we are used to, it is completely dynamic. I am still figuring out what is the best way to present my information. One thing I have to be very careful about is user permssion. I notice Mediawiki doesn’t have very fine control over what user can and cannot do. I have to strike the balance between letting reader intractive with me and preventing spammer clogging up the website. On top of that, Mediawiki is not very good for customization, which is something I wish to have, but probably won’t have time to execute.