I have came to the final stage of moving to a new place. The only thing left to make my home complete is take my toys out from the box and put them in the display cabinet. I used to have one display cabinat from Ikea and it ran out of space before I moved. So I bought a billy bookcase with glass door as my second cabinet from Ikea. The first criteria of a display cabinet is that it have to keep out the dust. It would be a lot of work to clean up the toys provided my place usually is very dusty. It took me almost a week to setup my first cabinet. I only unbox a few piece every day, since I would feel bored if doing too many boxes in one go. I have started setting up my second cabinet, done the upper two most shelf so far. The only items left are the Gundam fix and Hcm-pro series. One of my problem is decide which toy boxes to keep and which I can throw away. Putting back the toy into original boxes save lots of problem when moving, the only concern the boxes takes up lots of space. I have decided to put the unnused accessories of each toy into a seperate ziplock bag and then put the empty boxes in the locker downstairs to save space. With my new display cabinet, I think it has enough space for the growth of my toy collection for another two years.

This weekend I didn’t went to Whistler, instead I went to Cypress Mountain today. Me and my ground of friends went to Whistler for a few consecutive weekends already, we really need a weekend to relax a bit, without having to wake up early in the morning and exhausted for the whole day. My cousin suggested that we can go to Cypress in the afternoon. Althought it is not as good as Whistler, I can use some excerise this week. The snow in Cypress is not bad today, provided that it got some fresh snow over the week. I am afraid this is probably the last weekend Cypress with good snow, Spring is coming. I took a lesson as usual although I didn’t expect much to learn. The level 6 in Cypress is easier than level 5 in Whistler. I have a present surprise in today’s class. When I mention I would like to take CSIA level 1 next week and ask the instructor to take a good look at my skill, I found out the instructor will be the examiner next week! At the end of the class, he said he cannot tell me whether I will pass, but he tell me to give it a try. It is really an encouragement. I sent in the registration form once I got home. Now, I hope the class is not full yet.

Today after work, me and Pat brought Charlie to vist Rocko for one last time. Charlie and Rocko are both golden retrivers, they have spent many times together when either one of the family went to vacation as the other family will take care of both dogs. The owner of Rocko is moving back to HK for good and going to give Rocko away. Rocko is jumpy as usual, seems doesn’t aware of his change of fate lying ahead. It is very hard to make him calm down and take a good picture with both dogs looking at the camera. We walked the dogs to a near by off leash area, let them play with each other for a while then walked back home. Charlie is happy seeing his friend. Before we left, we gave the dogs an expensive dog cookies that looks like a slice of pizza. I doubt whether the dogs know how to appreciate the different between a $1.5 cookie and normal cookie. They seems don’t really care what is given to them and finish eating in no time. Maybe the premium charged of having a nice looking cookie is more for the amusement of the dog owner than for the dog.

Tonight I have lots of questions in my philosophy classe. At one point, I have asked so much questions that the professor couldn’t handle some of my totally out of the box thinking and became so frustrated that he frightened to leave the classroom. Thanks to the eassy due in this class, I have to read ahead in the textbook about the philosopher the prof is teaching today. There are three options in the eassy assignment corresponds to three different philosophers. I feel like picking the one not yet covered in the lectures since it seems this his work is actually easiest to write. When I was reading the textbook, I am totally convinced by the thoughts of this philosopher, I couldn’t find anything wrong about his ideas. However, when the prof presenting the same idea in class, suddenly I see all the holes in his theory. In fact some of my insights are correct and the same questions are challenaged by later philosophers. I think when I am reading the text, my brain work 100% on absorbing the material. This is a CPU bounded process since my brain cannot keep up with my eyes. However when the same material is given in a presentation, it becomes a I/O bounded process and my brain has spare cycles to examinate the context. That’s why I can spot the problems in the theory and even have time to formulate the challenages. This technique can apply to toastmaster or presuasion. Your are goal is to feed your target audience at the right data rate so that they can fully understand your points but don’t have spare brain power to criticize them. Once the idea sinks into the brain for some time, there is a tendency for people to take it for granted. In another word, lower the guard of gate keeper of other people’s mind is very important when you want to convince someone.

Today I am stucked in all day long meeting again. The first meeting is really boring and useless, I go only for the free lunch. The speech is given from a remote site thru teleconference. Toastmaster said 60% of communicaiton comes from gesture and facial expression, no wonder one is interested in whatever he talks about. To make it worse, the slides are pages after pages of block diagrams. Who would care all those look alike boxes. I bet if there is no free lunch, no one will show up in that meeting. The afternoon meeting is a marathon meeting from 1:30p.m. to 5:00p.m. It is a training on one of the software tool that I went through a couple of years ago. I only need to be there to refresh my memory and join the discuss on making decisions. I brought some other work into the meeting room to better utilize my time. I found when I am locked up in a meeting room, I can actually concentrate better. I able to accomplish the schedule planning and task assignment for my part of the testbench. I suggested that we should all a laptop at work so we can bring it into the meetings. Using pen and paper to calculate time in the schedule is not fun. However that raise another question if everyone has a laptop and no one will pay attention to the meeting. I proposed we can block internet access inside meeting room. So people can only access the intranet and do actual work or listen to the meeting, both are equally boring I presume. The guy sit next to me said blocking internet is useless cause he will probably setup ssh session in his Linux box for turnelling to the internet. I guess it is in the blood of engineers eager to find ways to work around any obstacles.