Tonight I went with Pat to a christmas gathering of her church friends, and I am the only guy there. If I knew that ahead of time, I will choose not to go. It is not a pleasent experience to be the only guy in a group of girls, because most of time you are not interested in their conversations. I expected some guys I know from that group will show up, but it turn out the host didn’t invite them. There is a girl in the group going to get marry in the summar, too bad that her fiancee can’t come. Other than this girl, the rest are all single, so they have no one to bring along. Sometimes I wonder, how come so many of Pat’s friends are still single. Maybe I should start hooking up the single guys at work with them. The only problem is I can’t think of a way to introduce them to each other without embrassement of match making them intentionally. Probably that is the reason why they are single in the first place, I can’t think of any activities they like or will enjoy, and at the same time also allow them to make new friends of the other sex outside their own social circle. In short, both of them are quite boring.

Tonight Pat sang christmas carolling for her chuch. The different choirs from all masses put together a carolling concert. Each choir sing about 10 minutes, and there were 8 of them in total. St. Mary is really a big church that runs many services every week. The first choir to perform is the children choir from St. Mary elementary school. The kids are so cute, especially when they are dancing up and down. Pat’s choir sang second, she had a solo part in one of the song. I took lots of pictures for her. It’s so funny when everyone’s mouth is opened in big O shape singing the “Oh Gloria”. This two choirs are the only performance interested me, then I slept through almost all the rest. Christmas songs are best to put people to sleep, especially after a long working day. I recongize the audience of the concert are mostly friends and families of the choir members. I think the carolling concert is a good event to build community spirit for the church, have a function that everyone can enjoy.

Carlee is a well known brand of potato chips in HK. It is originated from Japan. I think it is the best tasted chips after I had tried so many different brands. Today I just tried a new ramen flavoured chips from Carlee. Well, it taste like shoyu ramen, to be specific, the shoyu soup. There are so many exotic flavours of Carlee chips, unlike local chips made here in Canada, only have the those old boring flavours. The classic Carlee is bbq and curry flavour. Later it introduced other flavours spicy, seaweed, pizza, okonomiyaki, chicken, ketchup, light salt, etc. It also have time limited edition, like the ramen I just had. Carlee not only taste the best, its texture is very prefect. The chip is not too hard nor too soft, it is fired to have the right cripyness. The only other honourable brand is Pringles, the rest of potato chips bands lacks the charm of Carlee, not even close.

I am going to black list any sellers using UPS to ship their items. I ordered something from eBay, the item itself is not very expensive, but the seller insuranced the item against my instrution and I end up have to pay a small duty fee to the custom, which it’s fair. It’s just 7% GST, and cost me $2 anyways. Then UPS charge the ridicously high handling fee, $17, just for collecting $2 from me. What a rip off. Sometimes I wonder, what did had our government done in the NAFTA treaty. Shouldn’t we had already scrape all the traiff between Canada and US? This makes me start thinking about the WTO meeting happening in HK. In an ideal world and classical economy theory I firmly believed in, all traiff are evil. The WTO suppose to reduce the cost of trade between countries, but it end up hijacked by beneficial groups setting quotas to protect their own interest. I am sure the Canada post is the one most object free cross boarder shipping between Canada and US most. When can we Canadian enjoy the same cheap deals most US consumers enjoy?

Now I have the first draft of my thesis completed, the only thing left to do is wait for my surpervisor to review it, edit it and then cirulate to the examination commitee. I found I am so eager to gradunate that I can’t wait to get the defense done. I have to think what I want to do next. One natural follow up of my thesis is turning into into a paper and get it publish in a conference. Hopefully I can get it done over the X’mas holidays. I also go through the trouble to get the P.Eng title. I think PMC is paying for the application fee, I know enough P.Eng at work to sign my reference and most important it is a title that follow me for life. Although the P.Eng is really nothing more than merely a title you can put on the business card. On the side, I also have to catch up with the movies, TV series, books and animes I had stocked up due to lack of them. There are a few articles I would like to write on top of my usual review on anything I read or watched. I will probably write one about WTO, since it is the hottest topic in HK this week. I also want to complete my article on intellectural properties, it has been two years since I finished the first one third of it. For a longer term goal, I have to think about what course or program I would like to persuade. I am looking into a few part-time or even full-time programs. I don’t have enough information even to start thinking about my decision at this moment, gota do a bit more research on the prospect on those fields.