The relationship between ex boyfriends and girlfriends always has to handle with care, especially when both of the couple are your friends. Extra precaution have to taken into account to make sure both parties will not showing at the same time to your events. Otherwise, it may bring embarrassing moment to the whole group. Sometimes I wonder why it is so hard to step back from a relationship to friends. Although I had similar experience with my ex, cut all the contact after broke up, yet I still don’t understand. I guess only time can heal the feeling of being hurt in order to be friends once again. I wish at some time in the future, my usual gang will be united and hang out like in the old days.
Quote of the day: Stone age did not end for the lack of stone, and the oil age will end long before the world runs out of oil. – from an article on energy crisis in the Economist.
Today during lunch, we had talked about the trouble of burning CD to play in car. The topic naturally extended to the iPod adapter come with the latest BMW models. Somehow Ray Woo pointed out why can’t we simply have a audio system takes compact flash of SD cards? There are already audio players with mp3 decoder that can read data CDs. It shouldn’t be too hard to add a memory card reader, which only cost $15 for PC used version. Downloading songs to memory card is much more convenient than burning CD, and a 1GB memory card is big enough for any trip. I feel about disappointed about myself that I didn’t think of this idea early. Anyways, now after I had gave it a second thought, I can figure out why no one made such device yet. It’s purely economical reason, a 1GB memory card will cost as much as the audio system. Unless the price of memory cards drop significantly, using them in car is still not very feasible.
Tonight’s Simpsons episode is really hilarious by making fun of the concept of rapture commonly believed among evangelist Christians. In the episode, Homer walked into a theater and saw one of those left below (mocking the left behind series) movie. He got scared by the apocalypse and some coincident (yet funny) signs of the end is near. Homer then derived the end time using some weird calculation and convinced everyone in town with yet another coincident. However, the end of world didn’t come as he predicted, so the crowd ditched him. It turned out that he forgot to count Jesus himself in the number of people in the last supper, thus his previous calculation is wrong. This time no one believes in him, and it turn out he is the only one raised to heaven. In heaven, Homer found himself not happy because he missed his family very much. He bring out one of philosophical dilemma of salvation in mild way. How can a person have eternal happiness in heaven if he see his family and friends are suffering in hell? In the end, Homer made God turn back in time and cancel the apocalypse. This episode has many in-jokes of many common mis-concepts in Christianity. The conversation between Homer and God about Jesus never be the same after he came back from Earth has a really nice touch humor. I don’t like the idea of rapture personally, and always think that it is the work of the devil to mislead innocent souls. However, I couldn’t realize the idea rapture is so ridiculous until it is portrayed by the Simpsons. This episode is highly recommended to the evangelist christian as a mind opener.
I had so many article debts, and I finally finished 3 articles in one day to repay some of them. Now all I still own is two articles to review a book and an anime. Since I had re-establish my website, I made promise to myself every time when I finish a movie, a TV series, an anime, a book or a CD, I will write some feedback before I start something on new. I figured out if I don’t write my feeling down, my time spent on those things will simply be wasted as I tend to forget them eventually. Although my writing is very slow and the thoughts not very organized, I found that writing reviews are very enjoyable. It forces me to view those stuff from a new aspect.
Arr… Arr… My website got hacked again. The hacker exploited a security hole in phpBB 2.0.10. I should have upgraded my phpBB once I got the security warning. This time the hacker has a bit more conscience, he only defaced the front page of my forum, left a message tell me to patch my version of phpBB. Since it is partly my own fault not patching the files immediately, I not as mad as last time. Last night I spent quite some time installing the latest version of phpBB to fix the security bleach. I’ll just have to leave with my current setup a bit longer, once I had more free time I’ll get a new computer to setup a more secure server. My grand scheme is to integrate phpBB (forum), Word Press (Blog), Coppermine (Album) into a coherent website. I’d also like to add databases to display random quotes, facts about myself and interesting background pictures. The crowd jewel of my site will be an on-line version of my mp3 archive completed with sorted catalog and search features.