Tonight, I had a chocolate buffet with friends at Sutton hotel. The buffet is a bit disappointing, not as many variaty as I expected. I end up have to order an entree to fill up myself. Both of the friends I met with are going to get marry this summer, apart by just one week. They exchanged ideas on the wedding and honey moon, me and Pat can’t really participate in the talk, so we both listen to their conversation. Wedding seems so far and yet so close to me, especially hearing it happens to people around you. When Pat is a few years older, we have to start planning ours seriously too. For the moment, we can just keep dreaming how our wedding will look like. If it is possible, I’ll opt to skip the banquet, save the money to upgrade our honey moon. I don’t think we can skip the church ritual, but that shouldn’t be too expensive. Too bad we are not celebrities, or we can sell the broadcast right of our wedding to TV station to make some profit.
german
Today is the last day of my level 2 German class. So far I had took 16 classes, my German is still pretty bad, especially my pronunciation. This time I get enough people interested in continuing to study the next level. Hopefully my German will be better when I go to World Youth Day in August. I gota find some time to review all I have learnt so far, probably organize them in an excel spreadsheet.
brainstorm
Today during lunch, some colleagues sitting in my aisle had a brainstroming section on new product ideas. It originated from a chit-chat last week that we all concluded the company has no good ideas on future product. We had limited the ideas to CMOS chips, probably with a processor core. The more ideas generate most interests are pattern recognition accelerator and some sort of babel fish device. I personally think dedicated hardware for robotic motion control may have a market. As all unbounded brainstorm session, we know we had run out of ideas when technolgies from Startrek showing up on the whiteboard. I don’t know where this excerise will lead to, probably no where. One thing I do notice is that Ph.D level research is required for any new killer hardware application.
starbuck
Today the Starbuck outlet at work has opened for business. They know about good promotion on how to attract customers. Each of us got a coupon for free coffee. When I first received the coupon, I thought it is only good for one cup. It turned out that it is one free cup each day for this week, what a brillant marketing idea! Just a cup of free coffee won’t give you much incentive to spend $2 for something you can get for free in the cafeteria, even though the coffee from starbuck tastes better. However, giving you one cup per day is a different story, it slowly builds up your addiction to their coffee. I had a large cup today, and I didn’t plan to finish it. Somehow I just slip the whole cup bit by bit without knowing it. I think I should resist to this evil marketing scam tomorrow and give up my free coffee. The moral of this story is positive out of expectation works quite well in convincing people to your favour.
mensa
Today I went to the Vancouver Mensa AGM. It’s my first time going to any Mensa event after joining for almost 3 years. It is held in the basement of one of the member, he kindly provides refreshment (i.e. beer) for the meeting. As expected, the meeting is kinda boring, just went over the house keeping items one by one. Most of the members presenced are old folks, there are only me and another young member. I am a bit disappointed that the members all look pretty normal, hardly can tell they have higher than average IQ. I think I will give it one more try before stop wasting moeny on the membership fee. I will probably participate in one of the social events, see can I find more interesting people other than grandies to hang out with in Mensa.