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Daily Scribble

Toastmaster 2009

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In 2008, I absented from the Toastmaster most of the year. I have many excuses, like getting marry, travel to India, working on project with ridiculous schedule etc. I went to the Toastmaster year end party before X’mas, mostly for the free pizza. I found that I do miss the enjoyment and satisfaction of delivering a good speech in front of a crowd. Today is the first Toastmaster meeting in 2009. The theme of the day is goal setting. The president of the club try to re-energize the club by having a mini-workshop. During the meeting, he asked the members to think about what they want to archive in club this year.

I am not making any process in my ATM speeches. It’s over a year since I did my last speech. My goal of this year is finishing off my “Humorous Speech” manual and achieve the ATM credential. There are only 4 more speeches to go, my plan is to give one speech every two months. This club has its annual humorous speech contest on Oct. I am going to deliver my last speech as a contest entry. Since I am long time Toastmaster, I feel very natural speaking in front of people. This year, I am going to focus on my pronunciation and the use grammar in my speeches. These two problems are the biggest challenges for most ESL speakers need to overcome.

Daily Scribble

Skiing basics

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This is my toastmaster speech on humorously speaking.  The objective of this speech is to open the speech with a humorous story.

People from Scotland are notorious for their meanness and I met one of them in ski school at Whistler.  I heard he said to the ski instructor, “I want to learn to ski, I want to ski with one leg only.”  The instructor asked him, “Yes sir, I can teach you how to ski on one leg, but may I ask why?”  The Scottish answered, “Because I will only need one ski.  It will be cheaper to buy one ski than two!”

Mr. Chair, dear fellow Toastmaster, summer has gone, the day is getting shorter and shorter.  Yes, winter is coming soon.  It is time for us to take out our ski gears from the closet and get ready for the skiing season.  May I ask how many of you ski?  Please raise your hand.  You may have been skiing for many years, you can race down the mountain like a bullet.  Maybe you are new to the sport, looking forward to graduate from the bunny hill.  Today, I am going to review some basic skiing techniques.  There are 3 core techniques in skiing, balancing, pivoting, and edging.  Let’s start with balancing.

If you cannot balance, you will fall.  Stance and balance is most fundamental skill in skiing.  What is a good balance?  The technical definition of having a good balance in skiing jargon is the center of mass over the bass of support.  Well, the jargon doesn’t make much sense even to a room full of engineers.  To make it easier, you just have to know my friend Bob.  Bob can really help you ski.  Who is bob?  Bob’s name is short for Butt over Boots.  When you start a turn, you must be like Bob.  When you are skiing, may Bob be with you.

What is the natural enemy to skiers?  It is the trees!  How to avoid hitting a tree, you have to learn how to turn when you see a tree ahead of you.  All turnings are initiate by pivoting your ski.  Many beginners make a common mistake when they try to initiate a turn.  Instead of pivoting their ski, they rotate their body to direction they want to go.  Don’t do it.  Rotating your body will not initiate a turn, it will only make your ski go faster.  Pivoting is pointing the tip of your ski to the direction you want to go, the key is to turn your legs independent of your body.

How many ski instructors need to change a light bulb?  Six.  One to screw in the light bulb and five to say “nice turn”.  Edging is a more advance turning technique that gives you a nice turn.  Instead of pivoting your ski, you have to angulate your ankle and lean on one edge of your ski.  Because of the curve shape of the ski, exerting pressure on one edge of the ski will turn the ski.  The shape of the turn is depending on your speed, the pressure you put the edge, and the degree you lean against the slope.  The only way to make a perfect turn is practice, practice and more practice on your edging.

Now let’s review the three core skills of skiing.  They are stance and balance, pivoting and edging.  If you can master this three basic skills, you will be skiing like a pro.  Wish you all have a great skiing season.

Daily Scribble

How to buy a gun

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This is a speech prepared for the Toastmaster humorous speech contest.

A woman walked into a gun shop and said to the shop keeper, “I would like to buy a gun for my husband.” The woman said she don’t know much about guns and ask for some advice. The shop keeper then asked her, “What type of guns your husband likes?” The woman said, “Are you kidding? He doesn’t even know I am going to shoot him!”

Mr. Chair, fellow Toastmasters, when you walk into a gun shop, you don’t to be as clueless as the woman in the story. Today I am going to give you some tips on how to buy a gun.

First you decide what type of guns you want to buy by asking yourself what targets are you going to shoot? Paper target, sports clay, wild games or your mother in law. You need to buy the right gun for the right target. Rifles for far away target, handguns for close combat, and shotguns for anything that flies.

Buying guns is like buying shoes, you have to try it out to find the one that fits you. You may have to try out many guns before finding one that is comfortable to use. Pick up the gun, pretend you are Bruce Willis in Die Hard, imagine you are fighting a group of terrorist. You want to make sure your gun feels like an natural extension of your hand at all time.

The next tips is specially for the ladies or any fashionable gentlemen. Guns come in different colors, such as black polyester, dark blue steel finish, shiny silver nickel finish, fine-wood walnut finish, marine camouflage in different shades of green. You may want to pick a gun that matches your dressing style. When you are holding a gun, how cool you look is as important as how good you shoot.

Last time when I went to the gun shop, I overheard a conversation between two hunters. The first hunter asked the second one, “Why do you hunt without bullets?” The second hunter replied, “It is much cheaper and the result are the same.” I am sure my fellow Toastmasters are much better shooters than the second hunter, so you may want to buy some bullets. Buying bullets require some delicate knowledge, you have to know how to read numbers. All you have to do is read the caliber marking on the gun and find the bullets that match the number.

A single bullet is not expensive, but if you plan to do lots of shooting, the ammunition bill may add up quite high.  Do you know that you can get bullets in every day low price at Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart carries a huge selection of bullets. If you buy in bulk, you may even get volume discount.

Let me ask you a question. What will you do if you catch you teenager son buying dirty magazines? I will tell him buying dirty magazines is wrong, because it may jam your gun. In a gun shop, a magazine is not something for you to read, it is something that holds extra bullets. It is always wise to have a few spare magazine with you. You don’t want to find yourself run out of ammo in the middle of a shooting.

Now you have buy your gun, some bullets and a few magazine. You are ready to shoot. But wait a second, let me tell you a real story of how not to use a gun. In 1990, a Seattle man named David Zaback got a gun from the black market. He decided to turn make some quick bucks. He walked in to shop, pointed his gun at the shop keeper and ask for money. However, he made a big mistake, he picked to the wrong shop. He was trying to rob a gun store! He was shot dead right on the spot by the shop keeper and other customers. Remember, don’t do stupid things with your gun. Happy Shooting.

Daily Scribble

42

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I haven’t done a table topic in the toastmaster meeting for quite a while, so I volunteer myself today. Today’s toastmaster meeting is more special than usual, because it is the club got chartered. We invited the district governor to present us the certificates, and PMC provided free lunch. The topic I got is a quote from Pablo Picasso, “Computers are useless. They can only give answers”. I think I did ok in the table topic, except that I totally forgot to mention 42 until I went back to my seat. For those who had read the Hitchhacker’s Guide to the Galaxy, you should know 42 is the answer to all the questions of life and universe, except that the question is not known. Later on when I mention that to my colleagues, almost everyone agree that I had totally missed the point of that quote. One of them haven’t read the book and seems puzzled about the importance of 42. The rest of us question his identity of being an engineer, we even threaten to take away his iron ring. I think I should download and watch the movie version of that book to reinforce my engineer nature.

Daily Scribble

First speech

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Finally, I had completed my first toastmaster speech. I don’t think I’m doing very well. I can feel my legs was shaking for the whole time. It is different than doing a table topic, where is more careful and have no expectation. My time management is really bad, run out of time half way and my mind went blank because I don’t know what to say in order to cut my speech short. I can imagine my pronunciation and grammar has some problems, due to the lack of sleep makes my mind slow. Anyways, it’s done and I have to think about the second speech planned in next month.

Time is running out before my trip to Germany, and I have less than 2 months to reach the milestone I had set for my thesis. I found talking an extend period of time on phone with Pat every night become a big distraction to my study. Especially when I have to spend energy to ‘tum’ her all the time. My goal is to cut down the duration of phone call from over 45 minutes to 15 minutes a day. The extra 30 minutes may not seems a lot, but the time it takes for me to focus make the big difference. In addition, the timing of call make a big difference. Have an hour of solid work before the phone call helps productive, so I could use it call as a welcome break. Unlike the current habit, I got interrupt when I just about to begin my study. My mind on the work is lost after the phone call, and it usually take an hour to regroup.

One last thing, although I agree not to sleep again in church to avoid more nagging from Pat, sleeping in church itself is NOT an immature behavior. There are many valid reasons to fall asleep in church, and it doesn’t imply disrespect to the priest, fellow church goers or God. It may worth the time to write a serious article on the true nature of sleeping in the church, but that would take quite some time to a proper research. I’ll definitely put this topic down on my to do list after I had finished my thesis. For the time being, let’s use the reason that sleeping is a from of prayer, quoted from this article written by Maurice Bellet, a Catholic author.