Bookstore

I went to Border bookstore today after a church band practice. It always a pleasant experience going to a physical bookstore even though the virtual online bookstore does pretty much every thing I need reagrding to my book shopping need. There's the aspect of physically touching a book that is appealing to me, and then the fact that social and culture awareness magazines help me to broaden my view on humanistic aspect of life around the world.

For instance, I read the Bitch magazine with an article that talks about the raise of JAP culture which makes me better understand the subtext behind comedy show Sarah Silverman Program. And then I read the translated Japanese comicbook ROBOT and read some distribing Japanese comics.

I mean, sure maybe I am able to find all these online, but the beauty of a physical bookstore is that they are all just right there, instead of me jumping around to find interesting material to read.

A simply animation

I spent the last 2 days to learn both the technical side of actionscript events in Adobe Flash CS3, and then the artistic side of creating animation. The result is the following short animation:

If you couldn't see it, you can try this link.

It's not that pretty, but it's a start.

Snoop Dogg's Fatherhood

There's a reason why Snoop Dogg's so called reality show Fatherhood is on "E!". The show is so fake and artificial that fits right into the whole E! lineup. I watched a few episodes just for the sake of keeping up with pop culture, but other than that giving it a "pass".

Another crazy dream series

I was trying to take a nap at 3:30 p.m. so that I had energy to attend a prayer meeting at 6:00 p.m., but it turns out that I woke up at 8:00 p.m. . I wonder how many people I pissed off this time.

So during that "nap" I had a bunch of dreams, and at the end I was waken up because of a horror scene.

The dream started with my and my ex-roommate Joseph Lai living in a big house. One day we drove and we somehow got into time travel, and saw ourselves on the same street moments ago. And then we started to talk about the sequence of time traveling and how it works. Pretty nerdy a conversation. And then I chatted with Joseph's wife Simon about some game magazine stuff.... darn that part of dream was pretty nerdy.

And then the scene switched to something strange. It's a sort of office workspace environment but I knew non of the coworker. We were in a meeting and someone was playing some thing toy. Boss was pissed and asked who did it. Then someone said, "accident happened and someone loss a finger. we need to spread up and look for the finger part ....." and I woke up from shock.

And that's when I realized that I missed the prayer meeting.

I came home early so ....

I left office at 4 p.m. as there seem to be something wrong with my car and thus I needed to go tot my auto mechanic and figure out what's wrong. Turns out my mechanic told me that the battery is fine, and I got motor oil changed. And if there's still problem, I may need to shell out US$200 - $300 for a new starter. Oucch!

Since I am home a bit early, I was trying to not wasting my time

What I did tonight:

- Tuned my nylon string guitar
- Figured out how to use the central air conditioning system to give me more heat. Eventually, though, I think it's more energy efficient to get a heater.
- Installed Visual Studio 2008, and then watch the Get up to speed on Visual Studio 2008 video to learn more about how to use Visual Studio 2008 how effectively.

Eventually it's the third item that sucked most of my time ... til now ... sleepy ... bedtime.

NetFlix really is better than Blockbuster online

After using both NetFlix and Blockbuster.com for 2 weeks, I have to say that NetFlix beats Blockbuster hands down. The availability of title from Netflix is definitely better than Blockbuster, or at least for the titles that I care, like music video, ballet and independent movies. Honestly, I am still debating about whether I should continue subscribing NetFlix since I really love their service but doesn't have enough time to consume all the video content as I still have a lot of TV shows in my back log. Oh well, maybe later. But I highly recommend Netflix for those who are movie and video junkie. With Netflix, there's just no reason to pirate online at all.

Just had a very nice nap during lunchtime at work. Sleeping is always great for my productivity. I even had a dream during the nap. Somehow my dream these days tend to have something to do with dropping out of college. Like this morning I had a dream about I decided to quite my master degree study because I found certain subjects like Biology way harder than I expected. This is strange, consider that I never had my master degree. I did thought of getting a master degree but I pretty much gave up that idea since I much preferred learning from the Net these days, and I don't see master degree graduated earn significantly more than those who hold just bachelor degree.

It's still strange that I continue having dreams about school related topics.

A day wasted

Whenever I couldn't recall my accomplishment for a day, I call that day wasted. So I think I wasted yesterday.

Granted I figured out some technical problems of my system, and it was also partly that blue screen of death that caused me semi depressed for most of the day. And I also got too cozy of my bed that I spent most of my time just "feeling good" on my bed (guess you don't really know how much I enjoy sleeping). But I still consider that day wasted. Not that I am way too bad about wasting a day. After all I tried working and thinking too much time that maybe wasting a day or too is not a bad idea.

More nightmare coming out of my friend last night

This time I didn't remember all the details of my dream, but I knew that they were mainly nightmares. It includes a scene which a TV drama was shotted near a industrial building about someone fallen from a building. Someone sent me a huge box of industrial material which was clearly a wrong address delivery. And then some other bad things happen, something seriously bad but I forgot the detail.

鐵公雞

也不是甚麼傳奇。事情是這樣的：

年幼是家裡買了一部錄影機。我喜歡武俠電影，而當時每晚在深夜，電視台會播放一些十多年前的舊電影，於是一有機會，我便會深夜醒來，看看電視有否播放武俠電影，有的話便用錄影帶錄下。

有天深夜，我開電視，看到是武俠片，便按錄影掣，然後睡覺。第二天我查看錄影，才發覺只錄下十分鐘左右，然後已經沒有帶了。我也沒有認真看內容。

幾年後的一天，我翻看我的錄影帶，偶然看到這段「鐵公雞" 的錄影，覺得十分可笑。首先女殺手們用洗衣的木版，頭巾和籮作武器，根本沒有可能男女主角造成威脅。跟著看到一大班大男子漢臨時演員身穿女裝格鬥，再看到「她」們如何一個個一碰便倒下，不合情理到達可笑的地步。可是同時我又看到男女主角非常認真。「到底這套片是怎樣的一回事」我想。於是便萌生要看這套電影的念頭。

可惜當時互聯網仍未流行，相距錄影日子已久，就這樣過了十多年的幾年前，我將手上的錄影全盤電子化，這段影片又出現在眼前。一心要解開童年的迷的心又再燃起。

昨天終於收到這套電影，坦白說，我所謂買了的刺馬實在有水準得多。但一如我所說，好演員之所以好，在於他們不理劇本多爛，接了，便好好的演。

另外，臨時演員其實非常重要。既然要安排一場女殺手們的場面，就算請不到打女們，起碼鏡頭也要避忌，不要近距離被人看到一班男頭女裝的殺手吧。話說回頭，有沒有一些七十年代的武俠片有一些好看的女打場面？

Second Chance

I forgot the detail of the dream. All I remembered was that at the end me and 2 other young men was trying to commit suicide by driving a car into the ocean. But then time rolled back before the car hit the water, and the next thing I know we were back the "beginning", when me and two are my friend (no recollection of who they they were) was starting to have a vacation in some sort of beautiful resort area.

And then I realized that I was in some sort of US teenage movie.

Killed a roach

I saw a big roach near the front door while I was back from post office. So I took off one of my shoes and slammed on it. I think it was dead after then. Somehow roaches are kind of slow in this country.

I am so good at pissing off people, even when it's in my dream

I had dreams again.

A lot of things seemed to be happened in my dream. Among all of them, I recalled 3 segments.

The first was about living place. My family in Hong Kong seemed to move to yet another place again. Interestingly, my dad was living with us this time. Me and my elder brother was living in a double deck bed and I had the upper deck. I forgot the detail about how my dad was boasting about the stuff he brought back from some strange places.

Then the scene of my dream turned to a reunion of my primary school classmates. I was hosting a game which people got prize by certain gift card in envelop, so I let them take a look at the gift card inside the envelop, and then I took the envelop with gift cards back, shuffled them, and put them back on the table. But just when everyone picked their gift card and seemed happy with what they got, I suddenly realized that the look and shape of these envelope were all different, and thus people might have cheated by simply paying atttention to the envalope with giftcard they wanted, and picked the one with the gift card they like instead of randomly picking one. So I insisted in taking all the envelopes back, and restarting the game. Such action ticked off my friend Albert and Woo, and they were very pissed. In fact, later they left the reunion party without saying a word. I also remember chatting about some gadget with Raymond.

To think about it, the game had tons of design loophole, and I didn't thought through before I take action. I have a feeling that this kind of echoed what I did in my workplace.

The final dream segment that I remembered was about a farewell gathering for my previous fellowship pal Siu Ling. Not much was recalled from that segment except that I knew she's leaving and going to a place far far away. Also, after the gathering, I found out that Siu Ling left her iPod at my place. I hold it up, found that it was attached to an external battery, and it was extremely heavy. I took out my own iPod (very interesting the fact that I was totally aware of myself having a iPod Classic!), and found my iPod being much lighter.

And that's when I woke up.

People asked why I had so many dreams. I don't know. Maybe everyone has a lot of dreams, but rarely will they document them as frequent as I do.