but isn’t this rather deep? i mean, what exactly do you mean to “optimize” something, and what exactly do you mean to “need” to optimize something?

i still remember that radio interview with 何家麗 from long time ago. “if you get to learn something, learn it well. if you somehow need it later, then you are already prepared. if you end up not needing it, you still haven’t lost anything.” i think this is the better attitude, no?

so shouldn’t we just “optimize”? if we need to “optimize” later, we’re already prepared. if not, we don’t really lose anything. (maybe time and effort? *sigh*)

design errors are hard to fix. how many design errors are caused by thinking that we don’t need to “optimize” right away? after all, to “optimize” something you have to first figure out how to measure the quality, quantity, or other measure of“success” of the thing, so it would mean having a clear understanding…

or would that simply mean we can never have a clear understanding of anything, so we can only “optimize” as we improve the understanding of it?

i guess that depends on what we mean by to “optimize” and what we mean by to “need” to optimize? back to square one…

we had a little chat today, and she asked me about the certificate.

she thinks that it’s pretty good. i guess then it does mean it’s better than i thought.

i thought mispelling “埃及” was pretty serious. but what kind of comment did i get back?

i don’t mean i expect good comments, but i am not insisting on “perfect chinese” for notes. nevertheless, spelling is just like typography—i mean, sometimes bad spelling just distracts people when you want your spelling to just disappear into the background so that people just concentrate on reading what you have written.

i am sick of this: excuses for bad spelling, very distractful misspellings, in the name of “my notes are just notes”. if you print them out and distribute them for people to follow your lectures, then they are not “just notes”: you don’t want people to focus on your misspellings.

i don’t really know what to think about this. if even joyee is asking me why i have been skipping joshua, while this is the kind of comment i get from proofreading these notes, i don’t know if it is wrong for me to feel a lack of belonging at cmcc…

the work day was frustrating. i can’t say hectic, but it sure was frustrating. in the final hours having to finish the layout of the certificate, i decided to essentially scrap the old layout and start over, with a now-usual 3x3-superimposed-on-5x5 grid. but i decided to also use an arc—and this was probably the biggest mistake, since this was something i never tried before. at the end, it was finished an hour late, but still downright ugly.

andy pushing me near the end was no help either. quite the opposite, he only annoyed me and made it even harder for me to think and feel anything. and his help at the very end was so 求其 i literally had to undo a couple of the frames he finished to fix his shoddy work. sleepy. tired. and. very. frustrating.

both quincy and stephen got the certs. and i quipped to angelina that the certs look ugly because i made them. but it was joyce who made a comment: the single word “interesting”. “you mean ugly?” “interesting use of colours.” =P

lessons from the ugly certs: (1) don’t ever attempt new techniques when you are short on time—i should have known this =P (2) doing grids for single-page layouts is probably harder than doing it for multi-page layouts (which would include 3-fold brochures, since i just finished one yesterday and it looked totally fine). so i admire koichi sato even more now. (3) i need to study other people’s grids and practice doing grids more =P

*sigh* sleepy

at the end, angelina was asking how i was getting home, i really thought about going home by bus. why not? it’s highway 7 and i had my yrt tickets with me. but i got a ride =]

(and when we were getting there, both andy and denise were complaining about how traffic is always jammed on highway 7. but after going through all the trouble to avoid it, we still had to go through a short length of highway 7, and they were both complaining about the bad traffic. seriously, i couldn’t see how they call that bad traffic. it felt like normal flowing traffic to me. unless they never drive along sheppard or other city streets? i just don’t get it…)

facebook is going to change again, this time apparently for something sensible, until i went to the forum of a game i play and found that they are making some pretty bizarre policy changes too. seriously, facebook’s constant bizarre changes really annoy me. i’m not against changes. but i am against bizarre, unexplainable stupid changes that not only don’t make sense but make facebook feel harder to use.

i suddenly realize that facebook’s stupidity must be contributing to my decision to stay at xanga, to start using twitter, and to reconsider myspace—all while my friends are all still on facebook and pretty much nowhere else… =(

忽然，我意識到，喺 iTunes 播緊嗰啲歌詞內容唔係同嗰個朋友講嘅，而係同我講嘅……

今日 practice 勁少人，到一點踏三都淨係得七個人（兩個彈結他，一個彈琴，加埋 Anges）。我哋重恁個個 black Friday 落哂美國…

send text message 道歉得唔得呢？今晚會唔會 gtalk 見到佢呢？……