I got up this morning fully intending to book a badminton court, but things went sideways in a very predictable way: I started looking at some code and missed the best booking window. After that, the phone line was basically impossible to get through. By the time I finally managed to connect, every slot was already gone. So that’s that for this week—no badminton, just waiting for next week and trying again.

A couple of days ago, someone on V2EX asked about good static blog programs for PHP. In the replies, I casually mentioned PMBlog, a static blogging system I had written before. I honestly didn’t expect anyone to pay much attention to it, especially since I had already made a separate post about it there in the past. But to my surprise, a few people actually praised it and gave it likes. That made me genuinely happy. I made sure to thank everyone who showed support.

There was also one more thing I nearly completely forgot about. Yesterday I had promised our secretary that I would show up as part of the audience for tonight’s outstanding secretary defense session, but when the time got close, it slipped my mind entirely. If he hadn’t texted Mu Ge, I probably wouldn’t have remembered a thing.

There were sixteen secretaries taking part in the defense altogether. If I had to complain about one thing, it would be the wildly uneven gender ratio. There were just so many female secretaries, and every one of them seemed unbelievably formidable. The first girl to present was pretty cute, I have to admit. As for the others... well.

Our secretary ended up going last, which was unexpected. Still, with all his years of experience giving motivational speeches—yes, that really is his unusual hobby—this kind of defense was never going to be a problem for him. He handled it with no pressure at all. Hoping he gets the title as expected.