TIGblogs - Robert Lin's TIGBlog

A Personal Bank for your Ideas

Sun, 25 Feb 2007 00:51:00 EST

Sometimes a great idea comes to you out of the blue, but before you can think any further about the idea, you have to dash off and attend to a dozen other things. Afterwards, what remains is only a lingering feeling, a vague awareness that you had a great idea earlier, but you can no longer remember what it was. For thousands of years, creative practical people have probably solved this annoyance by tying knots or scribbling ideas on something, so they could go about their daily business first and revisit those ideas at a more convenient time later.

Continuing with the approach of scribbling ideas down, I made a little web-based tool which basically allows you to fill out a form, roughly categorize the entry, automatically have it date-time stamped and saved for later review. Like a piggy bank that grows with every contribution, you can build a large personal bank of ideas. Then, whenever you want to draw upon the collected knowledge in your personal bank of ideas, simply use the search feature to display and sort ideas.

So if this sounds useful to you, and you don’t mind that it’s still a work in progress, I’ve made this tool available as an Open Source project at SourceForge. Visit the ideasBank project to download and install on your own PHP, MySQL-enabled server.

Additional projects will be released in the future on SourceForge as well.

Cardboard Dinosaur Head

Sat, 28 Oct 2006 11:04:00 EDT

Here is my cardboard dinosaur costume from this week's Fright Night staff party. Other than the individual costume contest event (I just participated - Mona Lisa was the winner followed by the impaled Jesus costume), there was also a group costume contest, the pumpkin carving contest, and a meeting room converted into a haunted house attraction.

This cardboard dinosaur can be made anywhere you can find two cardboard boxes that can fit your head, two shiny CDs or DVDs for the eyes and basic office supplies. No glue is necessary, tape if you want to do this faster. Refer to the numbers in the photo and follow along.

0. Joining and Hinges: This step isn't shown, sorry. Just ensure the two boxes joined and hinged
at the back in some way. What I did was a glue-less approach using tabs and
slots to join the boxes, but you can just use tape to join and make a hinge.
1. Neck: Make a hole and make sure your head can fit easily into the box, without
being too large or the costume head may slide downward. I used a DVD to trace
incrementally larger holes until there was perfect fit.
2. Teeth and Jaws: To help make it consistent, start with one side and put a piece of paper
the area you are cutting, so that you cut both the paper and the cardboard
together. In this way the paper keeps the exact shape of the cut and you can
then use it as a template to make the other side identical. The trick with
the lower jaw is to use the upper jaw to trace a matching teethline for the
lower jaw, so that the jaws will meet and actually close together easily.
The lower jaw should have a much larger section uncut at the back that can
serve to catch and hold the upper jaw open later when you wear the costume.
3. Fitting the eyes: Use the DVDs to trace round holes for the eyes, but the holes should be
just smaller than the DVDs so that it will be a tight fit which holds the
DVDs in place. Otherwise if the hole is not small enough the DVDs may just
drop out of the hole. In my case I had an additional plastic DVD case with
a spine that just happened to hook onto the inside of the hole too - but you
can use tape too. Also, fit the DVDs at an angle so anyone can see the DVDs
from both the front and side views.
4. Carve nostrils: Not shown here, but you can add finishing touches such as nostrils.
5. Go to the party.: You can keep the jaws open all the time to easily eat the Halloween party
food, or close it like a knight's helmet visor for additional protection when
entering the haunted house. Have fun!

Superman, IMAX 3D

Fri, 30 Jun 2006 23:59:00 EDT

Today was a department team-builder day in which we went to see the Superman Returns IMAX 3D version at the Paramount. It was my turn to organize this, and my only regret was that two people couldn’t join us for the film due to the late afternoon start time conflicting with their long weekend plans. I liked the film, which was also a first IMAX 3D experience for me. Overall, it was a great activity day.

The itinerary, for future planning purposes:

Before 1210: Called for reservations. Emailed last minute details to the team, with a Photoshop’d Google map to drivers depicting the underground parking entrances, but this was probably overkill.
12:10: Intended to leave early at this time, to allow time for parking, before our 12:40 lunch reservation.
12:17: Approximate time that we actually left.
12:30: Entered Milestones restaurant after parking, lingered for a few minutes waiting for the other half of the group before getting seated. Enjoyed Kobe Beef Meatloaf, trading food, splitting appetizers, the gelato dessert with a mint sprig in it (mint was also in the virgin Mojito drinks some had) along with some odd horror storytelling.
14:15: Left restaurant. Group split again, some visiting street shops at random. We went to the Silver Snail for comic collectibles, followed by a brief stop at Active Surplus.
15:00: Regrouped and entered Paramount Festival Hall Theatre, picked up our advance-purchased tickets upstairs. One person went ahead to try and hold center seats while the rest of us were busy getting popcorn and other concession stand food. I just had a large yogurt or ice cream swirl.
15:15: Entered IMAX theatre. An attendant handed us the polarized IMAX 3D glasses we would need to wear during some parts of the film. We managed to get middle row seating, but on the side only, so probably if we had come even earlier we could have gotten center seating.
15:30: The IMAX 3D pre-experience starts in which they do the standard smoke-and-mirrors laser show, where you learn that IMAX is Canadian and the location of speakers. I wonder if IMAX theatres in the United States perform the same thing. Then the actual film began.
17:17: End of credits, and left the theatre, split for home and the long weekend.

Superman Returns, as a film, had interesting imagery and references. Someone pointed out the imagery of Atlas supporting a globe. I just kept seeing the standard JC poses. I liked the Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic quote, which is by Sci-Fi writer Arthur C. Clarke, although they didn’t mention his name in the movie. The shuttle launch method reflected recent developments. The 2004 Paul Allen-Burt Rutan winning of the Ansari X-prize comes to mind, with their SpaceShipOne/White Knight system, where a little space shuttle called SpaceShipOne is lifted for the bulk of the journey by a mother aircraft, White Knight, before launching itself into space. On a separate note, it was good that the EMP bursts were conveyed rather simply with mostly power-outages, and that was probably all that was needed anyway. No scenes of folks dropping dead from pacemaker failures or pigeons crashing in London’s Trafalgar square as seen in The CORE. Overall a fun film with repeat-viewing potential.

Making Chocolate Treats

Tue, 06 Dec 2005 21:38:00 EST

Here are some tiny photos from the introduction to working with chocolate workshop, as part of our department team-builder activity day at a chocolate store and school called js bonbons on Dupont street.

The main picture shows most of what we made at this two-hour afternoon workshop.

The chocolate bowl, seen at the top right, was made first. As you can see more clearly in the lower pictures, a balloon is used as a form for the chocolate bowl. Everyone dipped their own balloon into a steel bowl of warm liquid chocolate to coat the bottom, and then set the balloon on parchment paper to cool. After cooling it was coated only a second time. Jenn the instructor said that for larger bowls, we would have had to give it at least three coatings, but for our current size, two coatings were enough.

The chocolate-coated strawberries in the foreground were made after the bowl, in a similar manner, except that after ten seconds of placing the coated strawberry on the paper, we slid it sideways and then lifted it away from the base so that the strawberry wouldn’t have a base like the chocolate bowl. Decoration was done with white chocolate as well as the lighter milk chocolate poured to fill paper cones that were cut at the tips to allow a fine line of chocolate to ooze out. We had to re-heat the tip of our cones by leaning the tips against the water pot on the stove, but other than that it was straightforward. You can see my attempt here at making a face with one of the strawberries.

In the very background, you can see strange lumps. These are the truffles, and we had about six or so different flavours of the pure truffle material. The vanilla truffle material was easy to work with, but the Earl Gray Tea was super-tough even to pull out of the container. They were then hand-rolled into ball-shaped lumps. Then we did the messiest task, the outer coating, which required dipping the truffles into the liquid chocolate and then rolling them in our fingers before rolling them onto the paper. Our fingers just kept getting thicker and thicker with chocolate! Truffles were later decorated by Jenn to distinguish different flavoured truffles from each other now that they were all coated on the outside now in same-coloured chocolate.

In the end (not shown here) we pooled all our work into a huge tray and then each grabbed what they wanted into their own chocolate bowls, before finally bringing it to Jenn so she could clear-wrap and ribbon-tie it up for us. That was the end of our fun workshop.

If there is anything I would do differently in the unlikely event that I were to make similar chocolate treats at home, I would wear gloves, or else use chopsticks, spoons and any combination of tools to do the work without getting any of that sticky chocolate on my hands. Even now after washing my hands several times, my hands still smell like chocolate!

Material notes:

Couveture chocolate, made of 31 to 39% cocoa butter, was the main ingredient, used for our chocolate bowl and for doing most of the coating.
Milk Chocolate was the ligher-coloured chocolate we used for some coating and decorative lines
White chocolate was used for the white streaks

Throwing Pottery

Thu, 29 Sep 2005 23:56:00 EDT

We had a great department team-builder day today. Well, it wasn’t a full day like the Centre Island one, but this was good enough. We started with lunch at The Queen Mother Café on Queen, where I enjoyed some appetizers, delicious Pad Thai and pumpkin cheese cake.

After The Queen Mother we headed over to the Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art at their temporary location near OCAD, and began our pottery class for the rest of the afternoon. This was my first time throwing pottery. Throwing pottery actually just means working with clay on a rotating plate. Apparently it is called throwing because in old English, the word for throwing actually also related to turning and twisting, according to this explanatory article I found.

The experienced instructor, Karen, demonstrated how to do everything properly such as securing the clay, squishing it down and up several times to align it, compressing to reinforce the bottom, adding water to keep the clay from drying up, and removing the masterpiece with a wet wire once it was finished. Then we started our individual lumps of clay and wheels. I managed to make a crude bowl, flower vase, and at the last minute, with no time to thin the walls, I mashed together a thick stubby cup without handles.

We helped with the cleanup, and moved our creations to the shelves of the firing kiln room, so that they could be baked in the oven after a bit of drying. Karen also mentioned the option to come in over the weekend to buy the paints and add colour during their Sunday drop-in hours if anyone wanted. We left a contact number so she could contact us in about two weeks when our pottery would be ready to be picked up. Overall, a fun experience.

Well, it wasn’t as fun as the three-day Kingston, Ottawa, Montreal, Quebec City bus tour with the whole family a few weeks ago, where we wandered off the official tour at night and accidentally came across the historic battlefield, the Plains of Abraham as well as a few Martello towers. But today’s pottery class was good enough.

First day at work and we BBQ

Tue, 21 Jun 2005 19:25:00 EDT

My first day of work at a 3D software company and we canoe/ferry over to Toronto Centre Island for a department BBQ. I learned the secret of making cohesive hamburgers that are less likley to fall apart - add eggs and oatmeal to the ground meat mix, as oatmeal acts like a sticky glue when cooked, according to Ian the resident BBQ chef and todayrsquo;s organizer. Never tried adding oatmeal or eggs before, but all of this will be good reference info if I ever need to organize a similar BBQ trip myself.

I did actually start the day quite normally, with a company tour to meet other relevant departments, getting the tax forms from HR, being shown the new but slow, beta-status content management system I will be using in the next couple of weeks, and even attended my first meeting. But then from about noon onwards we took the taxi out to the waterfront for our department team-building ldquo;dayrdquo;, which was the canoe/ferry trip over to Centre Island for the BBQ for the rest of the afternoon.

We never actually got to official team-building activities involving some fancy baton. The ferry trip took at least a twenty-minute wait, and it seemed to take an hour getting canoes for those who took the canoe routes, then there was preparation of the site like hauling over two park benches to our park grill, pre-burning the grill, so it wasnrsquo;t until at least 2:15 that we finally brought out the nine hamburgers wrapped in foil with paper seperators in our cooler box to place on the grill. That was followed by the three veggie burgers before we started eating the meat hamburgers that were ready. There were two bags of twelve bread/hamburger buns each, minus one which was pecked away by an agressive seagull who punctured a huge hole in the bag while we werenrsquo;t looking.

We also took out the paper plates for the large, deep aluminum tray of salad. When the remaining hamburgers were ready we put them aside and brought out the ten or so chicken breast shishkabobs and three tofu ones to put on the BBQ grill, so those were eaten a bit later.

Apparently the shishkabob sticks should have been soaked in water to prevent them from charring and darkening when placed on the grill but Ian didnrsquo;t have time.

In addition to all of this food, Ian also distributed small individual brown bag snack kits beforehand at the start of the trip, each containing a bag of junk food, a juice drink, an apple and an orange, so all of this was more than adequate for our group of about eleven people.

By the time we finished eating it was already about 4pm and time to go.

Apparently there is a company-wide BBQ on the above-street porch on this week, but Irsquo;m not sure if I can handle another BBQ, as I always get so thirsty afterwards. Today at least, was a great first day at work. As my new colleagues say, tomorrow I will actually have to work!

Photo: Nine delicious meat burgers with garlic, basil, oregano, oatmeal and egg mixed into the meat by Ian

Graduation

Sun, 19 Jun 2005 00:27:00 EDT

My graduation ceremony took place earlier this week on Tuesday in U of Trsquo;s Convocation Hall. It seemed like a very hectic day, because I was always moving non-stop. I remember moving from place to place taking photos with my parents, getting the gown, gathering and following the other graduands, walking up to get my handshake and furry hood placed over my head while watching my step and keeping pace, picking up the diploma backstage, and going for further picture-taking.

Most of the ceremony was rather boring, the one thing I do remember was that Douglas Wright, who reminded me of the bald spectacled scientist from the original Half-Life computer game, recieved an honourary Doctor of Laws degree at our ceremony. Apparently there is an entire U of Waterloo engineering building named after him and he had some large role in shaping current government policy. I remember he gave the usual career advice to follow our interests and abilities.

If there is anything I have learned here at U of T, itrsquo;s a deep appreciation of the first part of that advice, the interest aspect. I found that when I took a boring course such as some of those mandatory courses that I was not particularly interested in, I always ended up taking a billion times longer to actually finish the work such as an essay for that course, even if the work was simple. This is bad, because it means time that could have been spent on the more fun work, is being eaten away by time spent on the boring work. And it even brings down my total marks for all courses. Despite the greater time spent on the boring work, the boring work always brings low marks, while simultaneously, the inadequate time spent on the other more fun work means less marks for those courses as well.

In economic lingo, doing work you are not really interested in, whether for school or in your career is actually expensive, in terms of Opportunity Cost, the only worthy measure of expense. It costs you time out of your life that you could have been spending on doing something more fun, worthwhile and more productively, so that your total fun and productivity output goes down. So, I believe I should always strive to do what I am interested as I will accomplish the most when I do.

Returning to Douglas Wright, he also talked about being unconventional, and more importantly said ldquo;I recommend that you be ambitiousrdquo;. After four years in this very traditional university academic environment and coping with barrage after barrage of endless essays, it was refreshing to hear someone talk again about being unconventional, and about being ambitious. I never forgot, but thanks anyway for the refresher!

Photo thanks to Alan.

IGDA Toronto First Indie Showcase

Fri, 03 Jun 2005 00:01:00 EDT

Went to the IGDA Torontorsquo;s very first Indie Game Showcase, which started about 7PM at the IAOD within the CBC Building on Front street. About 8 independent Toronto-based game developers presented quite a variety of games, ranging from arcade-like side scrollers to real-time 3D games both on PC and for windows mobile platforms.

I think it was set up very well. Two groups of presenters on either side of a main projection screen would alternate, so that when a team from one side presented, the next presenter would be getting ready on the computer on their side. Even when one or two groups did have technical difficulties, Anne-Marie the MC was able to either move on to further audience questions or switch to the next working group, so it all ran quite smoothly.

Each presentation ended with a short question period, and at the end of the presentations, around 8:50 pm it was the mingling period where we could go up and meet whichever presenter we wanted to mingle and chat with until about 9:30, when they had to close down the presentation hall. Regular students at the IAOD were still seen working late in the computer labs, but we had to leave.

Composite Photo, Top Left: Jim presenting his funny Juggling game; Top Right: U of T biz student Jerry with his Iron Nail side-scroller game; Bottom: The mingling period where we all swarmed the game developers.

Doors Open Toronto

Mon, 30 May 2005 01:07:00 EDT

Brought my parents downtown today for the Doors Open Toronto event, where we went to see about six buildings along Bay street. We only had half a day, so I chose that area because it was most densely packed with interesting buildings that I knew of, and all within walking distance of each other.

We started with the Toronto-Dominion Centre 54th floor tour with the spectacular city view. One disappointment was that the washrooms, part of the complete work of the Toronto-Dominion Centre architect Mies Van Der Rohe, were off-limits to the public, so my parents will only be able to see them from the photos I took last year when I was visiting as part of an architecture class field trip.

We headed south on Bay until reaching Front street to quickly glance at the Union Station exterior, as well as the Royal Bank building with its gold-coloured windows that apparently, according to tour guides back in the Toronto-Dominion Centre, actually contained real gold. We made a U-turn by crossing to the east sidewalk of Bay street and began walking north to the Santiago Calatrava-designed BCE place. These were not actually part of the Doors Open event, but were interesting buildings to see anyway and were open. We ate lunch at the BCE food court before touring the beautiful Galleria.

After BCE place we headed north to the CIBC site, where a Doors Open volunteer guided my parents around the grand, Roman-bath-like banking hall while I wandered off snapping pictures. The guide pointed out a few embedded fossils that I didnrsquo;t notice before in the central octagonal red marble flooring.

Then we left and crossed over to the west sidewalk of Bay street and headed a block north to visit another bank-type building, again with a grand banking hall but with a different, lighter look and gold grillwork doors everywhere - the Canada Permanent building. They had the original metal vault door installed and intact. You could see the inside of the vault door when you went into the vault room, which had been converted to a small meeting room and was accessible through another door that had been made in the vault wall.

The last major site we went to was the New City Hall further north on Bay/Queen, where the huge council chamber, resembling a flying saucer, was completely open so we went up to explore for a while.

It was getting late and so we left and started walking west on Queen, walking past Osgoode Hall and Campbell House, which were two other Doors Open sites, before finally reaching our car and heading home.

Photo: The lounging area behind the assembly area, all within the saucer-shaped Council Chamber in the New City Hall on Queen. In the foreground is the interesting structure where waiters may come out with food or take back dirty dishes when councilors lounge here.

DigiFest last event and exhibit launch

Sat, 28 May 2005 00:29:00 EDT

Just got back from the Design Exchange (DX) where they held the launch of the digital/tech/arts exhibit WILD, the last part of the DigiFest series of events co-hosted by DX, the Harbourfront Centre and the OSC. I spent the time between eating the veggies and those delicious pseudo-potstickers served in wine glasses, chatting with Paola and other former co-workers at DX/DXNET, and exploring the various exhibits in the medium-sized exhibit area. This will be on display in the publicly accessible ground floor for an entire month until July, so feel free to visit them if you ever pass near the Bay/King downtown financial core area.

Kora, an artist from Belgium stood beside the two large hi-def flat-panel displays showing a virtual 3D environment, each with an on-screen avatar controlled by a computer keyboard and mouse on a table to navigate the same 3D world. The whole installation was part of a project in which live video of an event could be played in the virtual world, and that the ideal installation should have been actual projection screens boxing the user on all sides for a more complete immersive experience. I learned that the nVIDIA video card could handle the three screens, so long as you attach an additional adaptor to allow three VGA outputs for the three projectors. Found out that the 3D environment was created using Quake editor and 3D Studio Max, so I then wondered how they got a live video stream to play in Quake - it was a custom mod they coded. Nearly all of the usual Quake controls were absent, and navigation was done using the mouse controls.

This exhibit was particularly interesting for me because Irsquo;ve done similar work back in 2000, when Adobe released a beta authoring software for creating online 3D multi-user worlds called Adobe Atmosphere. It took an annoyingly long time to create, and the interact-able geometry had to be very primitive but I did manage to create a virtual art gallery for my renaissance art presentation as well as a virtual island for my end-of-year project. Now that Irsquo;ve seen Korarsquo;s project, if I ever need to create a 3D multi-user world again then I will very likely look at using Quake, Unreal editor or some other well-established game modding-related tools due to their rich graphical features, ready-built interactivity features and general stability.

The other great exhibit was the Tom Tompson-themed rear-projection onto a painterrsquo;s canvas in which you used the painterrsquo;s brush on the canvas and the projected image of a Tom Thomspon image responded as if you were actually painting, building up the layers of the painting. The creators were a group of four who had met each other as students at the Canadian Film Centre. I noticed an ordinary SONY video camera aimed at the back side of the canvas, and connected to a Mac computer. I also noticed the camera had some kind of black filter, so I asked what it was and found out it was the magnetic disk from a floppy disk, serving as a makeshift infra-red filter. I asked further about how the infra-red comes into play in detecting the userrsquo;s brush location, and Trevor the one who set up the brush explained that there was an infra-red emitter embedded inside the brush head. USB supplied the power, which I remember is 5Volts. So it was this hidden infra-red emitter and the filtered video camera that allowed the computer to detect the userrsquo;s brush location and update the projected canvas image accordingly. Very neat.

All in all a great evening.

Then on the way home I saw another neat piece of technology, although this one was a mass-produced consumer product - an Ambush Warrior mountain board. My first time seeing a mountain board, which the girl explained was like a snowboard on wheels. I prefer to see it as a skateboard on wheels. I took a few pictures before getting off the subway car.

Tip about Doors Open Toronto: For this event happening this weekend in which historic or culturally important buildings all over Toronto are open to the public, one way to easily map out and find out what buildings are open in any particular area of interest is to use google maps, loaded to Toronto, ON and then local search type in the Doors Open Toronto buildings listings url (http://www.doorsopen.org/building/ ) and presto - you now have a custom map to plan your day. For some reason, the Toronto-Dominion Centre at Bay/King, which features a spectacular view of the whole city from the top 54th floor, does not seem to get plotted on Google maps. But most of the other ones get plotted so it can still be useful.

Picture on the right: Those delicious pseudo-potsticker things served in empty wine glasses at the exhibit opening event.

CyberARTS Open House, Tenth Anniversary

Fri, 20 May 2005 12:57:00 EDT

The CyberARTS open house, tenth anniversary (started 1995) and graduation ceremony took place last night, so as a former graduate I was invited back. Met other Cyber grads, various teachers and finally got my old sketchbook back. The Cyber-wing with its iMacs, G4s, smartboards and projectors looked relatively the same, as did the art studio except for all the new wall decorations, an eye-wash station upstairs (Mrs. Forrest joked that it was to wash her tears when she couldnrsquo;t take it anymore), a new glass sound barrier between the upstairs and the main area. Only about seven former classmates came, so after the event some of us went to continue our little reunion at Second Cup for another two hours before heading home.

Featured photo of the Cyber graduation ceremony by Israel Yang.

Crafts with Pringles Chip Canisters

Tue, 03 May 2005 12:42:00 EDT

Itrsquo;s slightly sad seeing two empty Pringles cans stacked in our recycling bin. Not because Irsquo;m longing for more over-salted Pringles chips, as we are still slowly munching through several canisters from last weekrsquo;s everything-$1 Food Basics promotion.

Instead, the sadness comes from the realization that if I donrsquo;t come up with any ideas that will extend the useful life of these empty canisters, they will simply be taken away by the municipal recycling trucks next week. This fate is environmentally-friendly and therefore quite acceptable, but somehow it seems rather un-creative.

Making piggy banks out of them was the first idea that came to mind, since their removable, soft-plastic lids could easily have a coin slot cut right out of them. But I donrsquo;t need any piggy banks at the moment. The most amazing idea Irsquo;ve seen so far is the Pringles directional antennae (aka Cantenna, 802.11b Homebrew WiFi Antenna) so you can aim and extend the range of your wireless laptop, but until I get a working wireless laptop this wouldnrsquo;t be useful to me.

Eventually, doing a Google search I found an entire page of Pringles Canister ideas which has a lot of good ideas I might use, but I am still searching.

Hope this was useful to anyone else looking to do crafts or electronic projects with Pringles Cans. If anyone has any further great ideas please let me know so you can contribute to my worthy cause of saving empty Pringles Chips Cans from the municipal recycling trucks. Thanks!

Photo by Greg Rehm, 802.11b Homebrew WiFi Antenna ( http://www.turnpoint.net/wireless/has.html )

Jean Lumb 04 Dinnner

Sun, 24 Oct 2004 00:40:00 EDT

Just got back from the Jean Lumb 2004 Awards Dinner, made possible by the foundation, the Multicultural History Society of Ontario (who have a new audio exhibit on Jean Lumb and her life achievements) and a host of community sponsors. Childrenrsquo;s choir performances, government officials, multi-course dinner, tons of camera flashes, awards presentations, documentary film and then the raffle tickets, and best of all, all of us alumni, 9 in total, getting to sit at the same table! Also, Ben Chin, TV anchor, was the MC. We got to take pics after, too bad we forgot to get autographs!

Also spent a lot longer figuring out my neck tie than I wanted but fortunately, I saved that excellent web page from last year when I had also to get into a biz suit for the Jean Lumb Award Dinner, so that came in handy and I was able to fix it and come to this event!

Overall a great night.

Photo of our table thanks to an anonymous nice raffle lady.

Additional photos in our Yahoo Group (private) for now, public photos possibly later :)

Toronto Architecture course ends

Mon, 16 Aug 2004 13:25:00 EDT

Exam tonight, for the Toronto Architecture course. It was a truly rare and enjoyable course mdash; taught completely by actually walking the streets and going inside the architecture of Toronto. Did I mention I love field trips? And we get a credit for this. I wish all my courses could be this fun.

I took a ton of photos. The one featured here was of our class in the boardroom on the topmost, 54th floor of the sleek black modern TD Tower of the Toronto Dominion Centre. Our tall prof stands on the right pondering something while we make ourselves comfortable spreading across the room. The architect was Mies Van Der Rohe, and the TD Centre complex is considered a culmination of his life#8217;s work. We were also on the 54th floor because it was a floor entirely designed by him, as the bulk of the tower was rented office space, up to the tenants to renovate as they saw fit. The 54th floor was the exception, being occupied by the owners, the Toronto Dominion Bank. Everything here, from the garbage bins, to the giant oak conference table carved from a single tree, the walls, the clocks and even the washrooms were designed by him. Normally closed to the public (except for the Doors Open Toronto event that John our corporate guide mentioned), the one thing you should not miss if you ever come up here is the spectacular view through the giant curtain windows. You can see Toronto and the harbor, everything in miniature, quite similar to the view from the CN Tower. This photo unfortunately only shows the boardroom.

The majority of the photos, other than zooming in on architectural features covered in class, were horizontally panned sequences. So that I could potentially re-create what it was like to be at that spot, by making interactive panoramas using any free Java-applet viewers such as Duckware#8217;s PMVR which comes with a floor plan feature.

At the moment the few photos I managed upload are viewable on a photo gallery, for myself and any classmates who were there when I announced it at the last class:

http://members.lycos.co.uk/ejlennox/

Tripod Lycos (UK) had less storage space than I had expected, so I couldnt upload all the photos I wanted, and had to be more selective. Next time, for similarly large batches I should go with a service that actually specializes in photos such as Fotki or Fotopic, etc.

H K go to white castle

Fri, 16 Jul 2004 00:23:00 EDT

Just came back from the official Canadian premiere/ promotional screening of Harold amp; Kumar Go to White Castle at Paramount. After the long lineup and metal detectors we finally got in. About a third of the seats were white taped as reserved apparently for Alliance Atlantis people, the rest were nearly filled but we managed to find a central column seat. A police officer from the movie, as well as the stars John Cho and Kal Penn dropped by to say hi. Kal Penn was wearing a I (Heart) L.A. shirt while saying how he liked Toronto, so I thought that was funny. And they mentioned how we the audience would recognize filming locations since it was filmed in Toronto, made to look like New Jersey.

IN the film there was a shoppers drug mart that looked familiar, as well as the hallway that looked like it was filmed in U of T’s Hart House, but that was about all I could recognize.

Also what stood out for me was when one of the bad characters remarked to Cho: “Better Luck Tomorrow” – most likely a reference to the independent film with that name that Cho starred in a year or two ago, which was also the first film of Cho’s that I saw)
nbsp;
All in all a very crazy, sick-humoured funny film and a great way to conclude a long 15 hour day*
nbsp;
* writing that Toronto architecture essay comparing Cumberland amp; Storm's University Collegenbsp;(1856-9)nbsp;with W. Storm's Victoria College (fin 1892)

The Ring inspired wierd dream

Sat, 12 Jun 2004 15:14:00 EDT

I had a UCD (Unusually Creative Dream!) last night after watching the Americanized version of the Japanese horror film "The Ring" for the first time. Having already seen the original Japanese version, this version was a generally funny review experience knowing approximately what would happen next, eg seeing the spooky photoshop twirl filter effect on the photos.

Anyway, the dream involved me just looking at about 3/4 of a page of financial journal entries, reading down the columns of the page, checking that all debits indeed equal credits, the usual. Except the last group of entries weren't numeric entries. They were strands of dark, wet black hair, dripping water off the bottom of the sheet. I couldn't make sense of the adjacent account descriptions because they were smudged out, but the hairs were short bundles that fit into either debit or credit box, so there was some hint that this was still supposed to be Financial Accounting.

Please note that since I'm still dreaming and not in a lucid state, everything just happens spontaneously without my questioning it or any realization of just how absurd and creepy it is.

So I then proceeded as a diligent bean counter would, and started parting the wet, dirty intertwined strands of hair with a pen to count them individually, to be sure that hair strands on the left (debit column) did indeed equal the hair strands on the right (credit column).

Talk about splitting hairs.

At that point, my subconcious dream engine ran out of surreal fuel, or my rational side protested, or the birds outside my bedroom window just started chirping. In any case, I woke up, and decided that in the future, I should avoid watching Americanized Japanese horror movies while studying for professor Zuliani's upcoming Financial Accounting I tests.

ForcesOfNature

Thu, 03 Jun 2004 11:04:00 EDT

Went to see the 7 pm preview of FORCES OF NATURE at the Ontario Science Centre's OMNIMAX theatre with a few high school friends last night, thanks to some extra tickets from Vahagn. A quarter of the audience was made up of children, the rest were probably with a group, such as Toronto's Emergency Services Personel. The pre-show slides and introductory speakers seemed to make it a point to acknowledge and welcome them in the audience, in appreciation of what they do.

Then it was on with the show to see some real world natural mayhem. The volcanic eruption coverage was the most clear and spectacular of all, complete with lava flows, lightning streaks within the growing, morphing shapes of the volcanic cloud - the texture and overall round shape reminded me of vanilla ice cream on an ice cream cone, except that it was grey and constantly expanding.

After the OMNIMAX preview we went to Safi's place for the pool tables, followed by a movie at Vahagn's house. Vahagn also handed me a funny photoshop'ed picture of me surrounded by blondes and brunettes, printed, like a real photograph. The ladies seem to be wearing the same white sport/perforated white uniforms, probably from one of those car shows. Apparently a year ago he took my a pic of my head from the algonquin trip photos last summer and grafted it onto an existing fellow in this hi-res photo he got somewhere from the internet, sent it to everyone except me and was planning to mail it as a prank on my birthday or something. However he decided just to hand it to me now. So now I have a fake photo to add to my non-digital photo album (he couldn't find the original photoshop file).

on-off switch

Fri, 30 Apr 2004 11:26:00 EDT

Funniest lesson learned from the million dollar DARPA robot race across the desert:

Name	Traveled	What Went Wrong	Lesson Learned
Team CajunBot Six-wheel ATV	0.0 miles	On-off switch located on side of vehicle. Bumped into a wall on way out of start area. Turned self off.	“Put the on-off switch somewhere else.”

Complete chart (May '04 issue of WIRED) can be seen here.

katsu group dinner for Aikido group

Sat, 10 Apr 2004 23:56:00 EDT

Enjoyed a great dinner at Katsu (on Danforth) today with my Hart House Aikido group. My first time at a Japanese buffet, don't know if all Japanese buffets work this way but this one had nice menu listing/order slips where you wrote the quantity you want beside the items you wanted, then they prepared it and brought it for you to eat. Repeat X times until full!

There was also quite a variety, maybe 40 or more items so it was a great way to learn about the food there whether you already knew what you were ordering, or just trying to see what it was. Someone else will eat it if you don't, as we had about 13 or so people. We may have several Aikido white belts, a Jiu-jitsu veteran, but Kent is the man who holds the record for most sashimi consumed - more than 20 pieces, I lost count.

A huge lump of green, chunky wasabi on a little plate inspired us to discuss various prank ideas involving wasabi, including lumping enough wasabi on an ice cream cone and passing it to someone claiming it was green tea ice cream! (Beware, next time someone passes you an innocent-looking cone of Green Tea Ice Cream!) That inspired someone to want Green Tea Ice Cream, so we added 'Green Tea Ice Cream' onto the menu listing/order slip, but then when we found out that they actually did have it but charged an additional $2.99 so we decided to cancel that. Other than that disappointment, most of us just kept on happily ordering.

At the end of the day, I hope this cozy little restaurant's accounts aren't in the red due to us.

last Aikido class

Sat, 27 Mar 2004 19:39:00 EST

Sadly, yesterday was the last class of Aikido for this semester. Here's my slightly edited group pic of about half of the total class, all seniors except me, who stayed around to about 5:30 pm in the Hart House activity room.

Basically the picture-taker was added into the middle row (Raj ?- the experienced senior guy who Sensei usually uses for tossing around to show us techniques) , and the topmost letterhead from my Kyu certificate was added on the wall.

Class ended with the usual bows to the dojo and Sensei, followed by independently approaching classmates one after another to do sitting-kneeling mutual "thank-you" bows. Then there was just general chatter, while others practiced favourite techniques and throws on others. I had some nagging questions about the side break-fall, as well as techniques we were taught today so I got a few demonstrations, and I also witnessed some kind of perhaps ending tradition of doing 10 back break-falls per participant, to be done by all participants, so there were 4 guys who just did 40 back break-falls.

The picture-taking was done near the very end, so unfortunately no spectacular Sensei demonstrations since he had left so soon, just group pics and various seniors throwing each other silly. Photos here or here.

After the fun of Aikido, I had a more surreal experience at an evening Superhero/super villain themed cocktail party, dressed as Lex Luthor (but with some hair growth, not completely bald like Lex). Other readily recognizable characters were Wonder Woman, Cat Woman (Sanaz) who cooked some pasta, but otherwise it was a creative costume party.

The best improvised outfit I think was Greg the upstairs tenant with the red-striped shirt, socks-for-musles and wet suit pants, all put together apparently on 5 minutes notice.

On another note, yesterday I also found the best resource and listing of links I've seen so far about how to enter the game industry, focused on high school students but of course anyone can use it:

http://www.igda.org/breakingin/resource_links.htm

got my 8th Kyu

Wed, 24 Mar 2004 19:04:00 EST

Sensei Kimeda handed us our certificates today in Aikido class, so I got my 8th Kyu rank, for successful testing monday of basics and 4 moves we were taught since starting in January.

I would have greatly preferred to receive it in the form of an ancient scroll, and have that scroll presented to me via an elaborate ceremony involving drums, sumo wrestlers, pyrotechnics, wine, sushi and other carnal delights, and a promise to have my name etched in stone somewhere sacred to go down forever in the annals of Aikido history.

However, switching back to reality I decided to settle for Sensei's firm handshake, bow, and the really oversized Aikido Canada certificate, which essentially says, in a mix of modern laser print and traditional seals and calligraphy, that I rank 8th Kyu grade according to Aikido Yoshinkai HQ in Tokyo, Japan.

Sounds impressive for an entry-level rank.

Battlestar Galactica (2003 tv movie)

Sat, 20 Mar 2004 13:19:00 EST

Last night's Battlestar Galactica (part 1, TV movie) was a nice surprise. I thought it was the original old 70's TV show or film but after repeatedly recognizing contemporary actors/actresses (and other clues, like the Cylons looked taller/skinnier/more like the robots they're supposed to be, contemporary-looking level of graphics/SFX, etc) I checked.

Its actually the 2003 remake as a TV-movie, and as part of a larger entertainment strategy of using interactive TV, an XBOX console game, involving Vivendi Universal Games, Microsoft, and the filmmakers, which I had read about earlier in an interesting wired.com article. Buzzword-of-the-day: convergence?

The actors/actresses that I instantly recognized:

Actor/actress in BSG:	Also starred as:
The chief engineer? who just needed 40 more seconds to evacuate his crew	The deputy in Smallville episode 120 "Obscura" who gets wacked unconscious by the other deputy who is the actual villain.
The secretary of education lady	same actress who plays the injured First Lady in Independence Day (starring Will Smith).
The doctor? on Caprica	That old private detective in recent Smallvile episodes 306 'relic' to 307 who is hired by Lex to investigate Lionel but ends up as a corpse in the morgue.
The african-american woman who reads the oath of the presidency to the secretary of education lady	Lex Luthor's psychiatrist from several recent episodes of Smallville who ends up 'with her car wrapped around a tree' in the 309 'Asylum' episode after not cooperating with Lionel.

And then there was the pretty Asian pilot Valerii aka "Boomer" (see photo) whom I didnt recognize but I thought I saw somewhere (Romeo Must Die, "dancer" in the beginning. Apparently Grace Park stars in Edgemont but I've never watched that show).

Looking forward to tonight's part 2 of 2.

Lockheed U-2 essay

Mon, 15 Mar 2004 04:02:00 EST

I now know more about the Lockheed U-2 high altitude photo reconaissance aircraft than I ever wanted to know (Recently finished this 10 page essay, complete with value-added timeline and index)

Some day, somehow, I'll go to Burbanks, California and take a look inside Lockheed's top secret Skunk Works...if they are still based there.

nice internships

Fri, 27 Feb 2004 18:26:00 EST

nice internships! I hope there will always be as many high-profile opps like this every year.

http://interns.takingitglobal.org/

Did you know: Anita Roddick worked for a while at the UN in Geneva (this was in her student days before she started the Body Shop).

Hmm..too bad I'll have to wait till I complete university but definitely would make all this daily lecturing drudgery and essay writing worth it...sort of.

shoes on a window

Mon, 23 Feb 2004 11:40:00 EST

How... resourceful. Im at the new college computer lab, in front of me are huge curtain windows that look out ino the little "quad" area and the rows upon rows of windows of the student residence. I just saw someone open their window, lay down their pair of soccer shoes on the small concrete framing ledge outside.. to dry/air the shoes perhaps. But, perhaps not trusting gravity and friction alone to hold the shoes in place, he then went on to tie both laces carefully to the window-crank before departing in a hurry.