Wow, what a year. This year alone, I've lived in three different cities across the US and Canada, spanning two states and province and covering a distance of over 4000 km.

I spent 4 months in Apex, North Carolina (near Raleigh) working with a customer. It was the furthest south of the border that I have ever lived. It was also the nicest furnished single-bedroom apartment I have ever stayed in. There I attended Sovereign Grace Church, and had a good time fellowshipping and eating Mexican fast-food. I racked up Aeroplan miles and status segments as I flew to Buffalo every other weekend to get a rental car to drive up to visit Clarissa As a result of the frequent flights, I will enjoy Air Canada Prestige status for 2012. To be honest though, I'm not even sure how that benefits me. I think I might be allowed an extra bag for free now on Air Canada flights, which is nice (though, lounge access would have been nicer ).

I spent 7 months back in Streetsboro, Ohio, where I continued working a variety of projects and continued to attend The Chapel at Tinkerscreek. This was an amazing small church where I felt at home during my stay south of the border. There were some sad times, but with those sad times came reminders of God's sovereignty and of him working out everything for his glory.

Finally, with what started as preliminary discussions at the beginning of the year, I finally arrived in Edmonton, Alberta at the end of November. And as such, I have rounded off the year by spending 1 month in Edmonton - the furthest north I've ever lived. I started attending the South Edmonton Alliance Church, and have been blessed with welcoming friends!

And of course, perhaps the biggest event in 2011 overall: Clarissa and I became engaged

And together we look forward to an exciting new year in 2012.

This past year has been a year of waiting. While I definitely enjoyed my time in each of North Carolina and Ohio, I knew that it was just a waiting phase for when I would be able to move back to Canada to be with Clarissa. So now that we have achieved that, a major milestone is complete and we are eagerly awaiting our marriage next year, as the Lord would allow.

I praise God for holding everything together over this past year. It's not that everything went perfectly; of course there were ups and downs. But the downs gave us the ability to reach even higher highs, which is only be God's grace.

Happy new year everyone

Did I mentioned that I moved to Edmonton?

It's cold here!

Ever since moving to the US, I slowly realized that were are a number of pop music songs that I used to hear a lot in Toronto on stations like z103.5 or 99.9 Virgin Radio. But I'd never hear them on the radio in the US (e.g. on Cleveland's 96.5 Kiss FM, which I'd consider equivalent to z103.5).

Whenever I'd drive back home to Toronto, I'd hear those songs again.

And then as soon as I returned back to the US, I wouldn't hear those songs anymore. I kind of missed them actually.

Today, I realized that those songs were all by Canadian artists. And that's not to say that the music is bad. If anything, I rather like it.

Although to be fair, I believe that I've probably heard at least one Canadian artist in the US. That would be Justin Bieber. But that's hardly exciting.

I remember when I was gathering information for preparing my exchange application to NUS. The engineering professor in charge of engineering exchange at UWaterloo talked about how he didn't really care so much about people going on exchange who already had some sort of international exposure (referring to my friend with me who grew up in a different country all together). The people that he really wanted to go on exchange are people who grew up and lived exclusively in the GTA all their lives.

Being away from Toronto for the past while, I've found that I've actually come to appreciate the times I get to be back in Toronto. There is a certain familiarity that it brings. I suppose, having grown up completely in Toronto's suburbs, I never really knew anything else until now.

I took a hike through a portion the Cuyahoga Valley National Park this morning, specifically through the Deep Lock Quarry area. The site's rather descriptive name features two main attractions: an old quarry site (from which large millstones once were hewn) and the remains of the deepest lock along the Ohio and Erie Canal (which apparently opened up Ohio to the rest of eastern America many years back).

I would have liked to venture to the bottom of the lock to take some photos, but since there was still maybe a foot or two of water pooled at the bottom (that and if I climbed down I don't think I'd be able to climb back up myself), I merely took a few photos from the upper level of the lock.

Nevertheless, I still would have been under water had I occupied the same space some 150 years ago when the lock was in operation.

The photo doesn't covey it, but it was still quite a drop down to the lowest level.

I was in Oakville over the Labour Day long weekend. Being my first weekend in a long time for which I had no explicit plans or obligations set, I decided to take a trip to downtown Oakville just as evening was setting in. I don't know when the last time I was in downtown Oakville was. If I were to guess, it was probably sometime in highschool. Sometimes I forget just how accessible the lakefront is. Whenever I think of Lake Ontario, I think of downtown Toronto, Harbour Front Centre, etc. But really, Lakeshore Avenue West does indeed go out as far as Oakville.

It's a fairly quaint area with expensive houses and aged trees. There are benches along the path every so often, but the humid summer weather and fear of mosquitoes prevented me from stopping for any amount of time.

I was digging through some old files and found this photo I snapped a couple years back in Singapore. It intrigued me because it looks more like an illustration than a photo, but that is actually how the tree looked above me that evening when I looked up. Even more surprising to me at that time was that I managed to capture this using my cellphone at that time, which had one of the worst low-light performance I had ever seen in a camera. But as the adage goes, the best camera is the camera you have with you.

I took this photo a long time ago. I don't think I ever got the post processing exactly how I would have liked. But I forgot what I wanted it to look like now anyway. Probably going for a faded/old look?

I forgot what I was cooking that day too. Was it something as simple as instant noodles, or was it something more elaborate? Oh well, it doesn't matter. All I know is that on that day, I wasted an egg. Well, wasted at least in terms of nutritional value. I did get a few kicks taking photos of the poor egg. But it threw my egg count off. I usually try to use my eggs in pairs so as not to end up with an odd number left over (what do you do with just one egg?).

But, I got over it. No use crying over spilled eggs. Life moves on.

This isn't really "street photography" per se, as it didn't really happen on the street (Shanghai World Expo). But the idea of non-offensively capturing people in the middle of what they do is something that I wish I could do better.

However, a lot of the time I become too self-conscious about other people becoming self-conscious about me taking photos of them when they don't know who I am.

Some people say that using a less intimidating camera (i.e. not a DSLR) helps people feel more relaxed. Or if you must us a DSLR, at least not with a telephoto or anything large and intimidating (pretty much any fast zoom or fast portrait lens). But sometimes I feel that a photo is a photo and people become concerned with why you are taking a photo of them nonetheless whether it be with a Canon 1D MK IV or with an iPhone.

Sometimes I feel like I just want to try running around with a 50mm prime again (as in the photo below). I haven't done that for a while.

I may have noted this before in a previous blog post, but I just noticed the same phenomenon again: It sometimes seems like Canadians are still mainly a Blackberry affair. That is, of the mobile phone flavour.

For the past four months I have been in an extended onsite role for one of our customers. That is, I've been living away from home providing contract engineering help. As part of the perks of living away from home for work purposes, I have an allowance of air travel that I can take each month. So I've been flying between North Carolina and Buffalo on average twice a month. That equates to around eight flight segments a month.

It's always a given that once the plane touches down and begins taxiing to the gate that you see and hear everyone around you power up their mobile phones.

Having been living in the US for nearly a year now, it's become common place for me to see a wide-variety of Android-powered smartphones being toted around by mostly everyone. From the super techno-geekish to the fashion-conscious "cool guy" to the crisp business person.

The other week due to a massive US Airways system-wide computer outage, I missed a connecting flight in Charlotte enroute to Buffalo. However, the US Airways staff were kind enough (obligated enough?) to rebook me on an alternative flight, which instead of landing in Buffalo now flew me directly to Toronto. Nice!

Finally I was on my way back home to Toronto for the weekend. And soon enough we touched down in the familiar and comfortable Lester B. Pearson International Airport. And right on cue, people around me started pulling out and powering on their phones.

And to my surprise, EVERYONE around me pulled out a Blackberry. Where did the Android phones go?

Oh that's right, I was back in Canada.

Buy a Blackberry, and you can feel good knowing that a portion of the proceeds will go towards humble Waterloo engineering co-op students providing them with food, shelter, textbooks and Engineering C & D coffee and beef/chicken patties.

They're all disappearing! Why?!

My favourite form factors for laptop computers appear to be disappearing from my favourite computer manufacturer.

Ever since I got my first laptop in 2005 (still the one I'm currently using!) I've had some kind of high opinion for Fujitsu.

And while my trusty Lifebook T4010D has aged along with me, we've both seen some nice form factors that Fujitsu put out over the years.

My favourites being the P1600 series and T2000 series tablets.

The P1600 were in my opinion perhaps the last greatest ultra portable notebooks.

The P1600 series were descendant from the P1120 and later P1510D (which I am lucky to own and have currently lent out to Clarissa). The P1120 was an ultra portable circa 2003. It featured an 8.9" touchscreen, which would be the hallmark of the tablet P-series Lifebooks. However it had sported an underpowered 800 MHz Transmeta Crusoe processor, which made it unusable to many.

The P1510D vastly improved over the P1120 by adding a fully powered Pentium M processor and a convertible screen allowing you to fold the computer down to a slate form factor. This was an amazing form factor. A 8.9" screen meant that it was not too big but not too small. The whole package weighed a mere 2 pounds. This was truly an ultra portable computer. And mind you this was circa 2005, before the "netbook" craze hit.

Following the success of the P1510D, enter the P1610, P1620 and P1630. These, to me, are the pinnacle of the P-series form factors. They still sport the hallmark 8.9" touchscreen but improve over the P1510D by upping the screen resolution to a standard 1280x768. Not to mention the P1610 runs an Intel Core Solo processor and even more impressively, the P1620 and P1630 pack full-powered Intel Core Duo or Intel Core 2 Duo processors.

Now, a lot of people these days would look at a P1630 and immediately cry, "NETBOOK!?" But no, let me remind you of some key differences.

Netbooks run underpowered Intel Atom processors. Netbooks usually top out at a resolution of 1024x600. Netbooks are usually 10.1" or larger screens. So you have an underpowered processor, low resolution screen that is actually not that small.

Compare that to the P1630. A full-powered Intel Core 2 Duo processor with a high resolution 1280x768 screen in an even smaller package with the same or better battery life, all without the battery awkwardly sticking out the bottom.

This to me is one of the greatest laptop form factors ever conceived. It is small to truly go with you anywhere. Yet, unlike your average netbook, the P1630 is as powerful as your neighbour's 14" behemoth desk-bound laptop computer.

That to me is the greatest portable laptop. It would be the one I would want to carry with me while traveling.

And yet, Fujitsu never refreshed this line. They've now opted for a 10.1" tablet, which is a size many people are probably now more accustomed to because of netbooks... but I think they're missing out on the beauty of a full-powered 8.9" sub-notebook.

The next greatest form factor that I miss from Fujitsu was their T2000 series. From what I could tell online, the T2010 and later T2020 were a huge hit. And for some reason that I don't understand, they never refreshed this line either, instead proceeding with the T5010, which was basically twice the size of the T2020.

The T2010 and T2020 were 12.1" Tablet PC's, obviously larger than the P1600 series, but these sported more powerful configurations and featured full blown Wacom digitizers (hallmarks of a true Tablet PC) which provided writing and drawing experiences second to none (if professional graphics artists use Wacom digitizers, they must work well right?). Being an owner of the older 12.1" T4000 series, I appreciate this size class quite a lot. But the T2000 improved upon the T4000 series in practical ways by removing the optical drive, dropping the weight and adding a LED-backlit widescreen which increased the battery life dramatically.

So what did you get with the T2010/T2020? You got a convertible Tablet PC that converted down to the size of most slate-only Tablet PC's. Something that was truly portable yet with a sizable screen for document or coding work.

There seemed to be a sort of cult following for the T2000 series. Everyone online who owned one seemed to love them. To be honest, the same went for any of the other Fujitsu Lifebooks that crossed my path.

And yet, recently Fujitsu has seemed to try and go main stream.

Their unique Stylistic series now look like iPads. Their laptops are becoming more common in form factor. Yes they are still sticking to their guns by producing class-leading Tablet PCs, but I hope that they will keep it up.

I hope they'll have some more attractive offerings if/when my Lifebook T4010D bites the dust.

(wow I think this post has the worst grammar I've written in a while - I should just stick to posting photos)

Taken just over a year ago at Tian An Men Square in Beijing, China. Dug up this photo again as an opportunity to try out some post-processing techniques. I don't think it turned out as well as I hoped.

This photo was taken with my former Panasonic DMC-G1, which was sold away to fund my current Panasonic DMC-GH1. It's funny to think that I actually no longer have the camera body that took this photo. That camera traveled with me to many interesting places and took many photos that bring back fond memories.
 

After a friend of mine had his Facebook account quite maliciously compromised, I began to think about what kind of security safe-guards I personally have implemented. In an era where one's online accounts and identities can have such a influence on our real lives, it seems that it only makes sense to pay attention to the security surrounding these credentials. This isn't so much a matter of offending Facebook friends as it is of sensitive information that an attacker might be able to exploit if he had access to your personal email or other sensitive accounts, etc.

A strong password is one thing, but I realized that a lot of things we do these days render passwords of any strength useless. In particular, either leaving accounts logged in indefinitely or, saving passwords in client software such as browsers, email clients, etc.

Having a strong password is definitely a good first step and this guards you the average remote attacker - it is virtually impossible to guess a strong password (of course, one that does not have any personal significance and is not from the dictionary or even some "leet speak" variant of a real word). But if you can access your account without entering your password, then the advantage of your strong password disappears.

Typical scenarios that do not require a password for account access include:

    1) Possession of a cached login token (e.g. cookie or session information)
    2) Saved password in browser or client software

(1) can be compromised remotely by someone either sniffing traffic between you and your host or by a man-in-the-middle attack in which the attacker transparently injects himself between you and your host, passing traffic through (while inspecting the traffic).

(1) and (2) can be compromised locally in which an attacker gains physical access to your data.

Sniffing and man-in-the-middle-type attacks can be initially guarded against by using a secure connection to your host. This is not to say that you are 100% safe-guarded, but it will at least most likely deter the attacker who doesn't have a personal vendetta against you. This could be as simple as just making sure you use a secure SSL or equivalent connection where available.

For GMail, go to your mail settings page and enable the option to "Always use https".

For Facebook, go to your Account Settings page, expand the "Account Security" section and check "Secure Browsing (https)".

 
Gmail and Facebook also provide the ability to audit what sessions you currently have open and also to logout of other session remotely. It's not bad to check these periodically to see if something looks fishy.

Those settings should deter the casual remote attacker, but dealing with a local attacker with physical access to your computer is not so simple. An attacker gaining physical access to your computer usually occurs in one of two ways:

    1) You step away from your computer briefly while leaving it logged in
    2) Your computer is stolen

To combat (1), simply lock or logout of your computer when you step away from it. Of course, make sure you have a strong password that someone won't be able to guess after 5 minutes of trying.

To combat (2)... well, unfortunately, your Windows or Linux machine out of the box will not protect you against theft. Even if you have a strong Windows account password, the attacker can still gain access to the data on your hard disk without logging in unless you encrypt your hard disk. A BIOS password does not protect you either as all the attacker need do is physically remove the hard disk from your computer and read it from another computer.

Needless to say if your computer is stolen, you're at the mercy of the thief if you have saved all your account passwords in your browser or clients.

And this, I realized, is a major flaw in my own security precautions. I've been keeping sessions logged in for my email accounts and have also saved passwords for various other accounts in the browser and have also saved my email password in my email client.

Thus if someone should steal my laptop, they could pull the hard disk and restore my Firefox and Thunderbird profiles and immediately access my email. Sure you say it's just personal email, but think about the repercussions if they moved fast enough such that they quickly reset my bank or PayPal passwords immediately gaining access to real world assets. All of a sudden, access to my GMail account doesn't seem so innocent anymore.

So essentially you have two options:

    1) Stop saving passwords and always logout of sessions before putting your computer away
    2) Encrypting your hard disk

Personally, for the time being, I opted to go with (2).

Most business-class or higher-end laptops contain an extra hardware security component known as a Trusted Platform Module (TPM). The TPM can be used in addition to traditional file and disk encryption techniques to lock the encryption to the TPM embedded in the computer's motherboard. Thus it is not possible to perform a decryption apart from the TPM, or, unless you possess a recovery key generated at the time of TPM initialization. This offers some added peace-of-mind should my laptop ever be stolen that an average attacker would not be able to access my sensitive files without either expending a lot of time and effort to break the encryption, or if they were able to also steal the recovery key (which I now need to make sure I store physically separate from my laptop).

In the time that an attacker would be able to crack the encryption, I would have likely noticed the theft of my laptop and have changed my relevant passwords.

At any rate, whatever path you do take, it's definitely good to ask yourself what would an attacker have access to if they ever stole your computer.

Having been driving in the US for over half a year now with a car that only sports metric units in the dashboard (kilometers-per-hour and degrees Celsius ONLY! ), I have had to get good at doing imperial miles-per-hour to metric kilometers-per-hour conversions on the fly while driving. Of course by now I have most of the important ones memorized, but every so often I encounter a less common one (most common usually being 25, 35, 55 and 65 MPH; less common being the ones somewhere in between). Luckily for me, I've found a really simple way to do the conversion - easy enough that a 4th grader could probably do it in seconds.

During my first days in the US, I wrote out a conversion chart on paper to keep on my dashboard for quick reference. This worked great for the first day - until the sunset and I could no longer see my cheat sheet

So then I figured I'd either have to memorize the conversion chart, or I'd have to get really good at doing the conversion in my head.

The more precise conversion rate is something around 1 mile ~ 1.609344 kilometers. And for all practical purposes, let's just say that the conversion factor from miles to kilometers is 1.6. That is, if you are presented with a speed limit of 35 MPH, you would do 35 x 1.6 = 56. And you would know that 35 MPH ~ 56 Km/h.

Of course multiplying by an odd decimal number such as 1.6 doesn't necessarily come naturally. So for really quick and dirty approximations, I started by using a multiplier of 1.5. This made things a lot easier and it was safe in the sense that I was sure to never be speeding - but of course, I never felt efficient in the sense that I knew I could be driving faster - I just didn't know by how much. (Unless of course I expended a little more energy to actually calculate the 1.6 multiplier).

And then I thought about it a little more and realized that 1.6 could be thought of as 16 just by shifting the decimal place. This is useful for people for software and electrical engineers who are familiar with the fact that a lot of software/electronic quantities are often given in hexadecimal. So we are fairly good at spouting off anything that is 2^n. The key here was to note that for each whole 10's value in the speed limit, you would sum up that many 16's. And if there is a remaining one's value (in the US, this will always be 5 if it exists), you would just add half of 16, or 8.

Thus, if you saw 55 MPH, you would count up 5 x 16, which is is 32 + 32 + 16, which is 80. And of course we can't forget the remaining 5, which means you add an 8 for a total of 88. And you now know that 55 MPH ~ 88 Km/h.

But wait - that's only useful if you are familiar with your multiples of 16. That's still not easy enough for a 4th grader.

So to make things EVEN easier. We take a seemingly less direct approach and first divide the posted MPH speed limit by 5. So again using 55 MPH as our example, we get 55 / 5 = 11. And we're nearly there. Again since everything was based on 1.6, which became 16, we now maintain those factors and use 8 instead since we've just divided by 5 earlier. So multiplying our result by 8 we are now back at 88 Km/h.

Now this is easy! Especially since all posted speed limits come in multiples of 5, so it's child's play to perform the first division. And 8 is also a low enough factor for most children to recite multiplication tables from memory.

But when we look back, we see that we're actually right back to the original 1.6 multiplication factor. Only, we've taken 1.6, converted it to a fraction, 16/10. And then we reduce that fraction to 8/5. So now we have our conversion as MPH x 8/5. We then rearrange the operations to get MPH/5 x 8, which is the same thing.

Of course, I suppose in most cases, your car probably already has dual unit markings... moreover with the accessibility of in-car navigation systems, it's probably easier just to switch your GPS device to imperial units once you cross the border...

But if you need an excuse to have your kids practice their 5 and 8 multiplication tables, have them convert the speed limits for you

It sometimes really feels like a scam.

A couple weeks back I booked a round trip from Raleigh, NC to Buffalo, NY. I purposely selected a slightly more expensive flight because the return flight arrived earlier rather than later. This return flight had a half-hour layover in Washington, which is why the whole trip was much shorter.

But to my dismay when arriving in Washington, my connecting flight to Raleigh was delayed by nearly two hours. So much for that.

At any rate, I thought I'd try my chances with that flight again this weekend and booked the exact same flight.

And lo and behold, I'm now sitting in Washington DCA with my connecting flight to Raleigh once again delayed by nearly two hours.

It's the exact same flight with the exact same delay.

I'm almost thinking that there is in fact no flight from Washington DCA to RDU that departs at 7:35 PM.

Over the past year I've had the pleasure (or maybe inconvenience is a better term) of flying to various locations in eastern USA. And no matter where I go, my flights are always delayed. Always.

I suppose I don't have much to compare it to, but I just know that when flying to various locations in Asia, we never experienced any delays. I haven't flown extensively in Canada, but from the flights that I have had so far, I also did not experience a single delay.

So I just don't know what it is about flying in the US, but it's nothing that I look forward to anymore.

I don't know how people can do business in the US with flights getting delayed all the time.

All I can say is that if you ever need to get somewhere punctually in the US via air travel, you had better book a flight that will get you there at least one or two FULL days in advanced. Otherwise there is a good chance that you will completely miss, or at best, be very late for whatever appointment you have.

And so I still have an hour and a half to wait before my flight is estimated to leave at.

Someone must be laughing right now

For those of you who didn't realize, I have been in North Carolina for the past month. This past weekend I decided to check out a local state park. They have a few hiking trails with some points that overlook a lake. It was nice to get out and about and brought me back to some of my elementary school days when they would take us out hiking through the forest behind our school.

I took a number of still photographs, but also some video. I thought I'd try out putting together a short montage of some of the scenes. Videography is still pretty new to me, and it's different enough from still photography that the technical aspects require some new techniques. For example, shutter speed in video becomes fairly important. Most people seem to recommend shooting at a shutter speed that is twice your framerate. So for example, I shot these clips all at 1/60s shutter speed. Which, if you can imagine, on a super sunny day would result in massive over exposure. Stopping down the aperture seems like a good choice until you realize that you're reaching f-stops of like 11 or 22, which means you are reaching the diffraction limit.

And that's where a neutral density filter would come into play. For me, I don't have one... so as an alternative I threw on my circular polarizer, which helped to cut out a one or two stops of light. I still had to stop my aperture down more than I would have liked though... but it helped a bit.

It's an interesting medium.

Hmm. I'm not yet sure whether YouTube or Vimeo is better for a free account when embedding. Vimeo offers generally higher quality, but with a free account (as I have), embedding the video gives a lower quality video. Viewing on Vimeo's website lets you watch it in "HD"!

The wonders of post-processing. The bird was but a black silhouette in my viewfinder until I adjusted the tone curve in my RAW processor, which revealed some green feathers (you may need to view it at a larger size to see).
 

 

When I think about it, it's funny why we enjoy playing RPG's and running quests and what not on MMORPG's. Because when we have to do a quest in real life, we call it an errand, and we'd usually rather sit at home playing an RPG running quests to get some cool item (which are really just virtual errands).

Here are my last couple days as an RPG.

Ash: I want to get Ohio license plates to accessorize my car!

Ohio BMV: Well, well.  I can do that.  But first, bring me proof that your car meets my emissions standards.

Ash: Ahh...

Ohio BMV: I can't give you your Ohio license plates until you bring me proof.

Ash: OOK.

Ash accept's Ohio BMV's quest to acquire 1x Passing Emissions Inspection Report

And so Ash sets off to find the elusive Passing Emissions Inspection Report.

Ash arrives at the Ohio E-Check Emissions Testing Centre.

Ash: I want a Passing Emissions Inspection Report please!

E-Check Lady: The emissions monster is terrorizing our planet!  He is holding our only Passing Emissions Inspection Report! If you defeat him, you can have it!

Ash: No problem, where is the monster?

E-Check Lady: It's just over there past these gates, but to enter you'll need to either pay $18 or give the gate keeper an official Ohio Vehicle Title .  And we don't have any more of those.

Ash: Ohh.. I don't have one of those, where can I get that from?

E-Check Lady: I think I saw someone giving those out somewhere on South Meridian street.

Ash: OOK.

Ash accepts E-Check Lady's quest to find 1xOhio Vehicle Title.

Ash arrives on South Meridian Street and looks for any NPC's that might be handing out Ohio Vehicle Titles.  He sees one!

Ash: Can I get an 1xOhio Vehicle Title please?

Title NPC: Sure.  However I don't make them.  I can only refine old Out-of-state Vehicle Titles into new Ohio Vehicle Titles.  Do you have any old Out-of-state Vehicle Titles?

Ash gives Ontario Vehicle Title to Title NPC.

Title NPC: Thanks!  It'll just be a moment.  *clank clash bang*

Title NPC: Alright, I'm done!  Here is your shiny new Ohio Vehicle Title !  Enjoy!

Ash receives Ohio Vehicle Title!

Ash returns to the Ohio E-Check Emissions Testing Centre.

Ash gives 1x Ohio Vehicle Title to gatekeeper.

Gatekeeper: Heh.  Thanks.  Good luck with the emissions monster... no one has ever returned...

Emissions monster attacks!

Emissions monster uses +2 visual inspection against Ash's vehicle!

The emissions monster wants to eat you because it cannot find a Check Engine Light

Ash use Service Manual!

The emissions monster sees the Check Engine Light.  Ash dodges the emission's monster's hungry bite.

The emissions monster uses an ODB-II attack!

Ash is pinned down by the ODB-II cable!

The emissions monster reads three error codes!

-8129 HP

Ash faints!

And so I need to get my car checked before I'll be able to try for the emissions check again... good thing my last save point was right before battling the emissions monster, so I don't need to go through the trouble of getting the other items required to get to the monster. 

Through a remote teleconference, I was somehow able to produce these delightful cinnamon-dusted cream puffs. And they didn't turn out half as bad as I would have expected for my baking history.

It's been a long time since I've watched a Japanese animated movie. It's been an even longer time since I've watched a science-fiction Japanese animated movie.

But I heard about Hulu.com here in the US, and it's quite an amazing website. It takes what hundreds of websites in the past have done illegally and turned it into something legal - make full-length TV episodes and movies available for free online. It's all ad supported, in the same way the networks' first-party websites do it.

At any rate, I stumbled across this movie called Vexille: 2077 Isolation of Japan, and the description sounded like your typical over-the-top Japanese science fiction anime. But I saw that it was only available on Hulu for six more days (I suppose Hulu has varying licensing terms with each of the publishers). So I thought I'd give it a watch.

And I was rather impressed at the science-fiction component of it. The science-fiction plot twist that it develops and then carries through with is perhaps one of the most sinister applications science and engineering I've seen in a movie that is set in a near-future time frame.

More sinister than the Matrix for sure. Maybe not as scary as Ghost in the Shell, but in a lot of ways, more sinister than what Ghost in the Shell presented.

In a nut shell, the setup for the plot is that in the near future Japan becomes (I guess they are already in the present day?) the leader in robotic technology and is the sole supplier of all of the world's robotic needs from civil applications to military applications. Nanotechnology is progressing to the point where cybernetic/android development is beginning to take off, but UN places a strict international ban on this research and development.

The Japanese government at this point in time is largely staked by Daiwa Heavy Industries, which is the main producer of all robotic equipment and a major researcher of the new nano/bio/cybernetic technologies. They have the Japanese government push back against the UN, but are unsuccessful. Not wanting to give up their ways, the Japanese completely isolates themselves from the rest of the world constructing a physical and electromagnetic barrier around the entire island.

For 10 years no one enters or leaves Japan, and no one outside knows what is happening inside.

That's where the story starts. The US decides to send a task force to infiltrate the Japanese barrier.

And the story follows what one of the special forces team member discovers when she finally infiltrates the barrier.

And what she finds is to me, conceptually more scary than what Neo discovered when he broke out of the Matrix.

An interesting watch for the science-fiction buff who is interested in what the potential effects of highly controversial technology could bring.

Its wide smile is rather mocking. How do you smile endlessly?

2010 was a milestone year - in more ways than one. Life has been a flurry of activity since the start of 2009. Since then, I would say that life has never been the same. There were good times and bad times, but that was then. We are always in the present and things move on. 2010 was equally divided into three periods, which was a bit strange since I had graduated by the middle of the second quarter of 2010 (Waterloo students always operate on four-month spans - but I was no longer a Waterloo student).

2010 saw too many milestones to properly recount here - and I won't even try. If I were to pick one main word to describe 2010 it would be limbo. 2010 carried a lot of good and bad anticipation. As the year went on, the bad anticipation reduced and the good anticipation increased. Life feels like it's coming together now and I fully feel that I am entering completely new chapter in my life. Graduation plays into this, but it is not the main reason. Things are coming together, but not everything is there yet. Hence the feeling of limbo. I would say that this period of limbo is not quite over yet, and depending on how 2011 begins to roll out, this limbo will either be absolved slightly or will persist in the back of my mind while I try to focus on tasks at hand.

This entry may be a bit cryptic, but to be honest, it's been a while since I've written more than a few sentences. The single academia chapter of my life has closed and the new non-single working chapter is just opening.

It's an ongoing trail.

There was a bright red cardinal sitting in the tree just outside my window. However I only had a 14-45mm lens mounted. I proceeded to change to a more suitable 45-200mm lens to try to capture the bird, but alas, by the time I had switched lenses, the bird had flown away.

I had lunch with some friends the other day back in Canada, and in a brief moment of geeking-out, one of them mentioned to me about how Android hadn't really caught on that much in Canada. I commented on how in the US, it seemed to be the in-thing right now, perhaps right up there with the iPhone.

I didn't think much of this until I was at Square One (a major mall in the Greater Toronto Area) later the next day. I saw a group of teenage girls who were probably still in highschool, if not just finishing junior high. And of course in the US you'd probably expect them to all be toting LG or Motorola feature phones with QWERTY keyboards for quick texting. Nothing too fancy, just a basic phone with a keyboard. If they were older, maybe they'd be toting iPhones or Android devices. But in Canada, no, they'd all be toting Blackberries.

I always knew that Blackberries were popular in Waterloo, but I had always attributed it to the fact that RIM was just next door. But maybe it's more of a Canadian phenomenon than an actual Waterloo one.

I rarely see Blackberries here in the US. But I always see basic "texting phones" or if it's a "smartphone" then it's of the Android or iOS variety.

One day at work my colleagues were gawking a bit at Blackberry Messenger, and how they felt that it was quite silly. Having had contact with many friends who actually use BBM, I tried to give a reasonable answer on its merits. But all of these were shot down rather quickly.

So it seems that in the US, Android and "texting" phones form the iconic "social butterfly" device. In Canada, however, I'd say it's the Blackberry.

When 16-year-old girls are openly sporting Blackberries at the mall, you know that it's no longer just a boring business device.

Or maybe Canadians are just loyal that way.

It's no different here anyway - here in Ohio I can't tell you how much pride and emphasis there is on industry that is built by and built for Ohioans.

I was several hours early for my flight, but I wasn't going anywhere.

I don't know what it is, but something has welled up inside me once again - the patience to code - outside of work.

I've had the patience for the past couple days to sit and see if I can't code up some crazy idea I have that could bring Microsoft Exchange provisioning support to non-provisioned client devices.

I wonder if I'll be able to do it? How long will this patience last?

When I was still in highschool, I used to spend hours coding - I was that much of a nerd. Of course, I stuck on Visual Basic 6 for way too long. It took me a good kick to get up to speed with C/C++ (my fifth co-op term, where I spent 8-9 hours a day coding pure C code for an embedded platform - if that won't teach you C, nothing will). But now it's probably one of my more preferred languages.

Anyway, no promises for my idea. I keep on wondering why no one has tried to do this yet - maybe there's a good reason, maybe there isn't. I'll see if I still feel so confident in a few weeks from now.

PalmOS 5. Where have you gone?

Oh, there you are! Such a curious place to be found!

I've finally made the jump from b2evolution 2.x to the newer 4.0.1 beta version.  This means I've completely skipped an entire major revision!

The upgrade was a lot less painful than I thought.  In fact it was fairly painless.  The only effort I had to expend was because I decided to restructure my directory layout, moving b2evo into its own directory and shifting my entire blog under ashleyee.com/blog/ rather than at the top level.  Not wanting to lose the fidelity of older perma-links, I had to do a whirl-wind tour of Apache mod_rewrite in order to craft some rewrite rules that would allow the old URLs to automatically redirect to the updated versions.

Everything seems ok now, but if you see that anything has broken, let me know (I'm no expert at Apache rewrites, so my rules may not be bullet proof).

4.0.1 promises to make deleting spam easier, which is a welcome feature since I've been getting loads of comment spam lately!

一二三 Testing 1 2 3.

This photo was taken somewhere in Hiroshima not far off from one of the memorial sites.

There were a lot of flowers around, all looking the same and being the same. But this flower was different, and sat among the grass, standing out to me. I almost missed it too. I didn't think to take a photo of it at first, but then realized I really didn't want to lose that opportunity. I went back to look for it, and luckily after a bit of searching, found it again. I'm glad that I did.

It was around 8:10 PM on April 29, 2010. He was already gone, but not that I even knew who he was anyway. I just have this photo of his back.

On a technical note, I've always been intrigued by a kind of urban street photography. I've just never taken many of these types of photos because I understand that people often become quite self-aware when you point a camera at their face, especially when you don't know them. It's a difficult type of photography as well, in terms of composition because everything tends to happen so fast that you don't have a lengthy amount of time to stop and consider the composition. If you think too much, the moment will be gone forever.

We actually didn't usually take taxis in Japan, making use mostly of the Japan Rail system or our feet. But the city lights that night were somehow soothing even though I was thousands of kilometres away from home.

On a technical note, I very much enjoyed running around the city at night snapping quick shots here and there. The streets in this area were empty enough that you weren't catching tourists in every shot, yet busy enough that there was always something to take a photo of.

There is a stretch of trees along the road to my apartment that have been particularly red this week. They usually greet me and my car on my way back from work, but today I took a walk out to pay a visit to these trees on foot before their red leaves gave themselves up to fate.
 

Cross Country
Golden, CO

A Volvo XC70 drives down Washington Avenue in Golden, Colorado.

The stout reddish mountains in the area were a nice change in scenery from the rather bland landscapes of most of the suburbs in south-eastern Ontario and north-eastern Ohio.

I was walking through "downtown" Golden, Colorado this afternoon and when it came time for dinner, I stopped by a Quizno's along the street to pick up a sandwich. They had patio seating, and since the weather was so nice I thought I'd enjoy my sandwich and American-style sugar-free iced-tea outside. Not too long into my sandwich, I couldn't help but overhear the conversation of two young girls sitting behind me. The term, "free-body diagram" caught my attention, and sure enough, it sounded like they were working on some sort of physics problems. At first I thought maybe they were university undergrads studying statics or dynamics or something related, but once I heard them mention "air resistance" I figured they were probably just high-school students. The problem they were working on sounded like a hypothetical, "if you were standing on a scale and accelerating upwards, why would the scale read more?" Their explanation was heavily based on air resistance. Something like, "oh you know, because there is an equal and opposite reaction for everything, the air resistance pushing down on you would increase the reading on the scale."

I remember that type of explanation. For some reason, high-school physics students have some mass obsession with using air resistance as an explanation for so many types of physics problems.

I mean technically, their answer was not wrong, but it's not the most correct answer. Sure the air resistance was adding some additional force, but it's probably a better answer to refer to something like inertia, and then mention something about how the scale doesn't measure "weight" in terms of mass, but rather as a force. Then you would bring in F=ma to demonstrate that. Use your free-body diagram to show all the accelerations and forces, which should result in the numbers falling out somehow to show that the scale reads a higher weight. Then if you feel so inclined to, you can mention air resistance as an additional, but possibly negligible force depending on the size or geometry of the object (i.e. the drag coefficient).

I was almost tempted to just turn and say, "excuse me, I couldn't help but over hear your conversation about air resistance..."

But I'm pretty sure I've mentioned "air resistance" at least a few times in high-school physics before.

Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office. These are probably two of the most iconic products for the average computer user. And somehow Microsoft has taken a very bad rap for their Windows and Office products. I too went through a large phase of rejecting Windows for the much more flexible GNU/Linux flavour of operating system. But in recent times, I've come to appreciate some things about Microsoft that aren't so obvious when you are just a Word, Internet Explorer and Solitaire user.

I know that I may not have a lot of authority on this subject, since I yet to be a full-time .NET developer. But in recent times I have been exposed to some of their newer .NET technologies, and have even found some older Microsoft technologies and concepts in areas where I never thought existed.

For starters, the new .NET frameworks are amazingly easy to get started programming for. At least on the user interface level, these frameworks expose so much useful capability that you can really only spend an hour or two and hammer out an extremely polished application (provided it's a small application).

The two parts of the .NET framework that I have been exposed to are the Ink frameworks (from the older XP days), and now the newer Windows Presentation Framework (WPF) found in Windows 7. Can I tell you that these frameworks give you upfront access to some very useful capabilities upfront.

For the Ink framework, it literally only takes a few minutes to rig up a full-blown Tablet PC application that will give you fully indexed and searchable handwritten text - no need to convert the handwriting to text - just leave it as text and you can interact with it as if it were typed text on the programming side of things. All this without needing to know anything about the theories and algorithms behind modern handwriting recognition (which by the way, if you have never experienced on a Windows 7 Tablet PC, you have no idea just how amazingly accurate it is).

For the WPF, I've discovered just how amazingly easy it is to setup all your fancy multi-touch pinch-zoom gestures that Apple popularized. It's literally only a few lines of code.

And I'm sure the list goes on. More recently, I've discovered just how easy .NET makes interacting with external databases. Everything feels so seamless to me at a first glance.

And even reading articles about some of the concepts behind traditional C++ and the newer .NET managed C++ and how you can combine them in the same application makes me just realize how powerful it truly is.

It's been a long time since I've done any high-level programming. And suffice to say, so far, my experiences with the latest iterations of .NET have been quite pleasing.

I had a stint of Apple Cocoa and Objective-C, and I was not too fond of that. Somehow C# just seems like a much more familiar language - even though I've probably only programmed in it maybe 2 or 3 times, and never for a major project. Objective-C was for a term project, and I still couldn't wrap my mind around it by the end.

And then there is something odd that I discovered the other day while reading up on industrial automation technologies at work. OPC, or OLE for Process Control is a set of industry accepted specifications to facilitate the communication of real-time data from Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC) to user interfaces and other monitoring systems in an industrial process control scenario. This is based on technologies developed by Microsoft for the Windows operating systems.

This, I thought, was quite interesting. That means that Microsoft's influence extends to things even as far removed from personal computers such as the jam in your peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Or even the ice cream in your freezer. These things were manufactured by processes controlled by PLCs, which likely use OPC as a communications technology somewhere along the line.

The Canada Goose. Perhaps one of the most loathed animals on campus at the University of Waterloo.

They're such arrogant animals. There are many occasions when they will cross the road in front of moving traffic, knowing that the cars will stop for them. When students are walking around campus, the geese will also enjoy the same unmovable status, and they will not move when a student approaches them, often hissing at approaching pedestrians forcing poor students to take a longer route to class.

But I noticed something strange the other day while arriving at work. I work in the United States now, and when I got out of my car and walked towards the back door at my office, I noticed that there was a fairly large group of geese occupying the walkway, effectively blocking my way to the entrance.

Maybe I was still too tired, so I didn't think much of it, but I continued to walk towards the gathering of geese. And to my surprise, the geese ran away from me and immediately cleared a path allowing me to walk freely on the path.

It's almost as if the geese know that when they're in Canada, they enjoy some sort of royal status, and act all arrogant about it. But in the US, they know they don't have any protection from the government, so they know well to get out of an American's way.

Who would have thought? Or maybe just the geese that never cross the American border don't learn to be arrogant since they aren't treated with the same respect as they are in Canada.

My internet access is finally setup, so it feels nice to be back online once again.

Over long-weekend, without any internet access, I found myself watching TV (free aerial broadcasts).

One thing that struck me were how many political commercials there were encouraging people to not vote for a particular governor in Ohio.

The main reasons were that this particular governor had voted for NAFTA and other free-trade agreements with countries such as China. This out-sourcing of work has apparently cost Ohio locals a lot of jobs.

Oops. I'm working here under the NAFTA agreement.

But all this opposition towards out-sourcing made me think back to the ECON 101 course I took last year. The (in)famous Larry Smith was the lecturer, and he talked a lot about the global economy and how a lot of jobs these days are being out-sourced to cheaper overseas workers.

Only Larry Smith talked about it in a much different way than these TV commercials were. From these TV commercials, you'd think that NAFTA was something of the devil, destroying the American economy and robbing its children of the fruits of their labour.

Now I don't claim to be an expert on the economy, so I can't comment on how things seriously are. But I have some amount of trust and respect for Larry Smith. He knew that out-sourcing is a problem for us North Americans. But he didn't slander it. He didn't go on tantrums against any politicians or companies that supported NAFTA or other free-trade agreements. Rather, he stated it as a fact. And a fact of no one's fault. It was just how the world was working as a result of mass communication and other global technologies.

His recommendation? Don't sit on your hands and expect to be spoon-fed by your employer anymore. Those days are gone. People expecting to find a cushy 9-5 job with a fat retirement fund would be sorely disappointed, according to him. So what to do? Be innovative, he'd say. You need to stay ahead of the curve and better yourself to offer more than just the ability to churn out repetitive results. You need to give your employer some kind of competitive advantage that the foreign worker won't. You need to understand that the overseas worker, at your current state, can put out the exact same product as you can, but for a fraction of the cost. You can't blame large corporations and call them evil for trying to maximize their profits. After all, that's what you, the shareholders are paying them to do. So to stay in the game, you need to put yourself ahead of them by offering more than prefabricated or routine answers. You need to give new and innovative answers. You need to think.

So Ohio, yes maybe we're bleeding jobs to NAFTA workers, but -- oh wait, I am a NAFTA worker. You wanted to prevent me from entering your country on TN status, then you needed to apply for the same job as me and beat me in the interview by offering the employer something more than I could offer. And you know, you shouldn't even be scared of me. I'm just as at risk of being out-sourced as you are. I am, after all, an expensive North American engineer. The moment they decide to send off the business to Asia, then we're out of a job - unless we can once again, provide something extra that the employer is willing to pay for. Innovation, says Larry Smith, innovation.

I'm not trying to pick a fight here. I'm just saying...

But she saw it everyday
Near Guilin, China

Panasonic Lumix DMC-G1
Panasonic Lumix G Vario 14-45mm f/3.5-5.6

An excerpt from the Digest of Ohio Motor Vehicle Laws:

If you hit a deer and cause its death, you may take possession of the deer by law, as long as you report the collision to a game protector or other law enforcement officer within 24 hours. The protector or officer will then investigate and issue a certificate entitling you to the carcass. It is illegal to take a deer carcass without reporting it.

You never really realize how bloated today's web pages are until you browse the world wide web on a mobile browser on a limited data plan.

I was searching on Google for some very simple information today, and loading the first page that came up, I was shocked to find that simply loading the HTML and CSS for that page hit over 1 MB of data. I had turned off images and Flash, so this is pure HTML and CSS. How is it that your HTML and CSS for a web page hits over 1MB? I swear that page may have hit 1.5 MB or even 2 MB if I didn't hit the stop button. And all I was looking for was one sentence on that page. Crazy!

So many other pages I see start to load up over 600 KB for a single page. Sometimes even without images or Flash enabled. I don't know why?

What exactly do people have in their HTML and CSS that warrants over 1 MB of data?

Let's say that the page I loaded was encoded in UTF-8. And let's be overly pessimistic and assume that for the page that I loaded, on average each character required two bytes in the UTF-8 encoding (for English texts, the average is actually closer to one byte, half our assumed size).

Now then, 1 MB of data equals 1 048 576 B. And with our semi-worst case assumption of two bytes per character, that gives us roughly 524 288 characters of text.

Now then assuming that the average word in the English language is five letters long, that means that this 1 MB web page has nearly 100 000 words of content, the rest being CSS and HTML markup.

But clearly the web page did not contain 100 000 words. In fact it was probably closer to 1000 if anything. That means that the remaining 99% of the web page content was actually markup.

Wow! People forget that not everyone has unlimited bandwidth. I remember once I tried to load a page for another friend, this time with images, and the header of site layout alone was something like a 10 MB PNG file.

I mean, it's not that I paid a huge amount of attention to size when I coded up my blog layout, but still. I think my page with images loaded hits around 600 KB. But the majority of that is PNG images. I should probably try to cut down the fat on subsequent iterations of my blog.

--

As an addendum, loading that website again this time with images enabled and not hitting the stop button on my phone got the download count up to 3.6 MB before my humble phone complained that it was out of memory and closed the browser. )" alt=")" class="middle" width="15" height="15" />

Don't get me wrong, I'm not so partial to the iPhone. But I'm impressed by it not so much its feature set, but for its coherency, which in a way led to its mainstream success.

I think what Apple has done right with the iPhone that other phone manufacturers haven't is to deliver a product to the market that is relatively bug-free. The iPhone's feature list is tiny compared to the likes of Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Samsung's competing phones, for example. But the iPhone nails its small feature list very well, whereas historically, the other phone giants tend to release their featureful phones with defect-ridden firmware, which only matures maybe in a year of the product being in the market.

I've long since been a bit apathetic towards Apple, however, for their flashiness. That is, they often give them impression that they are first to market for everything, when in reality, it wasn't their idea or technology at all to begin with. Perhaps that just shows the distaste of business and marketing at its finest in me... but I digress.

Nevertheless, when reports of the iPhone 4's signal reception issues, I curiously for once paid attention to the iPhone 4. Admittedly, the thought that came to mind was, finally, the apparently all perfect Apple has realized that they aren't so perfect after all. But would the consumers care? Probably not... everyone is in love with Apple. But then of course came the consumer report that actually rather bluntly said they would not recommend the iPhone to anyone, which I'm sure came as a blow to Apple's ego, since they do pride themselves on producing products that are first and foremost for the consumer. And they do a good job at it, for the most part.

So after the whole ordeal, I was pleasantly surprised by Apple's decision to give free cases to all iPhone 4 owners, along with their statement that they had made a mistake and were not perfect. Good on you Apple, I was for once impressed with your public relations.

But then I saw an article on a Symbian news website that reported that Apple actually pulled out some attacks against Nokia for having the same problem as Apple with reception. According to Apple, Nokia's phones have stickers on the back telling their users where not to touch. Admittedly, I have only seen a small portion of Nokia phones, so I can't acknowledge or deny this statement, but obviously the writers at All About Symbian have seen and handled nearly every Nokia smartphone on the market past and present - and they have never seen such stickers.

Nokia's response to Apple's attack is fairly mature and emphasizes that antenna design is something that Nokia prides itself in. They don't say anything more about Apple and just concentrate and talking about what Nokia does.

I don't know why Apple has to compare themselves to other manufacturers all the time. Their cute Mac vs PC commercials are always funny, but they're always selling Mac compared to PC. It's all about what the PC can't do. It's rare to see a modern Mac commercial that speaks to some of the really good points about Mac without talking about Windows. Interestingly, I find that Microsoft's Windows 7 commercials quite refreshing in that they highlight some of the key new features in Windows 7, but without even mentioning Apple whether implicitly or explicitly.

And now when Apple has some engineering errors, they pull all other industry leaders in the same boat and say, hey look, everyone else is doing it too.

It's funny. When Apple has no problems, they tell the world how much better they are than all other electronic companies. But now when Apple so clearly has a defect in their product, they do the exact opposite. In a sense, when its convenient to look like everyone else, they'll try their best to do so. What happen to standing out? Which is the Apple thing to do?

Either way though, they are still comparing and comparing. Which I suppose is how the consumer world works... but I mean, I would have been really impressed with Apple if they just left it as, "we made a mistake, here are some free cases."

It's like when Nintendo had the issues with Wii controller straps breaking. They addressed the issue quickly by offering free stronger strap replacements and free silicone bumpers for their controllers. They didn't go to venture into other territories by saying things like, "oh but look at this other game controller, which also caused damage."

But I digress, Apple still is, and will remain, the most worshiped electronics giant in North America.

So what's next?

I am currently looking for an apartment to rent in Ohio. I have a handful of places shortlisted and will be checking them out in person by the end of this month.

I'll then be moving down to the US at the end of the summer.

There will be a lot of new experiences.

Life is slowly transitioning into a whole new phase. It's exciting and things definitely seem to be moving faster.

And oh cool, I'll get to shop from the American versions of NewEgg and Amazon.

After five years of study, I have finally been awarded a Bachelors of Applied Science. After returning home from the convocation ceremony, I spent some time cleaning out my closet. To my interest I found my acceptance package from the University of Waterloo. Inside the package was an offer letter welcoming me to the Systems Design Engineering program.

Looking at the letter, I noticed that it actually contains a rough description of what Systems Design encompasses (it is always an on going joke among Waterloo engineers that SYDE students don't know what they do). The description reads as follows:

You will find that Systems Design will allow you the opportunity to explore systems where it is essential that electrical, mechanical and computer components are designed or analyzed simultaneously as well as investigating the business aspects of products.

In some sense, almost every modern engineering project requires these key disciplines.

The letter is full of promise and speaks nothing about the academic challenges that I would encounter during my five years in Waterloo. Nor does it speak to the innumerable amount of good times and friendships that I would form through vibrant campus life.

The five-year old letter looks just as bright as the degree certificate that I now hold, which equally promises an exciting future.

It's been a good five years over all, and I'm excited to see where the next five years of life brings me.

For amusement, I took a snapshot of my degree and offer package side by side. It's all together an end-to-end scene.

The Singapore pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo 2010 was a bit disappointing on many levels. It didn't speak to the progress that Singapore has made in the last 40 years. I'm sure with Singapore's vastly innovative talent, they could have featured something more than bouncing trampolines. (I mean, look at the Marina Barrage, the MRT system, NEWater, etc).

But I did enjoy the music video presentation. The only thing is that exclusively Mandarin artists were featured. Granted, the Expo is in Shanghai... but still, I thought that it would have been neat to include some Malay and Indian artists in the song.

Managed to find it online. Now I just need to find that cool background music from the Canada pavilion. Hmm...

The mirrorless camera world has been full of action within the last year. Mirrorless cameras take your traditional 50-year old single-lens-reflex camera design and remove the reflex mirror and optical viewfinder. The advent of the digital camera's live-view functionally removes the necessity of this mechanical component. Thus you find yourself with a camera that uses a consumer sensor format (APS-C or Four Thirds) typically only found in entry-mid DSLR cameras inside a smaller body with no optical viewfinder.

Panasonic and Olympus paved the way for this break with tradition by introducing their Micro Four Thirds system two years ago. This new format garnered a lot of praise from some professional photographers as producing a compact imaging format producing near "DSLR-quality" results.

While Panasonic and Olympus have been steadily building up their system by adding numerous quality lenses and bodies, other consumer electronics giants have been working on competing systems as well.

Samsung has since released their NX system, and more recently, Sony has released their NEX system.

I'm very curious to see how this battle ensues given that four major players are now in the market with three competing systems (especially since I've already bought into the Micro Four Thirds camp).

Samsung and Sony have positioned themselves quite well in the consumer world so far. Samsung's NX10 is very comparable in size to Panasonic's and Olympus' Four Thirds-based offerings while Sony has seemingly done the impossible and produced an APS-C-based camera in a package even smaller than what Samsung and Panasonic/Olympus have been able to do.

There are doubts flying around the internet about the viability of Sony's format as a quality imaging system given some apparent optical compromises they have made by choosing a flange-back distance even shorter than Micro Four Thirds while using a larger sensor. The Micro Four Thirds system is more conservative in this regard, which results in larger bodies, but some speculation I've read is that their more conservative approach may allow them to preserve their optical quality over what Sony may be able to do given their very aggressive engineering decision. Clearly for consumers, they may not care about any of these optical engineering decisions, since the bodies will be vastly smaller than Samsung's and even Panasonic/Olympus' offerings. But as a prosumer format, perhaps it will remain lacking.

Samsung? Not being well-known in the photography industry, it's still interesting to see how their format progresses, especially since they are the only player in their system (Sony is also a single player, but they've already proved that they are a viable consumer photographic equipment producer with their Alpha DSLRs).

Panasonic seems very committed to the Micro Four Thirds system - perhaps even more than they had been to the original Four Thirds system. Consider that Panasonic has only ever released two Four Thirds bodies, while since the announcement of Micro Four Thirds, they have already released five bodies for this mirrorless system, along with a respectable array of lenses spanning a range of 7mm to 200mm and soon to be extended to 300mm.

So far, Panasonic and Olympus have had the luxury of being first-to-market and early adopter loyalties. Samsung have had the luxury of being the first system to provide an APS-C-based mirrorless format. Sony have the luxury of being the smallest-bodied system.

Which format will deliver the innovation, features, usability and image quality that consumers demand?

Obviously I hope that Micro Four Thirds will come out on top. But between Samsung and Sony, I feel a bit more partial to Samsung's format. Sony's format appears to be overly-stylish than usable. Early reviews loathe the usability of the camera. Of course, user interface issues are not an attribute of the system format. But it doesn't impress for Sony's first offerings. The apparently overly-short flange-back distance seems worrying too.

But we'll see.

The giants of Canon and Nikon have been very quiet. But there is a neat distinction between Canon/Nikon and Panasonic/Samsung/Sony. The former are leaders in imaging technologies ranging from consumer DSLRs up to laboratory equipment (i.e. Nikon). Panasonic/Samsung/Sony, on the other hand, are consumer electronics giants that are wildly diversified. They also do not have major legacy SLR systems to support. Thus perhaps it has been easier for them to make this break.

If Canon and Nikon entered the mirrorless market, it would certainly cut into their DSLR sales.

But these are all just musings of an average consumer who likes taking photos with a slight gadget affinity.

It's like a redux of my transit in Shanghai Pudong International Airport enroute to Singapore in January of 2009. Only I'm now in Taoyuan International Airport enroute to Toronto via Tokyo. And I'm at least not alone this time. But it's still a tiring ordeal.

We arrived in Taipei at 10:45 PM. Our flight out of Taipei is at 8:20 AM the following morning. The check-in counter only opens two hours before the flight departs.

So here we sit in the airport. Waiting for the check-in counter to open.

At least there is free internet access here, albeit very slow and patchy for anything other than basic browsing.

This six-week trip has been both exciting and tiring all at the same time. By the end of the fifth week, I was already ready to go home. But the stop in Hong Kong was a nice one. Our group kind of split up to see different things and people. For myself, I had the opportunity to meet up with a few UWCCF people in their native Hong Kong. It was a very nice change of pace from the previous five weeks. Rather than being worried about sight seeing, I for once was just able to chill without worrying about time.

Looking forward to arriving back in Toronto. For various specific reasons

I'm currently in the middle of a 22 hour train ride from Guilin to Shanghai. It's been a long trip, and there's just under a week before I arrive back in Toronto on June 4. Mobile internet access here is relatively inexpensive compared to Canada (88 RMB per month gives me 200 minutes, unlimited incoming and 30 MB of internet access, that's roughly $13 or $14 CAD). So I'm happily tethering my notebook to my phone over Bluetooth right now

The trip has been a lot of fun and we've seen a lot of things. Overall China feels more haphazard than Canada. But there's so much rich culture and scenery to see here. Plus the food is awesome and relatively inexpensive when compared to Canadian prices.

Having grown up in Toronto with Singaporean parents, my Chinese food exposure has been primarily Cantonese-style and Singaporean-style. But having traveled to various regions across China, I've been able to expose myself to some different types of food such as some foods in Haerbin and Chengdu, to name a couple.

It's been good! But I'm looking forward to getting home. We'll stop in Hong Kong for a couple days before taking the long flight back to Toronto.

For those of you that didn't know, I'm currently traveling around Asia. After spending just over a week in Japan, a couple days in Taiwan, we have now been in China for roughly a week.

Currently in Beijing. Things here are fairly different here from Canada, or even Singapore.

My Mandarin has a lot of holes in it, but it's all I have to get around on when we can't call on the help of bilingual hostel staff.

A current feat of success has been booking a domestic flight from Haerbin to Chengdu in Mandarin.

A current feat of failure has been not being able to book a train from Beijing to Haerbin (which I thought would have been easier than booking the flight).

Ordering food is usually facilitated by picture menus... but I'm not sure how that will be once we get out of Beijing. The only items I order without the help of the menu are steamed rice and tea. Oh and "man tou" or other simple things that I know the names for already.

I originally intended to write here frequently about what has been going on during our trip, but it's often difficult to find the time to write. Perhaps evident by the fact that we're already half-way through our trip and this is the first entry I've written

Japan was neat. We saw both smaller towns and also larger cities. Went to a natural hotspring and stayed in a capsule hotel among other things. People say that Japan is really expensive. In a lot of ways though, when converting prices back to Canadian dollars, they actually worked out similarly to the prices we're used to paying for food and what not. But that's what makes it expensive. Imagine eating out for every meal for a week. That becomes expensive very quickly. Eating nice Japanese food is comparably expensive. So we ended up eating cheaper stuff a lot like udon or rice.

I can't believe it, but the university plaza where Mel's Diner caught fire last night. And almost everything is gone.

http://news.therecord.com/news/article/700674.

I had so many good memories at Mel's Diner.

I was originally going to title this post, "The End," but in a lot of ways, it's not the end.

Sure, it's the end of my undergrad career as I know it, but it is the beginning of so much more. For lack of a better term, "the rest of my life."

It's been a bit of a strange last year in Waterloo. In fact my last couple years of undergrad have probably been my most challenging and my most rewarding.

It's all good, and I'm extremely thankful for the time that I've had.

I think, I have few regrets about my undergraduate career.

If there was anything I might have done differently, it would be to be more adventurous in looking for co-op jobs. I would have maybe gotten out of Toronto sooner, but mainly, would have avoided comfortable software jobs earlier on.

That and I would have joined UWCCF in my first year rather than my second.

But having said that, I still have few regrets, if any at all.

It's my last night in Waterloo as an undergrad. And I'm actually sleepy. The house is quiet since I'm the only one left. Everything is pretty uneventful, but I almost prefer it this way. I was never one for crazy partying. Catching up quietly with friends is what I value more.

I've met so many people here in Waterloo. It's been awesome.

It's definitely not the last time I'll be in Waterloo. But, you know what I mean, right? Don't worry, when you reach your last night of 4B, maybe you'll feel the same way.

Recently I have been having a sort of mini musical renaissance. Well, I suppose the music I've been listening to isn't all that old. But by listening to music circa 1999, this music is over 10 years old, which is nearly half of my current lifetime.

In particular, I've been listening the old band Audio Adrenaline again. I own three of their albums, Underdog, Lift and Worldwide, and have the first two in the form of digital audio on my computer.

I started listening to this band in elementary school, and it's perhaps the band that drove some of my music tastes today - primarily alternative rock.

Listening to them 10 years later, I find that I actually do appreciate their music quite a bit still; perhaps even more than before. As far as alternative rock music with Christian lyrics go, I feel they're probably one of the groups that have been more deliberate with their lyrics. Groups like Relient K do have some good lyrics, but they're often more coded, or sometimes just irrelevant all together. Audio Adrenaline's lyrics are often either very prayerful or worshipful. And they're simple. Sometimes when worshiping God, it is just so good to speak out words of praise. It doesn't have to be fancy because it's the heart that worships God.

One of their later songs, Lift does this.

Count them, every one
All of the million things you've done
You are the lord of my life
And I roll them over and over
In my head, in my head
But I don't understand
But I'm glad you're in my life

And I lift you up so high
I forget about the world I'm living in
Lay it at your feet
I'm giving in
My joy inside
I cannot hide
I love to lift you up

Lord I love you
You're a father's hand at night
You're the sunshine in the day
And I long to be with you
All my days
In old age if I'm still hanging around
I'll be found around with you

And I lift you up so high
I love to lift you up

I'm turning 23 years old tomorrow. Yet today was an amazing day already.

Between sushi, ice cream cake (with my favourite kind of ice cream), cookies and vanilla-chocolate-banana-cranberry cupcakes with green gummy bears packaged in a special box, and most importantly, friends, I feel blessed.

I'm not so good with words... so I was rather speechless throughout the entire day.

Thanks to everyone for making the day before my birthday extra special.

There is a worship song by Hillsongs called Rest in You. It is one of their songs that I like a lot, since I feel that it holds a simple truth that is a very useful truth to remember.

The lyrics are short:

Your faithfulness endures always
Where mountains fall and reason fails
And You calm the raging seas
And You calm the storms in me, again

All I know is I find rest in You
All I know is I find rest in You

My heart will praise throughout the night
Where singing seems a sacrifice
Your grace is all I need
Your grace is all I need

This song serves as a reminder to me what I should be doing when things aren't going so well. I know these past few months, I hadn't done these things so well. And a lot of times, I ended up writing up rather depressing blog entries. Part of me just wanted to get it out there, and I didn't really expect anyone to read it. But as it turns out, I later realized that I had a lot more people following my blog who could read 漢字 than I originally thought.

This served as a reminder to me to get back to perhaps what I should be doing.

The other day I was thinking about a lot of things, and when all my housemates stepped out of the house to work on their design projects, I figured, this is a time when I just need to worship. So I pulled out my guitar and worshiped and worshiped.

It was an amazing time to just be real before God. And it also brought to light to me that there are a lot of things in life that I still held before God. Things that I needed to give up to Him and release.

One thing that I've been coming to appreciate more and more is that personal worship and personal reading of the Word. Church gatherings are great, and fellowship events are awesome. But there's something different about being able to read, pray and worship in a small room with the door closed and with no one around you. All pretense is gone. In part, I believe this is why Jesus tells us to go into our rooms and close the door behind us when we pray.

There is a lot of expectation within the church to act a certain way or to participate in service in a certain way. During sharing night, Ken was sharing about how he was lenting musical worship. And how maybe people might look at him weird if he wasn't singing during a time of musical worship, opting to maybe read his Bible instead. And in a lot of ways, I really thought how wrong that is that there actually is an expectation of how we should worship God in the church. Worship is about the heart. So singing without the heart is not worship. You can be completely silent and be completely worshiping. In fact, is that not what Ecclesiastes suggests? "Guard your steps when you go to the house of God. Go near to listen rather than to offer the sacrifice of fools, who do not know what they do wrong. Do not be quick with your mouth, do not be hasty in your heart to utter anything before God. God is in heaven and you are on earth, so let your words be few."

This is why I realized how important personal worship is. Whether it be singing, sitting quietly, reading the Word, praying, interceding, etc. Doing all these things not only corporately, but personally is a really refreshing thing.

God is a God to be revered. And to worship Him out of an attitude of looking good or fitting in is fairly misconstrued. I know I'm sometimes guilty of this. Which is why personal worship and meditation on the Word is a good check for my heart.

The other week at the UWCCF grad dinner, I figured that since it's my last year, I should actually bring a camera this year to snap photos with everyone.

I decided that I should leave my SLD camera (is that what they're calling them now?) at home and opt for a compact point and shoot, my FX520. Given that I wouldn't be the one taking most of the pictures with the camera, I decided to give Panasonic's much touted intelligent auto (iA) mode a run for its money. Essentially trusting the little camera to make all important photographic decisions for the night.

And in some cases, it performed quite well. But in others, it gave some pretty terrible results. In most cases when it did, the person taking the photo noticed and took another one. But there were at least one or two where I only had one shot, and the iA picked the wrong settings for the shot! So disappointed!

All photos were shot indoors in relatively low light (artificial incandescent lighting), so you would expect that the camera should push the aperture as large as possible.

But there's this one picture that I really wish turned out better (group shot with all the Singaporeans/former Singaporeans/Singapore PR). And the camera's choice of parameters baffles me. If I were to take the shot, I would choose wide open aperture (in this case f/2.8) and a slower shutter speed with flash (or just set to slow synchro flash on aperture priority). ISO maybe around 200 to 400. And what did the camera pick? Well ok it got the slow synchro alright. And picked ISO 400, which isn't terrible. But some how, it picked f/4.0. Say what? Why would you pick f/4.0 on a point and shoot in low lighting. You can't even use increasing depth of field, or stopping down to sharpen the image as an excuse here. It's a point and shoot!

I thought maybe it's because the person taking the shot zoomed in, which would reduce the max aperture. But I checked the focal length in the EXIF data as well. And nope, it was at the full wide end, which should have allowed the camera to pick f/2.8!

Bizarre! I used to think that I could just set my cameras on iA anytime I give it to someone to shoot for me. But now I'm not so sure.

I think I would have gotten much more consistent pictures from the night if I set my FX520 on aperture priority with slow synchro flash at a fixed ISO (say 400). Strange!

The weather has been so nice lately. But we all have to study hard.

A lot of people are sometimes shocked to hear that I only speak one language fluently.

It's true, and it's a product of growing up in an English-speaking family in an English-speaking country.

But I think about it for a bit, and I find it funny that although I only speak English fluently, there are certain words or phrases in other languages that I do understand, but don't necessarily remember when/where I learned them. I've just been hearing them from young.

Just note that the spellings I use here, are probably grossly wrong. Remember, I only speak, read and write English! So I just sound it out when I write...

For example, if says they want to jalan jalan, I'll know they'll want to go for a walk. Or if someone tedo already, then I'll know they've already gone to sleep.

If someone says they want to 吃 (in Hokkien dialect), I'll know they want to eat.

Other words such as lobang, etc also have some kind of connotation in my mind, although maybe I couldn't use it in a sentence or translate it directly for you. Or was that even the word? I don't know it, but I understand it conceptually every time I hear it mixed with an English sentence.

Certain words I understand but don't always think of an English translation off-hand. Like, "don't anyhow hantam ah!"

Same with, "ai ya, siang siang" or "ai yo, so turok leh"

And of course there's always "eat until gelak" or "wah, this soup so kyam!"

And there's always things like kecil or besar that I've also come to associate with describing how small or big someone is - and I always know it in reference to either me, or other kids around me. From my childhood.

But here's the thing! It's so useless! If you spoke to me completely in Bahasa Melayu, I'd be lost.

When I think about it, I find it pretty funny. And I can almost see that I had the potential to speak to languages growing up. I just didn't.

If only I spent more time with the older Nyonya aunties at church, maybe I'd be able to speak 1.5 languages haha!

There was an occasion once a while back where in talking with friends without technical background that the concept of imaginary numbers came up. I don't remember the context of it, but I remember that in commenting about the usefulness of imaginary numbers, I mentioned something to the effect that, "they make the world go round."

A lot of times when people question the usefulness of engineering, I put forth the consideration that practically everything around them is engineered. Sure it is easy to point out obvious products of engineering such as planes, cars, space shuttles, etc. But if you stop to think a little bit more, you'll realize that the shirt you're wearing was manufactured in a facility that had machinery to produce the fabrics, perform silk-screening, etc. The jewelery you are wearing is made of precious metals that had to be mined using engineering know-how for both tools and safe tunneling. The sandwich that you ate for lunch had bread that was produced in a bakery that used an oven that was specially designed to bake your bread in a semi-efficient manner. The list goes on.

In modern society, practically every industry hinges on or makes use of engineered solutions.

The very fact that you are capable of reading my post right now is thanks to the efforts of countless electrical, civil, mechanical, computer, environmental, chemical and systems engineers. (No the internet wasn't just built by comp-sci people - think of the infrastructure).

Yet amongst all of this engineered "stuff," I was humbly brought to Palm Sunday. I attended Elevation this past Sunday, and for the worship service, they had kids pass out palm branches. As I sat holding the palm branch, I store at it for a bit. And suddenly appreciated the beauty of this simple plant. I was holding something that wasn't engineered. Sure the bio-engineer and chemical engineer might argue that we now have the ability to breed plants, modify their genetics, etc. But that's exactly what it is - modifying.

We cannot create nature or life. And despite all of our advanced engineering know how, we would still die if we were not already provided with the things we need to live. If we had no water, could the chemical engineer synthesize enough H₂O for the planet to survive? But what if the chemical engineer didn't have 2 H's and an O? Could the physicist put enough electrons, neutrons and protons together to make enough H's and O's for the chemist?

Similarly, could the civil engineer build a bridge if not already given concrete for compression and steel rods for tension? Could the concrete and steel be made without the raw materials found within the earth?

Could the electrical engineer connect your phone call through a cellular network without the electromagnetic spectrum?

Everything is built upon the life already given to us using the creativity already given to us.

And so I appreciated the plant for what it is. A product of something that I could not engineer.

Then the Lord answered Job out of the storm. He said:

"Who is this that darkens my counsel
     with words without knowledge?
Brace yourself like a man;
     I will question you,
     and you shall answer me.

"Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation?
     Tell me, if you understand.
Who marked off its dimension? Surely, you know
     Who stretched a measuring line across it?
On what were its footings set,
     or who laid its cornerstone -
while the morning stars sang together
     and all the angels shouted for joy?

"Who shut up the sea behind the doors
     when it burst forth from the womb,
when I made the clouds its garment
     and wrapped it in the thick darkness,
when I fixed limits for it
     and set its doors and bars in place,
when I said, 'This far you may come and no farther;
     here is where your proud waves halt'?

...

"What is the way to the abode of light?
     And where does darkness reside?
Can you take them to their places?
     Do you know the paths to their dwellings?
Surely you know, for you were already born!
     You have lived so many years!"

...

The Job replied to the Lord:

"I know that you can do all things;
     no plan of yours can be thwarted.
You asked, 'Who is this that obscures my counsel without knowledge?'
     Surely I spoke of things I did not understand,
     things too wonderful for me to know.

"You said, 'Listen now, and I will speak;
     I will question you
     and you shall answer me.'
My ears have heard of you
     but now my eyes have seen you.
Therefore I despise myself
     and repent in dust and ashes."

Friday night was my last official UWCCF sharing night. In addition, being the Winter term, the next year's committee was announced and commissioned.

When watching the new committee gather in the centre of the room as we prayed for them, one new difference struck me. All of the new committee members were younger than me. Some of them, I remember as frosh. I've always been used to seeing committee as being first older than me, then my age.

It was a really neat thing, when I thought about it. This is the new generation.

By no means exceptional. But by all means indicative that we are reaching the end.

I'm becoming super irritable these days. But we're nearly there.

In computing, marking a variable as volatile indicates to the compiler that it should not assume that the state of the variable follows the conventionally assumed scope it appears in. It is subject to change without notice regardless of scope.

In my experience so far, an example of this might be when you are developing in C at a lower level. For example, if your program has an interrupt service routine (ISR) that handles external interrupts, this routine might need to update the states of variables in the main program. So you should declare these variables as volatile, because they may be modified outside the conventional scope of the program. I.e. the ISR may run at any time and update variables in your main program regardless of the fact that in conventional sequential programs, the state of those variables should be preserved by scope.

But you cannot know for sure what the ISR may end up doing to the main program.

The effects of the changing a variable outside of scope cannot be predicted. Thus you must declare those variables as volatile so that the compiler doesn't make assumptions about the scope of those variables in its optimizations.

Today felt like a volatile day. Certain things affected me that probably shouldn't have. But you know that the ISR means well. And the programmer should ensure that the main routine gives the ISR a benefit of a doubt.

What does it taste like? I'm not sure. I didn't drink it after taking a photo of it.