Buzz buzz. Sin City is almost here! *Squeals*
Monthly Archive for March, 2005
One of my most valuable experiences in high school at Woburn was participating in the FIRST Robotics competition. All those late nights machining, brainstorming, formed a good excuse to ignore my classes. Travelling to Michigan and Florida to compete was really Chris’ most energetic. And let’s not forget Team SYD.
Woburn was there at the inaugural Waterloo Regional where I helped Ian as a referee for this year’s game, Triple Play. All these great memories rushed back to me, of my days in high school when things were simpler and a lot more fun. Sometimes I think that I can’t wait to graduate, get back to Toronto, so I can get back to mentoring at Woburn. They have unparalleled spirit for robotics.
Woburn has a great robot this year, one of their three awards at the Regional were for innovative design, but they lost in a heartbreaker during the playoffs where they were on the 3rd seeded team. The disappointment is still crushing.
The FIRST Robotics competition started in 1992 with 28 teams and has since grown to over 900 teams participating this year, and I’m quite frequently amazed as to how successful it’s been in promoting young involvement in science and engineering. It’s probably why I’m in engineering now. It’s weird though, robotics is everything I love about engineering. It’s too bad I kinda hate everything else…
We lost our playoff game. The basketball season is over.
It was a day that couldn’t have gone any smoother. It was a day that could only have happened in Toronto.
I woke up at 830 am (!!), and actually ate breakfast with fresh fruit and juice. I don’t even try to think of the last time I had breakfast. Out of the house within the hour, I hopped on the bus. I just realize how much I miss the TTC. I had time to chill, listen to some tunes, and read the New York Time Magazine, dated my birthday, 2005. The ride downtown was without incident, and nicely calming.
Mental note: invest in some studio monitors or noise cancelling headphones. The subway is too noisy to achieve zen without them.
First stop was Cafe La Gaffe on Baldwin. It’s a cosy little restaurant that serves a delicious brunch. Their egg sandwich makes my tongue taste in disbelief I ever went to Mel’s for breakfast. My grilled salmon sandwich was among the best fish sandwiches I’ve ever had. Thanks for the Protip Sandra!
The AGO has this fun exhibit running until April. Massive Change: The Future of Global Design. By Bruce Mau Design (created AGO, Roots and Indigo logos), poses questions about the future of large-scale global change. Basically a highly stylized presentation of the benefits of sustainability and research in energy, materials, foods, genetics, urban planning and visualizations of our planet, and everything on it. Not too much new for me, but it was enjoyable, and an exhibit that gets you excited about design.
I would have loved to spend twice as long at the AGO, breathe in a little more Massive Change and reintroduce myself with the permanent collection, but my tickets to Wicked had a 2 pm curtain. Wicked is a highly successful Broadway musical, brought up to Toronto for a limited engagement. It was showing when I was in NYC in the summer but tickets were hard to come by. So when tickets went on sale for today’s show back in November, I snatched them up. It’s the story of the life and times of the friendship between Glinda, the Good Witch and the Wicked Witch of the West, from the Wizard of Oz. I don’t want to spoil it for anyone, because it’s full of surprises, and it really makes you fall in love again with the original. The story was engaging though the musical numbers seemed to lack Broadway polish. Really fun nevertheless.
And how can you end a perfect day without some good ol’ fashioned shoppang! The Eaton Centre was too close to pass by. It’s a long time friend I hadn’t seen in a while. Checked out the new H&M, got a few new half-outfits, dropped half a bill on some new tunes and the mall closed with Chris very happy.
But that wasn’t enough for me. More! I’m needy like that. Finally filled that McNugget craving I’ve had for weeks, and on the way back to Waterloo I got caught up with four episodes of 24. Got home with an hour left in the day and franky I’m exhausted.
Waterloo is okay, but days like today make me want to never leave Toronto. It was my perfect day. Nothing’s standing in my way.
I came across this cool page last week. It’s a list of articles from around the web about autism, Asperger’s Syndrome and the related social detachment of engineers and programmers. Skim the various excerpts, and something interesting happens.
Autism is considered a neurodevelopmental disorder that causes marked problems with social relatedness, communication, interest, and behavior (wikipedia).
A child with autism is 2.5 times more likely to have an engineer as a father (autism is much more prevalent in males). In my daily travels, I interact with a lot of students at Waterloo that have little or no social skills, but are likely great programmers and dedicated workers. I wonder if these great minds had autism when they were young?
This quote caught me off guard:
My hypothesis is that the ‘abnormal’ condition known as Asperger’s syndrome is remarkably similar to the ‘normal’ functioning of an engineer’s mind.
I know I’ve said in the past that kids identified as “gifted” when they’re young are also more likely to have ADD or autism. It’s a little mind-boggling that if you believe in the IQ scale, that the top and bottom actually have quite a bit in common. Maybe more so than the general population… hrm…
Haha, ok, a picture with Mu, Will, Ken and I actually has nothing to do with this post. You figured I was trying to say something didn’t you?
My studentlifecentre.com is adjusting its focus to UW student life and the various signage around campus (posters, displays, billboards…).
It’s all done. That long weekend has come and gone and after all the ups and downs, spoilers and surprises I’ve finally turned 23… and it was good.
It’s hard and stressful to plan a surprise present for someone, and I imagine it’s even harder to keep me completely out of the loop. There were obviously things a brewing for a few weeks now, and I had my suspicions over what the Waterloo peeps had going, but I’m glad to say that I definately didn’t expect something so amazing.
To everyone that helped create my birthday-wish video and personalized comic book, Thank you. You’re all great and quite sweet. And everything that everyone did was really unbelieveable. Thanks to everyone to wished me a happy birthday also. I heard from a lot of faces this weekend. Happiness ensued.
As promised, here’s the Magnum Tan comic book, A Crimson Toe Production and the birthday wish video. Sorry if you don’t get the flood of inside jokes.
Magnum Tan - The comic book
Forest Hump - Apparently my favorite adult video (~22mb).
[UPDATE] - The sound doesn’t work on this file… recompiling and will upload later.
The whole Birthday Hoopla was put together by Winky a truly genuine person who I’ve known for just a year but has become my closest and most trusted friend. I owe a lot of thanks to her. This project wasn’t without its hiccups. You should hear the commentary on this one.
Did you know? This whole thing came about from a dream Winky had. She envisioned the whole thing in her sleep, and somehow remembered enough about it to make it materialize. As project manager, she brought all my lazy friends together to create something fantastic. Stella, Hitoshi and CJ spent way too many hours on me and everyone’s effort is touching. Thanks again.
And oh! The outtakes must be uploaded!
Now if I can only decide on what I should buy myself to celebrate…
hiyo.org is back with a relaunch after a three week hiatus.
After a night of restlessness, hiyo.org is back in its full glory. New layout, new posts can be made, and all the archived goodness is uploaded from backups.
Some stats: hiyo.org was offline since February 16th until March 3rd. Since last July (the last hiyo outage prompting server switch), there have been over 18000 comment spams which have been blocked or moderated on some 900 posts. Hopefully the comments won’t destroy hiyo.org.
If it keeps up, we’ll have to switch to a login system to post on hiyo.org. Now I can finally have time to post to _my_ weblogs.
This post was supposed to start with an interview with the man himself, but he’s not replying to my ICQs asking about ugly strippers and his auditions for the cast of the next season of Sex, Toys and Chocolate.
Simon and I started hiyo.org ages ago. The domain name was registered on June 25, 2000. It was probably a big ball of crap back then, and somehow we have an established readerbase now. We’ve come a long way since having to publish our Monkeyville: Adventures of a Monkey.
hiyo.org has been offline for about a month now (and down a few months every now and then each year). Blame it on webhosts who you pay $10 a year to host a site. Once they get your money, they don’t really care what happens to you after that.
A little more than three months from hiyo.org’s Five Year Anniversary. It seems as something that Simon and I never really took all that seriously has somehow become carved into the lives of more people than we had ever expected. People love and miss hiyo.org. We’re happy to announce hiyo.org will soon relaunch soon under a new moniker:
hiyo.org media network - name under construction.
This time it won’t just be a list of links to interlog and sympatico webspaces, or just half a dozen sloppily grouped blogs. It’ll be a dozen sloppy blogs! Hurray for evolution!
The catch? hiyo.org will be starting fresh. Since I have to spend a few weeks setting everything up, might as well start with a clean slate. Be with us though the whole re-birth of hiyo.org (and friends).
And extra cool points: We’re (I’m) spending a ton more money on hosting to get more options, server space, bandwidth, etc so we can bring you the full potential of hiyo.org without limitations. And bonus! We can now host your website AND domain under the hiyo.org network umbrella.
Domain names start at $5 USD a year, and (heavily subsidized) hosting is just $1 a month. Join on and be part of the hiyo.org family through the next five years.
January: 11 uniques per day.
February: 22 per day.
March (so far): 45
But 100 on February 14th? I’m clueless… Was I supposed to do something spectacular? I don’t think I promised some huge V-day extravaganza…
okay, downtime makes me cry. i just bought my 5th webhost account. pending dns propagation and upload speed, hiyo.org will be up in the next day or so.