This page republishes entries from my personal blog.
- Towards my 4-hour workweek dream
The 4-Hour workweek by Timothy FerrissStatus report from this week:Number of meetings I am in: 23
Percentage of time in meetings: 74.2% (26 out of 35 hours. This has to be stopped!)Number of projects I am in: 3 (130% of my time, on paper. The reality? I don't want to know.)
Number of PhD students I am supervising: 7 (20% of my time: meetings and commenting on papers/reports)
Number of undergraduate thesis students I am supervising: 7 (10% of my time.)
Number of courses I am teaching: 1 (20% of my time)
Number of miscellaneous things: don't want to think about (20% of my time: paper reviews, standardization body..)Total time needed: 80 hour.Total time desired: 4 hour. ("But I won't lose no sleep on that, 'Cause I've got a plan" - not a suicidal reference. :-)).
- Research is a game, by definition. Thus my work is playing games all day, by definition (but not fun).
Just finished an interesting book on game design. The book has little to do with details in game programming or mechanics design but has everything to do with what makes a good game tick.
The Art of Game Design by Jesse Schell.
It provides some interesting definitions. I never thought about them deeply (except for pleasure versus enjoyment popularized by the best-selling book on the subject).
- Fun is pleasure with surprises.
- Play is a manipulation that satisfies curiosity.
- A good toy is an object that is fun to play with.
- A game is a problem solving activity , approached with a playful attitude.
- more cocky than an actuary
I was at the annual presidential dinner of Institute of Actuaries of Australia last night, performing my hubby-of-an-actuary duty and enjoying the consequence of sitting next to a grumpy old mathematician.
After a flurry of math/Latin quizzes (which made me blush), a joint attack on Australia's tertiary education (which made me doubt my career) and a dose of Fermat's last theorem (which made my head spin).... he said "You know, mathematician is God, actuary is Jesus." Well, it is certainly true for him because he is the father of an actuary.
- One more thing: iPhone can kill Medusa
Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief may be an awful movie but it tells the truth:
1. Even the reflective cover of an iPhone (not mentioning the apps) can save our hero.2. Looking at an iPhone too attentively can get your head cut off, even for the powerful Medusa. (Perhaps she was trapped in Steve Job's reality distortion field).
- As an ISO guy, I would like to bring your attention to ISO 3103
As a delegate to ISO-IEC/JTC1/SC7/WG42 (a very rewarding name), it is my duty to promote all important ISO standards. :-)
"ISO 3103 is a standard published by the International Organization for Standardization (commonly referred to as ISO), specifying a standardized method for brewing tea." This important work won the1999 Ig Nobel Prize. You can buy the standard from the ISO site for just about 4500 AUD. For such an important matter, it is not surprising that a competing standard was developed by Royal Society of Chemistry in 2003. This standard appears to be more comprehensive and end-user oriented. The following paragraph attests to this."to gain optimum ambience for enjoyment of tea aim to achieve a seated drinking position in a favored home spot where quietness and calm will elevate the moment to a special dimension. For best results carry a heavy bag of shopping – of walk the dog – in cold, driving rain for at least half an hour beforehand. This will make the tea taste out of this world."Anyway, as a lover of gadgets, this is what I really want.
- I was never a"car guy"until..
I was never a car guy ... but somehow I ended up in a "green car" project (don't ask me how and what it is about. I don't know..) or maybe it is about one of the two followings: :-)
Anyway, after being dangerously exposed to the latest hybrid/electric car technologies, I am very glad I am still not a car guy. There is no "until".... so far.
- is mindlessly eating healthy, except....
Reading behavioral economics/psychology over the years, I have realized that a behavior change is mostly about "tricking" (rather than consciously making) yourself into doing something good. "Mindless Eating" (from Cornell University consumer behavior professor Brian Wansink) is a "diet" book that contains a few such tricks with some scientific evidence....and I am practicing them by consciously tricking myself unconsciously... :-)
All good so far except that my wife's coworker's roommate is doing a full pastry course at TAFE. And his assignment (one different cake every day) somehow finds its way into my mouth day after day despite the large degree of separation.... I was just informed that tonight is Opera Cake.
- drooling over this iPad killer....
- Pixel QI screen: back-light off (automatically) under bright sunlight; much longer battery life; reduced eye strain on ebook reading
- Back-side touchpad: Apple has a few patents on back-side touch but hasn't incorporated into any of their products. I think it not only solves the finger blocking/accuracy problems, it also alleviates the problem of having one hand holding a rather heavy tablet. Now you can navigate and click with both hands holding a device.
- And more: rotatable camera, HDMI output, ambient light sensor, AGPS...
- "If human beings don't keep twittering/buzzing, their brains start working!"
I have been listening to the audio book version of the hilarious "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe" in the past few days. I believe the following was Douglas Adams' take on social media.. :-)
"It is worth repeating at this point the theories that Ford had come up with, on his first encounter with human beings, to account for their peculiar habit of continually stating and restating the very, very obvious, as in "It's a nice day," or "You're very tall," or "So this is it, we're going to die". His first theory was that if human beings didn't keep exercising their lips, their mouths probably seized up. After a few months of observation he had come up with a second theory, which was this - "If human beings don't keep exercising their lips, their brains start working". In fact, this second theory is more literally true of the Belcerebon people of Kakrafoon. The Belcerebon people used to cause great resentment and insecurity amongst neighboring races by being one of the most enlightened, accomplished, and above all quiet civilizations in the Galaxy. As a punishment for this behavior, which was held to be offensively self righteous and provocative, a Galactic Tribunal inflicted on them that most cruel of all social diseases, telepathy. Consequently, in order to prevent themselves broadcasting every slightest thought that crosses their minds to anyone within a five mile radius, they now have to talk very loudly and continuously about the weather, their little aches and pains, the match this afternoon and what a noisy place Kakrafoon has suddenly become."
- dragged himself through 10km yesterday .. barely meeting the goal of 50km in 2 weeks...:-)
So my official "excuse" to get a Nike+ sensor for my iPod Touch was to run and lose some weight (meh.. my new year's boring resolution..)
The average new year's resolution lasts for 3 days, which can be attested by our lunch group's "trying-new-restaurants" resolution lasting exactly two days (come on, guys!). My running resolution has so far lasted for 2 weeks (starting middle Jan after returning from my holiday). not too bad. :-) NikeRunning has a level system [1] and my next goal is to reach 250km in another 8 weeks. I am expecting some challenges along the way.... 
[1] Yellow (0-49 KM), Orange (50-249 KM), Green (250-999 KM), Blue (1,000-2,499 KM), Purple (2,500-4,999 KM) and Black (5000+ KM).
- iPod Touch maxi
At 6am (2pm EST) , I reached for my iPod Touch in my dreamy mode..... only to see another giant iPod Touch being announced.
The iPad is slightly underwhelming because there weren't any surprises. For god's sake, it's God's last act. :-) Like: run all iPhone apps plus a few purposely designed apps (e.g. iWorks); very fast (as I heard); new eBook store and publisher deals (what about magazines?)
Don't like: Thick borders around the screen, no camera, still no multi-tasking, still no flash, not a wide-screen (also the rather square form).
- just gave a presentation about the end of the world
It was my turn to give a mini presentation after the morning tea. I chose the title "Countdown to 2012: 2010 'Hot' Trends".
The first slide is about the end point by 2012:
Ok. The talk was not about the end of the world in 2012 and "hot" trends as in climate change. It was much more boring: 2010 technology trends in cloud computing and business process management. :-) And by 2012, we need not just 2 monkeys but "Twelve Monkeys" as the size of the board of directors dictates.
- is watching Australian Open.... from 715909 meter away
Couldn't resist trying out IBM's augmented reality app (IBM Seer) for
Australian Open on my Android. Seeing through the wall of my laundry,
Federa vs. Hewitt is happening only 715909 meters away, :-) There are
also plenty toilets indicated around the court.
- just spent 10 seconds (out of two years in my life) staring out of a window
New Scientist must have a good reason to recommend an "afterlife" book written by a neuroscientist. :-)
Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman Quite a few of the "possibilities" are hilarious (and thought-provoking).
- In your afterlife, you relive all your experiences but this time with the events that share a quality grouped together: two years of boredom staring out of a window, two months of driving the street in front of your house, sleep for thirty years, five months of flipping through magazines while sitting on a toilet, without taking any shower before you taking a 270-day one, six weeks waiting for a green light, seven hours of vomiting, 6 days of clipping your nails, eighteen days of staring into your refrigerator..... (All this does put a new perspective on my daily life.)
- Reincarnation into another species of your choice. Sadly, in the process of turning into a relaxing and handsome horse of your choice, you forgot your experiences of being a human. Without comparison, it makes the new horse experience rather pointless. Even worse, with a horse brain, you won't choose to spend your next life as human ever again. The sliding down of the intelligence ladder is irreversible.
- You die in two-stages. You have always lived in your own head and don't quite know the true you as seen by other people. So in the first stage, your images which exist in other people's head are collected, pooled an unified. The mirror is then held up in front of you and you see yourself clearly for the first time. And that is what finally kills you.
- An interesting day in Canberra (no oxymoron or pun intended) ;-)
Went to Canberra for "The Masterpieces from Paris" exhibition.
- I've never seen so many people in NGA, perhaps more the Louvre in terms of density!
- Had to have a meal in the crowded NGA cafe. Who was it that said "food in museums is on the same level with art in restaurants"?
- Is Canberra this small? We bumped into an old friend of ours in downtown. He is doing a PhD on swordsmanship history of Korea/Japan/China at ANU after spending 2 years on a 3000-people island in Japan. Can life and PhD also be this fun?
- Ultrarealism CGI
Went to see Avatar (2009) being curious about what James Cameron would bring us after 12 years and the CGI of course. Overall, I like it and thought the CGI was impressive and on a whole new level, until I was pointed to this - ultra-realism CGI :-)
Every "frame" is rendered in 1.5-2 hours on a top end Intel Due Core.According to my back-of-the-envelope calculation, a one-time rendering of a 1.5 hour movie perhaps needs 40 years on a single machine. But if you put it in the cloud, it only costs about 150k USD. Negligible in movie production I suppose? I know very little about CGI rendering so maybe the numbers are totally wrong.
- The hell has frozen over!
I got the "George Clooney meets John Malkovicn in Heaven" machine as an early Christmas gift.
After surveying all sorts of Internet fights over it and employing my confirmation-bias skills, I am now 100% in love with the machine and I am not ashamed of owning one. :-) Quality: Very decent and "consistent" espresso quality (perhaps better than the quality produced by an average person using a thousand-dollar machine) Cost: At less than 300 AUD, even with the expensive capsules, my calculation shows it is still economical in the first 5 years compared to a 1xxx$ manual machine.Laziness factor: priceless. Coffeegeek score: 8.51
Don't argue with me!
- A"lovely"day that ended in Windows 7
Now I am running a new Windows 7 on a fully formatted/cleaned disk with all antivirus software reporting fine ..BUT am I in Matrix wrapped by a hypervisor virus?? (An early install did show some strange sign). The good thing is that Windows 7 (Aero enabled) runs fast and blissfully on my Acer AOD 150 netbook, which was not fully expected.
Yesterday, I did the most horrible thing in the universe: I couldn't resist the temptation to run a dubious exe file after my beloved AVG antivirus software assured me its safety. And this was what happened:
* AVG detects four viruses. (OS: XP)
* Quarantine! Move to the vault! Kill them all... Now!! I pressed the button calmly... with my trembling hand.
* 10 seconds later, AVG detects 20+ viruses.
* The stroll bar of the detected virus list is becoming smaller and smaller quickly as more and more viruses are spawn. AVG now detects hundreds of viruses. AVG stops responding.
* The virus uninstalls AVG, completely.
* The virus blocks all anti-virus websites but gleefully allowing your access to the rest of the Internet. The virus modifies my host file.
* My beloved real time folder sync software syncs some viruses to my other computers (thankfully, didn't execute them!)
- We are heading for Permutation City
Amazon just introduced bidding for cloud computing capacities. I will refrain myself from joking about all the possible derivative products, bubbles, computing mortgage and the inevitable GCC (Global Computing Crisis). :-) But it does remind me of an interesting sci-fi book.
"The plot of Permutation City follows the lives of several people in a near future reality where the Earth is ravaged by the effects of climate change, the economy and culture are largely globalised (the most commonly used denomination of currency is the ecu, from the word ecumen, a Greek root meaning 'the inhabited world'), and civilisation has accumulated vast amounts of ubiquitous computing power and memory which is distributed internationally and is traded in a public market called the QIPS Exchange (QIPS from MIPS, where the Q is Quadrillions)." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City