So, Georgie and I have been together for four years today. To celebrate, we went to a small restaurant called 168 Degrees Modern Cuisine.
The place was airy, but quite homely at the same time. It was quite pleasant; we ordered some spring roll/crepe hybrids, and salmon and chicken mains. The salmon came as a grilled fillet with some nice thick chips and salad, and the chicken (a whole chicken!) came with crisped-up skin, some warm, modified oyster sauce and some rice and vegetables. It was extremely filling; we then chased it down with a scoop of green tea ice cream, and a complimentary mint. The total came to a shade less than $60, which was quite good for a restaurant of this standard. We definitely recommend this place, hoho.
After dinner we went to the next suburb to pick up Georgie’s brother. While we waited for him to finish a game of pool with his friends, we went into a nearby shopping centre and decided to climb the escalator on the descending side for fun.
After making it to the top, we realized someone was slow-clapping us from the other side; there was a guy in a blue shirt, glaring at us and waving his arms across his chest like we had just parked a tank on top of his children. I waved back, thinking he was being friendly, and he did it again.
It slowly dawned to me (much faster to Georgie) that he didn’t want us doing that, despite the fact nobody was even near the escalator at the time. We wouldn’t have done it otherwise. He glared at me the whole way out; I like to think that inside we had sated his lust for power, at least for the moment.
The internship job is great; developing a way to estimate the orientation of a shape based on the position of its corners has been very interesting to me. Machine vision is not part of my degree, but I do not know why it shouldn’t be when OpenCV makes it so accessible. I mean, we learnt assembly code for two months last year, damnit. Surely this is more relevant.
On another note, I recently bought a pair of AudioTechnica ANC7b headphones from an online store in Australia that gives free shipping to locals. Not bad at all; the headphones sound amazing (albeit pricey) and really very comfortable. Much better than the cheaper Sennheisers I had for the last year or so.
Sorry for everyone who leaves comments; I will return them when I can. D:
Well, it’s been a mediocre Christmas. It isn’t really a big deal here; only two houses in my street put up lights, and one of them was just a single chain along his gutter. The other was a bit more elegant, so don’t worry. We’re not total heathens on my block.
In the aftermath of Christmas in the horrible shopping spree, my dad and I went to a large homewares store in a major shopping centre to get a new Teflon pan. We drove around and around, but there were so many cars waiting eventually I turned off the engine, pulled out the keys and my dad went in to buy the pan himself. I was starting to doze off when a car near me vacated his space, and around half a minute later a man drives into it. As he got out of his car, he gave me a cocky smirk, and I couldn’t help but laugh. Situations like this tickle my God complex a little, where you feel you have a deeper understanding of a scene than others, and are more in touch with the nature of the universe. I couldn’t help but indulge. Hah.
Several weeks ago I bought a small USB microscope from DealExtreme; I frequently shop there for cheap, dodgy stuff. Like vernier calipers with one end of the caliper chipped off; nice one there. The microscope was a pleasant surprise; it worked out of the box with a basic OpenCV camera driver I had knocked together during when I was being assessed for the internship. I had bought it with the intention of checking knife edges; with adjustable focus and built-in, dimmable LEDs, it’s quite good for up-close stuff.
I’m into knives quite a great deal. I enjoy the way they fit in my hand, the sharp crisp snap when you open it, and the effortless way a properly cared for knife will handle things you use it for. I’ve always enjoyed slowly sharpening a knife freehand, I find it helps me relax quite a great deal and it clears my head. The microscope reveals burrs and tiny flat spots on the blade, which I can then polish out further with fine grit-papers.
Another reason I had bought it was to compare what a good factory edge (from a decent company, like Benchmade or Spyderco) looks like compared to something I had done freehand. It will help me improve, I hope, although I’m rather happy with my level of skill so far from what I’ve seen on the scope. I keep a mini Griptilian as a reference knife for comparisons; I think the handle design, blade shape and lock mechanism work together brilliantly and individually too. Although not exactly costly, I find it simply too…good to use (although I’m sure it can withstand anything I throw at it) and instead I use a Spyderco for normal tasks as I’m not afraid to get it wet or grimy, due to the Griptilian’s relatively exposed (and more elaborate) mechanism.
In other news, Georgie and I went to see Bob Evans recently. If you’re reading this you’ve probably read her blog covering it in much better detail, but I must admit it was fun. What she didn’t tell you was that I was reluctant to go until around two days before, but really. I had a great time and I’m glad I went; it was my sort of ideal event setting (I even shook his hand! haha).
I also got a half-year internship at a robotics development lab in my university, where I will be working on vision software for an automated healthcare robot. The software packages are still a bit new to me and I’m a tad rough around the edges, but we’re getting a feel of each other, hoho.
If you made it this far, I wish you a happy New Year. I just hope it’s not the last one, eh. To be honest the blog title has some relevance to the carpark thing earlier, but it mainly came from my dad, who had to write a poem in primary school and he started it off with ‘a man in a pan…’
So, November drew to a close and my holidays began. My exams were quite good, but with three on three consecutive days I was quite tired come the final; on a Saturday afternoon. It was the one I hadn’t been looking forward to, but I did okay, as far as relative personal satisfaction went. It’s up to the markers now, I suppose.
I kicked off my holiday by installing Skyrim; I’d been looking forward to it for ages and it was everything I had wanted and expected, except for a few minor bugs which I’m sure will be ironed out in time, as is the case with most Bethesda products.
The game itself is brilliantly immersive; I won’t go into a review of it, as there are enough out there that you could tell anyone all about the game without playing a second of it yourself. But it’s one of the few games that really draws you into the experience of your avatar such that you lose track of time with ease.
Whether you’re arranging books on your shelf in your house, beating an old widow to death in her own bed (after assassinating her daughter), or sneaking up to a fish stand hoping to pinch some salmon, the sheer quantity of things you can do overrides the mundane nature of some of the activities. But you still end up enjoying them!
I also got a car. It’s a hand-me-down from my aunt, and the car is as old as I am. I’m not personally a religious person, but I try to be good. I see many fake religious people everywhere that use their ‘faith’ as an excuse to pardon themselves for their own flaws. My aunt and her family are some of the very small group of people who I can say have been touched by their faith in a deity, if there is one. I’m not just saying this because of the car; they have always treated me very well no matter what state of mood I am in.
Next Sunday, I am going to see Explosions in the Sky with Georgie (the band’s name ends at Sky). The week after, some dude named Bob Evans. If he’s any good, let me know. I sort of got Shanghai’d into seeing it, to prevent Georgie from going to a super-car race. But she doesn’t know that.
Explosions is a string quartet (I think there are four of them..) hailing from Texas. I stumbled upon one of their tracks, Have you passed through this night? and it is fantastic; should be easy to find on Youtube if you want a listen. It’s quite long, but soothing and intense at the same time which is amazing.
So, I’m back at university. Had a great break, and I guess it will be about time I returned to a more productive and engaging routine. Due to clashes with my timetable since first year, I am now doing a programming subject two years too late with some friends who happen to be in the same jam. The vast majority of students in the first lecture (and probably the last I’ll be attending for this subject) were in first year, and for most it was their first class ever.
I don’t mean to criticize, but I think people in late high school/university underestimate their basic human rights. Halfway through the lecture, a student raises his hand and asks if he can go to the toilet, to the surprise of the lecturer and everyone else. Even in high school, I mainly asked if I could use the bathroom out of politeness only. I mean, how many times have you been refused the right to pee? It’s ridiculous when people just walk out of the room, bags and all around this guy and he still feels the need to ask for his permission to drain his bladder.
On another note, my timetable for this half of the year is terrible. Although I get a three day weekend and Wednesdays off which is sweet, on two other days I have gaps at least four hours long. In that time I’d get hungry (duh) and food out there is expensive.
I’ve been home alone for much of today, and out of boredom I decided to resurrect a little project that I had all but given up on when I first started university and discovered the horrors of quadruple lunch hour. It’s…
Homemade Oat Thing!
I am hesitant to call it either a loaf or a bar, because it’s somewhat in between. Also, as I’m using quick oats I guess a more correct term would be ‘Baked Porridge’.
I decided to test this out using a small ceramic dish in our toaster oven; I half filled it with oats, tossed in some almonds and a tablespoon of honey, and finally added enough water to make it all mix. I added a bit too much water, but here it is.
It actually tastes pretty decent, and is quite filling which would make it a good long-day snack. It’s quite moist, a feature I find desirable yet lacking in almost every store-bought muesli bar I’ve had. I’d imagine it stores well in the fridge too; I think it’s time for a larger scale test soon. :3
So, as you may or may not have heard, I’ve been in Hong Kong for the last week. For the past seven the cityscape seen in Blade Runner.
Where huge apples are in abundance.
I’m staying in an 18th-storey apartment with my dad; the whole apartment is smaller than our kitchen in our house back in Sydney. The shower cubicle is barely larger than our bathmat, and the first few times I used it I bumped into pretty much every surface in the damn thing. Occasionally I still do.
For size comparison. No, my feet aren't abnormally big.
I have taken plenty of photos, but I’m only uploading the ones that are even remotely interesting. My skills as a photographer are pretty far below par; even the shots I took after climbing The Peak look like I just took them from some dude’s balcony.
Ah, jeez.
If there’s one thing I can describe without photos, it’s the food. Where back in Australia a Big Mac would set you back a good $7 (if memory serves. It probably doesn’t; I avoid McDonalds back home because of the insanely crappy value for money) here it’d only cost you a measly $2. Everything edible is more or less set back by a similar proportion, and there are so many damn new things I have never even tried.
A leg of roast goose. Note my dead eyes, blinded by the tastiness.
Oh, and Pizza Hut is a pretty big freakin’ deal over here.
Cheesy pasta, and stuffed crust. They eat like kings.
Our two dishes took 25 minutes to arrive and was served by some dude who was dressed like an actual waiter, not some 15 year old kid who probably shat in your mushrooms.
Another thing we tried was ‘dar bien lo’; you pick a soup which arrives above a burner. You cook meats, veges and noodles in it, and eat the stuff and then drink your soup. I’ve had it many times at home, but in a restaurant is quite an interesting experience. While both my Dad and I failed to photograph this, we saw some tourists that were rather stumped by the whole procedure, and were cautiously trying to roast their meat with their chopsticks above the burners. We were properly getting into it by the time they realised what the soup was actually for.
A great thing about this city is the Octopus system; it’s a prepaid card you can buy and top up at virtually any convenience store, and then just swipe by a reader to pay at most stores, and all modes of public transport. It even works through your wallet!
Other places I went to was the Promenade where many Chinese actors had left cement handprints (Jackie Chan’s looked far more enthusiastic than anyone else’s), Sai Kung fishing village (fishing no longer allowed), and the famous Ap Liu electronics market, which I will soon return to to buy a new mobile phone and take some happy-snappies.
Yesterday my dad and I were at a space museum where, among other things, they had a rotating gyroscope ride…
To infinity...and other places.
Most of the other rides were pretty bad; this one worked well probably due to its sheer simplicity. The ‘land the laser dot on the three photoreceptors’ ride was unbearable, and don’t even get me started on the Mars Rover thing.
Bastard.
You basically manipulated a crude pneumatic robot arm to pick up rocks. It was rather straightforward, except moving the robot left/right was very erratic, which nearly drove my dad insane. Sometimes it’d respond and most of the time it wouldn’t, causing him no end of frustration and grief.
Does he look like a bitch?
The most recent place I went to that’s worth mentioning is Nathan Street. It’s very very fancy, too bad I only took one photo of a small plaza due to the high volume of pedestrians. It’s so high-toned you even get guys on the sidewalk trying to flog you fake Rolexes. ‘It’s real copper, man!’
So, over the last six months I was working (for free) at a small engineering company around two hours from my house. We were taking part in an international robotics competition to make a robot that could autonomously travel through a maze and tag with a laser some stationary red bins and walking people in red overalls. The objective was to have three robots that were capable of this; and this is how it all went down.
Up until the last two months, everything was so relaxed. They eventually figured I wasn’t too bad at maths, so I was in charge of almost every mathematical task in the robots’ programming. When that was done, I helped make cables, and do some rudimentary machining tasks.
The guy running that place was retarded. Some of his ideas included:
-redesigning the chassis of the robot literally seven times over (the last amendment being a week before the contest date). At the end it was still…a rectangular box.
-coating the rubber tyres in Teflon to ‘reduce friction’. Hello, that’s how wheels work? And besides, I don’t think tyres can stand 400 degree C heat. The worst part was he made one of us call up a Teflon company, and when he was told it was a stupid idea the guy laughs and goes ‘Well, maybe we should’ve researched it a bit more”
-tried to make me sweep the floor because he had nothing for me to actually do (but I couldn’t leave early). I swept around one square metre before leaving
etc.
Finally, the day of the contest crawled around. It was a Saturday, too. The dad of the guy who ran the place turned up to help out, and we were using cable-ties to secure some plastic sheeting to posts we had driven into the ground; this would serve as a barrier. One of the cable ties his dad put in were upside down, and I had to state it five times and pull it out in front of him before he was convinced.
Like father, like son. Eh?
The government people (it was a govt run competition) turned up on the dot, and we were still scrambling to set up the maze, and some people were trying to…fix the robot. It didn’t move. At all. It had to be driven with some hastily written code controlled with a big fat Cat-5 cable running to a laptop with a guy walking behind it. Not impressive.
The reason why this was, was because we had never tested this robot because we simply ran out of time. Ironic, considering how laidback he was the first few months. Pathetic.
So our evaluation started four and a half hours late, and I got home at a quarter past eight.
Yay.
Hargh. So, there’s this internship I have to do as part of my degree. I was able to find a small robotics place roughly two hours away, and I have been going there for roughly three weeks now. Nobody tells me what to do so I generally go around trying to help people, and I hate that. We’re trying to build a series of autonomous robots that’ll go around an obstacle course; many other interns have been going at it before us and all they’ve got is basically a big remote controlled car. But it’s not my fault; all the tasks I get are so mundane that they have very little impact in the first place.
It’s quite a depressing atmosphere; a lot of work gets done, for sure. Many things are printed, people mull over screens and type a lot, but not much progress is made. The remote control car is still, alas, remote controlled. The one intern who bosses everyone else around whilst doing the minimum amount of work himself, still does what he does unchecked. I can not wait until this is over; by the way. Did I mention this is all unpaid? Gah. I’m never taking this train line again when this is over. EVER. Hahaha
I like it when I’m alone. It’s nice, and quiet. You don’t have to think about what other people want without seeming like a callous asshole, and you have time to reflect on your own wants and needs. What I don’t really like is when people ignore me when I actually have something to tell them. I had to overhaul a small part of the company’s website, and when I was done I told the company’s manager (it’s a veeeeery small company). Turns out he didn’t even pay attention to me/believed me when I told him; he asked someone else how the website was going soon after I left. I hate that, more so because of the way he’s rather nice to me when I am there.
Every day I have to leave an hour earlier or so, in order to take the last bus from my station home. I turned up at the station near the company a few minutes late; I was wet from the rain so I sat next to a man staring into a bottle in a brown paper bag.
“They got you stuck in work, mate?” It took me a second to realize he was talking to me. I started talking about the internship and the things I didn’t like about it, and he would complain about his failing career and the fact that nobody would hire him even if he promised to stop drinking. He was smelly, swore a lot and had wild, crazy eyes, but he also said some things that didn’t really suit his appearance like ‘Hahah, look at me, talking to a foreigner. You’ve been here since the gold rush, and they still call yous foreigners. Pretty fucked up, eh.’ and ‘That psychic chick in Minority Report; she could’ve been Shakespeare. Yeah, Shakespeare.’
We talked about life in general, and everything before he shuffled off the station when my train arrived, unlit cigarette in hand.
I sat on the train with my iPod in my ears turned off, thinking ‘That was the first proper conversation I have had with anybody down here.’ It was. It really was the most fulfilling face-to-face contact I have had with anyone in that part of the…world. In four minutes it felt like I’d known that dreamy alcoholic more than the people I’ve been working with for nearly four weeks. It took me twenty minutes of sitting there thinking that over, until I realized the iPod was still off. I didn’t take it out, or turn it on until I was on the bus an hour and a half later. I really just didn’t feel like moving; I guess I was a bit upset about the…isolation, if that’s the right word.
Well, that’s all.
I believe I can see the future, ‘cos I repeat the same routine… D=
Well, today Georgie and I went to the beach. We met up at the station, and went out to the city where we stopped by our university so she could eat the burger she didn’t want that I had unwittingly ordered. That was embarrassing, eh *sweat* We also spent some time there looking up attractions; we planned to go to the aquarium (which turned out to have a huge queue) and the Zoo, where apparently you and more people than you will ever know get a significant discount if you’re in a group of 5001 or over.
I picked up some laksa to-go, and then we went to take a ferry to the beach. Today was overcast and the weather was perfect. We walked around on the sand for a bit, and found out it was pretty boring since I couldn’t get my feet wet because I was in shoes. We ate our food (my laksa looked quite miserable by then) and then I bought a tea towel and some slippers. We stood in the water up to knee-deep and caught some waves, then we went home. All in all, it was surprisingly tiring.
One thing that annoyed me was the super scrawny Asian guy on the first ferry. He was with his girlfriend (which..sort of looked like him) and she had thicker arms than he did. Not that she was fat or anything, but you could’ve picked your teeth with his forearms. I’m not saying I’m the six million dollar man, but damn; I’d rather be walrus-fat if I had to pick one of the two. And he’d look at me every so often like I was wierd, with one slender, girly arm delicately draped over her shoulders like it couldn’t support its own weight. Yuck. Now that I mention it, there was a guy who looked just like him in uni that I knew two semesters ago, kind of. Shit, was it him? Ahh well. If he didn’t say hi, then forget him.
Another thing that disgusted me was a bunch of Korean kids that were acting like they’d never seen a fountain before. When you get off the sand, you see, there are three sets of fountains for decor and washing your feet. They washed their feet, but it wasn’t enough. They moved on until they’d washed their feet in another, and then they gawked over the last one because it shot a bit higher. What the hell.
Note to Wuggs: Don’t eat any more nougat today *floog*
My friend bought a new computer for himself, and asked me to build it for him. Neither of us knew too much about computers, so we pooled our knowledge together and pulled it off, learning quite a bit in the process. For those of you who are into this kind of thing, its specifications are as follows:
Power: Corsair TX 650W
CPU: Intel Core i7 920, 2.67 GHz
RAM: 4 gb DDR3
GPU: ATi Radeon HD 5770
Storage: Seagate SATA 500 Gb
Case: Antec Nine Hundred
OS: Windows 7 Home, 64-bit
It’s an incredible setup. Really. It boots in a bit under 25 seconds, shuts down in a bit under 15. The fans are a bit loud, but that’s because there are five of them.
Anyway, what happened was that his house was hit by a power surge which blew a fuse in the old power supply that was in before the Corsair. We lugged it over to the store where he bought it and managed to refund the old one because the warranty covers this kind of thing. After buying the new power supply, he let me keep it at my place. He didn’t seem too happy about the whole thing; he was very enthusiastic about ordering the parts, but when they arrived he seemed kind of deflated as if they weren’t what he had in mind. However, he had the heart to carry on with the building with me, just because I was very excited about building it.
I don’t know how long the computer will be at my place, but it’s got all my peripherals plugged into it and I’m really beginning to like it. Maybe he’ll sell it to me for cheap, I’m hoping. Besides, he’s got his eye on an even more intense one, with more grunt than I’ll ever need for probably the next decade. I think it looks pretty ugly, but it sort of suits him and his Transformer fantasy. They’d look cute together.
Today at work was pretty mediocre; I pulled in eight hours of work. Three horrible things happened:
1. Some guy I work with slammed down a crate of milk between us as we were filling them. One of the bottles had no lid and we both got friggin soaked
2. A box of mozzarella fell on my head
3. Someone accidentally hit my pregnant boss in the stomach with their trolley
Ahhh, life. I just wish these fans would shut up. The only gripe I have with the case is that two fans are at the front. They’re necessary (and quite good looking) but the noise output is quite high for a ‘quiet’ case.
OH MY GOD A COCKROACH CRAWLED ON MY HAND. Yeah, it was hiding on the back of a chopping board. So I flicked it onto a bench while freaking out, and shot a rubber band at it which broke off a long, hairy leg. Unfortunately I couldn’t finish him off because the force knocked him a few metres across the kitchen and under my mum’s computer desk.
Today, I wore my luckey holey shirt. It’s a cheap, raggedy shirt with holes in the front and back that have grown there over time. I’m very fond of the shirt, and it’s cool and light in summer. It’s all in all a very good shirt. Wuggs doesn’t like it, humof. Nobody does. They can’t understand just how damn comfortable it is, even today in the very hot weather I still felt okay.
You can eat my dog, you can eat my truck
But you eat my shirt, then you’re out of luck
