Breaking with tradition

I broke tradition this year by going skiing a second time (though it's a tradition I only started last year, in any case I couldn't call it an annual ski trip anymore :p). We went to Moonstone this time; poor Ed couldn't come even though he had been trying so hard to organize one last ski trip for the season. All his attempts got cancelled due to non-cooperating weather.

This time I would say I spent 60% of time on green hills and 40% on blue hills (well, just one blue hill that I felt comfortable with). Definitely I felt some improvement since the last time and I discovered a few things about my skiing style:

1. My right turns are better than my left turns
2. I don't have too much problems with the turns, it's after the turn when I am cutting perpendicularly across the slope that I have trouble with
3. As a result of 1 and 2, I am actually better at doing small turns going down the hill than doing the big "S" turns.
4. But since I am doing small turns, I'm picking up more speed and it's easy to lose balance and control. I need to work on coping with speed.

I was alternating between experimenting on the green hill and then applying the results on the blue hill to come to these conclusions. I hope I don't forget these insights next year :p

Annual Ski Trip 2k7

Went skiing at Lakeridge on Saturday, it was a blast (my body's still aching though). Last year was my first time skiing in over 10 years so I am still a newbie. This year, I stayed mostly on the green hills and tried out a blue hill a couple of times.

The highlight of the trip has to be going up the ski lift with only one ski! My ski got caught in a pile of snow and it came off, but the operators did not notice to stop the lift so up I went. Luckily when they did notice they handed the ski to another skier to bring up with her, but I still fell when getting off the ski lift at the top of the hill :(

Speaking of snow, I saw something funny at lunch today. See for yourself:

Voltron!

Now here's a step towards giant combining robots in the likes of Voltron (those 5 lions that combine into a robot, how many of you remember that?) Each segment is an individual robot and can combine in different configuarations to do different tasks. Now all they have to do is supersize it :)

http://www.newscientisttech.com/article/dn11238?DCMP=Matt_Sparkes&nsref=modular-robot

The Second City

Yesterday was the celebration for releasing a new version of our product. The whole area (well, the ones based in Toronto, around 50 people) were treated to dinner and a show at The Second City. The show is composed on a series of short skits; I especially loved the one that makes fun of Air Canada, where the "travel agent" was charging extra for everything from bathroom privileges to landing! The last third of the show was an improv skit. It was hilarious especially when they make some silly bloopers along the way :)

Aside: I read this interesting article about chimps making weapons to hunt for food! Can you say: "Planet of the Apes"?

The Ugly Duckling

http://edition.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/europe/02/17/duck.legs.ap/index.html?eref=rss_topstories

Weird...

I think...

I think I had a revelation today. Actually, let me rephrase that: I had a revelation today. My revelation is that I prefix my speech with "I think" more often than I should. For example, I would say things like "I think the show starts at 9 o'clock", or "I think it will be freezing tomorrow". And it's not just me, many people have tendencies to speak that way. Why is that? When a person is saying something, isn't it obvious that he or she is saying what they are thinking? In that context, the "I think" becomes redundant.

But of course, most people (including myself) use "I think" in a totally different context. We use it interchangeably with the phrase "I guess" when we are unsure of something, or when there is a chance that what we say is wrong; and by prefixing the sentence with "I think" or "I guess", it's as if we are leaving a backdoor for ourselves to get out of trouble when things go wrong.

When unsure of something, the use of "I think" is understandable. The problem is when we get so used to using it that we habitually say "I think" even for things that we are absolutely sure of. When 8 out of 10 sentences we say begins with "I think" or "I guess", how can someone tell whether you know what you are talking about?

In the workplace, not only do you have to know how to do the job, you also have to assert that you can do the job right. I am working on the latter part and starting from today, I will consciously use less "I think" and "I guess" when I talk.

The problem with AJAX

AJAX is the buzz on the web these days and as you know, it's supposed to allow a site to retrieve some XML data from some place and use it to render a part of a web page without having to load the entire page. And XML data is just everywhere on the web, most easily found as a feed, like RSS. So there I was thinking of pulling the RSS feed from my blog and then using it to build a dynamic list of entries to put on my site. Sounds cool doesn't it? So what's the problem?

Well, it's actually more of a limitation that a problem . The limitation is that the RSS feed must be on the same domain as my website, since cross-domain XMLHttpRequests are not allowed for security reasons (I haven't read up on this but since all the browsers out there restrict this, it must be a bad thing).

So is my idea shot down? At times like this I usually turn to Google for the answer; this time the answer came from Google, literally, in the form of another one of their nifty APIs. Since Blogger is part of Google, it's no surprise they have APIs for everything including flushing the toilet! What's surprising is how easy it was to use, all it takes is one line and one callback function to render the data, really slick.

Anyways, the page that I was reading is this one http://code.google.com/apis/gdata/json.html Specifically I used the JSON-in-script method to list my latest blog headings on my site now =)

Bridge to Terabithia

Saw an ad for Disney's upcoming movie, Bridge to Terabithia at the gym this morning. It's another one of those fantasy tales for kids like Narnia and Eragon. I actually would like to see this one though, and why is that? Well, I read this book way back in grade school, and even now I distinctly remember that I liked the story a lot. In fact, I still remember the story quite well, which is rare considering how lousy my memory is. I guess the book really left an impression. The movies comes out on Feb 16.

Peking duck flavoured pretz?

One of my colleagues bought some Peking duck flavoured pretz sticks to work to share today. First time I ever had peking duck flavoured anything (except for peking duck flavoured duck of course). It was weird munching on those sticks because it really tasted like peking duck! Guess they really can artificial flavour anything... Peking duck flavoured breath mint anyone?

Han Il Kwan Dinner

(thanks Ka for the pic)

On Saturaday, I went to dinner with my high school pals at a Korean restaurant called Han Il Kwan. The food was good, the company was good, I really had a great time. Thanks everyone for the enjoyable evening! After dinner we even went for dessert at Times Square and continued chatting. This sure brings back memories of high school times. Gosh, I've known this bunch for 10+ years, it's a shame we don't get together as often because of work, life, and everything in between. But that's also what makes the times we do spend in each other's company all the more treasurable. Looking foward to the next gathering.

To Friends!

The next big box

Here is the next big box I got my hands on, yup, it's the MG Strike Freedom which I've posted about before. I got it a couple weeks ago (thanks to my good pal Edward who delivered it from HK), but it's been sitting in my closest since. I am kind of lazy to paint it, and I want to try something different this time, like this no-paint technique I read about on Danny's site a while back. Trouble is it looks a bit complex and the guide is in Japanese. I need to find a good translated guide and maybe practice on some cheap 1/144 model first.

On a somewhat related topic, I just posted 2 more albums covering the transformation of the YF-19 to Gerwalk mode, here are the links:

Transformation
Gerwalk Mode

Finally!

Two weeks ago, I set out on this (rather foolish) quest to get the best weapon in Final Fantasy XII (henceforth refer to as "that damn spear"). For those who don't know, that damn spear is suppose be in a treasure chest in a certain part of the game, and it has a *1/1000* chance of appearing. 1395 attempts and many, many... many painstaking hours later, that damn spear is finally in my hands. Finally seeing that damn spear appear after 1394 failed attempts was definitely a sweet moment and as you can see I even took a picture of it:

And Keith sir, I have to thank you, I think your luck rubbed off on me when you wished me good luck today on MSN... haha =)

Happy New Year!

Hope everyone has an excellent year ahead of them! Cheers!

Are you Dumb or Attractive?

Here's something I came across that's kind of strange... Apparently, a certain type of parasite can make a person either dumber or more attractive (this is sounding like something out of The X-Files) . I think I might be infected :(

YF-19

I have uploaded the first batch of photos of Yamato's amazing 1/60 YF-19 (yes, this is what's in the box!) Check them out at my gallery here. Here are a couple of sample shots:

HOHOHO

Season Greetings and a belated Happy Boxing Day :)

What's in the box??

(awww... the focus is off, my bad)

*sniff* *sniff*... and Merry Christmas!

I am just recovering from my cold... nasty bugger... The way you get over a cold is to pass it on to someone else, unforturnately that happens to be my Dad... boohoo.

Can't believe it's the week before Christmas already!! Let me wish all my loyal readers (the 3-5 of you) an early Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! I am getting lazy, haven't been updating my blog as often as I should (and haven't kept up with all the interesting stuff going on in your lives either... tsk tsk). But 2007 is just around the corner, so one of my new year resolutions will be to read and write more blog entries in the new year... haha :p

Well, before I go, I'd just like to leave you will the following picture (Santa came early this year :)

(more pics to follow soon!)

Annual Movie Day

Today was the annual movie day at work. I didn't go though, the movie choices are not that appealing, "The Holiday" or "Blood Diamond", not enough to drag me down to Eglington at 8:45 in the morning!

I did meet up with the folks from my old dept for the annual Christmas lunch though. Kind of nice that they still invited me to join. We went to this Carnaval Brazilian Grill place, the food is pretty good and not a bad price considering you get all the meat you can eat :) The servers would come out with a skewer of various meats like chicken, sausuages, beef roast (hmmm.... beef...) and they would carve slices of it onto your plate.

The dept Christmas lunch usually included a gift exchange portion as well. I didn't bring a gift this time, felt that it might be kind of weird to participate when I'm not working with them anymore. But I was looking forward to watching them go through it, it's fun to just watch since people are allowed to "steal" other people's opened gifts or pick a wrapped one. This year, I was disappointed that not many people brought gift, and not much stealing going on :( Maybe it's because there were not as many people there to begin with; and actually it seems the lunch and gift exchange didn't carry with it the same kind of energy and excitement from previous years. Or is this just my own perspective as someone who's not part of the team anymore?

The next MG

What I really wanted to post were some links to promo pics of the next MG, the ZGMF-X20A Strike Freedom. This kit is looking pretty sweet!

Pics from figure.fm
Pics from Gundam Base

Now who wants to buy this with me? Better yet, who wants to buy this *for* me? Hehe.