Congratulations to My Dear Friends, Billy & Eli

It was a long day today, but it was worth every minute. Today (Aug 4th) is the big day for my dear friends Billy and Eli. Their story is a sweet fairy tale that started from high school through to University, leading up to this wonderful moment and continues forward into the next chapter of their lives together. Words cannot describe how happy I am for them. Billy, Eli, thank you for letting me share in the joy of this special occasion.

C O N G R A T U L A T I O N S !

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P.S. This is such an interesting picture Mun took that I just had to post it. I never seen our Miss Coconut look so "inch"! Hey, is that a middle finger??

Wasaga Beach

Went to wasaga beach today for a bit of BBQ and fun in the sun. Today's weather was just perfect; no rain and not too hot. I can't remember when's the last time I went to a beach and actually got in the water. For sure I have not done that in the past 20 years that I've been in Canada. Today, we played some water volleyball, monkey in the middle, running against the waves. Haven't done any good exerciese like this in a while, I'm dead tired!

Thanks to mun for organizing. It was great to hang out with my closest buddies from high school. Even Billy and Eli are back (for their big day next week, congrats). Haven't seen them in over a year!

For pictures of today, click here.

I'm Back

People's been asking if I've been abducted for the past couple weeks, well, of course not! I took some time off to spend some time with my Grandma, Aunt, and cousin who came to visit us from Vancouver. They just left this morning so life is now returning to normal. Speaking of which, I was on the way to the airport and back between 5-6am, and as you probably heard by now, there was a truck rollover on westbound 401 just before 6 this morning. Luckily I just missed the massive traffic jam.

Work is slowly (a bit too slowly) picking up the pace now. There was a recent re-org in my department and now I'm officially transitioned to a new team. I'm still under the same manager but going to be working on some entirely new stuff so that should be exciting. But I feel a bit lost since everything is so new and still very uncertain about how it's all supposed to work.

One more piece of news is I got accepted to the ConGESE MMath program at Waterloo. The ConGESE program let's you take the degree part-time and courses are offered on-site at the workplace. If all goes well, I should be starting classes in January.

That's all for now. P.S. Happy Birthday Greeting #4, Coconut.

Happy Birthday Crab

Crab is one year older, yay!! And so the gang went to Brix to celebrate. I ordered a grilled veal loin with corn risotto, it wasn't too bad, except it tasted exactly like the dish I ordered there for lunch last time. Different ingredients, same taste, isn't it amazing? The company was great tho, great long time friends, some I haven't seen in a while. It's a shame we get together less and less nowadays. Everyone is busy getting on with life (well except me, I am pretty free, for now).

I kind of miss the good old days; I know I know, we are not really that old... but I feel old, esp within the last year. Part of the reason is probably because after switching jobs, I really do have much more free time on my hands. I'm no longer glued to my laptop *after* work and on weekends. Unfortunately I don't know what to do with all this time. I never was an active or adventurous type of person, and always buried myself in school and office work. I would even go as far to say that I define myself through work. A workaholic? Not really, I am lazy by nature; maybe I'm just a square peg in a world full of round holes.

Anyways, inevitably the table conversations come to the topic of Facebook. Seems like this is pretty hit right now, everyone is on Facebook (well again, except me). But isn't this a souped up Friendster? Apparently not, or so they keep telling me. Is there really that much to do on Facebook? OK, well, I am slightly intrigued now. Being in the IT industry shouldn't I be jumping on top of all the latest techno fads? Actually, what I am interested to know is what makes Facebook a success while Friendster a flop? I wonder if there are any case studies done on this... would be worth a read.

Gundam 00

Woohoo, it's official, the next Gundam series coming this fall is called Gundam 00, pronounced "double-O" (an object-oriented Gundam?? =)

Here's a trailer from YouTube. The main Gundam looks a bit like the force impulse.

SCWCD

I haven't done a review in a while, so I am going to write a review about this book: SCWCD Exam Study Kit, Second Edition, by Hanumant Deshmukh, Jignesh Malavia, and Matthew Scarpino.

If you are considering getting yourself SCWCD certified, I would highly recommend you to *not* get this book. There are just so many problems with this book.... for starters, I don't find this book making the studying any easier. Cert guides like these are supposed to cover the exam objectives which the reader needs to master in a clear an concise manner. This book however, has a number of sections that goes into details that are mostly irrelevant for the exam while other sections don't cover the topic adequately.

And for a book that's in second edition already, it's hard to believe there could be so many mistakes, just take a look at http://www.manning-sandbox.com/thread.jspa?messageID=51256. That's just plain sloppy

My rating: 3/5

Bill Gates' Predictions

An interesting read while on break:
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/316483_software21.html

So apparently, Gates never said 640K of memory is all anyone ever needs. Well, shame on us, we had you wrong...

Up and Running, Sort of.

Cause of death: faulty power supply leading to frying the motherboard (see the blown capacitor in the picture below...)

I got the board and power supply replaced at PCvillage. And sorry to disappoint you Ed, I didn't upgrade my comp, just wanted to get it back up with the minimum hassle. I don't really have a need to get a super fast computer and video card simply for checking email and going on Internet (kind of sad really, I don't play computer games anymore, but there's the DS =). In fact I have downgraded to using the onboard video since the they didn't have a board with the old AGP slot (oh gee, seems like only yesterday that the AGP was the next big thing in gaming, and now it's obsolete...) The board does have a PCI Express slot so I could get a better card later on.

So at least I can boot up now, had to repair Windows which turned out to be less painful than I expected. But my system is a bit "flaky" now, there are stuff here and there that doesn't work quite like it used to (for example, my bluetooth keyboard and mouse just refuses to connect). Well, I gotta format my comp, something I expected to have to do anyways. What fun.

Isn't it odd that I blog more when my computer is busted?

Computer is Fried

My computer started making a siren sound during the middle of the night; it was like my alarm clock going off. I sleepily got out of bed and shut the darn thing off.

This morning, I turned my computer on and it ran fine... for about 10 minutes. Then it made one more siren sound before it promptly keeled over =( I can power on the computer but nothing happens after that, it doesn't boot, nothing on screen... dead. Probably the mobo fried I suspect... *sigh*

The Hype is Over!

** This post may contain spoilers about Spiderman 3 !!! **

The hype of course is the long awaited Spiderman 3 which opened on Friday. Before going to see it, I had already heard the reviews saying the movie is only so-so. But still, it's the blockbuster of the summer and I just had to go see it! So off I went on Saturday for the 11 am IMAX show (yup, that's am).

Now that I've seen it, I agree with everything the critics said about the movie; there are just too many plot elements, even for a movie that's 2.5 hours long! And they didn't pace the movie very well, lot of the scenes felt rushed and were not developed fully, they simply do the bare minimum to tell the story so that people who don't know about the storyline from the comics can follow. It's the age old balancing act of quantity vs. quality.

And I am disappointed that Venom got such a dinky treatment in the film, wasn't he supposed to be the focus of the movie? And he's suppose to be Spiderman's arch-nemesis, he's not supposed to die so easily... let's hope he's not really dead and comes back for a proper treatment in the next one.

I give it a 7/10.

CN Tower Climb for WWF

Yesterday morning was the first time I participated in the CN Tower Climb for WWF. I must be crazy, that was what I kept thinking even as I began climbing the steps. It was around 2/3 of the way up that I actually started to think that I can actually do this! And then before I knew it, I was at the top! My time was 34:31, nothing spectacular but my goal was only getting to the top =p

It's unfortunate that I couldn't take any photos of my climb, they didn't allow you to carry any cameras or cell phone with you (even if you turn it off). They are pretty strict about that too, they had metal detectors to check you and my friend Phil was actually turned away because he had his phone with him. Really sucked for him, basically the whole morning just waiting in line for nothing and not to mention having to pay for parking too! I wonder why they are so strict, my guess is that these loose items are easily dropped and it would be bad if they dropped down the stairwell and land on the people below.

At a glance

Haven't written here for a while. Nothing really to write about, or maybe I'm lazy and lacking motivation, yeah, that's it. But I thought I just do a quick post to list some stuff that has happened since the last entry:

- Finished FFXII (I hope I get around to writing a review for this)
- I bought an NDS :)
- Considering getting a car... Went with Eddy to some car dealership yesterday. CSX looks nice (I'm biased). I'm clueless when it comes to details of pricing/financing options and other junk like that. I wish I can shop online and have the car mailed to me. Need to do some research.
- Went to a wonderful house warming party hosted by Ka & Corrie yesterday. Thanks for the great food, and I am happy to say, no stomach problems.
- I'm in the process of applying for part time graduate studies, starting next Jan, hopefully...
- CN tower climb is one week away!

Otters Holding Hands!

The otters vid that's was talked about on the news, very cute indeed!

Wireless power a reality

I remember back in university, when Logitech first came out with their wireless computer peripherals, I was thinking that wouldn't it be cool if the mouse or keyboard also received their power wireless. My friends laughed at me and said that was a crazy idea. Well guess what? That crazy idea is now a reality with wireless power technology developed by a company called Powercast. You can read the article on this from CNN here:

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2007/04/01/8403349/

I hope this is not some April fools joke. The possible uses of this technology is endless. This is truly exciting!

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.

Long time no update

Wow, almost a month without posting, hehe, FFXII is too addictive (I am just trying to be nice to my good friend Edmund and not tease him with my progress on the game ;)

Other than that, none much exciting stuff happen in life. Work is going pretty smoothly lately, actually getting a chance to write some code (finally!) and it's a lot of fun (yeah, call me a geek); this is sort of the work I've always imagined doing coming out of university :) And the best part is, the work is manageable within regular work hours. At the end of the day, I really do feel I have accomplished something and I can go home and not think about work until the next day. In my previous role, I always struggled with the feeling of not getting any work done during the day, and so I resorted to putting in extra hours after work and on weekends.

Anyways, I wasn't intending to talk about work when I started this post, but I guess I don't have much to say about the past month other than work and FFXII (which I am not supposed to talk about :)


And booo, I forgot to mention about the coconut.

FFXII Impressions

It's finally here, in my hands. Went to Future Shop after work to get it, and didn't see any on the shelf (*gasp*). Maybe they were trying to scare me on Halloween. Good thing Keith warned me about this, so I asked a salesperson to get a copy from the store room. Don't let the price fool you, it was actually $10 cheaper (another good tip from Keith).

After booting up the game, an intro movie comes on, which consisted of scenes from the game paired with a musical score that sounded like a medley of all previous final fantasy games. Wasn't quite the intro I expected, it lacked a certain "oomph" to it. But my disappointment was soon forgotten once I started the game. The "real" intro made me feel like I was watching a movie, in fact, it had a Star Wars prequels feel to it (in a good way). And I've read reviews saying how good the dialog and voice acting was, it's really hard to believe until I actually hear it for myself. You can really tell they have made tremendous effort in this area to make the localized version of the game sound authentic. For the first time, I actually felt that the English dialog fitted a Japanese game. The European-like setting also helps in this respect.

Moving on to the new battle system, it will sure take some getting used to. It's a step towards (but not quite reaching) the battle system in Star Ocean 3, which I liked. Since you only have to choose an action once and the character will continue to perform that action, battles become largely an exercise of moving your character into range of the target, and selecting a new action on a new enemy once you defeat your current target (although I imagine the latter won't even be necessary once gambits come into play). It's still too early to tell whether I like this system or not.

I am now in the city of Rabanastre, and I have to say it totally blows away the tiny towns and villages in FFX. It's not fixed angle so you are free to look around and marvel at the grand scale of the city. However, this also brings me to one of my nitpicks of the game. When I want to look right, I instinctively push the analog stick to the right. This actually swings the camera to the right of your character, hence you see what's on the left instead. It's not so bad once you get the camera swinging, but I trip over this everytime I start to look around. It's opposite to most games out there. It seems reasonable to have a setting to reverse this, but unfortunately there's no such option.

Soukyuu の Fafner: Right of Left (OVA)

Last weekend I watched the Fafner OVA, called Right of Left. It is a prequel to the original series (review here). If you intend to watch the series at all, you should watch the OVA only after you have completed the original series, since there are plot elements here that you are not suppose to know about until later on in the series.

On the other hand, if you are not interested in watching the series, then I think that Right of Left has enough weight to be watched on its own (although having watched the series would certainly increase your enjoyment of the OVA). The key point is that Right of Left does not try to resolve the loose ends left in the series. Even more importantly it does not try to reveal any more information than what the fans of the show already knows, thus avoiding the pitfall of generating more questions than answers.

One thing that was done really well is that all the main characters in the series make a returning appearance... (hmm, I guess you don't really call it "returning" since this is a prequel). In other prequels, very often the scenes with the "returning" characters feels forcefully slotted in and makes you feel like life is just one coincident after another (as much as I love B5, I've to say its prequel "In the Beginning" comes to mind here). Right of Left felt very natural in the way it handled this.

The bottom line is, people who've watched the series will enjoy the revisit to the Fafner universe and seeing the main characters again, at the same time newbies can also enjoy it as a stand-alone story without being burdened with the background information on the series.

My rating: 8/10

Virus Troubles

Last night, I found a virus on my laptop. The strange thing is, I haven't used my laptop for a long time and so I have no idea how it possibly got infected. It's only one of those annoying viruses that keep opening pop-up windows and it doesn't corrupt any data, so normally, it shouldn't be that hard to clean up. But damn, it took me the whole night to get rid of it... (partly due to my own stupidity).

- the Norton on my laptop was outdated, I should have just updated it to a newer version right from the start, but for some bizarre reason I decided to go download some spyware doctor program instead.

- spyware doctor told me I had a virus (duh!), but the stupid trial version only scans and doesn't allow you to fix the problem (#$@&!&$!!). What's kind of trial program is that? What a completely useless piece of dog poo...

- ok fine, I uninstalled spyware doctor, uninstalled Norton and put on a new version. The scan came up with 3 infected dll files. 2 of them Norton was able to delete, but the 3rd one it left it alone (what da heck...) Well, no big deal, probably the dll is in memory so it can't be deleted.

- so I go in safe mode with command line, and tried to delete the malicious file manually. To my surprise and dismay, the file is locked even in safe mode.

- I need to use the recovery console, I figured. Stuck my winxp CD into the laptop and rebooted. Hey, how come it's not booting from the CD?? Fine, I need to change the boot sequence. Rebooted again, and held down the del button thinking that'll take me into the BIOS... no luck.

- *sigh*, spent another 10 - 15 minutes figuring out how to change the boot sequence on Toshiba laptops. It turns out it can be done in the control panel. grr...

- Finally booting into the recovery console now, and I am staring at the prompt for the administrator password. Uh oh, what is the password? My usual passwords don't work and I have to reboot after 3 unsuccessful tries... annoying.

- Logged back into Windows. I am trying to switch to the administrator account, and the winxp login screen doesn't usually show the administrator login icon (I forget under what conditions it shows it). In any case, I had to switch back to classical login so that I can type in administrator directly

- After fidgetting at the login screen for another 5 - 10 minutes, I finally figured out that I had NO administrator password set (I am kicking myself at this point). That's not a good thing, so I changed it to my usual password.

- Back in recovery console, typed in my password, tada!! It didn't work... what the... When I set the password, there was a warning that my password was too long for older versions of Windows to handle. Could that be the problem?? Logged back into Windows as administrator again, changed the password to something simple. Reboot!

- Back in recovery console... again. Typed in the simple password and it STILL doesn't accept it. I am about to throw my laptop out the window.

- Googled around, and came across this page (it's a godsend). Turns out that winxp's recovery console, for whatever stupid reason will not recognize your password. The workaround is to disable the password prompt by setting the following registry value to 1:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\Setup\RecoveryConsole\SecurityLevel

- Back in recovery console, true enough, the password prompt is gone. And finally, I was able to delete the infected dll file. All this trouble I went through just to delete this one file... *sigh*. I logged back into Windows and everything is fine once again. I am starting to wonder if formatting my laptop would have been less troublesome.

Upcoming products

Some cool pics of upcoming products, courtesy of Pam's Home Page.

Transformable Macross (yes, the SDF-1 itself). The way they did the metallic look is actually quite nice.



Pics of MG Strike Freedom, I am soooo getting this.

Battlestar Galactica Impressions

I've recently started watching the re-imaged Battlestar Galactica series (sorry bud, couldn't wait for ya). I started watching this series because I was told that this series is similar to Babylon 5, which is a sci-fi series that I liked. After watching the first season, I would say the similarities are only superficial.

That's not to say BSG is bad though. They are just different. There are sci-fi shows, and there are dramas in space; B5 is sci-fi, and BSG is the latter. What I liked from B5 is the interactions of the different alien races and the idea of the younger races (such as humans) getting caught in the epic battle between the ancient and mysterious Vorlons and Shadows.

In contrast, there are no aliens or epic battles in BSG. There are battle scenes with the Cylons but it is not the main focus of the series. At the core, BSG is a story about survival of the human race, and I've always been fascinated with these end-of-the-world type settings. It shows the extremes of human behaviour and makes the viewers think what they'll do in the same extreme circumstances.

I'm looking forward to watching season 2.

Interesting news... maybe

Just thought I'd share some interesting news I read recently, or at least I find them interesting, I'll let you decide for yourself.

Last Friday was the 13th, yup, black Friday. This is not just any Friday the 13th though, it's special because if you add up all the digits in 2006/10/13, the total equals 13. The last time this happend was over 400 years ago, you can read about it in this article. Does this mean double the bad luck?? My Friday was fairly uneventful =)

Recently, researchers from Russia and US successfully created Element 118, the heaviest element to date. This piece of news caught my attention because 118 happens to be my favourite number.

Do you have a friendster account? How often do you log on? This article tells the rise and fall of friendster.

[Review] Designing Web Services with the J2EE 1.4 Platform

This book is written by members of the Sun's Java BluePrints team, "from the Source", it says on the cover. Although the name says "Web Services", it actually covers other application integration concepts in the J2EE platform. I guess in order to understand the pros and cons of using web services one should understand what are the alternatives.

There are various code and xml sniplets throughout the book to help illustrate the concepts, as one would expect. I find in most cases the xml samples were more useful than the code samples; some just show you a stub which doesn't give you any extra info on top of what's already described by the text. Content-wise, I like how the concepts in the book are summarized into recommendations on the approach to use when designing an enterprise application. These recommendations are set apart from the text with bullet points so they are hard to miss, but it would be even more convenient if all these points were repeated in a list at the end of each chapter.

I only have one complain about this book, which is the chapters are very long and could have been broken up for an easier read.

My rating: 3.5/5

Ready for FFXII

Seeing how FFXII will be coming at the end of the month, I finally took the time to finish Final Fantasy X-2 which I had put aside for the longest time. FFX-2 was a nice re-visit of the world of Spira and the characters that we've come to love from FFX. But the game itself was not as solid as its predecessor; it's a bit goofy at times and I find the garment grid system somewhat cumbersome.

Still, it's nice to have closure for the FFX series, though the ending wasn't as satisfying as I hoped (the last battles were easier than expected and I only got the normal ending). Thank goodness there's youtube =)

MG ZGMF-X20A

We knew it was coming... I just didn't expect it to be so soon!! December is when the MG Strike Freedom Gundam will arrive in stores. Damn... I didn't factor this into my spending this year... boohoo... so much goodies are coming out by year end, YF-19, FFXII, PS3, and now this. I am going to be super poor T_T.

WTP 1.5.1

WTP 1.5.1 was released this past Friday, Sept 29, 2006 (although the web page didn't update until today). So what's special about this release? Well, it's the first WTP release where I had contributed some bug fixes to. I joined my current team literally the (first business) day after 1.5 was released; that itself is kind of interesting because there is a clear separation of what I did and did not work on. Secondly, Sept 29 is kind of special too since it marks my 3th year working at IBM. Coincidence perhaps?

The universe sure works in mysterious ways...

Ribbon Bar

A month or two ago I was browsing the Vista screenshots and I was thinking to myself, the new UI is looking pretty good; the transparent windows and simplified menus gives you a less cluttered look and feel.

Then today, I saw a screenshot of the ribbon bar that's replacing the menus and I have to say, what the heck are they thinking??


So this ribbon bar thing is suppose to be a "context sensitive menu" that presents the users with only those actions that are relevant to their current task. It is supposed to "reduce visual clutter", but they sure have a hard time convincing me with that screenshot.

That ribbon bar looks huge with those icons that are spanning 2 rows. Realistically it's probably occupies the same vertical area as a normal menu bar and 2 toolbars would, but visually those large buttons just make it looks much taller (I am not a fan of large buttons). Not to mention that the whole thing looks like a big jig-saw puzzle small buttons mixed in with large buttons mixed in with some menu items.

It just looks like one big mess.

Something for Mom

It was my mom's birthday a couple days ago, we took her out to a fancy dinner and even got her a nice present this year! I say "this year" because our family doesn't have a habit of exchanging presents, not even on Christmas. And this time it was actually my dad's idea to get her something (I wonder if he's has done something to make my mom angry... =p). I should get into this habit for other occasions too.

[Review] The Java Developer's Guide to Eclipse

If you are a computer geek like myself, then you'll most likely know what Eclipse is (for those who don't, you can read about it at wikipedia, which can explain it much better than I could).

On its own, Eclipse is a pretty powerful Java IDE, but what make eclipse even more cool is that anybody can write plugins to extend its functions, and you can use Eclipse to write these plugins for itself. There are ton of books and articles to teach you how to muck around with eclipse, this book on the left for example is a good starting point.

The book is divided into 3 parts. Part 1 teaches you how to use Eclipse, part 2 teaches you how to extend Eclipse, and part 3 are exercises to give you practice on stuff you've read (part 1 mostly). If you have used eclipse before, you can probably just skim through part 1 and part 3.

The flow of the book is easy to follow (no need to flip back and forth) and there are plenty of clear examples to illustrate the concepts. There were a few places in the book that seems like it was repeating itself from a couple pages before, but this is only a minor distraction.

Unfortunately, I was only able to get my hands on the first edition of this book, which only covers Eclipse 2.0. The second edition covers Eclipse 3.0 (current Eclipse release is 3.2).

My rating: 4/5

Tang Concubines

Gosh, I haven't updated this blog in 2 weeks. I haven't been terribly busy with work, in fact things are winding down because we are close to release. I guess this lull at work has made me kind of lazy and that's why I haven't been updating my blog (yes, I tend to operate quite opposite to most normal people...)

So what have I been up to recently? My mom got 2 tickets from the bank to go see Tang Concubines at the Toronto Center for the Arts. My dad didn't want to go and so this is where the dutiful son steps in. I am really glad I went to see the show. At first I wondered if they will be speaking Chinese or English, and I was going to guess English because how else would the western audiences understand the story? But at the same time it would be quite strange to hear the ancient Chinese characters speak in English. Thankfully, the show was not in English, nor was it in Chinese... it was told by body language. There were 2 lighted billboards that explained at the beginning of each scene what the scene was about (this was in English and Chinese). The audience can then sit back, relax and enjoy the ensuing dance sequence, without having to worry about listening to the dialog. Reading the program before the show also helps quite a bit.

I was amazed by the flexibility and fluidity of the performers, it's hard to imagine that the human body is capable of such graceful motions. And you know about those people that can bend their body in all sorts of weird shapes and knots? I've seen them in TV shows but this is the first time I have seen one in a live performance. She can literally bend over and sit on her own head... that was a bit disconcerting. It sure give a new meaning to the phrase "I'll cut of my head for you to sit on" (no thank you, I can sit on my own head).

New HCM Pro Galleries

Sazabi

Zeta (Gallery 2)

Other HCM Pro news...

Nu Gundam Promo Pic
34-00 and 35-00 (some kind of zaku)
Sazabi SP Ver. (arghhhhhhhh!!!!!)

Soukyuu の Fafner

あなた　は　そこ　に　います　か？

I have just finished watching a series called Soukyuu の Fafner, also known as Dead Aggressor. Fafner tells the story of a group of young kids living on Tatsumiyajima island somewhere off the coast of Japan. The island is a peaceful place where not much happens, and the kids attend to their daily lives without a care in the world. However, this all changes when one day, the island is attack by an alien life form known as a "Festum". The truth is slowly revealed; the rest of the world is already in ruins from the alien invasion and Tatsumiyajima island is the last paradise, and also the last line of defense of mankind. For this reason, Fafners were developed on the island, and only the children of Tatsumiyajima island can pilot these giant robots to fight against the festums.

Kazuki, the main character, aka Shin Asuka's part time role

I am sure that from the above description alone, Fafner is sounding like another series of the EVA genre. That would be a correct deduction. Fafner has all the necessary elements: 1) an incomprehensible alien enemy 2) robots that can only be piloted by children 3) and most importantly, an incomprehensible story line (for most part of the series anyways).

Yes, Fafner has its fair share of dialog that would stop abruptly, or dialog that sound like riddles, keeping the viewers guessing and scratching their heads throughout-out the series. However, I am glad to say that the Fafner manages to escape the pitfall of other animes of this kind, that is, at the end of the series, there is a sense of closure; there is a coherent and comprehensible story underneath all that wishy-washy EVA-ish fluff.

The Fafner Mark Elf	Kazuki and the other main character, Soushi (yaoi territory)	A Festum attacking

All in all, Fafner is an enjoyable series. It has a nice blend of 2-D and CG animation, you never feel that the CG animation is overdone. The cast of characters all have their own very unique and well rounded personalities, that's quite a feat considering the large cast. In a series such as this it's inevitable some characters will die and those moments are really well done; you can feel the pain an anguish that the rest of the characters are going through.

My rating: 8/10

Chumsley Approves of My New Mouse

Since you asked... yeah, Chumsley get along fine with the new mouse. No tail for him to chew on =)

Nu

There were never any doubt that the Nu Gundam would be next in the HCM pro line-up. This picture confirms it.

Aside: I posted some new albums on my home page:

Chumsley (1 - 2 years old)
Baby and Chumsley
HCM Pro Zeta

Week-long Caribbean Cruise

Well, shipped my parents off to Florida this morning for their week-long Princess Caribbean Cruise. I do hope tropical storm Ernesto in the area doesn't ruin their vacation. I am looking forward to having some time to myself =)

In other (MG) news, the next Master Grade kits from Bandai will be the Crossbone Gundam and the IWSP pack for the Strike Gundam (pictures courtesy of the figure.fm community)

Crossbone pic 1
Crossbone pic 2
Crossbone pic 3
IWSP pic 1

Never read any Crossbone manga, but I guess it's fairly popular judging from the number of FIX models it has and now it's getting the MG treatment. The Crossbone name of course comes from the big X core fighter/backpack it has. I am not a big fan of the design, doesn't seem very practical.

Another Dead Mouse

Chumsley has chewed up yet another mouse cord, this must be his 4th or 5th victim. Of course my dad is jumping mad (since it's his mouse after all) and I am supposed to get him a wireless optical mouse this time and stop Chumsley's mouse hunt once and for all.

And this is what I ended up getting... For myself... (I am giving my dad my current keyboard and mouse)

I know... This is a bit more than just a mouse... But it's ok to indulge myself once in a while right?? This keyboard and mouse combo has some really sweet features, such as:

- Rechargeable mouse. Considering how fast my old mouse eats through the batteries, this should save some money in the long run.

- Bluetooth connectivity. This is a real plus, with the included Bluetooth receiver, it basically turns your computer into a Bluetooth hub. Really convenient for transferring files from my cell phone to the computer, since I don't have to crawl under the desk to connect my phone everytime I want to transfer something anymore (I can't keep the cable always attached to the computer, because any exposed loose wire is a great snack for Chumsley).

- Keyboard LCD, which shows you info such as current date and time, current track playing in media player, new mail notification etc. The coolest feature though is how it's integrated with MSN messenger. MSN messenger popups will be shown on the LCD. So for example, let's say you are working at your desk and the screen has gone into power saving mode, if anyone comes online or messages you, you can quickly find out who it is by glancing at the LCD screen.

- Touch sensitive media controls. Doesn't really enhance the user experience that much, but it's kind of cool.

And of course, there are a ton of other configurable buttons on both the mouse and keyboard. Here's a pic of the contents of the package, plus comparison with the old keyboard and mouse combo:

Chara Hobby 2006

I wish I could be there T_T

Pictures from the recent Chara Hobby show are beginning to surface on the internet, and a couple of items have caught my attention...

First, are the folks at Yamato finally going to release the long awaited, 2nd version of the YF-19?!? Check out the pics on this site! Looks like it's still just a prototype though.

Next up is this site, scroll to the middle of the page and check out the pictures of the coolsome looking Strike Freedom there. Could this be the an official MG kit?? Or is it mod of the MG Freedom? Notice though that the stand it's on is the MG Freedom stand... what does that mean??? (grrr... once again I wish my Japanese was better!)

Update: here is another pic of that Strike Freedom. And look at that Destiny beside it... that doesn't look like the HG version...

...

Gundam News

Gundam X will be #0033 in the Fix Figuration line of display figures, due out in December. The Fix line is something I have not gotten anything from yet, mainly because of the lack of articulation in them and they are kind of fragile; they are really meant for display rather than handling and playing with. However, Gundam X has always been one of my favourite designs, and the ability to display this as Gundam X or Gundam X Divider is a real plus (there is even a third form you can build it as, but it's just a grunt mech, it'd be cool if it was Double X). This one is tempting...

Speaking of Gundam X, I just put up the album to my HG 1/100 Gundam X kit.

Web Site Updates

I have been working on a couple of new sections on my home page. First is the photo album section. Rather than writing my own photo album though, I am just rendering the interface off of ImageStation's RSS feed (and this way, I don't have to take up my limited space on geocities). This mini-project was also my chance to experiment with some AJAX programming techniques. Although, in the end, I can't really claim credit for writing any AJAX specific code because I came across a handy little package called Sarissa.

Originally I thought it would be fun to write some js library functions to wrapper around the calls to the XMLHttpRequest object and handle doing XSLT as well. But as usual, anything I think of doing has already been done, I am serveral years too late in fact T_T. Sarissa is such a project, it provides a nice interface for doing AJAX programming. It was quite easy to use, although it's not without its share of bugs and quirks. But it's definitely better than me fudging around with browser specific instantiations and handling of XMLHttpRequest objects.

So now that the photo album is working, I put it to use for the second section I was working on, which is a section on my cats (those who know me shouldn't be surprised right? ;) The cats section can be found here. There are 3 albums so far =)

Another week gone by

Another week has gone by so quickly, well it was a short week anyways since Monday was the civic holiday. Last weekend I tried out that Owl of Minerva Keith recommended. It's really good authentic Korean food. There aren't many choice there though, but that's ok, everyone just goes there for the pork bone soup, it's really good.

Not much happened this week. I was very tired after work these past few days. I didn't go to gym at all (shame on me!) Work was not particularly intense, not sure why I feel so tired, maybe just been starring at the monitor too much...

[Review] Service-Oriented Architecture - A Field Guide to Integrating XML and Web Services

I bought this book a little over a month ago. I was hoping to learn more about SOA and web services in preparation for working in my new department. This book has 5 star review overall on Amazon, so I thought was getting exactly what I needed... Unfortunately, things could not be further from the truth.

The problem with this book is that it's too high level. Many of the scenarios described in the book are described in such high level that in many cases, I am at a loss as to what are the differences and points that the author is trying to get across. In those examples, ultimately it all boils down to stripping away the communication layer of an application and slap on a web services integration layer which appears to do just about the same thing. Magically, your applications will be able to talk to each other with ease, but there is no clear explanation as to why a web services approach would do better than other traditional approaches. Sure, pros and cons are given, but they are simply statements made without enough detail to support them.

I also found the flow of the book hard to follow and erratic. Often it feels like points are made simply for the sake of making it, there is no logical continuation from the previous point. There are a lot of back references too, i.e. in chapter 10+ you would still get a lot of: "for more information on XYZ, please refer to chapter 5". But of course it is rather pointless to refer back to chapter 5, since it is just more of the hand-wavy high level overview of the particular concept.

Another thing that bugs me are the diagrams in the book. Too many times I have found a diagram referred to in a paragraph would be found a couples pages ahead resulting in a lot a page flipping. *Good* thing the diagrams are about as useful as drawing stick figures in an anatomy class and soon I have learned to ignore them.

One might argue that the book is aimed at system architects and I am the wrong target audience. That is probably true but I have my doubts about the usefulness of this book for system architects as well. I would argue that any IT professional with experience architecting systems and background in software engineering would already be familiar with the strategies and best practices outlined in the book. Even to me some of the strategies and best practices sounds just like back in first year economics when the prof says that higher demand will result in increased supply.

My rating: 2/5

AJAX and REST

I first read about AJAX on Danny's site. I thought it was some kind of server-side add-on module, but actually AJAX is technique for doing Web development that improves a page's interactivity without doing page loads. AJAX stands for Asynchronous Javascript and XML and you can read all about it here. The concept is quite interesting. Basically, parts of the HTML on a page is generated dynamically with Javascript, using XML data retrieved from the server via an XMLHttpRequest object. And since the data exchange is asychronous, the whole page does not need to load.

So this AJAX stuff is cool but how to get my hands into it you ask? Well, one of the things you can do is add a Google quick search to your site. Yes, that's right, Google has an AJAX Search API, and I am quite impressed with how easy it was to incorporate into my home page.

Speaking of web development, I was suprised to find that YouTube has a REST API for retrieving videos from their site. REST is only a concept I've heard about from my manager once, this is the first time I encountered a real world application of it (but as it turns out, many sites such as Amazon and eBay have REST APIs too, I just don't know about them). REST is certainly a topic I would like to learn about. Furthermore, it sounds like AJAX and REST goes hand in hand together.

Saikano Movie

I didn't mention that I actually found a subbed version of the Saikano movie a couple days ago. At first I didn't get it because it was in mkv format and I didn't know how to play it. But it turns out to be quite easy, I just need to grab the Combined Community Codec pack. It even plays ogm files, so no need for the Nimo Codec pack anymore.

The movie casts Aki Maeda in the role as Chise and some guy that looks like 古天樂 as Shuji (he doesn't look any way like his anime counter-part, at least they could have made him wear glasses!) The film opens up shortly before the Sapporo raid in the story.

Sapporo Air Raid	Chise, you are on the wrong swing!

Most differences between the movie and the anime are a result of fitting the storyline into the a format what works as a movie; such as fewer supporting characters and some that play slightly different roles. Also, the relationship between Chise and Shuji is not as well developed as in the anime, this is to be expected given the length of the movie. The most significant change is the ending though, which I find weakens the film. I like the anime ending much better.

The special effects in the film was sparse, but those that we do get are done quite well. Some parts of the movie is quite dark though, and I suspect it let's the director get away with doing less special effects.

I was disappointed with the BGM of the film though. I was looking foward to hearing some of the music from the anime. That just didn't happen.

Overall, the movie does a decent job of capturing the essence of the anime. But because of the weak ending and lack of a good soundtrack, I have to give it a lower review than the anime: 5/10

P.S. I changed the template on my blog. I really liked the last template but it had some bugs with rendering the side-bar (some links doesn't appear unless you hover over them).

SPCA Shelter Destroyed

Heard on the news that an SPCA animal shelter was struck by lightning from last night's thunderstorm. The shelter caught fire and many animals were killed or injured. Such sad news, nature's fury can be devastating. Donations to SPCA can be made online, follow the link at the bottom of this article (http://www.citynews.ca/news/news_2462.aspx).

Darken Skies

Well, this is how the sky looked on my way home today (the top right corner is the massive rain cloud and it's in the direction I was headed). This was just the prelude, within minutes it was pouring cats and more cats... I thought driving through a snow storm was bad, driving through tonight's thunder storm at the peak of it was worst. It was like getting slapped over and over again with sheets of water from every direction. Good thing it was a short drive home.

Finished downloading Saikano OST. There are a couple of tracks I really like, the others were ok... they are nice but I don't recall where I've heard them, so they don't jog my memory about the series at all. The 2 songs I like the most just happens to be the opening and ending songs (not really surprising considering I've heard them so many times). I've uploaded them to my webspace and you can download them from here:

• Koisuru Kimochi (OP)
• Sayonara (ED)

Since space is limited, I probably won't leave them up for a long time.

News travels fast...

Apparently someone thinks I should update my blog more often =p Wow, you sure get wind of things quickly sp... Especially since I only told a couple people (literally) about my blog so far.

I *was* going to write something in here last night, but then my connection was lost and I had to reboot my computer to get it back, so didn't bother to re-type everything. Nothing much to talk about anyways, just stuff about work (I am sure no one wants to read that). So instead boring everyone with work, I decide to post pics of these instead:

Why am I posting them? That's because I just checked HLJ and my order is being processed for shipping ^_^. Can't wait for them to get here, look forward to more pics and reviews of them when they arrive. And of course, I'll also retroactively put up pics of models and toys I currently have in my collection (either here or in my home page). Stay tuned!