All Things Yummy

Out of things to do, and I like it that way! The travel brochure lists some 20 odd tourist destination within Penang, but none of them looked particularly interesting. Maybe it’s the fact that I’m much more of a doer than a seer but going to and taking pictures of various temples and gardens isn’t exactly something that I’d go out of my way to do… (unless, of course, if it involves monkeys!)  and by not going out anywhere, I probably had the most relaxing day that I’ve ever had in a long while.

Maybe this is the real charm of Penang - relaxing and eating. I dragged myself out onto Gurney drive to a coffee house called Mr. Pot where I had White Coffee (as far as I can tell, it’s their name for coffee with lots of sugar and cream), buttered toast (which is buttered and has some sweet substance on it), and toast with chicken curry.  As with everything else here, the food was delicious!  After hanging out there for an hour, perusing through the Sunday Times (or Sunday Strait?) where I learned that entry level Kia sedans are considered low level executive car here, I walked another couple of blocks down to the Gurney Plaza where I bought a book (Blind Willow, Sleeping Women by Haruki Murakami - damn, books are relatively expensive here!) and went to another coffee shop where I curled up with some fancy banana / strawberry drink, chocolate cake, and my new book. I got back to the hotel, then went and got a hair cut (another interesting experience - I was served tea to drink while I waited for a seat to open up… and the haircut was followed by a full on scalp massage as part of the wash process, all for less than $10 USD!), then headed to the Gurney Hawker centre for even more delicious and amazing food before finishing the day at the hotel’s coffee shop. The city hustles and bustles, but you can also slow the pace of life right down and be completely oblivious to everything else around you.

Couple of interesting things that I’ve noticed: my status as a Canadian citizen born in Korea but living in US and visiting Penang for 2 weeks seems to completely confuse the locals here. They don’t seem to be able to fully grasp it, though I suppose it actually is rather confusing. Growing up in Canada where everyone is basically an immigrant, I tend to take people moving countries for granted but I suppose it is a fairly rare thing if you actually think about the number of people who actually make that jump. The other thing is that everything here seems to be labour intensive, even the things that needn’t be. Everything from McDelivery motorcycles (yes, McDonald’s delivers here. So do KFC. Free as long as you buy 5 ringgits worth, or ~$1.50) to the way that hawker centres operate, it’s seems to be designed to be as convenient as possible for the consumer at the expense of labour requirements. As someone who’s grown up with doing things on my own and who’s used to that style, the difference is rather jarring, but I’m starting to see the human side of it all. Maybe I’m starting to actually prefer this humane side of commerce as opposed to the western we’ll increase efficiency by removing all trace of humanity from our interactions thing that we’ve got going.

When I sit down to use a Mac, the first thing I think is, “I hate Macs”, and then I think, “Why has this rubbish aspirational ornament only got one mouse button?” Losing that second mouse button feels like losing a limb. If the ads were really honest, Webb would be standing there with one arm, struggling to open a packet of peanuts while Mitchell effortlessly tore his apart with both hands.

Haha, that little diatribe is almost exactly the thought that goes through my mind whenever I see Macs.  Check the comments for throngs of indignant Mac users firing back.

Here’s an interesting artlcle that basically says invest in Altera and Xilinx beacuse we’re the future. Wee! It’s good to see the company being written about in this way even though the article has its share of mistakes. Embedded soft-core microprocessors are specifically mentioned too, including specifically mentioned Nios II and C2H.

By contrast, Altera recently announced a new microprocessor productivity tool for its Nios II soft core that enables, for the first time, software engineers to design hardware. Nios is already the industry’s most widely used soft microprocessor.

Anyway, the article does a very good job of portraying the market conditions as well as describe variety of products that Altera supplies as well as some of the momentum that we have behind us. So, if you want to know that Altera really really do, then give that article a read.

I accidentally bought a computer today. I bought a computer for the solar car office at an online auction last week, and I was bidding on things for fun… and I promptly forgot about it.

To my surprise, I got an email just now saying that I’ve won the auction and my credit card has already been charged. D’oh! Well, now I’m a proud new owner of HP Visualize X4000, a Dual Xeon P4-2000MHz with 1GB of memory and 18GB Harddrive. If you’re looking for a reasonable workstation for a reasonable price ($800?) let me know.

The Computer Organization final was this morning and it was… interesting. My brain blanked out in the middle, so I made some wild guesses… but so far, it seems like those guesses were correct. 3 more exams left!

I got this in my mailbox today. Impressive, these spammers. Managed to find its way through SpamAssassin configured with all the DCC/Pyzor/Razor goodness, through all the blacklists, and through Thunderbird’s built-in spam filter.

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Had my Iron Ring fitting today - apparently I’m size 5.5. I was surprisingly excited about something that I didn’t really expect to get excited about. The Iron Ring Ceremony (and the accompanying Champagne Breakfast and the Iron Ring Stag) is in exactly 1 weeks’ time, and I can’t wait!

I’ve been made the official Pancake Chef for the Champagne Breakfast from my experience making pancakes for lots of people. It’ll be fun, it looks like Tsu and Kevin are doing a great job organizing everything.

I should be studying, but I’ve been spending the last bit fixing up my photo gallery. Apparently the css file didn’t quite work for Internet Explorer. I’ve set it up a while ago, so that kinda tells you just how much I use IE. Go Firefox! I’ve also uploaded some North American Tour photos for your enjoyment

I was driving to school this morning… I’d usually be doing about 70kph up the Columbia Street toward the University, but I saw in my back mirror a white Crown Victoria turn in right behind me… White Crown Victorias are a trouble, so I slowed down to more leisurely (and more legal) 60kph… When I got to the top, I saw that there was a speed trap set up by the police… And when I got to the light, I realized that the Crown Victoria was being driven by a little old woman. Thank you, little old woman driving a Crown Victoria!

Oh yeah, and Vote!

I guess it’s a brand new year again. Wow… 2005. 4 more months until I graduate. It’s amazing just how fast the time flies by.

No, I really don’t have any specific New Year’s Resolution yet. Even if I did, it’d be something fuzzy like “Be more organized!” or “Take more chances!” which is nice and good, but hard to do and even harder to measure. My last year’s resolution was something concrete (Take 3 photos a day) but that didn’t really pan out either, especially after I completely took the camera apart and somehow left a finger print in the innards that shows up in every single picture taken with that camera.

Anyway, it’s good to be back on a school term. I only have 2 courses with labs and/or projects, so it’ll be pretty light term as far as academic workload is concerned. Solar car building process is now in complete and full motion, but I’ve *much* rather spend my time buliding and debugging circuits as opposed to dealing with bureacratic things… although I doubt the bureacratic aspect will ever be taken away from my plate as long as I hold the “Village Idiot” title. In any case, the plugs are finally going out so we’ll start to see actual car being built soon.

This term has been unlike the other terms, in that we have a big deliverable right away. Our fourth year design project symposium is quickly coming up, but after a weekend of debugging, I think we’re pretty close to having everything working. We blew up a power board (we’re thinking overheated voltage regulator) but we did fix most of the funny problems we’ve had during the demo.

Oh yeah, and I’ve ordered a new computer to replace the one that was given to Emo! Specs are below. For $1,063.51, it’s a pretty nice system, replacing the computer I’ve built back in 1A (with blown caps and all).

AMD ATHLON 64 3000+ PROCESSOR S939 1.8GHZ 512KB L2 CACHE RETAIL BOX 1 $179.98 $179.98
ASUS A8V DELUXE MOTHERBOARD ATHLON64 S939 K8T800PRO DUAL DDR AGP 5PCI SATA 1394 SOUND 1000LAN 1 $159.98 $159.98
SAMSUNG 512MB PC3200 DDR400 184PIN OEM 2 $77.99 $155.98
SAMSUNG SPINPOINT 160GB 7200RPM 9MS SATA 8MB OEM HARD DRIVE 1 $118.98 $118.98
BENQ DW1620 DVD+-RW 16X4X16 DUAL LAYER +R 2.4X BEIGE IDE OEM W/ SW 1 $69.98 $69.98
ANTEC SLK1600 MID-TOWER CASE 3X5.25 5X3.5 BEIGE ATX12V 300W 1 $49.98 $49.98
UBSIOFT FAR CRY - DVD ONLY - *BUNDLE WITH AMD ATHLON 64 CPU & MOTHERBOARD ONLY* 1 $0.00 $0.00
SAPPHIRE RADEON 9600XT 128MB DDR DVI-I W/ TV OUT OEM 1 $175.98 $175.98
MITSUMI FA404A 7-IN-1 FLOPPY DRIVE & FLASH READER CF/SM/SD/MMC/MS 1 $28.38 $28.38
Shipping & Handling: $40.60
Shipping Insurance: $14.09
SUBTOTAL: $993.93
GST (7%): $69.58
TOTAL: $1,063.51

So, we were travelling to Corpus Christi on December 24th. The flight went from Toronto through Atlanta to Corpus Christi.

With the winter storm, there were few flight cancellations. The flight from Toronto was only 2 hours late in departing. By the time we got to Atlanta, we were already about an hour late for the connecting flight. It took 2 hours in the lineup to find out that the flight from Atlanta to Corpus Christi was cancelled (They had gotten 6 inches of snow that day. To put that in perspective, Corpus Christi received 2 inches of snow in 96 years before that *total*) We were fully expecting a night at the airport, but Delta gave us not only free vouchers for food, but also for two nights’ stay at an Inn.

By the time we managed to get to Corpus Christi, it was December 26th (and the luggage didn’t arrive for another day). It was inconvenient… but also kinda fun. I guess it all builds character. At least we weren’t flying ComAIR - we could’ve been completely screwed.

Anyway, I’ve been sitting here fixing computers for the last 3 days. Finally fixed the last computer - hopefully they’ll last a while. Just in case, though, I enabled Remote Assistant/Login so that I can easiliy fix it even if it’s completely broken… again… :p

It’s been a while since I wrote here. I’ve been INCREDIBLY busy over last month or so… 4th year and Midnight Sun all coming together…

Anyway, today was fun. Class in the morning, then we drove the solar car to Economical Insurance. We finally have lots of new blood coming in to the team, so it’s a lot of fun. Then more classes, followed by dinner at an interesting (and pretty decent) sea food restaurant and work on our fourth year project.

So, me and Phil were sitting around, developing code on the robocup robots. Since the DiskOnChip we use on them are only 8MB big, we usually develop the software on harddrives that we manually mount. Problem, though, is that we only have one backplane, so we can develop and compile the software on only one of the robots. So, to actually be able to copy the new builds of the programs, we have to turn everything off, swap the harddrives, turn everything back on, copy the required file to DiskOnChip, then turn everything off again, then swap the harddrives back into the original configuration. Needless to say, it’s pretty tedious. Then Phil comes up with brilliant idea - We’re working on building wireless network! Why not just make a program that allows us to send files wireless between the robots? After 30 minutes of hacking, we ended up with a program that allowed us to easily distribute and copy files around just using BlueTooth… Ah… that made my week.

Heck, I’m so happy that I could even overlook the fact that I’m happy about coding a neat piece of code on a Friday night.

Someone rang the door bell couple of minutes ago… I sneaked a peak and it looked like she was selling stuff… so I hid and didn’t respond… Heh, I’m evil

Lots of things happening. I went and bought textbooks for next term today. I had a meeting about USRA/Grad School with my advisor today, with two more scheduled on Thursday and Friday. I need to go and ask for money from bunch of different people, as well doing all the other solar car stuff. The solarcar office is miraculously clean, though, which is wonderful. During cleaning, we found stuff from 1993 and before… it’s amazing how much old stuff was in that office. We filled an entire garbage dumpster thingie.

I’ve finished reading through most of James Clavell’s Asian Saga. I am now getting tired of his style… He is better writer than, say, Ludlum or Clancy… but he has his own annoying quirks as well and it’s finally getting to me.

Hmm… other things of note… I’ve stopped using Outlook. I use my blackberry for scheduling and Thunderbird for mail. Slowly weaning myself away from Microsoft Dependence.