Blogs

I went to Mackfest today to celebrate Alan Mackworth's contributions to AI. It was a lot of fun. I was happy to meet Alan and my sister again. It's been three years since we met last time! AKM is a great professor. I've learned a great deal from him. I also enjoyed the AI text book “Computational Intelligence” he co-authored with David Poole and Randy Goebel. I've read it at least twice.

Without his encouragement, TOS is almost impossible considering it's an after work project for me. With the birth of TOS, came the realization of my true potential. TOS is just the beginning, I know what I'm capable of:-)

I was also impressed by my sister's talk on her PARC robotic research projects. Obviously she's having great fun developing those robotic snakes:-)

What a beautiful Saturday afternoon! Sitting in bed, with a book in my left hand and a high lighter in my right hand, I looked out of the window. Blue sky, no cloud. Looked like it's Spring time for Vancouver!

OK, I hope this will be it. No more coding on this for the rest of the year. Consider this as my holiday gift for ... fellow thinkers. I've just tweaked the program to make it much faster at start up. Enjoy.

http://www.e-graviton.com/galaxy/

I've just released YZGalaxy 1.10. In this new version, you can enjoy the feeling of sailing through the vast space with the stars passing by and the galaxies tumbling around. Welcome to the deep space, the final frontier...

Just watched the PBS show “Monster of the Milky Way”. It is fascinating. It showed the theory and the evidence of a monster black hole in the center of our galaxy. Well, I've long suspected so even when there's not much scientific evidence around. To me, it's common sense. Just by looking at the shape of these galaxies, these spiral shapes. Don't they resemble the whirling water draining down into a sink? There must be a sucker in the center of any galaxy, black hole or not.

I was walking towards a pet food store in the shopping mall. A usual Sunday morning up to that moment, and I was feeling almost completely recharged due to the extra hour I had last night. The shopping mall was quiet and empty. A woman was on the public phone discussing something about “mental illness”. Two little girls were playing on the wooden horses while their mother was supervising them nearby.

A man in his sixties approached me from a corner and asked, “Sir, Can you help me?”
“Yes?” I stopped, expecting a normal question about time or directions.

A Nice day today, but it's getting cold and windy. The bike's kickstand got stuck with the pedals. I managed to solve the problem in a quick way, by breaking the spring of the kickstand. This unnecessary overuse of force has cost me 22 dollars. Well, the bright side is, I will install the new kickstand far away from the pedals, so it won't get stuck again.

An interesting piece of news in today's Vancouver Sun! A woodpecker has been smashing vehicle mirrors on Vancouver's east side. Apparently that woodpecker thought he's looking at another woodpecker in the mirror and he didn't like it a bit!

I just watched the movie Silent Hill. The film seems to contain bits and pieces from all the video games in the Silent Hill series. It is a good horror movie but I was not scared at all. It is good because it brings back some interesting memories of my “Silent Hill” gaming experience.

I've had a great summer vacation cruising below the waves in dangerous waters. No, not physically:-) In fact, this is the first summer I didn't travel further than 300km from my home. No matter, without leaving home, I got to travel below the seven seas in virtual reality. I was quite engaged in playing “Sub Command” and “Dangerous Waters”. I'm a helpless Submarine Simulation gamer. Last summer, I was a WWII U boat commander stalking Allied ships in “Silent Hunter III”. This summer, I was back to modern era commanding “Akula”, “Kilo”, “Seawolf” and “688(I)”.