Treasure Trove

I knew I save everything I can for a reason. I read one of J’s Tumblr entries on a movie about the Three Gorges Dam, and tried to find the paper I wrote on it way back in middle school.

I couldn’t find the paper (maybe it’s on a floppy disk somewhere at home), but I did come across my archive of essays I wrote during my high school years. I might post some of the more interesting ones here and there. Here is one on people:

[Sunday, April 01, 2001]

…

I read somewhere that the majority of people in America are linked by only two acquaintances. That’s pretty spiffy. To think that I could very well be two people away from the girl I’m going to marry, two people away from the president (actually, one person away; I knew one of the Bush daughters), two people away from anyone at all. Is our world really that small? Figuratively speaking, of course. I think it would be very amusing to be able to look at the world from a distance and follow the courses of people’s lives, to see how they live, how they think, how they see the world themselves. Perhaps that is why we like to watch movies. Movies are a way for us to escape our own lives and participate in others’.

…

 

Time flies

From an article in BusinessWeek:

Microsoft is already hard at work on its next operating system, Windows 7. While details are scant, experts think it might be late 2010 or 2011 before it’s on the market.

Reading about such things as 2011 in the news gave me quite a shock. I still feel like it’s the new millennium, and Y2K was just last year. Do you remember where you were in 1999?

 

First days at Apple

I’m back after my second day in the real world. It’s been pretty nice. I like my work environment; the perks are pretty awesome, and I saw J this weekend for the first time in a long, long while. By the way, 21 is a better movie than IMDB would lead you to believe.

I live so close to everything! Ranch 99 is a walkable distance, and so is the theater, as well as Safeway, and my work. Want to see it? It’s really too bad that this apartment is too expensive. It would be so awesome to live here.

Well, that’s my short update for now. More to come later.

 

Saving everything

At what point does the act of trying to record and preserve everything so your future self can remember start limiting how much you are experiencing that which you are saving in the first place? All the trips to

Huntington,

Santa Monica,

San Francisco,

and so many

other

places with J; all the

formal dinners

birthday parties,

Mafia games,

and barbeques with Avery people;

and a good chunk of what I remember is what I saw through the viewfinder. What did I miss? What could I have experienced were it not for the expensive piece of glass and silicon I held in my hands?

 

A little meta, anyone?

Wow, first meta-post. I hope I don’t do this too often. So I added a link to this blog on my Facebook profile recently, and the views shot way up. Thanks for the support, guys! Please do comment, as I appreciate any feedback on what is interesting, what is not, and what is worth posting about more. Ideally, this would be a conversation, and not just me talking at empty space.

I’ve added two more links to my blogroll: J’s and my Tumblr accounts. It’s a more convenient way to post the shorter things like a link or a photo. J also found a way to enable comments on Tumblr, so it’s even more awesome.

And just to keep this post a little non-meta, B came to visit today (he’s a classmate who is the same year as me). Five of us went to P. F. Chang’s today for dinner. It’s not authentic Chinese food, but very good anyways (try the lettuce wraps!).

Anyway, it was amusing to observe the different conversations that people have, depending on the group that is present. For example, the average intelligence level of our conversation was about that of a herd of chinchillas (i.e. nonexistent), whereas every once in a while, it would spike to some rather lofty value. Examples include when someone mentioned that the yellow stripes in the parking lot made a triangle if you projected it from hyperbolic space to normal Euclidean space; and, ironically, when we were talking about how dumb our banter was.

On a related note, I read somewhere a long time ago that the amount of meta-discussion increases with intelligence level. I think B got to 5 or 6 levels of meta-ness before we all collapsed back into chinchillas. Does this make me a level 7 meta-rodent?

 

Time lapse

I feel like the world is going by so quickly. In the past few weeks, it’s been change after change, and it’s all I can do to try to remember as much of it as I can. I will write more substantially about this in the future, but for now, there is a video that captures a little of what I am feeling that I’d like to share.

• Timelapse Reel #1

If that link doesn’t work, try this one: other formats.

 

xkcd: The Laser Elevator

xkcd has an interesting discussion of the evolution of laser-powered propulsion.

Choicy quotation:

If we were lifting the squirrel with a motor, railgun, or electric catapult, with 1.21 gigawatts we could send it screaming upward at ridiculous speeds.

Example image:

Imagine the possibilities!

 

Reactions to public photography

I came across this thread on digital Photography School where people post their experiences with people’s reactions to seeing a photographer. Some excerpts:

I find taking night shots in and around downtown dangerous. I attract too much attention, let me rephrase that…my tripod attracts too much attention. Drivers will start trying to see where my focal point is and start veering off the road, sometimes right at me!

A couple of months ago I actually had some old lady call the police on me. In her mind, somebody setting up a tripod by a lake was most likely robbing her neighbor

Speaking of public photography, I took this one of my lunch at Daikokuya in Little Tokyo, LA. People were looking at us, but no one told us to stop taking photos inside their establishment.

 

Ray tracing

From Wikipedia:

Ray tracing is a general technique from geometrical optics of modeling the path taken by light by following rays of light as they interact with optical surfaces. It is used in the design of optical systems, such as camera lenses, microscopes, telescopes and binoculars. The term is also applied to mean a specific rendering algorithmic approach in 3D computer graphics, where mathematically-modelled visualisations of programmed scenes are produced using a technique which follows rays from the eyepoint outward, rather than originating at the light sources. It produces results similar to ray casting and scanline rendering, but facilitates more advanced optical effects, such as accurate simulations of reflection and refraction, and is still efficient enough to frequently be of practical use when such high quality output is sought.

Some examples at the POV-Ray Hall of Fame:

 

Cell phones

It’s amazing to think about the sheer amount of frustration we are willing to put up with when we use our cell phones. From intermittent signals when we’re on the ground floor of buildings, to call failures simply because we’re making a call right after checking voicemail, to slow UIs and carrier lock-in, we are constantly reminded that in our pockets we carry a marvel of monopolistic intervention. Did I mention that my phone doesn’t know when daylight savings time begins? Maybe by next week it will have seen the light.

When I used Sprint, the calls were truly clear. Now with T-Mobile (do they actually think they can trademark magenta?), I miss the first syllable of most sentences, and the ’s’ sound is low-passed to oblivion. It’s gotten to the point where I add ‘mmm’ to the beginning of short phrases so that the chain of audio transmission can rev up before I speak the main content. It’s pretty sad, really. I must sound doubly insane when you see me talking on the phone.