The Twilight Report

spring cleaning (living room)

2007-11-27T18:11:00

Today I did the rest of the living room. I love my red plates and monet-esq placemats.

(more)

sweet

2007-09-30T19:44:00

On Friday the Chinese Navy was in town. We could see their two ships parked at the Navy base. The first group we ran into was asking where they could purchase a phone card. A man from the second group was asking where he could find a pay phone. When we were walking up the street after that we saw a third group gathered around a pay phone. Phoning friends and family back home I presume. It was sweet.

calmness

2007-02-20T02:51:00

The calm after the storm.

I keep thinking that I am going to get organized and write one of those “real” updates that people so often talk about. (but seldom ever do).

Yes.

Yes, I am one of those people.

Babel

Tonight I went to see Babel. It was a good film. I liked the way events in the movie were connected, but disjointed. It sort of reminded me of Photopia (among the more innovative “games” I have ever “played”).

May you live in interesting times.

I was looking this up and apparently it has nothing at all to do with the Chinese. It must have been one of those mistranslation things, or maybe just some western guy made it up. In the case of the former, then maybe they should have used a babel fish.

豬

2007-02-11T19:46:00

Today I went down to Chinatown for the Chinese New Year (春節 or 農曆新年) parade. There were lots of dragons down there, like me; I’m a fire dragon (火龍). Hope everyone has a prosperous year of the pig :)

you

2006-12-22T00:21:00

I was watching the Daily Show and the Colbert Report about Time’s lamest person of the year award ever: “you”, and today I walked past the newsagent and saw the cover which confirmed it really was as lame as I suspected. It also reminded me of an episode dating back to the New Mexico Super Computer Challenge...

When I was in high school, there was this thing were computer nerds got together from all over the state and competed to write scientific applications on the super computer hardware available at the national labs in New Mexico. It was sort of an academic decathlon for computer nerds, so it was the über in überdorky.

So there I was having lunch with my computer geek friends at the “challenge” and I says to Ellen (more or less out of nowhere), “did you hear what Jeff said about you?”

Nick thought this was hilarious, for reasons that I couldn’t fathom, but instead of admitting that I just nodded and agreed like I knew what was so funny. I mean, I had meant it as a joke, but it wasn’t that funny.

Then Ellen threw a piece of pie at Jeff, not because she was particularly mad at Jeff (who had not, in fact, said anything about her), but because someone had dared her to. That’s what wonderful upstanding young citizens we were in those days.

Later, I figured out that Nick thought that I was making a pun based on this Chinese girl that we knew whose name is a homonym for “you”. Still not very funny, but the joke became legendary for some reason, and I never admitted to anyone that I hadn’t intended it that way and anyway I didn’t even think it was that funny.

“You” was one of those classic over achievers. She was taking all AP classes, but did that make her smart? I saw what she did for her AP Computers final and it showed a complete misunderstanding of the technology that she was supposed to be learning. I also saw what the computer teacher wrote about her in his recommendation for her (pesky Unix permission bits). I don’t think she deserved the praise she got from him. I could see her being smart in English or Math or Science, because I didn’t see her perform in that capacity, but on the other hand, I could just as easily see her being good at taking tests. That would actually describe most of the people that I knew in high school.

My point is, I am much happier thinking that Time chose “You” (the person I knew in high school) rather than the second person plural as there Person of the Year.

like a heartbeat / on the downbeat

2006-09-22T22:24:00

Feeling overly dramatic and totally energyless tonight. sendmail should die; remind me again why we can't just use postfix instead?

I have an urge to write another computer demo. Will need two things:

to review OpenGL
inspiration

I was in a bookstore this afternoon after work and I picked up an OpenGL book. The hard bit will be the inspiration. My last demo was inspired by the number e^[1].

Who wants to be in charge of sound effects and music?

The other thing I thought about buying in the bookstore was a Mandarin/English dictionary. I decided to wait for now. I've obviously become interested in 中文^[2], but I have a few 中文 resources that I should finish with before buying new stuff. It could be a passing interest after all.

I'm a dork.
Chinese language

Dinner with the rels

2006-08-19T02:45:00

Tonight I had dinner with some long lost relatives. Actually not really; I hadn't seen them in about a year and a half. I see family on my dad's side (aside from Dad, his wife and the kids) so seldom that when I do see them it feels as though they are long and lost. I’ve never lived so close to so much family. It’s nice.

Also: my dad bought a new car. It was about time that old clunker was way too small for the size of the family. It’s so weird to think of my dad driving a car with those modern curves. I instinctively think of his car as being a boxlike refugee from the 1980s. Apparently Lara misses the old car. Reminded me of how heart broken I was when my mum sold the Tercel. That was years ago.

It was actually even pretty nice to talk to my step mother tonight. She treated me like shit when she first started dating my dad (that was years ago), but I’ve tried not to hold a grudge against her, as I think that would just hurt my dad, and solve nothing.

She is ethnically Chinese, so I got to ask her intelligent questions about which dialect of Chinese that her family spoke (she is herself essentially a native English speaker), and where her family originates from. Before I started studying Chinese input methods I was aware that there were many subtle regional differences in Chinese languages and culture, but totally ignorant about what they might be. I’m still pretty ignorant, but at least I am learning. I tried to get them to show me Tristan and Lara’s middle names, which are Chinese, and so have Chinese characters that correctly represent them. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get my laptop out of simplified Chinese mode, and my step mother only recognizes the traditional variants.

I’m pretty sure that “David”^[1] is a jerk. He came by tell me that I was working on the wrong thing today and that the resolution on my monitor reminded me of the cruddy old days when X Windows was all the rage. Hello, if you didn’t give me shit to work on then the shit that I work on wouldn’t look like shit. Blah, whatever. Either it will get better, or I’ll be gone soon. I don’t much care which.

guy at work who offered me the position that no longer exists

應龍

2006-08-06T00:54:00

Work has been keeping me pretty busy, and while I still find the regime in control of the network at Company 2 to be on the oppressive side, I am enjoying playing with foreign language input methods. I have been tasked with making software tools usable by native Chinese speakers. I have always been interested in how people interact with computers and technology, and when you take away all of the assumptions (which I have always lived with) which come along with English, things become a little more interesting.

(中文 stuff)

My knowledge of Chinese is itty-bitty, but just the fact that I can sort of distinguish different forms of Chinese from each other and from other Asian languages excites me. Maybe someday I will find the time to properly study Chinese. I think it would be a fun and useful thing to know. I almost picked up a Chinese language Sydney paper at the newsagent last night just to study the characters.

Last night I went back to Sydney Uni for "Trivia Night." It was pretty fun, we had pizza and answered trivial questions. The one question I got "wrong" was something that I really should have gotten right. The correct answer was either SGML or HTML, but I was pretty sure that HTML didn't exist in the 1980s (as specified in the question), where as I knew that SGML (on which HTML is based) had been around since the 80s. I just checked on Wikipedia, and sure enough the first specification documents for HTML date back to 1993. The reason I should have known that the "right" answer was HTML is because non-IT people with whom I was playing would be more likely to recognize the term HTML than SGML. I mean, SGML - what's that?