Summer Travel Plans

June:  Hawaii
July:  Winnipeg
August:  China
September:  LA

Leaving tomorrow for Hawaii. Hopefully my gps device works this time...

Quotes

I keep a list of some of my favourite quotes on Google Documents and I add to it as I come across them. I quite enjoy reading through these quotes periodically and here are some of my favourites:

I won't pretend fun things aren't still fun out of fear of looking silly
-- xkcd 219

It's easy to regret your awkward conversations but hard to regret the ones you didn't have.
-- xkcd 235

We live trapped in loops, reliving a few days over and over, and we envision only a handful of paths laid out ahead of us. We see the same things each day, we respond the same way, we think the same thoughts, each day a slight variation on the last, every moment smoothly following the gentle curves of societal norms
Pound for pound, one of the best verticals
-- xkcd 137

Grad students aren't bad people, they just make terrible life choices
-- Bart Simpson

I think for the most part, if you're really honest with yourself about what you want out of life, life gives it to you.
-- Ted Mosby, How I Met Your Mother

If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original
-- Sir Ken Robinson

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication
-- Leonardo da Vinci

When you're with someone you love, the most mundane things suddenly become wonderful
-- Hidden Leaves by V.C. Andrews

Though this be madness, yet there is method in't.
-- Polonius, Hamlet

The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
-- Hamlet

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic
-- Arthur C. Clarke

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
-- Arthur C. Clarke

Penny: "I'm a sagitarious, which probably tells you way more than you need to know."
Sheldon: "Yes, it tells us that you participate in the mass culture delusion that the sun's apparent position relative to arbitrarily defined constellations at the time of your birth somehow affects your personality."
-- Big Bang Theory

Penny: "What time is it?"
Leonard: "Almost 6:30"
Penny: "I slept all day?"
Leonard: "Oh no, it's 6:30 in the morning"
Penny: "What the hell is your problem?"
-- Big Bang Theory

There's always the possibility that alcohol and poor judgment on her part might lead to a nice romantic evening.
-- Sheldon, Big Bang Theory

100% of the shots you don't take don't go in
-- Wayne Gretzky

Animals are such agreeable friends. They ask no questions and they pass no criticism.
--1857 British novelist George Eliot

I screwed up
-- Barack Obama

The truth is told by whoever is left standing.
-- Tom Zarek, Battlestar Galactica

I want to give my kids just enough so that they would feel that they could do anything, but not so much that they would feel like doing nothing.
-- Warren Buffett

Computer nerds are the sex symbols for the 21st century
-- CBC, Starcraft Documentary

Thinking that other people might be better than you is what makes you Canadian
-- Steven Colbert

Man and woman are born to love, marry and beget children. Woman is so physically constituted that she is the one who bears the child. Man, on the other hand, is given the duty of being the protector of his wife and, after they are born, of his children. Therefore, he must always be the one who takes the initiative. He must be strong, he must be willing, he must be physically able to take care of his charges, He must be the aggressor.

It is, therefore, necessary that the man be taller than the woman. The psychological reason for this is that he must always give the impression of being his woman's superior, both mentally and especially physically. The physical reason, with which we are more concerned, is that if he is taller that his woman, he is better able to kiss her. He must be able to sweep her into his strong arms, and tower over her, and look down into her eyes, and cup her chin in his fingers and then, bend over her face and plant his eager, virile lips on her moist, slightly parted, inviting ones. All of this he must do with the vigor of an assertive male. And, all of these are impossible where, the woman is the taller of the two. For when the situation is reversed, the kiss becomes only a ludicrous banality. The physical mastery is gone, the male prerogative is gone, everything is gone but the fact that two lips are touching two other lips. Nothing can be more disappointing.
-- Hugh Morris, The Art of Kissing (1936)

Ted: "What you and Tony have, what I thought for a second, you and I had, what I know that Marshall and Lily have, I want that. I do. I kept waiting for it to happen and waiting for it to happen and... I guess I'm just tired of waiting."

Stella: "I know that you're tired of waiting, and you may have to wait a little while more, but she's on the way Ted, and she's getting here as fast as she can."
-- How I Met Your Mother

Phone calls from Internet companies

Bizarre.

I just got a phone call from godaddy.com. It was a courtesy call just to welcome me to godaddy and to see if everything was ok and if I had any questions. I joined within the past week and transferred one of my domain names to them.

I don't expect phone calls from Internet companies unless something is really wrong, so I was really shocked when they called. I bet their call centre gets a lot of deer in the headlight responses. I suppose they are making an effort to show that they have good service, but from a domain name registrar, it's kinda weird...

Right on Schedule

Happens every year. April 24th between 2:07pm and 2:12pm, the sun reflects off the ROM right through my window and into my eyes as I sit at my computer.

It's remarkable how accurate it all is. The accuracy of our calendar and clocks are remarkable and how steady the rotation of the Earth and its revolutions around the sun are pretty amazing when you think of it. Few things of what we understand as humans are this consistent.

RIP Geocities

The plug has been pulled on Geocities.

I found the files for my old Geocities site on my computer and I uploaded it to my website:
http://www.vincentcheung.ca/geocities/

I made that site back in 1997 and it's pretty hilarious!

Things I love about it:

1. "You have come to the Best Web Page on the Internet. With great background music and hundreds of links to the best web pages throughout the World Wide Web, how can you go wrong?"


2. MIDI background music! (You can even change the background music and there's a great selection of 90's music!)


3. JavaScript pop-up on the homepage


4. Frames!


5. Ghetto logo


6. Link and banner exchange galore


7. Most of the links don't work anymore because the websites have been closed down


8. The instructions for adding the site to your bookmarks and setting it to your homepage is for Netscape 3.0 and Windows 95


9. "Page me by ICQ"


10. Google is not listed under "Search Engines"


11. Beakman's World in the TV section


12. The website predates Starcraft as it's not listed under "Video and Computer Games"


13. The selection of "Free 'Must-Have' Programs" is rather amusing

Dangerously close to summer

9-man volleyball practices started today. Afterwards, I went for lunch in Chinatown and walked around buying fruit off the street, Chinese buns, and bubble tea, all the while with the sun brimming in the sky. If only it wasn't so windy, making it a little chilly, it would've been so close to summer...

Smells like poop

I just found a dried up piece of cat poop on the floor in the middle of my room. That explains why my room smelled like poop a few days ago. It really smelled like poop and it was bad. At the time, I couldn't find the source and I didn't think it was Tiki because I know that she took a poop in the litter box that morning and it didn't smell the same. I thought maybe b/c it was windy that the bathroom vents were flowing the wrong way.

My worry now is that the poop I found was a broken off piece and I still don't know where the rest of it is. Also, how did it get to the middle of my room?...

Shape Collage 2.1

Shape Collage 2.1 has been released!

There are a couple new features, some performance tweaks, and some bug fixes. The coolest new feature is the ability to add photos from the web. Just give it *any* webpage that has pictures on it and Shape Collage will automagically download the pictures from that webpage for use in the collage! This does not however, work for sites that require you to login, like Facebook, but that's what FaceDown is for.

Other new features include the ability to adjust the rotations of the photos and the drop shadow. The program settings are now saved between sessions so if you like the settings a certain way, you don't have to set them every time.

I promise that this blog is not becoming an advertisement for Shape Collage and VincentCheung.ca. I will be blogging about my vacation (eventually) :p

Shape Collage Around The World

Think of a language.... got it? Well, it's probably in the list below.

Shape Collage has been written about in at least 22 languages! Here's a small sampling of sites from around the world talking about Shape Collage. I arbitrarily chose sites that either had nice collages or gave me a lot of traffic and they are ordered under each language approximately as to when the page appeared, with the oldest first.

English

• gHacks


• Apple


• Chris Pirillo (YouTube video)


• Cameratown (YouTube video)


• Idenzine


• Softonic


• MacReviewCast (Podcast)


• AddictiveTips


• Techblissonline


• PhotographyBlog


• Rj Dollen (Cool art using Shape Collage)


• Digital Inspiration


• Lifehacker


• TWIP


• MacHeist (Where's Waldo)


• Macbreak Weekly (Podcast @ 1:33:45)

Spanish

• chickageek


• GeeksRoom


• Geek.ms


• Softonic


• UpToDown


• Visual Beta


• TechnoBITA


• Entrebits


• Nivmar


• Sebalorenzo


• TecnoBITA


• Jorge Serrano


• arturogoga (YouTube)

Portuguese

• Baixaki (Screencast)


• Misto Quente


• bernabauer.com


• WinAjuda

Italian

• maestroalberto


• ManuIdea


• Pucciom


• Gekissimo


• Click|blog.it


• guidami


• ilarialab.com


• Tutto Volume


• polycoke


• Il Bloggatore

Chinese

• Pobby-dog Blog


• Jinn's Blog


• Lawrence's Coffee Shop


• unkb.com


• UIUI


• Hong Kong Yahoo Blogs (wedding photos in the shape of a heart)
  
  
  
  • jw
  
  
  • p4pinky_yip
  
  
  • mobe_yuen
  
  
  • Katherine FanFan
  
  
  • fatpofatpo
  
  
  • mscaca1202
  
  
  • tracy_007hk

Japanese

• Oshiete-Kun


• Gigafree


• yknakamimi


• hatena


• Nutspress


• Lifehacker.jp


• Moongift


• National Creators Conference

Korean

• SimFilePC


• Krang


• Drchoi Blog


• WalkPC

French

• fdoun


• Cyrille Borne


• Vincent Dutrait


• Glandouillage


• MaxiApple


• Guppytrucs Freeware


• ZDNet.fr

German

• Roman bloggt


• Gif-Bilder


• drweb.de


• Apfel


• Ehrensenf (Video)


• Blogwiese

Russian

• Lexi_Ru


• Russian Apple Community


• Deep Apple


• Fotokolo


• baboker (Video)


• catode

Polish

• PC blog


• Programosy


• Fotomaniak


• Fotopolis


• Skrzypol

Romanian

• Catholica NETwork


• Topo's Page


• efoto

Hungarian

• beszeljukmac


• Techline


• kepszerkesztok


• szoftverbazis


• Sablonos Blog

Turkish

• TurkMac


• pdfdergi

Dutch

• PhotoPlace.nl


• Clickx


• fotoplezier


• Kindje op Komst

Finnish

• DigiCamera

Malay

• Syamsu


• Agusbagus

Serbian

• Serbain Macintosh User Group

Swedish

• dahlstroms


• stationsvakt


• Veronicas Foto

Arabic

• Rehla Online


• SUAE

Icelandic

• sfjalar

Latvian

• Bedre


• LatFoto

6 weeks, 14 planes

Here's some of what you missed. I'll do a proper blog later with the rest of the photos.

A monkey riding a hippo!

Bears boxing!

 

The Asian squat!

As seen in a restaurant (Hint: this is not a fish)

Some other restaurant

Yet another restaurant

LEE KUM KEE!!!

Grandma's childhood home with almost all of her grandchildren

Disneyland!

Hong Kong, China, and Australia

Bye! See you in 2009!

Talk amongst yourselves.

Random observations 2

• There are *way* more asians in Winnipeg then there used to be. It used to be that you'd go to a bar and you could literally count the number of non-white people on one hand. I don't know where all these people came from. It seems that the generation just a few years younger than mine is a lot more multicultural, even in Winnipeg.


• Girls definitely dress a lot skankier here than in Toronto. Even with a windchill of -40, girls wear super short skirts and dresses. Girls in Toronto seem to dress rather conservative in comparison.


• Tonight it'll warm up to -18 with a windchill of -28. I think we've finally seen the end of this cold snap! (This is *not* a sarcastic statement, this is the actual view of people over here)

Oh, and here are some amusing photos showing how cold it is:





Oh wait, these aren't actually pictures from Winnipeg where we've seen windchills as low as -49 in the last few days and there's permanently 2 feet of snow on the ground. My friend in Seattle took these and it was -3 outside and it had snowed a little overnight.

No more orthodontist!

I got my braces back in Grade 6... 1992! My orthodontist is in the Medical Arts Building on the 15th floor and I clearly remember the elevator being a novelty because it was the only time that I would ride the elevator. Nowadays, I ride the elevator every day in my apartment, but my elevator manners have Winnipeg roots.

I got my braces off after maybe a year and a half, but ever since then, I've still been going to my orthodontist every 6 or 12 months just for him to check on my teeth and how my retainer fits, which takes a whole 2 minutes. He tells me to just pop it in overnight once every few months or so just to make sure things stay where they are. The only reason I keep going to see him is that I haven't had to pay for the visits for the past 14 years! I don't know anyone that still wears their retainer, let alone still visits their childhood orthodontist!

I just went today and he told me that he's letting me go! After 16 years, I no longer have to go to my orthodontist!

Random observations

Actual flight path and door-to-door transportation as recorded by my GPS device
(This is just a screenshot b/c Google Maps couldn't handle that big of a file)

• The taxi driver was giving me career advice. He thought that I should learn Mandarin.


• Cabbie was talking to me in Cantonese. I hadn't heard that much Chinese for a long time.


• It's still harrowing walking through the airport metal detector carrying a cat without a leash or anything.


• Tiki didn't move or make a sound the entire flight. I don't think the woman on the aisle seat knew she was even there.


• During the initial announcement, the flight attendant tried to make a reference to the commercial where the guy thinks he's on a flight to Hawaii, but is actually on a flight to Winnipeg and goes "...going to Winnipeg..." No one laughed.


• When asked who was from Winnipeg, the entire flight went in an uproar. No one goes to Winnipeg at this time of the year unless they are from there.


• The games on the Zune are actually pretty fun.


• Upon arrival, the flight attendant neglected to notify us of the local time (one hour behind)


• When it was announced that the current temperature in Winnipeg was -27, it wasn't a big deal or Earth shattering news.


• While waiting for my luggage, I saw a woman drinking a slurpee. This is why Winnipeg is the slurpee capital of the world.


• I miss the feeling of the cold fresh air in your lungs.


• When driving here, if it's not a big road, you actually drive on top of snow since the roads aren't cleared right to the asphalt and salt doesn't work b/c it's too cold.


• There are 3 cats within arm's reach of me right now as I am sitting on my bed.


• Mi-Mi has reclaimed her spot on my bed and refuses to budge. Tiki is confused. Tiggy is indifferent.


• The fish is big now.


• The dog is big now.

Shape Collage

Some collages of Tiki made using Shape Collage

Shape Collage is the latest side project that I've been working on. It is an automatic photo collage making program that can make collages in different shapes. Just look at the collages above and at the end of the post to see what it can do. There are a lot more examples on the Shape Collage web page.

It's really easy to make a collage. You can make one with just 2 mouse clicks and in as little as a couple seconds! It's quite customizable as well, as you can change the shape to really, anything you want. You can even draw your own shape! You can also customize the border, background, etc.

Arranging photos into a collage

The photos are automatically placed in the desired shape of the collage using a machine learning algorithm that I came up with that is simple, but fast and effective. Basically what it does is put the photos on a page and jiggle them around so they are arranged nicely. This is a much harder problem than you may think. My readers with some knowledge of computer science will be familiar with NP problems. My algorithm isn't perfect, but it does a pretty good job most of the time. If you're really anal about it, you can save the collage as a Photoshop PSD and edit the collage in Photoshop if you don't like the automatic placement of the photos.

I started working on this project b/c I read a paper that automatically created a photo collage and thought that it was really cool, especially since it took me so long to make my Californian photo collage. Since they didn't actually release a program or their source code, I decided to just implement their approach, but it was overly complicated and rather slow - it took several minutes to create a collage with just 30 photos. So, I tried something simpler that was much faster - my program can easily create a collage with thousands of photos. Then I realized that my algorithm didn't have to only create rectangular collages and could also create collages in different shapes, something that I had never seen before, and so Shape Collage was created!

Anyways, check it out and let me know what you think! It's available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and anything that supports Java.

Snowboarding snowman collage

Volleyball collage

Encrypted Blog Posts Ver. 2

Over 2 years ago, I developed an encryption system that you could use to encrypt blog posts.

Since then, I have written several encrypted blog posts that were about particularly personal things and I didn't want the general public or certain people reading them. You can ask me for one of the keys if you want, but I can't guarantee that you'll get it :p

I just released a new version of my JavaScript Encryption and Decryption system.

Try it:
Show encrypted text (the decryption key is: password)

The new encryption code is a lot faster than the old version, the webpage decryption code now uses a fancy dialog box to ask you for the key, and I fixed some bugs. The entire process has been greatly simplified and the encryption page now automatically generates code that you can copy and paste into your website.

I'm starting to actually make use of my personal website, VincentCheung.ca, which is where I'm hosting my random side projects. I'm just finishing up the new design on that site in preparation for an upcoming announcement.

Congratulations President (Elect) Obama!

After months and months of campaigning, it's finally over! And the US didn't screw things up this time around! I know the polls pretty much had called the election for Obama, but I was still a bit worried that something was gonna go wrong. I was impressed by the polling; they were pretty accurate. I was following FiveThirtyEight and RealClearPolitics quite closely and while each individual poll is not that reliable, they are pretty reliable if you average them all together and weight them appropriately (as 538 did).

Anyways, nothing I can say would be anything more than what has already been said by all the pundits and newscasters. Well, except for the fact that even here in Toronto, people are very interested in the election. After volleyball, I went to the Wheat Sheaf for wings and beer, a pub that seems to have a bit of a sports inclination. Even there, the tv's (maybe 6 - 8 of them) were on CNN for the election coverage and when John McCain was giving his concession speech, the place went quiet.

Congratulations President David Palmer.... err... I mean President Barack Obama ;)

Got out of jury duty!

I got summoned to jury duty, but I got out of it :)

I wrote them a letter saying that I was a student and couldn't afford to take time off, etc. The amazing thing was that less than 24 hours after I put the letter in the mail, they called me to confirm that they got my letter and that I was off the hook! I was amazed! Not that I got out of jury duty, but that the mail got to them so fast! I always figured that the postal system was super slow and took at least a few days, even if it's in the same city, since I imagine that it has to go into some huge sorting facility, etc., etc. I was only sending it a few blocks away, but I still didn't expect it to get to them that fast, especially not by the next morning.

Anyways, it's a relief. It really doesn't make sense for students to have to do jury duty because it can really screw with you if you miss classes, especially if the hearing lasts a long time, you could even miss a whole semester and have to retake the entire year. For me, while I don't have any classes or anything, if I'm gone, there's no one that will do my research for me, so it'd have to be totally put on hold and research is highly time sensitive in that it's easy to get scooped. Students are in school to learn, no point taking that away from them.

The little pamphlet that comes with the summons to jury says that "If this is a particularly difficult time for you to attend, because of your employment, business, schooling, or personal circumstances, you can, by a request in writing, ask to have your jury duty postponed to a later date." I know several people that have gotten out of jury duty. Seems like only the unemployed, severely bored, or people not smart enough to get out of jury duty actually do jury duty, which makes me question the quality of the jurors. I hope I never have to rely on a jury...

Lord of the Ants

I now command ants in addition to wasps

My apartment in Seattle 3 years ago

Long time readers will remember my post from almost exactly 3 years ago about wasps coming into my apartment to die. I now have control over ants. For one reason or another, insects are attracted to me in the last moments of their lives. I must be some sort of insect religious figure that they believe they must visit when they die in order to transcend from this life into the next. Maybe these ants are actually the wasps from before, but in their next life...

Nuit Blanche 3

Last week, I went to the 3rd Annual Nuit Blanche in Toronto. It's "a free all-night contemporary art thing". Basically, they have artists put up their contemporary art throughout downtown Toronto, often converting public spaces into art exhibits. Some are cool, some are weird, some are dumb. It goes from sunset on Saturday to sunrise on Sunday.

I went to all 3 zones this year and did a lot of walking. I took my GPS along with me to record exactly where I went and so that I could geotag my photos (automagically putting the longitude and latitude into the photos so that I could put them on a map so you can see where I took each of the photos):

View Larger Map

There were my favourite ones (in order that I saw them):

A dozen mascots dancing in a field to music. It was remarkably amusing

Shipping containers that would shine light spelling SOS in morse code

Dropping and smashing stuff! You can't see it b/c of the motion blur, but there's a monitor and computer being dropped in this photo.

I don't think this was an official installation, but it was cool. Some guy in the back of a truck dressed in a chicken outfit sitting with chickens.

My favourite one. A waterfall coming out of a 3rd story window.

Video games using lights in Toronto City Hall. It's Pong on the left and Asteroids on the right. You control it by calling in to the photo numbers supplied.

More photos