Chinese New Year Eve Celebration

Chinese New Year in Perth with no family members around can be rather home-sick, so we helped ourselves by organising a get-together. David and me played host, and everyone made something out for the night. As shown in the photo, we did pretty well.
Clockwise from NE is Lingcai's bakuteh(肉骨茶), my mushroom-y vegies, Yeeting's Oyster lamb stew, my luohan vegetarian dish(罗汉斋), Toh's curry with drowned eggs, Yeeting's Hakka stuffed beancurb(客家酿豆腐), David's corn soup(粟米羹) and steam fish.
Not in the photo are grilled chicken still in oven and Fanta orange drink (which reminds me of Chinese New Year every time I have it as I usually only have it during CNY) brought by Ivy, Weiqi and Duyang.

We cover 5 nationalities from only 8 people - China, Hongkong, Singapore, Brunei and Malaysia, and we all celebrate CNY back home. :)
(Well, HK is part of china, but Hongkong people are still distinct enough to be separated from mainland Chinese on many aspect, so...)

After the dinner we played some games and Mahjong. And it happened to be LC's birthday on 29th, so we threw in a small surprise as well.
It was good fun! A good CNY eve.

In preparation for Chinese New Year

According to Chinese tradition, major house cleaning is carried out before Chinese New Year. So me and David took some time and effort to clean up the crowded living room. Our living room is rather spacious given the side of the whole house, but there are a lot of stuffs, mainly stuffs left behind by our friends, cluttered in the main living room area. So it was not very 'living-able' before the cleaning. We simply don't use that area...

OK, so we spent a whole day throwing things out and did some major rearrangement. We boxed up small items and stacked the boxes. The end result is very pleasing. I'm impressed with the level of improvement on its functionality and look. So I'm very happy with that. And we added a bit of artistic touch to finish it too, hence the bicycle wheel high up. Haha!

Besides the cleaning, we also went to get some new clothes to mark the new year. We went to Harbourtown and did a quick sample of many shops and eventually settled on a $10 shirt from FILA (marked down from $45!! Hehe, good buy!). It's white with red collar and nice patches on the side. It has to be somehow red or bright for the CNY atmosphere.

I also checked out the Nike shop and got myself a pair of running shoes. It looks quite similar to my first pair of Nike. The price is similar too after 40% discount. It's been hard to find a pair of Nike with air with not too outrageous design under $100. This one fits all my criterion and it's comfy. I like it, I like it a lot. It's good shoes. ;)

The pair of Nike I got in 2003 has worned apart a year ago. And I magically found a pair of rather new shoes in my house left behind by my ex-housemate's ex-housemate. So that postpone my search for a good pair of sport shoes for almost a year.

It was a fruitful shopping spree.

Australia Day Spectacular Fireworks

 

It's Australia Day today, a big event that stops the nation. Lingcai called to go watch the fireworks together, so Yeeting, Edwards and me went together. We cycled to South Perth (Mill Point Road) to see the whole fireworks with Perth city backdrop.

On the way to the venus, there are many interesting events here and there including air stunt shows and many cool boats on the Swan river.

The Fireworks is spectacular. Just so much of "Wow"! Totally enjoyed it. I took a few shots of the fireworks but mainly video, to take back to my housemate to watch it afterwards. He's on duty delivering pizza tonight so he missed out. I thought it's public holiday, he should get double paid, but it's not the case! :(

To end this post, I shall take on the aussie spirit and shout out loud:

Aussie! Aussie! Aussie!
Ooi! Ooi! Ooi!

 

Chinese new year around the corner

I was changing ISP for the last 2 weeks. No internet at home is rather inconvenient.
Today the setup kits finally arrived and I'm back online. Yahoo!!

It's Chinese New Year the coming Sunday. So there's some cleaning to do at home, and some events to prepare for. The last time I spent Chinese New Year overseas was wuite a while ago... Back in my time in Hobart.

Also, it's Australia Day tomorrow. Heard that it'll be fireworks. I shall check it out.

Happy Australia Day to my fellow Aussie mates!

Happy Chinese New Year to my family and Chinese friends.

Some Chinese New Year festive photos here.

AusPrices.com: Australia's Price Comparison and Search Engine

AusPrices.com: Australia's Price Comparison and Search Engine

This is good! I find the soundcard I need. Netplus is not the cheapest yet and it's far. There's an online company called Nintek sell it slightly cheaper, and it's in Nedlands.

His name is Tan Ee Hang

Yup, The little Tan's name is finally fixed. Ee Hang, he's gonna be. In Chinese it is 陈宇航. 宇 means Universe, 航 means sailing. I like the name. Very wide and ambitious!
And the translation is done well too. Ee Hang, instead of straight pinyin of Yu Hang. It has the Chinese Malaysian way in its composition and also avoids being pronounced by English speakers as "You hang"!! :P

Some photos in the mother's MSN space Photo album.

4 degree of separation from Google Blog

I was checking my email on Gmail just now and saw a Web Clip on top of my mailbox,
"Official Google Blog - Open federation for Google Talk - 13 hours ago".

As my usual curiosity works, I checked it out. Just one more story from Google. But then, I started to drift in the virtual flow by clicking on the first link down there: Google Talk Merits Other IMs to see how is GTalk better than other IMs.

And there's nothing much to read on that short post. But it turned out that the guy is a Malaysian Blogger! Driven by curiosity and driftism again, I click on the top of the page Random Citations to see what else he has to offer.

Bla bla bla... nothing really catch my eye until the sidebar:
What I read!
* My Photos
* Sister in Harvard
* Something smells fishy
* Just so you know
* Malaysia Chinese Students Blog
* WWW inventor's Blog
* Own Free Domains
* a Baha'i Friend
* Taste the World
* I'm XinYi
* Jimmy Messinis
* Sugar & Spicy
* Mtbeauty
* Biologisvensk
Sugar & Spicy ?! That's the exact same blog name as a friend of mine. I clicked it through and it is! ??!!

And on Sugar & Spicy sidebar again:
Friends' Blogs
* TzuYen's Blog
* Shih Ching's Blog
* Catarina's Blog
* Ke-vin's Blog
* Lynne's Blog
* Gibson's Blog

There it is, back to my own blog!

So, in summary:
Google Blog --> Random Citations --> Sugar & Spicy --> My blog

Degree of separation = 4

I suspect the degree of separation online is lesser than in real life. Hm... well, online is part of the real life, what am I talking about?! OK, put it this way, the degree of separation is a lot easier to trace online.
If you play with friendster and have lots of friends there. You'll be surprised to know this friend is a good friend of another of your friend from a totally different group/location/race/language/field. Amazing!

OK. My driftism on this session shall end here. So should you too, go back to work! Hehehe...

Siggraph meeting: 3D scan stuffs

I went to Siggraph Perth meeting tonight.
Phil Dench from Headus gave a very interesting talk on 3D scanning work they've done. From millions of triangle meshes --> spline surface or subdivided polygonal surface --> flattened UV texture of bump/displacement map, it gives a very good explanation of how the very detail 3D model is simplified for fast animation and rendering and re-detailed using bump/displacement map to get back the fine detailed look for final rendering.
A very good overview introduction on one part of the CG movie/game production process. Very interesting. And the 3D morph between Phil & killeroo is really cool!

Nick has been back from Sydney for awhile and I finally got to see him tonight. So we (Jim, Minh, Jason, Nick & me) went to Lido for Vietnamese dinner after the meeting. Heidi joint later too.

Oh ya, Jim has just put up a feedsucker page under onetwenty to get all the cs people's blogs into one place. Cool!
http://www.onetwenty.org/planet/

Trifocal tensor estimation Matlab code

I came back to the office after coding at home last week. Tested out the trifocal tensor estimation code and it only threw me one error and works all well after I fixed that one up!! It's a very good surprise as those 18x27 matrices and 3x3x3 tensor are quite tedious to calculate. And I've just understand how to read tensor notation 2 weeks ago, so I was very happy that all the code worked just like that.

Again, carefully laying out the theory and equations before jumping into coding proved to be a good practise. The 25-line notebook is a bit too small for the crazy matrix expansion, filling up the whole page... It kind of looks something like phd work when I flip around those pages of matrices. Hahaha!!

After the code runs, I still wasn't convinced that it is correct, so I cross check it with the code I from the Hartley & Zisserman's book from Oxford VGG website, and it's all good! Yahoo!!
I wrote this code because I searched the internet and couldn't find trifocal tensor estimation from noisy >7 corresponding points in three images. I'll publish this code on my website soon, so vision researchers can use it in the future. And I might get famous, hehehe!! :P
See my matlab page for its future appearance.

The years in Tassie with the engi Barrel

Accidentally found this UTas Engineering society page, and some snaps of me that I don't remember. So many familiar faces, most of them I can't remember their names, or I never knew their names to start with. That was the first time I ventured myself into Aussie mates and I had to admit, I don't understand their jokes 99% of the time. And as I don't consume beer like a fish and support any footy team, there wasn't much common topic to chat about back then.

John Shield and Nick Jones are probably the only two I can remember their names. I worked with Nick in Cadbury (yes, the chocolate factory) as student engineers at the end of 3rd year for 3 months. So I had some more contact with him than others.

But although I don't remember their names, those faces reminded me of my fond time back in Hobart.


This one is from 2001/03/09 BBQ, and I think it's Aaron getting a sausage from me. He's a dad of twins now.


And this one from 2001/03/15 BBQ, The guy is John Shield, president of the Engi Society 2001.


And this is me learning to pour a perfect beer on 2001/03/30 Barrel.

I was so super stylish back then. Haha!

Oh! By the way, if you want to check out those photos linked from the page, I have to warn you that it contains high level of crazy stuffs due to beer intoxication. Haha!
I was quietly observing the crazy world around me during those mega barrel! Amazing!!

PocketMod: The Free Disposable Personal Organizer

PocketMod: The Free Disposable Personal Organizer

This is brilliant! Turning a piece of paper into 1/8 pocket size booklet that's convenient to carry around.

Maybe I can fit a conference paper (usually <8 pages) into one of those booklet and carry around to read it?!!! Haha!

AMWA to congratulate TEE scholar

Tonight there was a special dinner organise by AMWA to present the inaugural AMWA Award to Adrian Khoo who won the 2005 Beazley Award!

So we met at Makan Makan Restaurant in Vic Park (my 2nd or 3rd time there) and had some great time. I met a young editor of Oriental Post Elvie L T Yap who knew Chingching Koh whom I knew back in Tasmania. Small world hey.

The photos are up on AMWA Photo gallery.

Danno is off for awhile, should we too?

I got this notes on my desk today, and under it is the CIV4 DVD and manual!!!! Danno called me the other day while he was in KMart getting this, asking me if I want a copy too, it was on sale for $60+. I resisted it as I know if I get a copy, I'd spend a hell lot of time on it, and probably ruin a period of my life.

Ah! I've spend an hour this afternoon reading the manual. I guess I'll eventually install it and check it out. But I need to have the will to not be sucked into it for hours or days! And I will have the will.

It's a good game. I like it. I like it a lot!

New student card

UWA is introducing a new magnetic student card. The metal chip is replaced with some kind of magnetic embedded in the card. All the access control devices are changed to non-contact card readers too.
The new system is a lot more convenient and the card won't wear out as fast. Because we don't have to slot the card into the card reader anymore, just place it close to the card reader and a pleasant beeping sound will acknowledge access granted.

It's good time for a change because my old student card is worn out and almost torn in the middle.

Here's the old card and new card comparison


And the stylish new card reader

Summer is here!

It's getting hot here in Perth. It reached 37 degree Celcius on Friday!! And I saw some scary evidence of the heat -- Shopping dockets left in my car turned black in 2 days, and the plastic NO SMOKING sign in my car deformed into melted shape due to the heat!!


I wonder how hot it gets inside the car under the sun...

The fans at home finally get to work. And my shorts are out too.

My hair is getting long and irritating. Maybe it's time to shave bold again.

Trifocal Tensor is cool!

I've been reading seriously about trifocal tensor from Forsyth & Hartley's books for the past week, making notes and crunching matrices and I understand most of the stuffs in that chapter now.
Yeah, making notes is really a must to accompany reading if it's to fully absorb the content. I find it useful and enjoyable. Just a little bit slow on reading. But there is a lot less of coming back to front forgetting what I've read.

For the general audience, Trifocal tensor is the geomatry of three camera configuration captured in a 3x3x3 tensor ( or 3D matrix ). With the trifocal tensor, one can recover the position of a point in a view given its corresponding point positions in two other views. The geometry is elegant. And the tensor notation is very compact, capturing a lots of stuffs in a few notations. It is beautiful maths!

It's very intimidating at first to see the jargon and horrible matrices with multiple subscripts and superscripts. But after sitting down quietly to crunch through the maths, it all makes good sense. :)

Use it to make little Tans

The Welcome little Tan post has attracted some attentions and comments.
Since there are increasing number of spam comments, I moderate the comments before they get to my page. And I usually just reject them. But I think I'll share this one with the world because it made me burst out into laughters for its creativeness!

Buy V!@GrA now! Cheap online pharmaceutical company - buy V*I*A*G*R*A online for $9.95 home delivered! Use it to make little Tans!

Does the marketing company employ people to go read random blogs and post "relevant" comments? Or is it a robot search engine that search for baby? Or was it just a prank someone is playing on me?

Anyway, I had a good laugh! I wish you do too! Haha! :D

Welcome little Tan

My cousin Pin gave birth to a chubby baby boy on Monday 02/01/06. It's been a really long wait. He's predicted to come out on Christmas day, but he skipped it. He then skipped boxing day, and day after and after and after, even skipped new year eve and new year day!!
He must be feeling very confortable in the womb. Just didn't want to come in to this wild world for as long as he can stay in there... It's been such a long wait that I gave him a nick name of jin-gu, so the full name is "wait so long" in hokkien.

N-year later when jin-gu is old enough to understand this post, I wonder what would his respond to his funny uncle. :P
Hey, be sure to leave a message here if you're jin-gu, Hahaha!

Congratulations Pin and KH! And to the grandparents too.

Beware of PayPal phishing email

I got an email in my Paypal folder telling me that my account access is limited. The email appeared to have come from service@intl.paypal.com. I haven't used my paypal account for a while and thought that it was quite strange. I then followed the link and try to check what happened to my account.

Luckily I haven't used my account for a while that I've forgotten my password, I put in a password and got through the fist "security check" and got to a page to put in all my details again. I then suddenly realised it could be one of those phishing email to get people's credit card number!!!
I googled some text from my email and found this:
Why is Your Account Access Limited -- Yes! It is highly probably that it's a phishing email!!!!

The website is
http://resolutionsvr.com/www.paypal.com/login.htm
The layout and links are all the same as the official paypal website.

Stupid me! I later found out that I didn't enter the correct password for the phishing site because I've forgotten about it. But I still reset the password to be safe.

Man! Those phishermen are getting better every day!! I nearly got it this time! Must be careful!!

Here's the evil email that nearly got me!!

From: <service@intl.paypal.com>
Subject: Notification of Limited Account Access

Security Information

PayPal is constantly working to ensure security by regularly screening the accounts in our system. We recently reviewed your account, and we need more information to help us provide you with secure service. Until we can collect this information, your access to sensitive account features will be limited. We would like to restore your access as soon as possible, and we apologize for the inconvenience.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Why is my account access limited?

Your account access has been limited for the following reason(s):

Dec. 31, 2005: We have reason to believe that your account was accessed by a third party. Because protecting the security of your account is our primary concern, we have limited access to sensitive PayPal account features. We understand that this may be an inconvenience but please understand that this temporary limitation is for your protection.

(Your case ID for this reason is PP-157-679-861.)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
How can I restore my account access?

Please visit the Resolution Center and complete the instructions.

Completing all of the instructions will automatically restore your account access.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

We thank you for your prompt attention to this matter.
Please understand that this is a security measure intended to help protect you and your account. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Sincerely,

PayPal Account Review Department

Please do not reply to this email. This mailbox is not monitored and you will not receive a response. For assistance, log in to your PayPal account and click the Help link located in the top right corner of any page. If your inquiry is regarding a claim, just visit the Resolution Center link above.

beautiful rainbow on Golden backdrop

This evening I went to airport to pick up a friend coming back from Malaysia. The whole day has been rather warm and a thick layer of cloud has built up in the sky. I set off at 7pm while the sunset was taking place. The city skyline was covered with a layer of lush gold colour. It was so beautiful!

Then the best part happened when I turned from Orrong Rd into Leach Hwy -- a full rainbow arches around the road I was travelling, with the golden dusk backdrop. So beautiful...

Good thing you can only experience it when it happens -- I didn't have my camera with me. Bummer!

[Found on SQ's blog some photos he took at almost the same time at another part of Perth, the colour was a little different though.
posted by Tzu Yen at 2005/01/03 11:57 PM]

And another bummer that followed was that my friend somehow lost my number and I got only his old mobile number. So we missed each other. I was there waiting and trying everything I could to figure out whether he has left or was still in the security room being striped-search. Haha! I was glad to find out (right after I gave up waiting) that he's got back home safe.
But the next emotion that follows was extreme boredom! Driving back alone for another half an hour after driving there alone was not very enjoyable, given that I was also very hungry.
[ You could tell that because I actually spent $1.70 to buy a freakin 50g pack of potato chips from the vending machine. Ha! ]

Well, the lesson I learnt today is

Double confirm with yourself and others each other's contact details before leaving your base.

It can be very inconvenient or even disasterous when you're on the road and can't get into contact with the very person you come to meet.
A backup plan that both know will also be very useful.

New Year eve Korean BBQ and BANG!

Yesterday night we went to Ivy's place for a Korean BBQ dinner. She's got a small table top BBQ stove. Very nice, all the food are well cooked and not burnt. :D~

Then We had a full game of 7-player BANG! Then first time I get to play the full game with my own card. It was good. But we didn't play many rounds because it was getting late...

Recap on my 2005

Dear all,

Thank you for reading my blog for the past year. Thank you for giving me your time to care about what I'm up to. Or at least just giving me a chance to brighten up your day. :)

At the change of year, it's a perfect time to review the past year and set off the direction for the next. I shall do the recap in this post.

Events of the year:

Jan - KC as my temporary housemate, had some real good exchange of thoughts with this witty guy.

Feb - Trip to S'pore, Penang and back home. Met up with some long-lost relatives and good friends. And of course my family and my girl. It was the first time I actively plan my trip and call people I want to meet out. It was fantastic.

March - I started blogging on March 10 | A spontaneous trip to Esperance sees the best beach in my life.

April - Learn about rigid transformation | Pondering about managing life and phd | Stumbled upon David Suzuki's work for the first time, I'm now reading several of his books.

May - Papa mama came to Perth! I took a month off study to catch up with the accompany I miss so much. It was so so so good!

June - Landmark Advanced course blown me away. Life as creation vs. life as survival becomes a lifelong battle worth to fight. Survival mechanisms take place whenever I'm not creating possibility and life is normal. When inspiring possibility is created, life takes new height and the experience of aliveness transformed. | Freedom of Choice

July - Landmark Integrity Seminar | Focus on phd | Great new housemates | Photo award | my 3D body scan | First Dinner@Adam which takes life of its own later . .

Aug - My love Liangliang visited Perth, so sweet. I'm so so so happy. | I gave a lecture |

Sep - Started Landmark SELP, created this project and got into AMWA | DICTA paper accepted | I lost my USB512 | Kes thesis submission inspired me.

Oct - Went to Perth Royal Show | Busy on project.

Nov - My birthday | move office | slow on blogging.

Dec - Cairns DICTA Conference | Christmas Festives celebrations | Lagging many posts: Carol by the candlelight, Xmas light, Xmas eve BBQ... |

Well, this concludes my blogging of 2005. The lagged posts may or may not show up. But I'll try to keep you up to date with my life endeaver. Maybe just a line of post as 2006 shall be busier than ever - I will get my phd done this year.