Kazoo Yen & physical Nonsense

Danno is finishing his phd up and going to leave soon. He gave me this gift that has my name in it. A kazoo and a 1 Yen coin. Ingenious!


And I'm so touched and delighted to receive a paper copy of the Only Talking Nonsense. It's really cool to read his blog about things that happened around his life which I share some scenes, but it's a totally different and amazing feeling to get a book of that which has my photos, my stories and a lot of my fond memories recorded.



Thanks Danno. You rock!
With the glory of Lordiness you bestowed on me, I forgive you for making up all the posters about me. Haha!
Well, I was never offended to start with, not even this one below and this tzu-yen.blogspot.com website. It's such great fun! You bloody pranker!


Thank you for your friendship Danno, I'm truely honoured.
I wish you all the best.
(And hope we get to execute some more pranks together shall the victims' fate destined. Muahahaha!! )

Tesla Coils music

Makig music using Tesla Coils.

Throw a paper plane Return

The Throw a paper plane game I posted had some very good responses. And some readers had challenged me to train harder. So I took the advice and trained.

I got 114.775m and ranked 1180. And I found a trick (or cheat) to get that score consistently, every time, no sweat! Click on the image to see the trick.

However, with that trick, now I cannot get pass my own highest score which I got in the first few attempts of the trick. I spent an hour after that trying variations of it but I just couldn't break it anymore.

Leave a comment if you found some other tricks.
I wonder how 1179 others get scores higher than this?

Updated:
My brother took this trick and perfected it to 114.835m ranked 918. 200+ people within this tiny 0.06m?! He thinks he has found the optimum configuration, the rest is due to hardware speed. I shall try on different computer and see if it does change the result.


Update 2:
Better training, better results! Seems like more people are good at it now.

acsii autostereogram, great message

stereo.txt

Source: http://www.lce.hut.fi/~ikalliom/stereo.txt

I make confusing road signs

I've got some result for my phd to show today. Take a road sign and swap the direction.
With 4 points correspondance, it's rather straight forward to compute the projective relationship (homography) between two planar surfaces. The novelty of this work is the smooth and perspectively correct interpolation of the transition.

You might have seen planar surfaces flying around in space in other animation work before. The difference is that those work are done in 3D space so the 3D coordinates of the objects need to be specified and then the scene projected (rendered) on 2D screen. Mine works in 2D - a 2D photograph and some corner points as input, the algorithm works out the homography, decompose it into perspective, scale, rotation and translation components and interpolates the picture properly.

Cool! I think it is.

I created a related page on my CSSE website here with animated gif.
Projective interpolation for animation

Throw a paper plane

This is addictive!
Paper plane game

I ony managed to throw it out of the windows once.
My record: 37.68m.

I challenge you!

What does graphic designers do when they don't have work

What does graphic designers do when they don't have work

Like to have the birddog as pet. :D

Prime Minister of Malaysia Re-marry

From Malaysiakini:

Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi will marry Jeanne Abdullah, 53, in a private ceremony at his official residence Sri Perdana in Putrajaya on Saturday.

The official announcement in Malay is here.

Congratulations Pak Lah! I wish you and Jeanne a fulfilling relationship.
And may the marriage provide you extra strength and will to lead Malaysia to the future you envisioned and inspired us.

See photo of Jeanne on JeffOoi.
Abdullah's wife Endon passed away in Oct 2005.

Stupid thesis will be defeated

Stupid thesis will be defeated
Have your speaker on.

Thanks Danno, I'm inspired.

Abi-station 似顔絵 face drawing

I made this picture several years ago on a japanese website. Recently I digged it out and used it on my MSN and was asked by several friends how I drew it. But I couldn't remember which website it was.

Coincidentally, I was looking at caricature generation for my research and came across this Web Picasso paper by a Japanese researcher and he has a website in Japanese with some drawings and explanations. Suddenly I recall this word "似顔絵" was the same word on the website that I used to generate this above picture. I googled it and there it is at the top:

似顔絵

The only problem now is that it is all in Japanese, trial and error will get you there.

Rabobank 6.6% online saving account

The second best after Bankwest 6.8% 1-year introductory offer. My one year offer will expire in October, then I may switch it to this one.

It also allows its clients to go straight into wholesale managed fund with 0.75% entry fee, zero ongoing maintenance fee and a tiny $250 entry value.

Report on The Australia (29/5/07) here:
Rabobank goes retail with a high-interest internet account

It boosts with very high standard of internet security, voted the safest bank in the world in 2006. The online login system is not the simple client number and password form boxes, but requires a one time access code generated by a Digipass hardware based on your pin number. And each Digipass hardware response to only one pin, ie your password! Read more here on RaboPlus security.
Reading that I'm now a bit puzzle! Do they actually send me a hardware?? I shall see.

Also it's one of the top 20 world largest financial institution. Sounds pretty good!

The website is at raboplus.com.au.