Graduation on April 1

How would you feel if your graduation is on April 1?
Many of my friend got this honour. Actually in early 2008, my plan was to attend this ceremony myself. But things got delayed and eventually I missed out on this one and will attend the one in September.
Anyhow, because of that, my parents got another chance to travel to Perth since they already got the tickets long before anything is really confirmed. So we had a great time in the whole March when they were here in Perth and they will come in September again for the ceremony.

I attended the ceremony for my housemate DeRong - Bachelor of Engineering (Mechanical).




Caught up with many friends.


Jingyu from China - Mining Engineer


Danno and Tone whom we spent our phd years together - Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science.


Jayvis from Spore- Mechanical Engineer


Chris from Mauritius, Stuart and Kaysen from Msia - all engineers


James from Msia - a student I tutored in his first year Computing for Engineers & Scientists. OMG!


Peter, my PhD supervisor who came for Danno's ceremony. I got hassled for my correction. :P Yes, I would get it done real soon.


Du, Danno's another supervisor who is also in the visvis group I belong.


And the big group of friends who came for Derong's ceremony:
Zheng, KokSoon (my friends who's visiting Perth), Yeeting, Derong and Minli.


I also test out my 12x zoom with ISO800 for some long range photos in Winthrop Hall.


PhD recipients get to sit up on the stage (showcasing the variety in hairstyles).


Honorary Doctorate recipient - Michael Fitzpatrick. (caught Peter in the background)


Daniel who did CS honours in our lab. He now got his EE/CS double degree.


Evgeni my fellow modeller.


Fred I met through ShihChing and Jason's church.


Derong looking smart


Stuart


Tone contemplating the moment


Danno's name and shortest ever thesis title read out by Robyn, who was my supervisor for a year and used to be in visvis group before she became the Dean of graduate research school.


Danno shaking hand with Chancellor.

I'm pretty happy with the zoomed results given that indoor stage that's very far away generally is very hard to photograph.

The ceremony was great. The food afterwards are delicious too. And I found a new word I don't know how to pronounce -- ENGINEERNG.

Earth from above

I went to watch the earth from above exhibition in Perth last Saturday. It's a photography exhibition of aerial photos of some interesting places on earth -- to provoke thinking about over-consumption and sustainable living. Awesome photos with awesome message! The only down side is that it's outdoor under the beautiful summer sun! There are some shaded area where I enjoyed most of the photos and caption readings.

Go and see it if you haven't, it's at the cultural precinct (just north of the Wellington train station). It's open till 7pm daily till 12th this month. Last 8 days.

There's also a Google earth version.

Since 1950, economic growth has been considerable, and world production of goods and services has multiplied by a factor of 8. During this same period, while the world's population has doubled, the volume of fish caught has multiplied by 5 and the volume of meat produced by 6. Energy demand has multiplied by 5. Oil consumption has multiplied by 7, and carbon dioxide emissions, the main cause of the greenhouse effect and global warming, by 5. Since 1900, fresh water consumption has multiplied by 6, chiefly to provide for agriculture.

And yet, 20% of the world's population does not have drinkable water, 40% have no sanitary installations, 25% is without electricity, and 820 million people are underfed with half of humanity living on less than A$3 a day.

In other words, a fifth of the world's population lives in industrialized countries, consuming and producing in excess and generating massive pollution. The remaining four-fifths live in developing countries and, for the most part, in poverty.

From: earthfromabove.com.au

Merdeka 51st

The last 3 weeks has been crazy for me, so busy I have no time to think.
There were several celebration for Merdeka, I submitted my thesis and I left Perth to Malaysia for 3 months holiday.
This post will concentrate on the Merdeka.

This year's Malaysia independence day celebration is the most enjoyable one for me so far. I met two new friends Siow Yong and Yia Shi, I was invited to the official reception for the Merdeka by the consulate and the Merdeka ball organised by AMWA was a big success!

I wrote a short post on AMWA's blog.

On 24 August, AMWA had its annual Merdeka Day Golf.


On 28 August, the Consulate General of Malaysia in Perth hosted an official merdeka reception at the Perth Town Hall.


The finale of Merdeka celebration was held last night at the Perth Convention & Exhibition Centre. With “Wonderful Colours of Malaysia”, AMWA hosted the 51st Merdeka celebration with Malaysian cuisine, cultural performances, a fantastic live band, groovy dances, happy snaps and a lot of fun!


I met Siow Yong because he ordered tickets to the Merdeka Ball from me. And after we started talking only I found out that works very close to UWA in an area I have a lot of interests in -- audio signal processing for hearing aids. And he also turns out to be very nice to talk to.
click here for a picture of Siowyong with the Vice CG Mr Tan.

Another really cool encounter is Yia Shi aka Ivy. I first met her at the Merdeka Golf. She is a budding journalist with Asia Business Times -- a new newspaper in Perth. She came with another journalist Angel and Joe.
After chitchatting for awhile we were pleasantly surprised to find out that she came from my mom's hometown where I spent a lot of my childhood at, and her mom came from my hometown. Ha! What a small world.
We sat at the same table during the golf lunch and had a good chat. Then Angel and Yia Shi came to cover the merdeka reception, so we met the second time there. And then the newspaper company had a table at the Merdeka ball, so I met their boss Mr Peh then as well. Mr Peh is really nice as well, and I met his son who's a table tennis state representative before at UWA. Small world again.



I'm writing this post in Malaysia. :)

Google Street view in Australia!

Google gets down and detailed on the street where you live


View Larger Map


View Larger Map

If you know where I live, you can even see my Daihatsu parked on the side of the road. Haha! That's pretty cool.

My neighbours are very rich!

According to the latest survey, Nedlands resident has average $2091 weekly income before tax. That amounts to $100k annual income!
Man! I'm living in a very rich area with expired PhD scholarship! :`(
Anyway, hopefully I absorb the goodness of this area and will catapult myself into that income bracket soon. ;-)

AMWA gathering at Kardinya

AMWA had a belated Chinese New Year gathering at Kardinya community center on Labour Day (3 March). I was there helping up from 9:30am for 11am start. Good fun in the kitchen chopping cabbage, cutting water melon and running around taking photos. Event finished at 2pm and we cleaned up, packed up by 3pm.
See the blog and photo gallery for more.


Chinese New Year Gathering 2008

UWA 3D campus team in Media

There were a couple of photo shots by our own team members and professional photographers from the papers. And with Jayjay's media contact effort, we get quite some media exposure.

At the top of scale shall be The Australian. We appeared on the Higher Education section with each of our faces bigger than a 50cents coins.

The Australian | 16/01/2008 | Page: 21 | Higher Education
Region: National Circulation: 133000
Type: National
Size: 482.57 sq.cms

Click the picture to see the actual size, or here for the online version.


It's also on Wanneroo Times (Brad) and Western Suburbs Weekly (Myself):

Wanneroo Times | 15/01/2008 | Page: 14 | Regional Changes - Central
Region: Perth Circulation: 77098
Type: Suburban
Size: 241.78 sq.cms

Western Suburbs Weekly
15/01/2008
Page: 5
General News
Region: Perth Circulation: 48960
Type: Suburban
Size: 189.49 sq.cms

And of course, the official media release is on the competition page on Google.


Previous post on this topic

Update:
On ScienceNetwork WA (24 January 2008)


Featured on frontpage of UWA new Website.

Media release on UWA (December 21, 2007)


UWA's Prospects E-Magazine

IE Aust Student Magazine

UWA Engineering Graduate Association Newsletter - The engineering Essential

PSA quiz night photos

Some photos on PSA quiz night last Friday

Our CSSE team - Tone, Jason, Rina, me, Shih Ching, Bob, John and Minh


The CSSE team 2


Broadway Pizza was great!


The Wong


The pretzel coaster that spoke my feeling


We won the Australian citizen test.


That was a lot of wine.

PSA quiz night last Friday

We went to Quiz night organised by the Postgraduate Students Association (PSA) last Friday. There were two teams from CSSE, and one of them emerged to take the second place (tied). Fun!

Read PSA Quiz Night and Tied for Second on Shih Ching's blog.

UWA in 3D

It has been a crazy week for me preparing an entry for the Google 3D campus competition (Aus/NZ). We decided to put a team together since we already have a team interested in modelling UWA in 3D. But modelling for Google Earth is a bit different because of the bandwidth and complexity constraint. So there are some considerable effort put in to make the models smaller in size and lesser in geometry. Most of the models are simply an empty shell with texture. anything that cannot be seen are to be taken out.
We applied some good tricks like using transparent texture to replace complex fences or row of pillars. Taking a snapshot of a complex windows structure of the model and replace the geometry with the snapshot works very well too.

The entry closed on 31 Oct 2007 midnight EST. And we hit the submit button at 9:35pm WST on Chris's laptop in his office down in G.(don't know which number, there has been some office shuffling recently). The historical moment was witnessed by Chris, Minh, Jonathan and myself. Chris has been a long captain in the team followed by me as the lead 3D modeller. Minh joint in couple of weeks ago and did some incredible work, and Jonathan came in like couple of days ago and did a great job with the business school, though a bit intensive on the geometry.
Others on the team includes Jayjay who initiated the whole UWA in 3D idea, Michael my fellow 3D modeller, Evgeni the quiet achiever, Bradley who did it the proper architect way, and John who took many great shots for the texturing.
Many other not on the 3D campus team gave us tremendous help to, thanks go to Louisa for keeping us informed on what is going on with ourselves, Leondro, David, Juan, Ashley, Ryan and Jeff for various help.

The madness was on Tuesday, me and Minh worked through the night in the lab to finish up as many models as possible. I started in the afternoon of 30/10 at about 2:30pm and persevered until 9:30pm of 31/10. About 30 hours of modelling. Wickedly fun! I heard Minh did longer!
Anyhow that night I hit my bed at 12:30am and recharged for two night worth of sleep until 4:30pm. Mad!!


Check the models out on 3D warehouse. You can see them either in Sketchup or Google Earth, both need installation. If you don't want to install a big software, use this 6MB SketchUp Viewer.
If you already have Google Earth installed, this 3D Warehouse network link will put a link to 3D model in Google Earth.

Several must see are:

Winthrop Hall


Physics



And unbelievably detailed Engineering buildings and Architecture.

Also check out the very clean Octagon Building and spiral staircase at Reid Library.

Stack of photos from phone

I've downloaded a stack of photos from my phone.


On June 18, I received this RaboPlus hardware pass code generator for their internet banking. Read Rabobank 6.6% online saving account for details.
Oh, recently Australia has increased the interest rate again. The Howard government does not particularly welcome that as election is coming soon. But I'm happy as most banks followed by increasing their rate too. At this time, Raboplus is standing at 6.7% while BankWest at 7% (12-month introduction rate)!!


On July 6, I received a very heart warming gift from a Malaysian auntie, ChoonHo's mom. She was here on holiday for 2 months, I was the first new friend she met here in Perth and we had 4-5 good chats altogether. And before she left for Malaysia, she knitted me this scarf as a gift. Each knot is a blessing, she said. I'm so touched. I'm so blessed.


On July 7 (obviously), I got this cool parking docket.


On July 19, I witnessed a police chase. Some car thief was chased down by 8 police cars. It was raining and didn't want to get wet. So I only got a photo of the channel 9 news car illegally parked on verged.


That night, I had dinner with my housemates at HKBBQ. The tofu dish is fantastic!

So is the BBQ

and the squid.



On July 26, I took a panorama of my desk using the stitching program that come with my k800i.