Just spent the past two hours going back through the entire journal and categorizing every post that was previously unfiled; tedious and repetitive work at best, but something I’ve been meaning to do for a while to keep things nicely backwards capable. I should remind the uncaring reader (e.g., my girlfriend) that the “categories” section on the left as well as the “thoughts uploaded under” section under every post link to posts of that category, so you can hop on to something else more interesting if the topic at hand is not your cup of tea.As I was going through my collection of writings, I began feeling a bit nostalgic for some of my older posts and related to my older self until I got sick of reading my own crap. As far as I can tell, the stages of my writing:
- Premature: Just got out of school, excited about getting own webpage, writing entries much too long far too often, about events in life that nobody cares about.
- Career Entry: Started job, talked a lot about being a noob at work, whined about the lack of money.
- Aspiring Comedian: Tried hard to be funny, failed miserably.
- IT Genius: Talked about a lot of technical and internet stuff that most people already knew, continued whining pattern on software companies and tech in general.
- Webmaster: Spent most of the time reflecting on how wonderful the current site is and how crappy previous attempts seem in retrospect, lots of posts advertising new features which took hours to create but minutes to forget.
- Philosopher: Gave outlook on life and theorized about its meaning and purpose thereof, making very little sense but allowed the use of long and often meaningless words.
It can only get better from here, right?
Asian gambling movies are fun to watch; there’s something in the genre embedded in ninties Hong Kong cinema that makes directors come back with mediocre remakes and cheesy knockoffs, something more than nostalgic quality…Well, it certainly isn’t the plot: pretty much every movie features a gambling do-gooder, possessing ungodly natural gambling talent, getting screwed over some experienced evil older fellow who got rich off his cheating and commences in a final showdown at the end of the flick, whereby the bad guy will cheat outrageously until it is revealed that the hero knew all along and was playing him like a puppet.Not to mention the laughably bad acting, the terrible production values, the groan-inducing “parodies” of more popular movie genres, and the shameless cameos trotted onscreen for ten seconds just so they can be featured in the trailer.
Texas Hold ‘em – one of the many varieties of poker, probably the most popular one, subject of friends’ gatherings as well as professional tournaments, and in last week’s case, an after-hours get-together in the office. I know the basic rules, but was interesting seeing how more experienced players play the game.Hold ‘em is one of those games where luck is a major factor, but player skill has enough influence such that over long periods of time, skill overcomes luck and classes of “good” and “bad” players emerge. It’s interesting since all the player controls is the amount to bet on the table: all the factors that determine how well a player plays can be distilled into the two random cards in his hand and money he puts down each game, yet good players will be able to determine intentions, strategies, and skill from that alone.
So recently, I’ve been playing this one game – Titan Quest – courtesy of the $1 Manager’s Special at CompUSA, which unfortunately ended 2 hours after it started much to the dismay of a few friends trying to get on the deal; I guess managers caught on to the fact that a newly released game shouldn’t be sold for $0.98.
Anyway, the game turns out to be pretty interesting and addictive despite its simplicity. It’s of the Action RPG variety: it’s similar to the classic Diablo, where your main task is to explore a huge world, left-click and attack monsters till they die, then pick up their remains (their possessions, not their carcasses). As you progress through the game, your character gets progressively more powerful, and you get better equipment from vendors and the aforementioned dead monsters, so that you can continue on and fight even more monsters, presumably more powerful as well.
Sounds stupid and repetitive, right? That’s what I figured too before I played an action RPG, figuring that the lack of storyline, meaningful characters or events, and interactive worlds would relegate the game back to the shelf.
Once in a while, you get an e-mail sitting in your inbox that looks just like 90% of the spam that infests your virtual mailbox, but sounds interesting enough to open and appreciate the new creative heights spammers climb to entice their victims. Only to find that it’s not really spam, it’s just someone or something you haven’t thought about in a long time.In my case, it’s actually pretty cool – some academic publishing house is letting me know that a paper I wrote two years ago (and I’ve since happily forgotten) for a research project got published in a book as a collection of studies. I don’t even really remember what the project was about, only that I did the graphical and UI part of the test program we wrote.
If you’re interested in the area of computerized document searching (a la Google) and some of the latest research on “the last 10% of search accuracy Google won’t touch” (according to our professor), this might be of interest to you; and if you don’t feel like paying $130 for one of what looks like over 200 volumes of text on fuzzy logic, I found the PDF archived in the bowels of the CS department at Berkeley, for your viewing pleasure.
Not so much for bedtime reading:
We present a framework system for evaluating the effectiveness of various types of “ontologies” to improve information retrieval. We use the system to demonstrate the effectiveness of simple natural language-based ontologies in improving search results and have made provisions for using this framework to test more advanced ontological systems, with the eventual goal of implementing these systems to produce better search results, either in restricted search domains or in a more generalized domain such as the World Wide Web.
Happy reading!
I’d like to say that my room is organized, neat even. I’ve spent a good chunk of change getting various pieces of furniture and equipment to refacilitate this supposed cleanliness: shelves, CD racks, drawer organizers, velcro strips for cables, etc. A few of these things work, but most fail due to the simple fact that people have a lot more stuff than it is depicted in those ads selling these items. When bookshelves are designed to look good half empty, trying to stuff a shelf full of heavy tomes of knowledge tend to result in an unnatural sag that can be corrected by having the books in the shelf below prop up the droopy middle.
But I hate dusting and vacuuming. The areas of the house that I frequent are free of dust; it’s the places that I don’t go which gather motes, and are often the subject of reprimands by girlfriend and parents alike. So instead of cleaning the place myself, I did the next next next next best thing to hiring a maid, which is buying one of those iRobot Roomba vacuums.
(For those who aren’t familiar w/ the little red machine, it’s a squat little robot that runs around the house vacuuming floors, automatically detecting walls and obstacles as well as avoiding falling off high places)
