Fallen Empires – Halcyon

Well, my first Chinese class at IVC is over. It was an aggressive course requiring me to learn and remember 13-20 characters a week but I had a great time. The following presentation is the final skit I made with 3 other classmates and presented in class. It contains plenty of minor mistakes and horrendous accents but it makes for good comedy

This is also my first attempt at creating video using my new camera. It turned out much better than I expected. The microphone on the 5D is surprisingly good.

While I was working at IBM, I got a great laptop backpack as a thanks award. It was well padded, had a waist harness to support carrying heavy stuff while hiking or biking around town. It even went with me to Paris. Unfortunately, it decided to give up this week. And even the magic of duct tape couldn’t rescue it.

Last I checked IBM stopped giving away this backpack as a thanks gift so I have been searching high and low for a way to replace it. Looks like all the stores around here don’t really carry many all-purpose backpacks. They all carry some version of the Veictorinox (Swiss army knife maker) backpacks which look quite good but they lack the waist harness.

After giving up on all the stores around, I finally settles on a Kensington Contour Backpack from Amazon. Just have to wait for it to arrive. Looks like no biking to work till Thursday.

Went on a bike ride yesterday which is probably my longest one yet. Covered about 16 miles (about 670 ft climb and decent) in about 1 hr. The ride took me through the foothills of Irvine along Shady Canyon Road to UCI and back.

Climbing up the hill was very hard since I was not prepared for it. I managed to climb at about 5 mph but the decent at about 30 mph was great fun. I’m definately going to make this one of my weekly rides and hopefully build up my strength and stamina.

http://www.bikely.com/maps/bike-path/209547 will take you to a map of the course I took.

While watching TED recently, I came across this very interesting presentation about how we learn concepts and how even tough we think we understand something, we don’t actually understand it. Take a look at this presentation and let me know how many answers you got right.

I’m glad that my parents let me mess around with semi-dangerous chemicals and electrical circuits when I was a kid. Even though I don’t have a formal education in those things, I managed to get 3/4 of the questions right.

Ps: if you have some spare time then stay for the commercial. It’s pretty well made.

After about 2 hrs of trying to figure out why by previous blog suddenly stopped working, I realized that they upgraded the version of Rails that was installed. Since there is no easy way I could see to switch it back, its time to try word-press. Hopefully there is a way to import my older posts…