Quantum mechanics simplified

i can tell you that the real stuff is sooooooooooo much more complicated and confusing than depicted in this video. But still pretty cool...

Ronaldinho's magic!

Insane yoyo player!

hey Shong, if you can do these tricks with chinese yoyo, i'm quite sure you don't need a fellowship to pay thro graduation...

What in the world is going on????????

A MUST-WATCH!!!! Very inspiring story of an american who walks the length of Japan

This video lasts for about an hour long....basically about this dude named Tyler MacNiven or "Kintaro" walking the entire length of Japan to look for the birthplace of his father. He only has a sketch of the birthplace and so it was a long shot. But this is truly an amazing journey of a man's quest to find love, his roots, the human spirit and himself!

In his own words:
"If you give yourself to the journey, the journey gives itself to you."

The Tipping Point

I've wanted to read the book "The Tipping Point" for quite a while now, and I finally got it in my hands after my reserve from the public library arrived. I've taken a pretty good class on "network economy" last semester, but this book really nails it. How does a trend catch on? Why google become the choice for search but not the other early competitors? These questions become much more relevant now that I'm working on Million Dollars Code. How do I spread the word? Of course I gotta have a good product on hand first. That's why me and Benghoe have yet to done any active marketing ourside our social circle. We wanna take all the feedback and improve before we fully publicize about it. But how do we generate a good buzz even if we're confident we have something decent is the question I've been thinking alot lately. I don't wanna come across as a spammer if i go around every prominent bloggers and tell them about our site. On the other hand i can't afford to be shy if I wanna give the site a chance to take off. There'd be lots of tough decisions we'd need to make in the next few weeks, but this book has definitely given me some good guidelines. Anyhow, I'm excited man! It's been a wonderful learning experience, and we've only launched for a week! hee

Fail early. Fail often.

Well, it's been a week since me and Benghoe first launched Million Dollars Code. We've got about 50+ people signed up so far, still a long way from our target. But it's great getting all sorts of feedback about our site. I think that starting the site in a "demo" mode is definitely a good decision. Essentially, I'm launching a prototype with the $100 award to entice people to give me feedback on how to improve the site. We have our fair share of negative comments the past week, and I actually manage to chat online with a cryptocraphy expert (Elonka Dunin who authors this famous site, "Famous Unsolved Codes and Ciphers") who has the harshest words for the site. But then again, all their points are valid and I'm glad that I'm getting all these feedback. Well, truths are usually hard to swallow, and it can be tough at times to stomach the criticism, but it's all good in the end if I can take these in my stride and improve myself.

Fail early. Fail often. That's my motto.

Funny LOTR remix

They are taking the hobbits to Isengard!

Nice song with cool anime!

Addictive song, with a cool anime MTV!

Finally! Website Launched (Break code to win US$100)!

It's official! The website I've been working on for the past 3 weeks is live! It still have some small bugs in it but the major functionalities are working fine. It's free to sign up now so go check it out yeah! It's www.milliondollarscode.com

So the idea is pretty simple: think of Wheel of Fortune except that you're playing against thousands of other players and that you're faced with a much higher noise-to-signal ratio. Each page has a code that is about 16000 characters long. Only some of the characters makes sense of course, the rest are just there to confuse you.

Initially, all characters are hidden beneath the "0" character. Once you sign up and select a character, the character will be revealed by midnight on the same day. So as more people join the game, more characters are revealed. Using the hints I'd provide every now and then, a smart 14 year-old should be able to solve for the hidden message beneath. So you don't need a PhD to win, but you'd need plenty of imagination and IQ to be the first one to break the code (and win my $100)!

Eventually, I'd like to earn money from this. But for now, the site is only in 'demo' phase and I'd look at the response. If it's good enough, then I guess me and Benghoe (the other guy I'm starting this site with) will go ahead and see if we can make a fw bucks out of this. If not, we'd call it a day and just treat it as another learning experience (indeed I've caught up with abit of web programming in the process of making the site!).

So, ladies and gentleman, let the game begin! And of course, all your comments and feedback will be greatly appreciated (especially if you find a bug in the site)!

The top brains in the world study in IIT!

I'm pretty sure I'd be trashed left-right-center by these guys in academics if they come to Berkeley.

Auto self-parking!

I wonder why we didn't have this earlier? We sld have most of the technologies required available a decade ago.

Weird buildings around the world...

Click here for more!

Patrick! Look at this!

This young dude is the king!

Real Transformer!

Wow! You have to admire the Japanese man! They are really sooooooo creative!

Amazing Drumming Animation

Saw this on GVOD. Imagine this is the kind of work that a good drummer has to pull off...

Another day in SF with Benghoe

Because my buddy Benghoe is giving me a hand in my new website, I met up with him for the second time in 2 weeks to discuss about the preparation of the site. Me and Tammy met up with him at the Sony Metreon, thinking that there's gonna be free wi-fi there. Well, there's supposed to a free wi-fi network but it's been down forever. Should have trusted the online forums comment about how the wi-fi hotspot in Metreon sucks. Anyway, we hang out for a bit in Metreon, snap some pics in the beautiful Yerba Buena Garden, before hopping to the Moscone Center right across the world where Benghoe visited a Comics/Anime convention earlier in the day. That place feels like a more elaborate halloween. Anyway, we circled around SF trying to look for a way to get to chinatown to take a look at their highly-rated Chinese New Yr parade, which truly disappoints. Chinatown did, however, smell like a war zone with everybody (actually mostly non-chinese) who wanna join in the it's-CNY-&-we-can-blow-up-stuff-with-fire-crackers fun. We ended the night with a great authentic chinese meal in a relatively upscale restaurant, where I took the pic of the fortune cookies (check out here). Another eventful day in SF, I love this city!


Me and tammy in front of the Yerba Beuna garden Waterfall, which commemorates Martin Luther King.


The city in the backdrop...


Promotional shot for the upcoming 2006 summer Blockbuster "The Day Michael Strikes Down an Alien". Proudly brought to you by Starbucks.


Promotional shot of another summer blockbuster "Star War Episode 0: The grandaddy of all Jedis".


Some wolves come here for attention...


Some wolves come here for food...


All traffic stops at the sight of the 2 mighty knights...or rather for all the Chinese cloth-dragons brandishing around on the road behind us...


As the crowd gets ready for the dragons...


While the local chinese residents looks on for another year of same ol same ol parade...


I wonder what kind of image an average American would have of a typical Chinese New Yr after seeing this parade...big heads, small bodies..


Cable Car too?


Finally..this is what I'm talkin about...unfortunately the lion dances are all quite disappointing...


Something interesting after the boring parade...this inspired me to start another blog, named "Fortune Cookies Heaven". Check it out!

A blog about "Fortune Cookies"

Took a picture of fortune cookies the other day, it was meant to be put here. But then i thought "hey, these fortune cookies are way cool and funny, possibly enough to stand on its own as a blog topic". So I decided to do a blog about "fortune cookies". So if anyone of u here ever go to a chinese restaurant, remember to collect it and bring home to snap a pic of it. I'd be happy to post it on my new blog.

So here's the link:
www.fortunecookiesheaven.blogspot.com

GOALLLLLLLLLLL!!! Car Football!

Saw this on GVOD, pretty dangerous but real fun to watch!

Octopus Camouflage!

First saw this video about a year ago. Found it on Google Video today. Amazing stuff!

Am I ever ready?

For those who've talked to me in the past few weeks or read the recent entries in this blog would know that I'm working on a website...it's an idea that came to me about 3 weeks ago and I've been working on it ever since...it seems to be a pretty simple idea to implement so I decided to go ahead and just do it. Well, turns out that my idea of "simple" is really quite time-consuming, and I eventually have to enlist a friend's (Benghoe) help to work out the site's integration with the database. Then today I found out further that in order to sell stuff on internet, it probably does the merchant some good to have more than just PayPal as the payment method. Not only that, being tied to a web hosting and merchant solution provider (I'm using Yahoo Small Business now) can be a 2-edge sword. On one hand they provide you with some neat features that can get the site up in a much shorter time, but customization can be a problem eventually, which is what I'm running into now. Also, to accept credit card online, I'd need to go through some "bureaucracy" to set up some kind of business officially.

For now, I'd be launching the site in a "demo" mode (hopefully in a week's time) and see how things go. If the response is good, then I guess I'd invest in some time to register a proper business and get things going. But for those who's itching to start a business, I'd say definitely do it and give it a try (of course do some risk calculation so you won't get burnt). It's really a great learning experience but certainly harder than it seems (my site is a pretty small site with just a couple of pages and yet it's taken me almost 3 weeks to build). In fact, I'm pretty sure that by next week, my site will still have some bug that needs fixing. Then again, a site is never really ready in that sense, always a work in progress. So I guess I'd be going for a launch next week anyway, and then concentrate on marketing and see the response, while fixing bugs along the way. I'm hoping the experience I get from starting this simple site will help out the other start-up idea that I've been working with another few friends (we're planning a launch in end May). So am I ready for the launch? Probably not, but I'm betting others out there in the WWW are ready for this site. Excited!

More pics with Chungjye and Marcus

Before Ling and Marcus left berkeley, we drove up to thee hill behind the campus where the Lawrence Lab is located...the view was gorgeous from the top...and the weather's perfect too!


Section 1 "Do Re Me"...

I look pretty relaxing here...but actually it's pretty freaky where i was lying cos right past that tree stub is a slope that's nearly vertical...

fantastic view of the bay from top of the hill

me and ling...

Distracted or Focused?

My mind's a circus these days. I wonder if it's the sunny weather here in California, but ever since I came to Berkeley I've had an explosion of ideas...or rather I spent much much more time daydreaming than usual. I mean I've always enjoyed daydreaming and thinking about the possibilities...all the what-if questions...but the recent flux of new thoughts and concepts is starting to take its toll on my studies...but that I worry much though..realistically speaking, I know that the stuff I'm learning in school right now (espeically the engineering classes) will have little bearings on my future career, so i've started shifting more efforts from school workload to actually realizing some of my ideas. So yeah, I'm distracted from studies, but I'm pretty focused in terms of the ideas I'm going after.

Anyway, the start-up idea me and my friends had been working on since November is gonna take a while before it sees daylight..we're postponing the launch date to end May, considerin that everyone is workin on it part time and we don't wanna compromise the performance. I hope that it won't be too late though as 4 months in the internet world is a long long time.

The other idea that I've been workin on these past 2 weeks is simple and potentially much more 'lucrative'. I think I may be able to launch it within a week's time. Gotta work on marketing thou, taking a small gamble here but i think the odds look good for now. At least I'm quite confident of breaking even.

Bump into a guy I knew from my Jap class today..apparently he's doing a film major and when i told him about my screenplay and another idea of a short, he became really interested...it'd be really interesting to have him direct the short...we're gonna meet up soon and brainstorm how to go about shooting that short but i think it's gonna be a really fun experience...

I also had a few ideas about my research directions on Carbon nanotubes...though at this point none of them is really much of a breakthrough...hopefully my advisor can approve some of my ideas so i can go ahead and start working towards my master thesis...busy busy...