Seattle (1st, 2nd day)

I really should have written a post about our 4-day Seattle trip almost a month ago but my coding has somehow squeezed out most of my blogging time these days. In any case, it was a great time hanging out with my buddy William who's apparently enjoying himself at Boeing.


The moment we touched down, William drove us to his place to put down our bags and picked up his roommate, Liz, another intern at Boeing, and made a dash to the Mt Rainer National Park, some 3 hrs drive from Seattle.


You know how they say Seattle rains all the time...well, somehow we brought the california sun with us and the weather was anything but cloudy for the 4 days we were there...this pic shows row on trees taken on our way to the natioal park..pretty neat eh?


Again...on our way to Mt Rainer...nicer scenary to come...


no...i'm not going to take a pee here...altho it's pretty tempting...aha...truly a "nature call" situation...


In case you're wondering..no, we did not plan beforehand the color of our t-shirts..


small lake on the foot of Mt Rainer..


well...a train...or at least was once a train and now turned into a stylish restaurant...


getting closer after almost 2+ hr driving...and getting hotter too...


Me and Rainer...


Look at the sheer scale of this place! Note how William is posing towards the end of the video...haha


Finally we're there...don't be fooled by the snow...it was actually DAMN HOT!


Snow..more snow!


slippery slope + sneaker = ~10 falls/minutes...the two girls were actually having alot of problem doing the climb...but me and William (or rather mainly William) were on an unstoppable roll scaling the snow-filled "trail"..


a closer look...


Sliping and falling and tumbling does have one effect: you get down the mountain faster....evident in this pic with me shouting to Tam: wait!!!


After all the falling and snowball fight, we took a long drive back to Seattle, where William brought us to a really nice seafood restaurant by the Alki Beach...we have a pretty gd view of the seattle skyline from there...thou it's not nearly as impressive as some of the other cities I've been to...


The Seattle skyline...the waters is exceedingly calm thou..


The next day, we head out to San Juan Island (at the expense of missing England's second half in a World Cup match..damn!). This is me and Tammy waiting at the jetty...actually I really dig this pink polo-T, but as I find out that morning, polo-T can really shrink after its first wash...crap!


Tammy posing on the ferry ride to San Juan Island...San Juan Island,as we'd find out later that day, is the northern most tip of US (except Alaska of course) and a hot spot for Killer Whale watch....unfortunately we were too late to go on one of those kayak tour...but the island is still worth the whole day exploring..


Me and my buddy William...he's been a great great great host to me and Tammy over the 4 days we were there...I owe him so many favors now I've lost count!


This is one of those moment in life where you are absolutely certain that there is a God...we were just driving around the big island without really knowing where we should go (with some wishful thinking of spotting a killer whale from the coast) when the road turns upslope and then suddenly, we found ourselves on top of a knoll, overlooking a huge stretch of grassland and then leading to the pacific ocean...it is absolutely breath-taking...the great thing is that we're alone too...no crowds, no other cars..just the 4 of us with this perfect scenery...i think i wanna retire here..hee


I wish I'm there now!


Me and tammy..backlight...bad picture, awesome scenery..


Michael: I wish I knew how to quit you...(Brokeback Mountain style)...alrite, seriously, I'm neither homosexual nor a cowboy...but this pic does strike some similarities..


The 21st century answer to Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid...easily my favorite pic of the entire trip...


The road...


The rocky beach...


Lunch in front of a sapphire sky and a navy blue ocean...


~~country road...take me home..to the place..i belong~~


more open road...


I totally adore this place!


I realize no matter how many pics I put up here, i can never do justice to this place...perhaps it's the sun or the wind or the company with me that day...that was indeed a very very beautiful day...


After lunch, we headed down to one of the whale-watching site..but instead we saw...


this...a bunch of kayakers who got to the island before us and got themselves closer to actions...which should ideally let them experience...


this...I wish we woke up earlier that day...


In case you're wondering again..no, we did not plan the color of our attire that day...

Robot Olympics

I love robots! So when I found out that the annual "Robot Olympics" is coming to SF, I know I can't miss out on this one. I ended up going there with my buddy Takeshi and his family. Saw some pretty kick ass robot combat actions (some have chainsaw equipped outside their armor while one actually spotted a flame ejector!), some pretty "retarded" robot soccer and some mini robots sumo wrestling. Not the most impressive show but it's still a treat to see the robots being ripped apart during the robot combat!


Mini robot doing sumo in the mini sumo wrestling ring..


The geeks headquater...


No...they're not as agile as this picture would suggest...but still pretty cool...


The robot soccer family...


One of the more nimble robot I saw at the show...this one is controlled via bluetooth from a cell phone...pretty neat stuff from the japanese...


This robot trying to show off...


This is only the light-weight category...didn't have enought memory to take the heavy-weight category...those robots are really enormous and truly manacing killing machines!

I'm (still) writing bad code! Dammit!

It's been quite a while since I last wrote a post. Been kept fairly busy with research and coding for my new website. Since I failed during the last attempt, I'm pretty determined to get it right this time, although finding a partner-in-crime prove elusive. I've learnt quite a tough lesson the previous time when I tried to launch another internet project with a few friends who were good in programming but like me, had too many other things on their hands to pull off any substantial work. The blame is largely on my though, since I also "slacked off" towards the end of last semester. This time round I made sure that I'm much more equipped with the basics of web programming so that I can be much more involved in the design process rather than asking my future collaborators with some ridiculous request and set some unrealistic timeline.

In any case, it's been a solo effort so far but I'm still enjoying it. I'm implementing my project on Ruby on Rails (RoR), the framework that's all the rage now among web developer. It's pretty amazing the amoung of free resources you can find on the net when it comes to programming. There're just always these gurus out there who have so much time on their hands that they'd look through post after post of code in forums to tell you how to debug. In fact, I kicked start my project with a Content Mangement System (CMS) called "Eribium", a RoR open source project written by a 16 year-old in UK! Amazing stuff, definitely saved me a ton of time. Of course there's still a ton of things for me to catch up but my app is finally coming into shape. Hopefully, I can make a launch by end Aug (fingers crossed).

Bush classic~

Saw this clip some years ago...still my fav out of all Bush's clips...hhaha...so eloquently put!