The Montreal and CHI2006 conference pictures are finally sorted and up! This time, I succumbed to peer pressure and published the pictures to a Flickr account too. Enjoy!

View the photos on my album page here.

View the photos on my Flickr page here.

CHI conference was fun. Meeting new people, reminiscing with old friends, attending all those cool paper sessions and talks… Now I’ll finally back in Pittsburgh with that whole pile of work waiting for me to finish. Some of the memorable parts of the trip:

Hookah Bar
Went to a hookah bar for the first time on the last night at Montreal. Our casino plans fell through that night, but the night still worked out pretty well. This was cheaper than alcohol. A few puffs made me light-headed for a while. I don’t like it too much.

Thousand Islands
This is indeed the place where the first Thousand Islands salad dressing was made. We passed by the Thousand Islands skydeck on our way back home. The view was awesome at the top of the deck. Two things I had learnt here. One, there are in fact only 997 islands here. Two, a island is a piece of land which has at least two trees on it.

Original Buffalo Wings
These wings were amazing. We dropped by the Anchor Bar in Buffalo. This was where buffalo wings originated from. We got adventurous and decided to try their Suicidal Wings, the spiciest ones they had there. I almost died. This is definitely a close contender to the Atomic Wings in Quaker Steak and Lube. We bought some for Jason and as usual, it was no sweat for him! Ugh.

It’s funny how everytime I go to a new city, the first thing I look for is food. And that somehow leads to Chinatown! This time it’s the same. We had dim sum at the Chinatown next to the convention center. Not fantastic, but at least there is.

There was this massive Earth Day demonstration! It was the largest one I’ve ever seen. Felt like a parade or something. I think they were trying to oust this politican out of the cabinet.

CHI 2006 Conference is held at Palais des Congrès de Montréal. This convention center has got to be one of the better-looking buildings around here.

I asked for directions to the Notre-Dame Basilica church and this guy gave me the wrong direction! “See that street, go all the way down. It’s about 3 blocks away!” I should have sensed that snigger from his friend.

Went into one of the many churches along the street. This was taken from within the Christ Church Cathedral.

Le Phillips Hotel. This is by far the largest hotel room I’ve ever stayed in. Four people living in a 2-bedroom-suite, it just feels like an apartment, and a very posh one.

—

First day of the trip and it was already so much fun. The 12-hour drive from Pittsburgh to Montreal wasn’t as tiring as I expected it to be. I did a fair share of the driving. We practically stopped for breaks an average of 1 per 2 hours. And we never seemed to stop eating and drinking and munching on those perennial supply of Planters nut mix.

Either Jeff’s car has an affinity to bugs or New York State has a lot of bugs. Wham bam! As we were driving on the freeway, we got this occassional splatter of weird-looking sticky substance on our windscreen. I thought it was bird crap at first. Then Jeff told me it was bugs! I was like *speechless*.

One thing I realized from this road trip is that listening to podcasts is one good way to pass time in the car. We were listening to lecture podcasts from various Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders, a weekly seminar series by the Stanford Technology Ventures Program. It’s funny how we always skipped lectures in school and now we are listening to lectures on our road trip!? Anyway Tina Seelig, the executive director of the program gave a very inspiring talk titled “What I wish I knew when I was 20“. She shared about her insights into what people should know before they hit the age of 20. Among those advice I could recall now were “It’s the small things that matter most” and “Try alot of things and keep those that work”. I thought they made a lot of sense. I’ll probably write about them in a separate post. For the interested folks, here’s the podcast.

• With Spring comes spring allergies… Why in the world do I have to develop allergies for tree pollen when my first two years over here are allergy-free?
• There we have Spring Carnival this year again. The rides, the booth, the parties and the events at the tent. Just another Carnival again.
• Missing my car again…
• Why must creating comments for javadoc require periods ‘.’ at the end of all the first sentences?
• I’m going to drive to Montreal early tomorrow morning. A whooping 11-hour drive (without any break at all)! It didn’t feel that long when I decided to drive one month ago. I wish I had chosen to fly instead. I guess the trip there will be worthwhile. A chance for me to redeem my bad impression of this island known for its European beauty.

[Apr 19, 3:46pm] It’s official! We sold our dear red car!

The whole car negotiation process was tiring and messy. All the price haggling and all. I want deposit… No I can’t give you deposit…. No no then there’s no guarantee… Ok lets settle this before I leave for the conference on Friday. And with one phone call, suddenly we had to settle the car title deed that afternoon itself!

There was a massive mad rush then. We had to grab all our groceries from Giant Eagle and Strip District before we lose the car. We had to eat our lunch. It was weird just because we didn’t have the mental preparation that we would be selling the car today. Suddenly we realized there is so much we haven’t done that can only be accessible with a car. Oh well…

I guess we really don’t have much time left here. So in a way I was glad we sold it now. It’s finally back to the good ol’ days of the ‘11′ - our legs!

Walking is afterall good exercise!!

There was so much buzz in the Singaporean blogosphere talking about the one-hour dialogue MM Lee Kuan Yew had with this group of under-30s. I was so glad someone recorded it and put it online.

With the content of the forum aside, maybe I’m just sensitive, the attitudes of some of those youths were really less than respectful. There they were thinking, ah, now’s the chance to unleash all these burning questions we have! Lets break him down! At some point, it really felt like a mass attack. After all, here’s a man who built up Singapore dirt up from scratch, with his guts, brains and the love for the country. Even to a 80-something elderly, you don’t speak with such aggression. Now show this man some due respect would ya?

And then there were all these awkward interruptions when some of them tried to fit in questions even before he was done speaking. Call that the by-product of the spontaneity of a good discussion. But by my standards, I’ll call that rude.

Anyway, my take on the elections - why break something when it ain’t broken.

In my latest project, we were tasked to do a skeleton rig, make it walk up the stairs and open the door. I decided to embellish it with a few fancy moves for the fun of it.

A pity I only read Keith Lango’s article about “animating forces instead of forms” after I created this scene. The key is with the arcs in the motion curves.

An Inconvenient Truth is not a story of despair but rather a rallying cry to protect the one earth we all share.

I love documentaries and this is one scary and thought-provoking one.

How many balls and serves do you need to hit to start getting a sense of a tennis serve? 200!

I was early for my tennis class today. There was no one at the courts, but one huge basket of tennis balls lying on the court. I’ve always wanted to be able to practise my serves all alone with no one to judge or waiting for you to serve the balls to him. Of course the whole inviting basket of balls was great, like a dream come true!! And there I went throwing the balls and hitting them. Hah- it was disastrous with 1 in 15 balls ending up as a decent valid serve! 5 minutes were all it took to settle all 50 balls. Then I picked up all the balls again and served from the other side of the court. 2 more rounds of this! Sweet! I must have looked like a fool to those kids playing at the playground (there is a childcare center next to the courts). Yeah- but what the heck…

I’m finally getting it I must say. 4 consecutive valid serves! Yay!

A few things I realized from today’s practice:

• Hit the ball with arm almost fully extended.
• Where the ball contacts the racquet face is darn important. At least for my Wilson Hyper Hammer, it’s about 3 inches  from the top.
• There is kinda a rhythm to the whole prepare/toss-ball/raise-arm/hit sequence.
• Bend the knees a little before tossing the ball and straighten them after tossing for that ’sweet spring’ upwards.
• Where you toss the ball is critical. With your left foot pointing towards the right net pole, the ball should go straight up in line with an imaginary line between your left foot tip and the right net pole. At least this is what I’m comfortable with.
• Consciously aim.

More tennis and more practice! I’m loving this game.