Haven’t blogged since Monday. I have been struggling to recover from the dreaded spring allergies, and catching up on the newest version of the Condor Heros (神雕侠侣). As some of you may know, I should be on my way to Yellowstone. But I’m still in Pittsburgh. The plans kinda fell through, but I’m glad I stayed back here. To finish up my project, tide my baobei through the last stressful finale of her Statistics Masters exams, to clear up all those crap in my room…

In a span of one and a half weeks, both baobei and I finished up two boxes of (300 pieces each) box-tissue. Sneezing and coughing. It sucked! Baobei commented, “All those poor trees died for us to make those tissue.” But those trees are the ones to give us those pollen allergies - they deserve it! Hah- an instance of karma I would say.
1 week more, my dad will arrive here in Pittsburgh. 2 weeks more, we’ll be back home!

I’m glad it’s raining now. Down with those pollens! Darn those pollens!

Second piece of my Chess Pieces render series. Zoom in. Modeled in Maya 7.0 and rendered with Mental Ray. Render time: 24min.

I wish I have a faster computer.

For my Maya 3D Final Project, I decided to go the easy way out and do still renders instead of an animation. I experimented with caustics and lathe modeling of the glass chess set. I’m trying to simulate a macro photographic shot with that depth of field. See the 800×600 version here.

(This rendered piece has not been photo-manipulated before)

There are amazing places we can find videos online. Now we can even watch TV shows online at peekvid. Grey’s Anatomy, 24, Family Guy…. It even has the classic Smurfs and Pink Panther!!! Its resolution isn’t the best, but it certainly works!

I’m quite a big fan of soy milk and soy products like beancurd. Recently, I have also included the Silk Chocolate Soy Milk into my regular shopping list.

Then Cocoa alerted me to this surprising report on soy, saying soy may not be beneficial to human health after all, when all along I thought soy is such a great health food. In a nutshell, the report says that soy contains a number of substances which resemble the female hormones. Eating more soy may lead to “half helping of men”, “little girls starting to masturbate at an age as early as 18 months” and “men getting older faster with each serving of tofu”.

It feels like one of those many food products where you have reports saying they are both good and bad, and you don’t know which side to believe. I guess anything in excess is just harmful.

Read the whole report here.

All of a sudden, being a vegetarian becomes not the least bit appealing any more. Good for baobei since she always hated soy stuff!

I recalled seeing such an automatic mahjong table on sale four years ago at Bukit Timah, but didn’t have the chance to catch it in action. Now this video is a dream come true!

First I wonder how much this cost. Next I wonder how the table knows which is the right side up for the tiles. Nevertheless, amazing!

(Thanks IZ Reloaded)

Just checked the pollen count today at weather.com. There was a high pollen count alert for Pittsburgh. No wonder I’ve been sneezing the whole friggin’ day, and my eyes could barely open wide. Ugh I hate spring allergies. It’s funny I only developed this after my second year here in US. I thought Singapore has tree pollens too - all year round, but I didn’t get these allergy symptoms at all.

Took two pills of Benedryl allergy medicine on an empty stomach this afternoon. The effect of the medicine was amazing. I actually felt very light-headed.

Now I know this is a real cheap way to get high!

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.