3.18.2008
Arthur C. Clarke, thanks for the moon ride :)
Also, I have...
3.9.2008
Erica’s Lebowski dance
Took me about an hour to put this up. Love it. Thanks, Erica :).
ps: I’m pretty bad at following the manual.
3.7.2008
spring is a little bit late this year
I live in the middle of the heart of Toronto. Although the billboards here are not as grand and poshy as the 5th in NY, you are still uncomfortably surrounded by myriad of overpriced French boutiques and theatre houses. Such convenience, as I later found out, is supposedly part of the ‘whole deal’ of living a vibrant city life. It’s kinda hard to breath around here sometimes. Thank god for the Burger King across the street.
3.2.2008
Isabel Allende: Tales of passion
In one of the most beloved talks from TED2007, novelist Isabel Allende talks about writing, women, passion, feminism. She tells the stories of powerful women she has known, some larger-than-life (listen for a beauty tip from Sophia Loren), and some simply living with grace, dignity and ingenuity in a world that, in too many ways, still treats women unjustly.
I find this talk moving and important. For me, coming from a developing country where the society is still marinated with the very idea of male superiority, Isabel’s tales of passion poignantly points out how we can solve some of the aching problems facing our world today by simply empowering women.
2.22.2008
learn how to read code, not just write them
I think CS program should put more emphasis on the title statement. The difference between homework programming and real world programming is, generally speaking, you most likely will be asked to maintain a codebase and that doesn’t usually involve writing hundred lines of codes per day. I learned it the hard way. Having already been ‘in the wild’ for a few years now, and lurking around various OSS projects, I can see newbies are still learning it my way :(.
Some fresh CS graduates walk into the real world thinking they will take ownership of a codebase and be asked to solve problems right away. Since some of them might have limited experience in collaborative coding environment (I can count in one hand the number of times I was involved in group programming projects during my 4 years in college), they choose not to study the existing codebase. It’s bad, they basically would choose to rewrite everything every time because it’s hard to maintain existing codes that are written by some schmucks they don’t know.
I think more credit hours should be allocated to courses that teach proper coding guidelines: how to write good comments, existing coding standards, why Unix tab parameter is different than say, a Windows system, source control and whatnots. It will be a boring course, but an important one nonetheless.
2.8.2008
Into the wild: review (sort of, spoiler’s alert btw)
More than 24 hours after watching this movie, I’m still writing this review with a wrenching heartache, an unforeseen after-effects to which I place all the blames to the beautiful story itself and Mr Sean Penn’s fetish and sadistic addiction in making every movies he’s involved in as an actor or as a director so criminally sad.
I would have given it a 10 stars but then I took 6 stars away because I’m still sad :(. It’s a sad, sad ending to a happy journey. I can’t stop thinking about questions like what about the old dude who had wanted to adopt him as his son, or Vince Vaughn who had obviously taken an immense liking to him, or the hippies living in the trailer, or the 16 years old girl who by the way is the most precious looking creature ever alive on earth, or his parents and most importantly, his beloved sister? They will never see this boy again. This boy who gave everything away and embarked on a journey to Alaska and happened to cross path with the life of all the people mentioned above. No matter how short the encounter was, he left a sizable pile of emotional leftovers for every one of them. What the fuck, this is so fucking sad.
I told you this is not a real review and I won’t apologize for over-using the word ’sad’.
Here’s something to ease the pain - Kristin Stewart has been inducted into my hall of fame. Here’s why :)
But still, damn it. what the fuck.