Well, after saving up for a while, and under the recommendation of my friend Alex, I decided to grab myself a Dell 2408 WFP Monitor. So far, it has been amazing. I have not plug a computer into it yet, but I have plugged my PS3, and it looks fantastic. I’m glad I made the purchase when it was on sale too! ($200 off!)

I haven’t had time to play around seriously with the calibrations yet, and I probably won’t till I have my new computer built. But from the reviews online so far, it’s a great set. The inputs are plenty and 1920×1200 at 24 inch looks so pretty. I pop-ed in Wall-E in 1080P earlier today and just sat there and drooled.

Can’t wait until the end of this month / early May when I have my new computer up and running.

If you are around downtown this Sunday, January the 18th at 3:00pm, then feel free to drop by the Trinity-St. Paul’s United Church on 427 Bloor St. West for some youth-choir awesomeness. Viva! Youth Singers are celebrating Jewish composers from around the world. I will be accompanying a choir as well as perform in a few others. Tickets are around $10 each I believe. If you’ve attended The Nutcracker with the National Ballet of Canada the past December, you’ve probably heard some of these kids in the beautiful music.

As well, a few of my friends, Alex, Dan, Adrian and Sherman are presenting their fourth year design project: Gesture Based Presentation System at University of Waterloo’s Design Symposium on Wednesday, January the 21st. From what I’ve heard, their system earned raved reviews from their professors. Catch their presentation, and this very cool hand gesture system in William G. Davis Computer Research Centre, room 1304 at 11:20am.

So the other day I decided to make some instant noodle… only to find that my water filter has frozen under the harsh conditions of a residence fridge. This thing is so old, that one half an increment makes a difference between “Mr. Freeze” and “Let’s spoil everything”.

Today I once again became a lab rat, no, not someone who spend too much time in a lab (I’m getting there though), but rather, someone who has decided to become part of the experiment… all in the name of science. It was a 4th year thesis project for my friend Jon. He was testing to see if a strapped ankle has better balancing technique than non-strapped ankle by using EMG measurements, as well as a freaken cool looking, pre-programmed moving platform in which I get to stand on with one leg and attempt to balance. Pretty cool stuff.

Speaking of science projects, my friends Alex, Dan, Adrian and Sherman have made some significant progress with their FYDP Laser Project. They’ve recently integrated several components of their projects to finally put together a working gesture-based presentation system. Some pretty incredible stuff, check it out.

The past weekend I was reunited with my house-mates and friends from my Disney Internship two years ago. It was, as usual, a fantastic time. Believe it or not, we barely did anything that was really “Disney”, instead, we hung out and just had a good weekend being together again. The first night we went bowling, to which we came up with the best names for ourselves ever. They were so weird and quirky I was afraid other people at the bowling alley would think we’re from outer space or something.

As hinted last entry, we headed for Wasaga Beach to have ourselves a grand time at the beach, no sunburns!

We also headed to Niagara Falls the next day, where Matt C. and Kevin got to have a go at their first ever Maid of the Mist ride:

And of course, no House of Goofs / S-Club Reunion is complete without a water balloon fight:

Rest of the photos can be found on my flickr:

Speaking of Disney. Google Earth recently launched Walt Disney World 3-D, where you can explore Disney World on on the map all in its 3-D glory, very cool for a Disney geek like me! It’s not just park buildings too, everything from the resort to the monorail to the flower gardens in the parks is presented in 3-D.

So 33 years ago today (1975), the then 19-year-old Bill gates and 22-year-old Paul Allen created a partnership called Microsoft. And well, pretty much changed the world. It doesn’t matter if you think Vista rocks or sucks, or if you like the corporate giant at all, set aside your differences today and wish a happy anniversary to the dear o’l empire. Unless you have been investing in them since the incorporated company went public in 1986, then all you need to think about is where to spend your money today, since the value of that stock would be worth 280 times as much today.

Wired has an extremely short version of the history of Microsoft.

Anyways, thanks to my friend Dan Hadi, I’m now addicted to Battlestar Galactica. We were in a conversation about soundtracks, actually, and he told me that BSG had a pretty good soundtrack. At first I was all “Are you serious?”, but I decided to watch the show one night anyways because the mini-series was up on Space, and now I’m totally hooked, and not just cuz Grace Park makes my motor rev.

The space battles are pretty fun to watch. Firstly, they’re realistic, because the sounds are muffled, as they would be in airless space, which adds a tension to what’s going on. ‘Realistic’ because the dogfights are tactical in nature, resulting in some spine-tingling aerial maneuvers by Captains Apollo and Starbuck, like Apollo’s last-minute saving of the day in the original mini-series, when he took two Cylon missiles off the civilian passenger ship he was escorting. When the soon-to-be-president asks “Where the hell is our escort,” and the camera switches to a first-person view behind the missiles, and Apollo comes in fishtailing with his thrusters’ heat signature attracting the attention of the missiles that were heading for the passenger ship, it makes for thrilling viewing.

The panic and tension that occurs every time yet another cold, calculating, roving-red-eyed cylon ship appears is only part of the fun. There’s the complex relationships between Captain Lee Adama and his father, Admiral William Adama; the silent agony of President-by-default Laura Roslin — who it is established early on in the first few minutes has cancer; Gaius Baltar, who may or may be mankind’s worst nightmare, or ultimately the key to their liberation; Kara Thrace, the woman whose nickname is ‘Starbuck,’ flipping the script since the original series’ Starbuck was a man; likewise, the new ‘Boomer’ is Sharon Valerii, another woman taking the place of the original series’ male counterpart. Each one of these characters is complex and deep, and each has secrets that are slowly revealed throughout the course of the series, making for great drama in addition to the great action.

The show also deals with some controversial politics. An episode featured humans as suicide bombers against the cylons, who’s the bad guy now!? What does it mean when your friend you’ve known all your life realized that he/she was a Cylon? The depth of exploration in social issues and implications on BGS is really what makes this show worth watching (And I haven’t even delve into the religion aspect of things yet).

As for the soundtrack, yes, I agree with Dan, it is quite fantastic. I especially like the mini-series, instead of opting for bombastic scores in the style of John Williams, it follows the style of Tan Dun (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) and uses a percussion driven score that creates quite a contrast and ample of tension with the action on screen.

I’m in the process of finishing up season 3 and Razor at the moment, obviously not going too well with the whole crazy week and exam thing, but I will definitly catch up this summer. Seasons 4 premiers tonight for those of you that follow, if not, start watching! It’s one of the smartest show on TV in the midst of all these reality shows.

A VO_{2 Max} measures the maximal amount of oxygen a person can utilize, to test that, the subject is to undergo exercise with increase resistance at time intervals until either the subject voluntarily fatigue or the VO_{2 Max} data reaches a nice plateau, the former being the more likely outcome. We also measured heart rate wirelessly (in the picture, the black strap around the subject on the bike), other data measured includes ventilations rate, lung tidal volume, won’t get into too much detail. My result for that one test was 52.8ml/kg/min (25.8ml of oxygen used per kilogram of body weight in one minute), which translates to 2972 ml/min in total! That apparently is pretty fit, so I’m happy with my result.

Anyways, back on track. So today’s lab on body thermo regulation had me biking for a good 30 minutes (suppose to be an hour total) at 62.5% of my VO_{2 Max}. Every ten minutes I would be weighted (weight loss = water loss through sweat and breath!), and while I’m biking, my skin body temperature is recorded, as well as my core body temperature. Don’t worry, we didn’t measure it rectally, instead, I ingested a CorTemp™ Core Body Temperature Sensor that wirelessly transmit my core body temperature from the gut. The sensor was coated with a silicone coating so it wouldn’t digest in my body, the thing has all sorts of batteries and circuit in it (see diagram below). I felt weird when my lab TA could come up to me and get some sort of “signal” from his recorder.

Speaking of my TAs, they’re a hoot! When I was asked to volunteer as a subject again, I agreed to it knowing nothing was going to go up my “exit”, the conversation went like this:

TA: “Oh yea Tim? You’re going to volunteer? Even though we talked about it yesterday in your lab (my other course, respiratory phys. lab)?”

Me: “Yup, seeing that I don’t see anything about rectum on the board.” (Class laughs)

TA: “Well that’s because we’ve written it in white markers, you’re screwed, literally!” (Class in stitches)

When one of my other TA was explaining to me how the sensor works: “I know it’s an expensive equipment, but please don’t try to recover it, if you see it, just wave it goodbye!”

And once the sensor worked: “Excellent Tim, we now know how hot you are… I meant that in terms of temperature, let’s not get me fired.”

Anyways, I managed to bike for a good 30 minutes, I was suppose to go longer, but when I went for a weight-in on the other side of the room, the sudden stop of exercise and standing up caused a loss in hydrostatic pressure and I felt really quite dizzy and wanted to throw up, and that was when my Prof stopped the experiment. Oh well, we got good data, would’ve been awesome to go longer. Next year the weight-in will be done right by the bike to prevent this from happening, yay for being a guinea pig!

It’s still kind of funny knowing that there’s a sensor in your gut right now just beepin’ away. Imagine going through some sort of security metal detector today, that would make me quite a suspicious character indeed!

So we’re now into the third day into the Zimbra Pilot here on campus. It’s really quite exciting. By next year all of the university of Guelph accounts will be switching to the Zimbra collaboration suite (owned by Yahoo!), not only will we have less problems with trying to fix expensive and old servers, we will also get integrated calendaring, better interface, and better usability overall. Too bad I will only be able to enjoy this till the end of August!

The collaboration suite runs on browser based AJAX client in conjunction with the Zimbra collaboration server, so everything looks pretty spiffy. Drag and drop feels awesome, automatic recognize pattern allows google map integration when the interface recognize an address, the interface also recognize dates (for calendar/appointment management, obviously), contact, messages, and even phone numbers! The phone number recognition works with skype to initiate call, pretty spiffy stuff, but nothing really unheard of. The interface looks way better than what we originally had.

Right now I’m just waiting for the pilot to start offering blackberry support, so I can download Zimbra for blackberry client, as well as more Zimlet support, although I highly doubt the university will allow us too much customization, I wonder how many themes they’ll let us play with?

I’ve been playing around with the Plazmic Theme Builder as well as the Blackberry JDE and device simulator to create my own theme for the blackberry. I originally thought of simply putting in my current desktop background on all of my computer into the blackberry to give me a consistent look for all my of my devices, but then I decided to go all out and create an entire theme.

I stayed with the default for all of the application and status icons simply because I’m not advance enough to create my own set. I did however, redesign the overall look by modifying stuff like the background dialogs, banners, incoming call background, and other focus and tabs. The colour palette consists of dark red, light blue and light beige. Fonts are red because it matches the casing of the blackberry, the light blue and beige compliments the red and creates a light and relaxing feel to the theme.

The result of the theme on the actual screen turned out pretty well, you’ll have to excuse the fingerprint smudges:

There are a few things I need to change though. Some banner items placement issues, as well as the incoming call screen size. One thing I couldn’t figure out was how to set the active call background. Right now it seems to only allow a blank white space. The Rogers theme that came with the phone had a big red background with their logo in the center. It’d be nice if I could add something to that big and boring space of nothingness.

I upgraded yesterday to the Blackberry Curve 8310. It was quite an exciting purchase, I managed to get voice mail, 150 text msg (makes twittering cheaper), call display and “who called?” feature for $1 a month instead of $11!

The display is nice and clear, GPS included, being able to browse the web is awesome, with the exception that I wish it supported Wi-Fi or 3G! I couldn’t care less about the camera, MP3 and video capability either. Getting my emails is nice, the facebook apps looks pretty cool, except I won’t be checking it out often thanks to expensive data plan. Canada really needs to get some service provider competition going, or else Rogers’ just going to make up prices to their likings, certainly doesn’t look too good for the consumers.

I’m definitely obsessed with it, it’s easy to get hook on this thing. I just learned how to ping other blackberry users, exciting stuff!

On the other hands, I cut off my cables to offset some of the cost for the blackberry purchase. I don’t watch too much TV and is hardly in Toronto anyways. Turns out though, the digital cable box allows you to watch VIP channels in the 800s, even though they canceled the VIP channels! Which means, I’ve been paying for all those VIP channels when I could’ve got them for free. Maybe it’s a glitch, if so, shhhh!