Chan's Personal Blog

Well, I'm off to the Young Adults camp at Nanoose Bay Camp this weekend. In addition, I've been drafted as a counselor for the Kid's Camp in the following week, so I'm going to be away for 10 days.

The draft was interesting. On Monday, my Youth Pastor calls me up and asks if I could be a camp counselor for Kid's Camp because they were desperate for volunteers. Unfortunately, he knew that I was unemployed, so it's pretty hard to lie about being busy.

There was one problem though, all counselors were required to pass a criminal record check. And no, the problem isn't that I have a criminal record. The problem was that a check would require at least 5 business days before it was complete, so it was unlikely that the check could be completed before the camp started.

We were trying to figure out how we could resolve this, and then it hit me. I remembered that Yahoo had already started a background check on me in early June, so they should have some documentation showing that my background was clean. I got off the phone and contacted Yahoo about this. Then, the strangest coincidence happened.

This weekend was the first time I had ever played on a Nintendo Wii, and I have to say that I was quite impressed by it. I was over at Jordan's place on the weekend, and one of his friends brought over a Wii, and it's a lot of fun when you have a group of people playing. It had that wow factor to it because it's so different from other gaming systems.

A lot of people have dismissed the Wii because its graphics technology isn't nearly as sophisticated as an XBox 360 or a PS3, but I don't believe this was Nintendo's focus. Their focus was to create new gaming experiences that focus on being fun. I believe that they have accomplished this.

I was playing a boxing against Jordan on the Wii, and even though the graphics weren't stunning, it was very fun. Controlling the Wii was extremely intuitive because if you want to punch someone, you punch with the controller. If you want to block, hold the controller up near your face to block. Needless to say, it was really fun throwing punch combos against your friends. How many video games makes you break out in sweat (other than Dance Dance Revolution)? In either case, I was thoroughly impressed, and I think the Wii has ushered in a new era in gaming. It's really fun to physically interact with the game.

I think one of the greatest strengths of the system is its focus on the casual gamer. I mean, have you seen the latest Nintendo commercial? It shows grandmas playing video games with their grandchildren. These games are really easy to learn and fun, and they're perfect to play when you have a group of friends over. It's a great party gaming system. The biggest tell of this is that even girls were playing games on the Wii. From my experience, games that require a huge tutorial and many hours of time invested are generally huge turn off for parties and female gamers. The Wii does a very good job of engaging non-gamers. (The stereotypical view of the gamer is that it is largely dominated by males.) Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that gamer girls don't exist, but they are more rare. Consequently, single gamer girls, please inquire within

Last month, I was walking home from downtown and I ran into one Mr. Hank Nienhuis. He was the drama teacher at my high school, and my sound crew used to do sound and lighting for all of his major plays and productions. I always looked forward to organizing sound and lights for the annual dinner theater because it was a catered buffet event, and we all got to eat for free.

Anyway, he seemed to be doing quite well. He's done a lot of travelling in his retirement, and I believe he recently came back from Europe. Also, he and his wife volunteers at the Thrift Store on Government St. and Bay St. (next to the foreign car dealer) every Monday, which is where I bumped into him. He was talking about how great of a salesman he was because he sold a lot of furniture that day. He tried to peddle some used furniture on me too.

We reminisced a bit about the past. Some things never changed though. I was still doing well in academia, still into web development, and still doing sound and lighting for shows. The foundations of all of this can be traced back to high school. Good times.

Suddenly I feel older.

In either case, go visit him at the Thrift Store on Government St. and Bay St. on Mondays. Make his day and buy a couch from him.

During this break from academia, I've finally had a chance to work on a few interesting projects that I've never had time to do. My latest project involved pimping out a Ford Aspire by adding underglow to the vehicle.

You'll understand the humour in all this because this is what a Ford Aspire looks like:



This is what the car looked like after we were done:


Check out the full photo album here.

The whole project started when my friend Chad bought a Ford Aspire, and he wanted to modify the vehicle. One of his rich asian friends had added glowing lights to his car for a ridiculous amount of money. The goal was to one-up his friend with a homebrew solution. So, Chad asked if I knew anything about LEDs and designing electrical circuits. Fortunately, I am a man of many random skills, and I did know a few things about electrical circuits, so I joined the project.

Well, today was finally my convocation ceremony, and I have officially received my Master's degree from the University of Victoria. That's another expensive piece of paper that's getting mounted on the wall.

Everyone has been asking if I was excited. Honestly, today was just another day. I was far more excited in February when I successfully defended my master's project which concluded my academic requirements. That was when I celebrated and felt that I had crossed the finish line. The ceremony today was more of a formality. I'd probably be more thrilled if I had finished my program in May, but I didn't.

For anyone who has actually attended a convocation ceremony, they tend to be fairly boring. You sit there waiting for your loved one to be called up, and they get their 20 seconds of fame on the stage, and then you wait for hundreds of other students to get their degrees before you can leave.

This last week, I had the amazing opportunity of visiting Yahoo!'s campus in Santa Clara, California; this campus is where their search engineering teams are located. It wasn't their headquarters, but it was still quite large; the campus consisted of three large buildings. Their headquarters is located about 10 minutes away in Sunnyvale, California.

Again, I have posted a photo album of the trip.

I'll just talk about the parts of the trip in which the photo album doesn't cover. So, last week I flew into San Jose to see Yahoo! I didn't have much time for this trip because I was only staying two days and one night. I got into San Jose at around 5:00pm, and went straight to my hotel, the Biltmore. Thankfully the hotel had a free airport shuttle bus service, so it was very painless getting there.

Yahoo booked the hotel for me, and they get a corporate discount with this hotel, so staying one night was very inexpensive (for a luxurious 3 star hotel). The place was way nicer than the Best Western that I stayed at while I was in Palo Alto, California.

The Scouting Mission

That night, I wandered the area just to familiarize myself with my surroundings, and to scout out Yahoo! before I met them the next day. My friend's assessment of the San Jose area was pretty accurate. Tons of highways everywhere, very large corporate buildings, and lots of stores in very low densities. It was fairly difficult to get around by foot because of the urban sprawl.

Rush hour traffic is pretty crazy. They have 7 lane highways filled with slow moving cars. The sad thing is, the majority of cars had only one passenger in them. The HOV lane was reserved for cars with merely two passengers on-board. Two passengers does not equal high occupancy in my mind. The other thing I noticed is that a lot of buses were completely empty.

While walking down the street, I came across a lot of tech companies including Intel, AMD, Sun Microsystems, and more. Ultimately, I found Yahoo! which was right next Mission College. The area was pretty nice. Across the street was a Paramount amusement park complete with rollercoasters and such. There was also a massive 20-screen movie theater, and even an In-N-Out Burger joint! While exploring the Yahoo campus, I was taking a few pictures, and a Yahoo! security car drove by, and the guard was starring at me kind of strangely. Anyway, I walked for 7km before I returned to the hotel.