Busy Month
Monday March 17, 2014
The month has been busy so far, with several social occasions peppering my week and plenty at work to keep me occupied. We had a sumptuous feast at Tiger, all you can eat ribs at Gasworks and a small but delightful dinner at my previous project manager's house. There's been nightmarketing and bubble tea and just general indulgence with food.
I went to the Power Plant display at the Botanic Gardens last Saturday, as part of the New Zealand Festival. It was a show of light and sound within the flora of the gardens. Ex-tropical cyclone Lusi was bearing down on the city and it caused a few showers during the night, but this only added to the mystery and eeriness.
On Sunday, the whole church was away at the annual church camp, so I took the opportunity to hold my own service - just jamming around on the piano with Wei and Andrew with no interruptions. Possibly the best church service I've been to! I've finally gotten my playing of "Let it Go" from Disney's Frozen to an acceptable level, and posted a video of me playing it on Facebook. Lots of great feedback and comments, thanks to all who listened! Still looking to finesse various parts of the piece to add volume and depth to the emotion and richness of the song. So good.
Posted by Jeremy at 8:58am on Monday March 17, 2014 :: 0 comments :: 
What a Weekend
Sunday March 2, 2014
The weekend started out with a few drinks and pizza at the Sprig and Fern, and some healthy discussion on mildly controversial and polarising religious opinions. Following that, we headed back to the Greenhouse for some delicious black forest cake to celebrate a non-descript March holiday which happened to coincide with World Civil Defense Day. I had my suspicions but I was still pleasantly surprised and a little embarrassed with the attention, but the night was thoroughly enjoyable.
On Saturday, we had the PikPok Family Day Barbeque at the Mt Victoria Bowls Club. Though the day was a bit windy, the sun was glorious and the atmosphere chilled and relaxed. Charlie had found out about the aforementioned non-descript March holiday and had brought in some candles to stick in the cupcakes, it was very sweet. Thanks to a sign she had written, people well-wished me as the day progressed, again very touched by the sentiments but a little embarrassed with the attention, teehee. It was awesome to spend the day with cool people doing cool things, just out in the sun chit-chatting and playing bowls.
We ended up at the Gryphon Theatre at 8pm to catch the final night of the Fringe at the Gryphon, with three improv shows: Brooks and Brown in Literally Anything, Sketchual Healing and Here's a Thing. Mind-blowingly funny, absolutely amazing performances by all involved and just damn entertaining, capping off what was a brilliant day.
I've been house-sitting at Charles's place too, with his two kittens Hugs and Kisses. Adorable but so mischievous! They like following me around the house and they're extremely playful. I left the pantry open and they snuck in to have a look around; they got stuck in one of the large drawers in the kitchen as well. They'd go into my room and I'd try to carry them out, but since there's two, I'd get rid of one only to have the other sneak in, and repeat. Still, heaps of fun to play with, and I think they liked the attention too.
I've also been following Twitch Plays Pokemon, a social experiment giving 60,000 people the chance to control a Gameboy Emulator playing Pokemon Red. After 16 days, they've finally beaten the Elite Four and Champion but spawned several memes and a joke religion - Lord Helix the Omastar, Bird Jesus the Pidgeot, Flareon the False Prophet, so on and so forth. Highlight of the Elite Four battles would be level 36 Venomoth (nickname ATV, or All Terrain Venomoth) versus Lance's level 62 Dragonite. Due to some questionable AI programming, Dragonite kept using Barrier and Agility as they were "Psychic" attacks super-effective against Venomoth, and Venomoth had managed to Disable Hyper Beam and Poisonpowder Dragonite. Totally epic, and absolutely fascinating to watch the whole game unfold at the hands of thousands of people like that. A new adventure begins in just over two hours - what could it be!?
Today I was at church for the final in the series of "Things I Wish Jesus Never Said", and then out to Lyall Bay for Ekim Burgers with Jimmy and Charlie. After a solid afternoon nap, I was at Laundry with Jono, Andrew and Wei for dinner, then Fidel's for dessert.
My weekend has been super busy but full of amazing friends and fun times. Thanks guys, you rock.
Posted by Jeremy at 8:45am on Sunday March 2, 2014 :: 0 comments ::
Programming's Hard
Tuesday February 11, 2014
Day one of the PikPok Developer Conference has just gone by. My talk on Dynamic Programming was well received and the programming competition had a few glitches here and there, but on the whole, not too much trouble.
I think it was a pretty big gamble pushing to run a programming competition at work. There is a lot of preparation involved, a lot of uncertainty. Not only did I have to organise all the questions and answers (one answer was wrong ;_;), I had to fight hard to convince all the programmers to enter! Har har. I think most people had a good time, and if they didn't, I think at least they would have learned how programming competitions work, and been made aware of the pressures and challenges you face when having to work in those conditions - I guess it's just an extension (or in parallel?) to how we'd do it in a day-to-day situation.
Quite a few people were tripped up on how to read from standard in - who does that anyway? Luckily for the Python programmers, they had it easy in that respect. We had a lot of problems with presentation errors - too much whitespace, too many newlines, those kinds of pedantic tidbits that don't really matter in the big picture. They are there to test people's ability to follow instructions rather than test their programming ability, which I might look into changing for future installations. Perhaps I can provide some basic reading/writing code so that people only have to implement the body of a method instead of deal with input/output problems? Is there a way I could do that for all programming languages that we support? Could we integrate that into DOMjudge somehow? All questions that I'll need to think about!
Because I split the group up into random teams of two, it was also interesting to see how people tackled pair programming. The dynamic between colleagues is always fascinating to observe, especially if there is conflict or strong opinions! I say that with a bit of schadenfreude, but this may be of use to my boss.
I would like to see more of these in the future, and hopefully my boss will approve (and mandate?!) these competitions to be run on a regular basis. I'd say today was a success.
Posted by Jeremy at 7:12am on Tuesday February 11, 2014 :: 0 comments ::
Year of the Horse
Thursday February 6, 2014
I spent Chinese New Year up in Auckland. I guess I'm a stickler for tradition, Chinese New Year should be spent with family and it was good to see my parents, my sister and brother in law, and especially my two nephews. One day I hope to spend CNY back in Malaysia - I almost had a chance to do that this time round but Malaysia Airlines wouldn't have any of that.
Eight at the Langham Hotel had a promotion during January where all diners whose birthdays were in January dined for free! So I treated dad to the famous buffet lunch there and it was awesome. There was plenty of fresh oysters and some different things from when I went over New Years with Jordan, and some festive delights in celebration of the Chinese New Year too! Not surprisingly, the majority of the diners there were Asian. The amazing lunch caused me to have a three hour food coma, but I regretted nothing.
Saturday was our family Chinese New Year dinner. Though "reunion dinner" is supposed to happen on New Year's Eve, rules are a bit more relaxed these days to allow for working families and those who have to travel long distances to get home. Nevertheless, the spirit of the dinner was honoured, with plenty of dishes, each symbolic in their own right: chicken, duck, prawns, fish and vegetables made for a scrumptious feast, even if it was a bit chaotic preparing it.
On Sunday I went to church, followed by our regular lunch at Masala, and then I met a few of the old gang at Cornwall Park for a late barbeque picnic for Jacinta. So wonderful to feel the sunshine (and no wind), and great to catch up with people - even if I'd only seen them a month ago. It's been six years since I left Auckland, but I still enjoy the friendships I've made with these people despite the distance. I also got to play badminton on Monday night with them - so good.
I managed to get a login for the computers at Uni so I could work on a presentation about Dynamic Programming for the PikPok Developer Conference next week. I took the chance to wander around the city campus, admiring the new buildings and appreciating the old ones. I was astonished to find the entrance to the CompSci department completely different - they've removed the time tunnel and replaced it with a large hallway where the Science Student Center sits, as well as a time wall depicting various important historical events. Info Commons hadn't changed much (Munchy Mart is still there <3) and I was able to finish most of the Powerpoint presentation in the three days I was at Uni. I also caught up with Bobby and Raymond on Tuesday at Elliot Stables, and Graeme and Tom on Wednesday at Tony's.
Such a pleasant and relaxed few days. I should do that more often.
Posted by Jeremy at 9:45am on Thursday February 6, 2014 :: 0 comments ::
Um. What?
Sunday January 26, 2014
I went out to Lyall Bay this afternoon to teach Mitchell how to drive. The area is full of learner drivers because the roads are relatively quiet and most importantly (in Wellington), it's flat. We stopped by the side of Onepu Road and swapped seats, just as a torrent of rain hit the area.
As we were about to leave, a very confused and worried woman beckoned me to wind the window down, and as I did, she frantically bleated "Help!! Please help me!! I need $10!!!!" She's a little out of it, and has a bad stutter, and it's clear she has a problem but whether it's a cash problem specifically, I am unsure. Anyway, I am a bit apprehensive, and I tell her that I don't have cash but we can drive to the dairy down the road to get some for her. Again she repeats, "Please!! I need $10!! It's life or death... I can pay you back $20 tomorrow...." and again I tell her we'll go to the dairy to get money. She asks to hop in the car and Mitchell and I quickly tell her she can't. Then she asks for Listerine ("It's $7!! I need Listerine!!!!") and I say to her again we'll meet her at the dairy. She starts walking away and Mitchell hits the central locking on the car and we wind up the windows and call the cops.
We drove round the block a few times and we spotted a police car driving away from the dairy where she had been waiting. Hopefully she'll be alright - but boy, what a strange encounter.
We've had a few birthdays this week; on Wednesday night we tried to go to Gasworks in Miramar for Jono's birthday, but they were totally full and Jono hadn't booked, so we ended up at Lonestar instead. We would have been indulging in the all-you-can-eat $20 ribs at Gasworks, so we substituted that with the famous Lonestar Hoisin and Mandarin Ribs (Large Stack). Greedy as ever, I also got the Jack Daniels and Chocolate Self-Saucing Pudding for dessert. Yummo.
I was at Sprig and Fern for a few drinks with Paul for his birthday, where we had some lively conversation about iTunes and choices, and Wei and I also taught the guys how to play Mahjong. Yesterday after badminton, I was at Strawberry Fare for lunch to catch up with Jono and Karlyn, back from their overseas travels, and also Jono's recent birthday. After that, I saw Frozen (would recommend!) and then met some workmates for dinner at Pan de Muerto, before heading back to Joe's place to play Machine of Death.
Looking forward to Chinese New Year next week - Year of the Horse 2014!
Posted by Jeremy at 7:21am on Sunday January 26, 2014 :: 0 comments ::