Ah, long time no blog. Well, there were a few reasons behind the long drag for me to update again. The first was the fact that after we moved in, we didn’t have Internet for a few days. After we got Internet, it was still quite inconvenient for me to blog for not having a stable computer that I’d always use. A week later, I bought my $1500 computer and managed to put it together, though it took another week before I managed to add in a memory card reader unit in order to download photos from my camera, and after that, I started writing an entry.

The entry was basically a discussion of my current views on how to live a life. It turned out to be quite a sizeable entry and it still needs quite a bit of work before it’s publishable. Meanwhile, I have something else to tell you guys about today, and that is my deck project.

You see, our house came with a deck in the backyard, but that deck must have been built at least a decade ago, for now it is structurally rotten and covered with dirt and grime. At certain places, the boards would sink down the moment you step on them, thus making it so that if you ever put your full weight on such boards, you’d stumble and likely crack the wood. Yes, it’s a safety hazard, and that is the most important reason why I wanted to do something about it.

New Deck Boards

But what to do exactly? One thing we could have done is basically to tear it down and redo the deck, but that would require a budget outside of what we can dish out at the moment. So instead, what we decided to do is to get pressure treated boards and pave a new layer of deck surface onto the existing boards. If the original deck board orientation can be called horizontal, our new boards would now be vertical. This way, each board would be held up by a few inches from all other existing boards. Considering that out of all other existing boards, about 80% of them are pretty good in terms of strength, this vertical alignment should be very stable.

Initial Materials

So, what did we need?

• Pressure treated deck boards
• Deck Screws
• Hand Drill

After hunting on craigslist, I managed to buy 30 pressure treated deck boards (2″x6″x8′) at half the price stores like Home Depot would’ve charged me. It still costed me about $120, plus ten more bucks for shipping. Nontheless, the wood got here. We moved it into the house to protect them from the rain that lasted several consecutive days.

Measurements

The deck is about 10 feet wide and 12 feet long, and the boards we got were 8 feet per board, so either we’re not going to do a good covering job, or we’ll need to cut the boards to smaller pieces. I drew up the plans for the new deck covering, it will be 11 feet along the shorter side, made up of 8 foot boards 3 foot boards, and we will use about 20 boards across the long side. It will not cover the entire deck, and instead will leave a lower walkway from the basement deck steps to the stairs toward garage. Perhaps pictures are better for illustrating this design:

What The Deck Used To Be

What The Deck Was Going To Be

Final Materials

Since we needed 3 foot boards, we definitely needed a way to cut them, so the final list of materials are below:

• 20 2″x6″x3′ pressure treated deck boards
• 20 2″x6″x8′ pressure treated deck boards
• Deck Screws
• Hand Drill
• Any saw that can cut the wood

A Mitre Saw

Thanks to my friend Charlie, I managed to borrow both the hand drill and a mitre saw. I didn’t take any pictures of the mitre saw, but it looks awfully similar to the saw to the right, so you can get an idea of what it is. I then drove to Home Depot and got a box of 3 inch deck screws. There were 250 screws in the box, which should be just a little bit more than enough if I plan to use six screws per board.

Cleaning The Old Deck

The first step was to clean the old deck. As I mentioned before, the old deck has been lacking in maintenance since forever, and most of the surfaces are either rotten or covered in dirt and grime. To make sure that the new deck surface is long lasting and nothing disgusting builds up underneath, we decided to clean the old deck surface. To do so, we connected our water hose and started blasting water onto the decks, and scrubbed it with an old broom that we found. After about an hour of work of both scrubbing and blasting it with the water hose, we managed to get rid of all dirt and grime for the surface that we were going to work on.

The effect was amazing. What used to be a mostly black and dirty deck all of a sudden turned into a deck with almost white wood. The wood actually didn’t look too bad. We waited for two more days for the deck to completely dry, before starting to add new wood.

Wood of Various Sizes

Cutting The Wood

Setting up the saw we borrowed from Charlie went less smoothly than we first envisioned. The box came with no instructions, so we screwed on the lose parts only by matching with the whatever marketing picture we saw on the box. It took us a while to figure out how to turn the saw to the right angle and to move the sawblade up and down. We eventually figured it out, and from then on, cutting the wood went very smoothly. We now have our wood ready.

It is now time to do some calculations on some fine details.

Calculations

In the rough plan, the boards are going to be placed right next to each other. However, any deck project should leave at least a quarter of an inch gap between each deck board to allow for wood expansion and to drain water should it rain. Hence, we did some calculations on precisely how wide the new deck surface should be. We came up with the number 117 and a half inches. However, when we actually laid down the boards, this number wasn’t used at all.

Screwing Down The Short Row

Clamping Down The First Board

In order to ensure that the boards are strong, the short row of 3 feet wood should be closer to the root of the house, whereas the longer row of 8 feet wood would cover the rest. This way, the (roughly one foot) overhang at the end of the old deck would have more support. Since we planned it this way, it would make sense for us to start from the root of the house, and thus we would first prepare the short row as opposed to the long row.

The very first board is very important, as its positioning is what all other board’s positioning will be relative to. To make sure that the position doesn’t shift, we clamped it down onto the old deck before hammering and drilling the screws. Afterwards, we left roughly a quarter of an inch of space between the next board, and aligned it with the previous board/end of deck, and continued in this fashion. After about two hours of work, the short row was finished.

The Pipe

Dealing With The Pipe

There was a water drainage pipe that leads from the roof of the house, down its walls, and slanted onto the ground. This pipe prevented us from laying long wood on the leftmost edge of the deck. As a result, we had to raise it. It turned it to be easily raised.

Screwing Down The Long Row

After that, we started working on the long row. By this time, it was already the middle of the afternoon. Working in the sun was really tiring, but after two more hours, we finished the entire deck.

Some parts of the new deck surface needs some more screws, but for now, it feels very sturdy and strong. I even tried to jump full force onto the overhang at the edge of the old deck, and it held like a rock – nothing shaky. The safety hazard from the previous deck has now been entirely solved.

What would we do with the uncovered deck? Well, right now I’m thinking of getting some outside carpets and just put it over that part, but we’ll have to wait for the Landlords to remove the grill first (I think they want it back), so that’s all left for after September starts.

Meanwhile, here are the finished pictures:

Final Result: From The House

Final Result: From The Garden

Hey guys,

I apologize for the lack of activity recently. We’ve just moved into a new rental house, and Internet is kinda iffy at the moment. When things stabilize, activity will continue on this blog.

I used to be an avid biker. Now, I have to drive for at least two hours every day. Toronto, and most of other places, have by-laws that makes it technically illegal for adult cyclists to ride on sidewalks. In Toronto, it’s a $90 fine if you’re caught, though police cars usually have more important things to do than hunt you down even if they see you. The argument for it is that likelihood of cyclists hitting pedestrians on sidewalks is greater than cars hitting cyclists on the road. And of course, there are far more pedestrians than cyclists, so we can guess who democracy sided with.

But if you think about it, it makes no sense. A bicycle by its function is nothing more than a tool that gives a pedestrian the ability to travel up to around 30 kilometers an hour at top speed. Now that I drive, I encounter at least five bicycles a day. I do a speed check on each and every one of them (follow them at the same speed and check my speedometer), and so far only one or two people have reached that speed, so we can conclude that most of the time cyclists ride slower than that.

A bicycle is flexible. You can ride it, you can stroll with two feet pushing against the ground, you can stop a bicycle in less than a second, you can make several sharp turns at small distances, and on top of that, a bicycle is very small thus granting it more possibilities for doing whatever it want. The only thing it doesn’t have is speed. If a cyclist wants to avoid a collision with a pedestrian, it’s very easy. Adjust your biking speed depending on how dense the pedestrians are on the sidewalks. Be courteous, don’t cut in too close to pedestrians. Heck, worst comes to worst, you can ride through a nearby parking lot or grass lawn if you have to in order to pass that pedestrian, or become a pedestrian itself by dismounting in less than a second. If you’re even the least bit careful while on a bike, it’s pretty much impossible for you to not avoid a collision with pedestrians provided that you have a decent IQ and sensory-motor functions.

And even if you hit a pedestrian, it’s never fatal. Very rarely do we hear pedestrians getting killed by cyclists crashing into them. Back in grade ten, I once totally crashed into a 92 year old frail-looking woman because I got distracted by something, the crash was head on, and I was going at a decent speed. Of course, I’m not proud of it, and I have been more careful ever since, but the point is that she merely got back up, complained, checked for injuries, and it seems everything was fine.

The same cannot be said for cars on the road. Unless you’re totally naive about roads, you must know that if the speed limit says 60km/h, then most cars are going to drive in the 65~70 range unless the traffic is extremely dense and crowded, during which drivers will cut corners and force lane changes quite often. Occasionally you see someone abiding by the speed limit, but then you’d see cars trying to pass that person one after another, zooming through either the left or right. Heck, I got horned at this morning for letting cars get in front of me since their lane was closing. I looked into the back mirror which revealed an angry hag muttering curses, to which I merely laughed and mentally labeled an idiot and continued onward. But what can you do? These are the rules of the road, which is a bit different from the rules they taught us in driving school.

Think about it, a bicycle riding at 20 kilometers an hour on a road where everyone else is driving at 60~70 kilometers an hour, and yet they expect the cars to share the lane with the bike? That’s preposterous. If the car stays inside the boundaries of the lane, and the bike stays on the extreme right of the lane, then the distance between the car and bike during the moment of passing would be less than a meter. At that distance and at that speed, any careless mistake on the driver or the bike (say caused by a bump on the road) can very likely get the cyclist killed. Yet, most cyclists don’t seem to realize that. They stay on the right, but not at the extreme right. They expect cars to somehow pass them without hitting them.

So that’s what cars do, in whatever way they can. Some cars immediately change lane to left when they see a cyclist in front of them. This is easy to do when there’s not much traffic, but can be quite a dangerous maneuver when the road is crowded or you get a bunch of other crazy drivers. Changing lanes at rush hour often require you to force cutting into a tiny little spot forcing the latter car to slow down and let you in. You have to somehow do this very quickly, as the bike is going much slower than you are and thus you approach it very quickly.

Some other drivers don’t want to go through the hassle of changing lanes, so they just push left into the left lane a little. This is even more dangerous because the car on the left lane behind wouldn’t know to give you space. Sometimes they’d just push forward and attempt to push you back since technically you’re not changing lanes. The result of course is your car being sandwitched in the middle of a car and a bike, with very little cushion space on both sides – very dangerous.

The only other option of course is to trail behind the bicycle and go at the bike’s speed. This means you will be driving 20 kilometers on a 60 kilometer road, blocking all cars behind you and is very unacceptable and inefficient, and probably illegal too.

Ultimately, it is much safer for bikes to stay on sidewalks as opposed to on the road. On sidewalks, collisions don’t do much damage and can be easily avoided. On roads, the bike’s very presense makes the situation much more dangerous for everybody involved. Collisions are deadly at high speeds and negligible at low speeds, and let’s not forget that cyclists are not much more than just flesh and bones, which makes them much less durable for high speed collisions (i.e. car to car), and unlike motorcyclists, bicyclists don’t have the speed to take advantage of their maneuverability to avoid these things.

And it’s even worse for cyclists who aren’t that good at riding bicycles. Believe it or not, there actually ARE people who are adults who have never learned how to ride a bicycle, or who have rode so little that they can be quite shaky. Are we really so heartless that we want to subject them to the fear of having a huge truck or bus cruising at 60 kilometers an hour brush right by you?

There is only one exception, and that is when a road has bike lanes. If that’s the case, then it would be safest for bikes to stay on bike lanes. Anywhere else, bikes belong on sidewalks, not on the streets.

It took me a while, but I’ve organized and uploaded all good photos that I’ve ever took of UofT. Some were took in first year, some were took within the last week.

As I take more photos, they will be added to these galleries. For now, check them out!

The Many Colors of UofT – Blue
The Many Colors of UofT – White
The Many Colors of UofT – Green
The Many Colors of UofT – Black
The Many Colors of UofT – Yellow
The Many Colors of UofT – Grey

Too often, we students of UofT are too busy thinking about our courses, high GPAs, tests, exams, and stressful things, that the campus – which is supposed to be this romantic and stimulating environment – becomes merely this excruciating distance between our homes and our classes that we have to walk through every day. But that’s not what campus life is about, campus life is an unique and amazing chapter of our life stories, and it’s worth treasuring.

Just uploaded a bunch of photographs I’ve took back in London. Enjoy!

A Walk Down Memory Lane

I went back to London for a duration of two weeks in order to practice for and complete my G1 Exit Test. While there, I had some free time to walk around the neighborhood. This was the neighborhood I’ve grew up in, the neighborhood that left many memories.

The current machine that I have at home is a system that I’ve built by myself. Back then, I wanted to build a computer that’s roughly around $600, and I wanted it to be a pretty good computer. This was my first dual core machine, and I bought the cheapest dual-core processor out there on the market: an AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+. I combined it with a mid-tier graphics card (NVIDIA GeForce 7600GS), fetched a random motherboard that worked with these boards, and recycled the rest from my old Gateway computer. Needless to say, I felt pretty accomplished once the computer was in working condition. However, I did make a few mistakes. The first was to not choose a better and more reliable motherboard. The motherboard I got has some issues with its USB interfaces such that I had to buy a separate USB controller card, and it has been very annoying having to go to the back of the computer to plug in any USB devices. The other mistake I made was recycling my old hard drives. They’re beginning to show their age. On my second fresh install of Windows on this machine, those hard drives kept on giving errors, and now some of them spin so loudly that the computer is literally a motor when I turn it on. Such loud noises is a sign that my computer has reached dangerous, critical territory, and really does need replacement before some major catastrophe happens.

Of course, I can always just replace the hard drive, however, I always had an obsession with optimizing my technology, and one thing that really bothers me is my technology not running as efficiently as it could be. That’s why despite the fact that I can still use Microsoft Word on this machine (hey, what machine couldn’t?), I am planning a $1500 budget for a new computer. Clearly, I can’t keep this trend going, as having to build a new computer every two years would be expensive and wasteful. Therefore, this new computer design must be extremely modifiable and last me for a very, very long time. I guess this means I’ll need:

• An extremely flexible computer case for any kind of future changes, including water cooling if I ever feel ambitious enough.
• A motherboard and graphics card combination that supports Crossfire or SLI interface.
• A motherboard that supports DDR3 RAM
• A new hard drive

The other features are all flexible, as they can be changed cheaply and without much trouble. Though, considering that crossfire/SLI means I’ll need to get the latest high-end graphics cards, it just doesn’t seem appropriate to still be stuck on a regular processor, so I can probably still go for a low to middle-end quad core if my budget works out.

But in any case, I want to show you guys the computer case that caught my eye for this new build. It fits my criteria perfectly:

The CoolerMaster HAF 932

From the outside, this thing looks like a humvee. It’s not the most graceful looking box out there, but I’m always for practicality over style anyway, so to me this thing is beautiful. “HAF” stands for “High Air Flow,” and you can clearly see why it’s called that. The case uses mesh instead of full metal for most of the surfaces, thus making it extremely open for air to get in and out of the case. On top of that, there’s a huge fan in front (on the bottom), to the side, and on top of the case, plus a small fan at the back of the case. When all of them are turning, this thing is going to move tons of air. Having so many fans also means the RPM per fan can be slower, thus the case itself should be pretty quiet. The case comes with wheels, meaning I can finally throw away the wheeler board I built for my computer towers. The case will be quite big, but that’s not an issue as long as I don’t carry it around.

The case’s sheer size means that if I ever want to expand to a different motherboard or add more components into it, there will still be plenty of room. This thing can handle up to an extended-ATX motherboard even though I’ve only planned an ATX one. Apparently it’s got holes and space behind the motherboard tray for cable management, which is good for me because my current build has horrible cable management, and it takes a lot of effort to say… even pulling out a hard drive. This thing is designed to be extremely moddable, with screw holes in place for any kind of case cooling system – it’s even got little round holes for running water tubes. Lots of room for future expansions – it means if I get this case, I pretty much won’t be needing another case ever again.

Online reviews for this case have been stunningly positive, with many people (having tried it out) claiming that this is the best case that ever came out on the market. There are some negatives though. Lots of holes for airflow also means the case will get dusty easily, but that’s not something that can’t be fixed by monthly de-dusting. Aside from that, there’s not much other complaints. Another feature that really caught my eye is that mechanisms are in place for installing any hardware inside without the use of screwdrivers. The case can be opened with thumb screws, drives are all mounted  with built-in sliders in its toolless drive bays. Probably the only place I’ll need to use a screwdriver is the one time installation of the motherboard and CPU heatsink and fan (since for motherboards it’s a standard and the CPU depends on the motherboard and not the case). It sounds like installing things in this case will be very fun and easy.

For now, I need to raise that budget first. Expect this project to be carried out sometimes in late June or early July. When it happens, I’ll keep all of you updated.

Last Tuesday, I’ve began my job at AMD’s Markham location. This would be my very first official, proper job, as all of my previous jobs dealt with selling knives at people’s houses and working little jobs in little chain stores. I wouldn’t belittle those jobs, as I did feel I learned much from them, but AMD’s experience will be very, very different.

For one thing, this is an office job. I get a cubicle with plenty of space, and throughout the course of the day, instead of punching timeclocks and following orders strictly, I am free to meet my position’s needs however I want to. Hence, my performance is now completely my own responsibility. If I want to be outstanding, it’s totally up to me – my own initiative, and my own efforts. In a nutshell, I work in a team of roughly around eight to twelve people. Our team is called the Component Quality Engineering (CQE) team, and we basically do preliminary regression testing for component code that come out of the dev team. In order to perform my work, I need to first get familiar with the software associated with my tasks, then I need to gain the necessary experience to make good decisions in monitoring daily changes in the code, and there’s a bunch of miscellaneous tasks and responsibilities as well. All the people in the team have been very nice and helpful so far, especially my current mentor, who has been explaining things to me nonstop for the past week despite having his voice going noticeably hoarse at least twice now. I will try to learn quickly to make their jobs easier.

The software we’re working on is basically the various drivers for AMD’s graphic cards (the ATI cards). Particularly, I volunteered for the application portion of these drivers. The most significant thing I’ll be doing testing for is ATI’s Catalyst Control Panel (CCC). This is a rather visible piece of software that everybody who has an ATI card must be very familiar with, and I have to say, being a part of this company culture, seeing the scale and orderliness of the corporate system here, and working on something that will enter so many gamer’s daily lives – all these makes me feel quite important. It looks like I’ll have to learn VB for this job, but more importantly, I’ll be getting real experience and knowledge on how the software development works in these huge and successful companies, and I think that will probably be the most valuable part of this experience.

Since the past Wednesday, I’ve started driving to work. Traffic in the morning was alright, but traffic in the afternoon is usually horrible. It takes about a bit less than an hour in the morning to get to work, and up to an hour and a half in the afternoon to get back home. The good thing, however, is that I’m already getting lots and lots of driving experience. I look forward to see how incredible of a driver I’d be after sixteen months of driving like this. As long as I’m careful, I’ll be able to avoid accidents. Access to a car also means quite a bit of freedom that I never had before. All of a sudden, my world no longer extends only a few blocks outward from UofT, although I have no idea what new possibilities are opened up. It’s like playing Age of Empires 2 and having just researched the cartography tech – all of a sudden you can see the terrain of the rest of the world, but there’s still the fog of war preventing you from knowing what’s really in those places. Haha, what a geeky metaphor, though I’m sure if anyone has played any RTS game they’d know what I’m talking about.

To everyone else who are starting their jobs: good luck, work hard, and be smart!

Clinton, Ontario

Test location: Clinton, Ontario

Test environment:

• one traffic light
• two major roads
• lots of little neighborhood drives
• lots of stop signs
• lots of pedestrians
• maximum speed 50km/h

Test results: Flawless except for one mistake of hesitating during green left turn arrow, risky, but instructor was nice enough to not consider it an instant fail. Final result 90%

I am now a driver

Over a thousand Steves...

Let me summarize what happened.

There’s this guy, called Steve. He has a mother. One day, his mother was murdered by their landlord. So what does Steve do?

Well, he goes onto the street and finds a random person. He tells the random person about the story and highlights the injustice of the situation and the grief that he felt. The random person sympathizes, but decides to move on like you’d expect any normal person would. Steve however blocks his way, and tries to physically constrain him, yell into his ear, and attempt to forcing him to help Steve do something about the murder.

Then when the police come to take him away for assault. Steve cries “so what?! The inconvenience I’ve caused him is nothing when compared to the fact that my mom was murdered!”

See, this is one reason why I’m not very trusting of a lot of these advocacy groups. They tend to be fueled primarily through emotions when the problems that they’re trying to address mostly require rational solutions. Of course, they know this too, but they’re prone to emotional outbursts, like this one, that only complicates things and does nothing to help solve them.

Also, why does every advocacy group always have to label someone as the villain? The world is way more complicated than the black and white concept of good and evil, and most of these sad and horrible things are the results of decades after decades of misunderstandings and failed negotiations. Every time a group is labeled as evil, I can’t help but to wonder whether that group can really be blamed given the situation they had to deal with.

Story here
Youtube video here and here.

Ah, just remembered something that I wanted to show you guys a while back, but couldn’t because I had to focus on exam studying. A long time ago, somebody showed me concepts of a laser keyboard that looked like this:

At the time, this looked so futuristic that I thought it was only a concept pic somebody made in photoshop to illustrate what keyboards could look like in the future. At least, that’s what I thought until recently, when I found a bunch of youtube videos testing out the thing. Apparently this is really a commercial product now. It costs at around $200. So, here you go, I’m talking about something that came out and hit the geek market as early as 2005 as if it’s the next new thing.

Check out the video here.

According to various reviews, the keyboard is quite usable, although it feels different at first. Apparently if I switch to one of these, I wouldn’t be able to type at the same speed as I currently can. Aside from that, apparently this is supposed to work quite flawlessly. Now I wonder how long it would take for laptops to start adopting this kind of keyboard as norm.

Imagine that. Take a tablet PC, get rid of the keyboard component, and you get just a touch screen. Right beside the webcam hole on top of the screen you get another adjustable laser head that projects a virtual keyboard. A small, thin plastic platform can slide down from behind the screen and fold over to provide a platform for the keyboard if you can’t find other flat surfaces (e.g. sitting on the grass). To make the screen sit still, use some sort of stand like they use for photo frames. The result would be a PC that’s, quite simply, a screen (although it would be a thick screen to house all the hardware).

One thing I wonder is whether the virtual keyboard can detect the act of “holding down” a key. Though I guess if you really need to hold down a key for certain applications and the virtual keboard can’t do it, there’s always the option to get an extra USB keyboard.

Meanwhile, I saw this in a magazine the other day:

And I want it…