1. First in class at MIT
2. Champion at D&D
3. Is MC Escher your favorite MC?
4. Drink Earl Grey Tea?
5. All your action figures are cherry?
6. Stephen Hawkings in your library
7. Your myspace page totally pimped
8. Knowing pi to a thousand places! (lol, now that is nerdy to the extent)
9. Got no grills but still wear braces (omg, the braces = nerdy joke)
10. Order all of your sandwiches with mayonnaise
11. Being a whiz at minesweeper
12. No killer app unrun before
13. Number one at Pascal
14. Doing vector calculus just for fun (this is sick)
15. Ain’t got a gat but got a soldering gun
16. Happy Days is your favorite theme song
17. Kick ppl’s butt in a game of ping pong
18. Ace any trivia quiz people bring on
19. Fluent in JavaScript as well as Klingon (LOL, and you thought French or German was a cool language to take in University… try javascript or klingon)
20. Rolling on your Segway
21. Collect X-Men Comics (awww… I like X-men too)
22. Toy around with ergonomic keyboards
23. Shop online on deals for writable media
24. Edit wikipedia (hahaha, good one)
25. Memorize the Holy Grail really well
26. Have a business doing websites
27. Make a homepage for your dog (rotflol… probably the only best friend a nerd can get?)
28. Spend the night with a roll of bubble wrap (huh?)
29. On the AV Club, Glee Club + the Chess Team
30. Spend your weekends at Renaissance fairs
31. Have your name marked on your underwears
I’m quite glad I’m affiliated with none of these traits, although I guess I wouldn’t mind being first in MIT. However doing vector calculus for fun? You’ve gotta be kidding me. And most of all, I’m not white, I’m fine being Asian thank you =) .
You may have watched quite a number of stop motion videos before, but this one is one of the most professionally made ones I’ve ever seen. Created only by streaming together a lot of still photos, this video features nearly 5 minutes of media content, I wonder how long it took the producer to film it.
To those old school gamers out there, this video especially brings you back to the old times with homages to many arcade classics like Pong, Snake, Tetris and Pac Man. Poor new-gen console controllers won’t be getting much of their owner’s attention though.
I’m not an online gambler or anything, but recently I’ve been hooked on to this Online Texas Hold’em Poker variant at gpokr.com. Developed by Ryan Dewsbury (who just happens to be from Toronto), gpokr distinguishes itself from other online poker sites in that it doesn’t use flash as the platform for the game. Instead, it’s built using AJAX, which stands for Asynchronous Javascript and XML, using the Google Web Toolkit SDK. Being run only on a Javascript based applet, this means that basically all browsers out there support the game and that no flash installation is required when you’re running on a public computer (*hint* say at work maybe?).
Having been released only for a little more than two months, the player population has already increased exponentially. I especially admire the efforts of Ryan in that the site is constantly, and very very frequently, updated with new features such as player social networking, win chart, different betting tables etc… improving the gaming experience for the users every single day, making the site very progressive in a sense.
While you only play with virtual money in the game, and can refill your chips whenever you go broke, the exhilaration of holding a straight in your hand and going all-in is as exhilarating as ever. While I don’t encourage online gambling, Gpokr is a fun, costless and addictive ajax game that will let you challenge your guts. So drop by one of the tables, in fact drop by MY table (the retrochronix table. Yup, it’s named after me cause I rock!), and check out my profile to compare how well your bluffing skills are against mine!
For those out there who personally know me, and realize that I haven’t been updating my old blog on Xanga for quite a while (actually since October 2005), I guess this marks my return on exposing my private life to the world out there.
While I have always done web development in a variety of contexts, and am beginning to feel more like a geek by the day reading all these tech sites out there, it just didn’t seem right to me that I don’t have my own proper domain, a place that I can call my own. But now, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to retrochronix.com. While currently it’s redirected to my blog that you’re reading right now, please anticipate the coming of the main homepage when I actually get the time to do it (i.e.when I’m not lazy and slacking off).
On the topic of blogging, I’m sure there are plenty of blogs out there floating around just waiting to be discovered (like mine =S). However, not too many of these blogs that I have visited actually display a sense of professional communication. With this in mind, I stumbled across this article on blog usability on useit.com written by Jakob Nielson which addressed just this topic. Jakob Nielson is this pro-guy in the field of web usability, and has done a lot of usability research and analysis on how to maximize the ergonomics involved on the internet. While I’ve come across many of his books and articles during my course research for APS185 during first year, it was interesting to read what he had to say about blogging.
You can read his article here. But for the people who don’t like doing their own homework, here is a summary of his key points I find the most relevant:
Use descriptive headlines
Hmmm… is “The art of blogging” a good headline? I don’t really know…
Links don’t say where they go
Be explicit when linking to external sites. Well I think I might have made this mistake just a few lines up.
The calendar is only for navigation
Categorize your posts! I don’t expect too many bloggers to fail this one, not me at least.
Irregular publish frequency
He suggests that “daily updates are probably best, but weekly or even monthly updates might work as well, depending on your topic. In either case, pick a publication schedule and stick to it“. I really don’t know how often I’ll update my blog. I too hope that I can do so on a regular basis as suggested *shrugs*.
Forgetting that you write for your future boss
In other words, be wary of the consequences of what you write. Well this really caught me on, while I’m aware of how there’s no privacy on the internet anymore now, think Facebook, I do need to keep in mind of my audience i think, just in case. I do still want to land a good job someday and not live off GoogleAds =).
Having a Domain Name Owned by a Weblog Service!!!
Yeah, baby! “Please visit my site at www.retrochronix.com”, doesn’t that just sound awesome? Pardon my excitement, I just love my domain name right now =D. Goodbye xanga, blogger, blogspot, myspace, msnspace or whatever else you use; Helllloooooooo Wordpress!
There’s still much for me to learn about in this area. The internet is just amazing, isn’t it?
