It is time to act music

TC asked me to go to a "concert" last Friday. We only knew it was organized by her high school ex-classmate, Christina. I also knew because we went on the same tour of our high school orchestra and choir group.

The name of concert was "It is Time to Act Music". We didn't know what to expect. It was at the Pumphouse. We weren't the ones to enter the venue but first few rows were empty. Don't know why people avoid those rows. Too close? We sat in the middle of the first row with a very close view.

After the show started and there were several piano performances by children. They were Christina's students. So the concert was mostly to showcase Christina's students to friends and family. I saw parents who came to the front rows and took pictures at different camera angles when their children were on the stage.

The concert was mostly piano performances. There were 15 students or so. There were also a couple of vocal performances. They mentioned that some of the songs will appear in a staged drama(?)/musical(?) that they'll perform next month.

The very last part of the concert was something different. It was the performed by a "special guest", a band called "Infinite Flying Kick", which is the band that Christina is in. Should I say it's a rock band? Well, they played 3 or 4 songs that sounded rock to me and they sure were loud. Or maybe they were in contrast with the prior piano performances.

A few songs by Infinite Flying Kick can be found on their MySpace page:
http://www.myspace.com/infiniteflyingkick

Bio, news, and photos can found on their web site:
http://www.infiniteflyingkick.com/

Looks like they've been performing here and there in Auckland for a year or two.

By the way, when I saw them, I thought that vocal/guitarist guy looked familiar. I thought I might have seen him during the high school period. Was that guy Willis in my maths class or something? Maybe Hari can give me a second opinion.

It's a girl!

I was writing a cover letter and I didn't know whether to use Mr or Ms to address to Jo, the person I was writing to. A quick search landed me on this site, Baby Name Guesser. It can analyze a first name and tell you how commonly it is used as a male or female name. This was exactly what I needed. It told me that it is 3.303 times more common for Jo to be a girl's name.

Then I tried the name “Jess”. It is 7.099 times more likely to be female.


As I expected. It's more common to be a female name. That was probably why Jess changed his name to Jest. (I still don't know which name he actually uses, though.)

The name "Jest" is less ambiguous indeed. It said:

It's a girl!
Based on popular usage, it is 61.752 times more common for Jest to be a girl's name.

:P

Regular posting

OK. Here is the thing. As Hari said, I could write more regularly. I've thought about it for quite some time too. But I have a commitment problem :P
Anyway, I'll start writing more regularly. I think 2 posts per week is fine for now. The posts can be boring and trivial and they can be as short as a few words. But just need 2 posts. Let's see how long I can stay committed to it.

Randy Pausch's Last Lecture - Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams

I recently downloaded and watched the presentation of a Professor at Carnegie Mellon University talking about "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams". I enjoyed it and I was impressed by the positive attitude of this professor.

The computer science professor Randy Pausch has been diagnosed with cancer and is expected to have only 3 to 6 months to live. This presentation is known as his "last lecture". Throughout the lecture he showed a lot of energy, told many funny stories and had fun. "I'm dying and I'm having fun," he said.

The title of the presentation was Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams. How to achieve your childhood dreams. How to enable the dreams of others. But it was broader than that. He offered words of wisdom on things such as attitude towards people, and why everybody should become a professor :P

Because I'm in the computer science field (I think). It was also interesting to see his work on virtual reality.

As Randy wrote on his home page, "I'm hardly unique". Indeed, you might not find this presentation extraordinary, but it doesn't diminish what a positive person he is and his contribution to students and the people around him.

The presentation can be found on Randy Pausch's home page:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pausch/
The duration of presentation is 104 minutes. The size of the download version is 252MB. My friends in Auckland can copy the file from me if you want to save your broadband data usage. Just hand me your SD card/flash disk/MP3 player/CD-R.

Site feed again

I came across this 4 minute video explaining RSS and how to use it in plain English, with Chinese subtitle.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1881080775770831914&hl=en

-----
I thought there's only RSS feeds for web sites such as blogs. I just found out there is another common feed format called Atom. In fact, I've been using Atom feed for my blog instead RSS which I thought I was using.

Most feed readers such as Google Reader handle all the formats anyway. So it shouldn't be a problem.

My blog hosting site "Blogger" provides both Atom and RSS feeds, with Atom as the default. My understanding so far is the Atom feed URL is
http://lungchenz.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default
and the RSS feed URL is
http://lungchenz.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

so ND, if one feed doesn't work on your cellphone, you can try the other.

RSS

FYI. Just to mention this RSS thing. Hopefully some might find it useful.
If you subscribe to the RSS feeds of web sites, it notifies you when there are new articles on the web site.

For example, I subscribe to RSS feeds of my friends blogs. So I check my RSS reader to see if there are new articles on their blog. I don't need to open each blog page one by one to see. It's like checking the mailbox for new mails.
I subscribe to certain types of news on NZ Herald. For exmaple, if there's a new article about "Chinese in New Zealand". I'll see the feed in my RSS reader.
I start to use it to subscribe it to job web site too. So I get notified when a new job get posted.

(A Screenshot of Google Reader)

To get started, you need a RSS reader/aggregator. You might try one of these:
Google Reader
http://www.google.com/reader/
SharpReader
http://www.sharpreader.net/

I use Google Reader nowadays because it is web based, so I can move between computers without setting up all the feeds again.

Sad sports results

All Blacks lost.
Chien-Ming Wang lost badly twice and Yankees lost.
What a sad week.

超級星光大道 on my TV

I wanted to choose something to watch on TV today and an idea popped up. I could connect my notebook computer to my TV and watch whatever video I have on my computer. So I connected them up. Then I tried to open to open the videos files and found that I have no players/codecs for them. (One Jap drama needed Real Player, another movie needed DivX.)

It actually led to something better. I thought I could just go on YouTube to play the videos and I watch them on TV. That's what I did. I found the video clips of the latest 超級星光大道 episode. I played some of them and watched them on TV!

The stuffs that made this work were:
YouTube + Wireless LAN + laptop + TV

I'm making use of the mobility of "Wireless LAN + laptop" at home while I still can. It's convenient. I can take the laptop around the house and it keeps the connection to the Internet. Dad Skyped me in my room last weekend. A while later I took the laptop to the lounge to find my mum. We could talk there. In the old days we used to cram into the study, and somebody had to stand or sit on the floor because the room was too small. Then we did Internet voice calls there because that's where our desktop PC was.

好個科技始終來自人性

An even cooler thing to do is to find out how to play the live broadcasts of MLB postseason games on the TV for free. But I doubt I'll find any free broadcasts.