Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween everyone! It isn't quite Halloween yet, but I don't have plans on going out tomorrow night, so I will wish everyone a happy Halloween now.

To celebrate Halloween my friends and I had a pumpkin carving party. It was quite fun since it had been a long time since I had carved a pumpkin. It was also Sandra's first time carving a pumpkin, so it was special for her too.

The day started out with a trip to the supermarket to pick our pumpkins. Not everyone was there, so we had to pick up extra pumpkins for them. We ended up spending about 20 minutes looking through the pumpkin bins to pick out the pumpkins that were either large or weird looking, or some combination of both. We ended up buying about 12 pumpkins, most of which were heavier than the 30 lb. limit of the scales in the check out line. After we paid for the pumpkins the five of us (and twelve pumpkins) piled into Kagan's car and headed to Julie's for a good day of carving. I thought it was a nice way to celebrate Halloween.

The pumpkins varied from something cooky, something spooky, something scary, something familiar to AIM users, someone from the simpsons and a couple from the family guy.

Jayson Shibata

Sandra's good friend Jayson will be returning to Hawaii soon. He was her best friend during school and they often studied together in school. Sadly, his job offer was back home and not in Seattle. Him being back in Seattle will give us an excuse to go to Hawaii though.

To celebrate his time here, departure, friendship and what not we have been hanging out lately. Last night we went dancing in belltown at Tia Lou's, which was interesting to say the least. It was nice to see Kim and Chau come out with us. I hope they had a good time.

This afternoon Jayson, Sandra and I went to the UW vs. USC football game at Husky Stadium. We did not have a lot of hope for a win since USC is currently ranked #1. I don't think the UW is even ranked. The first half of the game was exciting. It seemed like it would be a close game until the Trojans scored two touchdowns right at the end of the first half.

We took a few pictures at the game. Check them out. Also, here are some official recounts of the game.

Oh by the way, I saw Jason from Laguna Beach at the game. I forget to yell out that he is a pimp for hooking up with almost all the girls in the show. He still has another season, so I will give him a chance.

Updated Blogger Code

Here is an update to my blogger code. I guess it has gotten better in comparison to the last time I checked.

My blogger code: B5 d+ t k+ s u-- f i o x- e+ l c (decode it!)

If you want to decode my blogger code just click the link. If you have your own blog want to find out your blogger code, check out the blogger <code />

I Ching

What is the I Ching? It sounds familiar, but I am not sure. The I Ching, also known as the Yi Jing, is a ancient Chinese text. It's name can be translated as the 'Book of Changes'. Some scholars believe it's original title was simply 'Changes' (Yi). The 'Book' (Jing) part was added during the Han period when Confucian scholars picked up the text and used it as a tool to teach morality.

The original text was one part of three. All three texts were considered to be divination texts. The texts should be interpreted as oracles. Diviners would consult these texts, as if consulting old oracle bones or shells as they had previously.

The book was divided into two sections, the latter of which was supposedly added to the first during compilations of editors. The first section is the text (Ben Jing) and it contains the oracles. The second part of the text are called Zhuan, the commentaries, of which there are ten.

Here comes the interesting part ...

The Ben Jing is divided into 64 figures or Gua, what is called a hexagram by westerners. Each Gua has 6 lines. Each of these lines is then considered to be broken or unbroken. An unbroken line signifies Yang and a broken line signifies Yin. Each hexagram is composed of two set of three lines, each of which is called a trigram.

Here is one interpretation of each of the eight trigrams:

1. Qian = Heaven


2. Kun = Earth


3. Li = Fire


4. Kan = Water


5. Xun = Wind


6. Zhen = Thunder


7. Gen = Mountain


8. Dui = Marsh / Lake

So if you are like me, then your binary math radar is screaming.

Yin v. Yang, unbroken v. broken can also be a 0 or a 1. So then a trigram is a combination of 3 broken and unbroken lines.

2³ = 8.

The same number of trigrams listed above. Next, a hexagram is composed of 2 trigrams.

2³ + 2³ = 2⁶ = 64

Thus, we have all of our 64 Gua. Quite interesting. This is a pretty simple analysis of the Yi Jing with binary math. The next step is to consider binary operations on such values. I hope to research this topic and it's progression throughout history in my paper for this class. I will post more when I do that research.

Some interesting notes about the trigrams and hexagrams is their other usages that we may not necessarily know immediately. Has any seen the South Korean flag lately?

There are four trigrams on the flag. Starting from the uppper left we have Heaven, Water, Earth and Fire.

Another interesting appearance of the I Ching hexagrams is Dead Prez. This activist hip hop group use the 'Army' hexagram (::::|:) as their symbol. This is a combination of Kan + Kun (Water + Earth). Note: hexagrams are read from the bottom up.

I hope you guys found this as interesting as I did. I always enjoy finding relations between what I enjoy and what I study. Sources for this include wikipedia's article on the Yi Jing, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yi_Jing and my professor's coursepack, "Chinese 461 Autumn Quarter 2005 Pre-Qin Literature" by David R. Knechtges.

Animation Pipeline

I was working on a short presentation for school about my work experience this summer and I came across this article about productions pipelines by Bradley Gabe. Go ahead and read it, you might find it interesting. My first couple months at Omation were spent working with this guy. He is really nice and knows his stuff. It looks like CG Soup has been doing well recently, so I wish him the best of luck.

So that was a waste of time

After class today I decided to veg out and sit on front of a computer for a while. I added Google Ads to my codespace blog. I will probably make like 3 cents a week or something. I will keep track of the earnings and let you know if I make anything substantial. I am skeptical now that I will make anything and all I will do is give Google free advertising, which allows them to continue growing into, as some might say, the next monolithic, monopolistic companies. Can someone say Microsoft?

Well, it is time to get home. I have to prepare a presentation for the coop department about my experiences at Omation. I think it will be short. I will put up some pretty pictures and wave my hands a little bit.

I also have to update my resume, so I can apply for jobs at some of the aforementioned companies.

What to do with my blog?

I am waiting for my machine organization section to start in about half an hour. I came across a blog talking about how to make money from blogging. I started thinking about generating income from my blog. I would have to place some google ads on my site to actually generate any money unless I wanted a private person to actually pay me for what I am saying. This does not seem likely as me specialty is not writing, but programming. The number of professional sites in existence that already describe programming practices and techniques, it seems that the likelihood of being paid as an independent writer is not very high.

I guess the whole idea is pretty bad since I do not want to whore myself to this idea of blogging more than I already have. I love using it as a way to share what's going on with my friends and possibly other people around the interweb, but it may be that I get disgusted with it if I try to use it as a tool to make money. It is probably similar to other situations where people try to make money from hobbies. It seems that it is too easy for money to spoil what we enjoy and I don't necessarily want to do that.

So I guess at this point I have decided to not try and make money off of my blog as it may offend the people reading it.

In other news, I went climbing last night and I finally started to see some improvement from weeks before. Unfortunately at the same time I have noticed that my elbows begin to ache if I climb too much. I have talked about this with people and the injury is actually very similar to tennis elbow. From what I have read, the only way to heal is either get surgery or climb less frequently. Neither of those are options that I like. One woman from the climbing gym mentioned some herbal remedies, which I may try out. Chris told me about glucosamine for sore joints. I will have to do some more online research before I start taking it. Whichever solution I choose, I am going to have to find one soon since my brother and I bought an annual pass to the climbing gym. Now I am pretty much obligated to regularly climb at least twice a week, so that I am not losing money. Hopefully with improvement in technique and muscle development this problem will go away.

Time to go section for 378. We are going to learn about branching and looping in assembly language. Woohoo! Hey, why weren't you guys excited too? I guess I will just have to talk about it with Eric this evening, since he will put up with me talking about it. Maybe I will blog about it on my codespace.