Sometimes a great idea comes to you out of the blue, but before you can think any further about the idea, you have to dash off and attend to a dozen other things. Afterwards, what remains is only a lingering feeling, a vague awareness that you had a great idea earlier, but you can no longer remember what it was. For thousands of years, creative practical people have probably solved this annoyance by tying knots or scribbling ideas on something, so they could go about their daily business first and revisit those ideas at a more convenient time later.

Continuing with the approach of scribbling ideas down, I made a little web-based tool which basically allows you to fill out a form, roughly categorize the entry, automatically have it date-time stamped and saved for later review. Like a piggy bank that grows with every contribution, you can build a large personal bank of ideas. Then, whenever you want to draw upon the collected knowledge in your personal bank of ideas, simply use the search feature to display and sort ideas.

So if this sounds useful to you, and you don’t mind that it’s still a work in progress, I’ve made this tool available as an Open Source project at SourceForge. Visit the ideasBank project to download and install on your own PHP, MySQL-enabled server.

Additional projects will be released in the future on SourceForge as well.

Here is my cardboard dinosaur costume from this week's Fright Night staff party. Other than the individual costume contest event (I just participated - Mona Lisa was the winner followed by the impaled Jesus costume), there was also a group costume contest, the pumpkin carving contest, and a meeting room converted into a haunted house attraction.

This cardboard dinosaur can be made anywhere you can find two cardboard boxes that can fit your head, two shiny CDs or DVDs for the eyes and basic office supplies. No glue is necessary, tape if you want to do this faster. Refer to the numbers in the photo and follow along.

0. Joining and Hinges

This step isn't shown, sorry. Just ensure the two boxes joined and hinged
at the back in some way. What I did was a glue-less approach using tabs and
slots to join the boxes, but you can just use tape to join and make a hinge.

1. Neck

Make a hole and make sure your head can fit easily into the box, without
being too large or the costume head may slide downward. I used a DVD to trace
incrementally larger holes until there was perfect fit.

2. Teeth and Jaws

To help make it consistent, start with one side and put a piece of paper
the area you are cutting, so that you cut both the paper and the cardboard
together. In this way the paper keeps the exact shape of the cut and you can
then use it as a template to make the other side identical. The trick with
the lower jaw is to use the upper jaw to trace a matching teethline for the
lower jaw, so that the jaws will meet and actually close together easily.
The lower jaw should have a much larger section uncut at the back that can
serve to catch and hold the upper jaw open later when you wear the costume.

3. Fitting the eyes

Use the DVDs to trace round holes for the eyes, but the holes should be
just smaller than the DVDs so that it will be a tight fit which holds the
DVDs in place. Otherwise if the hole is not small enough the DVDs may just
drop out of the hole. In my case I had an additional plastic DVD case with
a spine that just happened to hook onto the inside of the hole too - but you
can use tape too. Also, fit the DVDs at an angle so anyone can see the DVDs
from both the front and side views.

4. Carve nostrils

Not shown here, but you can add finishing touches such as nostrils.

5. Go to the party.

You can keep the jaws open all the time to easily eat the Halloween party
food, or close it like a knight's helmet visor for additional protection when
entering the haunted house. Have fun!

Today was a department team-builder day in which we went to see the Superman Returns IMAX 3D version at the Paramount. It was my turn to organize this, and my only regret was that two people couldn’t join us for the film due to the late afternoon start time conflicting with their long weekend plans. I liked the film, which was also a first IMAX 3D experience for me. Overall, it was a great activity day.

The itinerary, for future planning purposes:

Before 1210

Called for reservations. Emailed last minute details to the team, with a Photoshop’d Google map to drivers depicting the underground parking entrances, but this was probably overkill.

12:10

Intended to leave early at this time, to allow time for parking, before our 12:40 lunch reservation.

12:17

Approximate time that we actually left.

12:30

Entered Milestones restaurant after parking, lingered for a few minutes waiting for the other half of the group before getting seated. Enjoyed Kobe Beef Meatloaf, trading food, splitting appetizers, the gelato dessert with a mint sprig in it (mint was also in the virgin Mojito drinks some had) along with some odd horror storytelling.

14:15

Left restaurant. Group split again, some visiting street shops at random. We went to the Silver Snail for comic collectibles, followed by a brief stop at Active Surplus.

15:00

Regrouped and entered Paramount Festival Hall Theatre, picked up our advance-purchased tickets upstairs. One person went ahead to try and hold center seats while the rest of us were busy getting popcorn and other concession stand food. I just had a large yogurt or ice cream swirl.

15:15

Entered IMAX theatre. An attendant handed us the polarized IMAX 3D glasses we would need to wear during some parts of the film. We managed to get middle row seating, but on the side only, so probably if we had come even earlier we could have gotten center seating.

15:30

The IMAX 3D pre-experience starts in which they do the standard smoke-and-mirrors laser show, where you learn that IMAX is Canadian and the location of speakers. I wonder if IMAX theatres in the United States perform the same thing. Then the actual film began.

17:17

End of credits, and left the theatre, split for home and the long weekend.

Superman Returns, as a film, had interesting imagery and references. Someone pointed out the imagery of Atlas supporting a globe. I just kept seeing the standard JC poses. I liked the Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic quote, which is by Sci-Fi writer Arthur C. Clarke, although they didn’t mention his name in the movie. The shuttle launch method reflected recent developments. The 2004 Paul Allen-Burt Rutan winning of the Ansari X-prize comes to mind, with their SpaceShipOne/White Knight system, where a little space shuttle called SpaceShipOne is lifted for the bulk of the journey by a mother aircraft, White Knight, before launching itself into space. On a separate note, it was good that the EMP bursts were conveyed rather simply with mostly power-outages, and that was probably all that was needed anyway. No scenes of folks dropping dead from pacemaker failures or pigeons crashing in London’s Trafalgar square as seen in The CORE. Overall a fun film with repeat-viewing potential.

Here are some tiny photos from the introduction to working with chocolate workshop, as part of our department team-builder activity day at a chocolate store and school called js bonbons on Dupont street.

The main picture shows most of what we made at this two-hour afternoon workshop.

The chocolate bowl, seen at the top right, was made first. As you can see more clearly in the lower pictures, a balloon is used as a form for the chocolate bowl. Everyone dipped their own balloon into a steel bowl of warm liquid chocolate to coat the bottom, and then set the balloon on parchment paper to cool. After cooling it was coated only a second time. Jenn the instructor said that for larger bowls, we would have had to give it at least three coatings, but for our current size, two coatings were enough.

The chocolate-coated strawberries in the foreground were made after the bowl, in a similar manner, except that after ten seconds of placing the coated strawberry on the paper, we slid it sideways and then lifted it away from the base so that the strawberry wouldn’t have a base like the chocolate bowl. Decoration was done with white chocolate as well as the lighter milk chocolate poured to fill paper cones that were cut at the tips to allow a fine line of chocolate to ooze out. We had to re-heat the tip of our cones by leaning the tips against the water pot on the stove, but other than that it was straightforward. You can see my attempt here at making a face with one of the strawberries.

In the very background, you can see strange lumps. These are the truffles, and we had about six or so different flavours of the pure truffle material. The vanilla truffle material was easy to work with, but the Earl Gray Tea was super-tough even to pull out of the container. They were then hand-rolled into ball-shaped lumps. Then we did the messiest task, the outer coating, which required dipping the truffles into the liquid chocolate and then rolling them in our fingers before rolling them onto the paper. Our fingers just kept getting thicker and thicker with chocolate! Truffles were later decorated by Jenn to distinguish different flavoured truffles from each other now that they were all coated on the outside now in same-coloured chocolate.

In the end (not shown here) we pooled all our work into a huge tray and then each grabbed what they wanted into their own chocolate bowls, before finally bringing it to Jenn so she could clear-wrap and ribbon-tie it up for us. That was the end of our fun workshop.

If there is anything I would do differently in the unlikely event that I were to make similar chocolate treats at home, I would wear gloves, or else use chopsticks, spoons and any combination of tools to do the work without getting any of that sticky chocolate on my hands. Even now after washing my hands several times, my hands still smell like chocolate!

Material notes:

• Couveture chocolate, made of 31 to 39% cocoa butter, was the main ingredient, used for our chocolate bowl and for doing most of the coating.
• Milk Chocolate was the ligher-coloured chocolate we used for some coating and decorative lines
• White chocolate was used for the white streaks

We had a great department team-builder day today. Well, it wasn’t a full day like the Centre Island one, but this was good enough. We started with lunch at The Queen Mother Café on Queen, where I enjoyed some appetizers, delicious Pad Thai and pumpkin cheese cake.

After The Queen Mother we headed over to the Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art at their temporary location near OCAD, and began our pottery class for the rest of the afternoon. This was my first time throwing pottery. Throwing pottery actually just means working with clay on a rotating plate. Apparently it is called throwing because in old English, the word for throwing actually also related to turning and twisting, according to this explanatory article I found.

The experienced instructor, Karen, demonstrated how to do everything properly such as securing the clay, squishing it down and up several times to align it, compressing to reinforce the bottom, adding water to keep the clay from drying up, and removing the masterpiece with a wet wire once it was finished. Then we started our individual lumps of clay and wheels. I managed to make a crude bowl, flower vase, and at the last minute, with no time to thin the walls, I mashed together a thick stubby cup without handles.

We helped with the cleanup, and moved our creations to the shelves of the firing kiln room, so that they could be baked in the oven after a bit of drying. Karen also mentioned the option to come in over the weekend to buy the paints and add colour during their Sunday drop-in hours if anyone wanted. We left a contact number so she could contact us in about two weeks when our pottery would be ready to be picked up. Overall, a fun experience.

Well, it wasn’t as fun as the three-day Kingston, Ottawa, Montreal, Quebec City bus tour with the whole family a few weeks ago, where we wandered off the official tour at night and accidentally came across the historic battlefield, the Plains of Abraham as well as a few Martello towers. But today’s pottery class was good enough.

My first day of work at a 3D software company and we canoe/ferry over to Toronto Centre Island for a department BBQ. I learned the secret of making cohesive hamburgers that are less likley to fall apart - add eggs and oatmeal to the ground meat mix, as oatmeal acts like a sticky glue when cooked, according to Ian the resident BBQ chef and today’s organizer. Never tried adding oatmeal or eggs before, but all of this will be good reference info if I ever need to organize a similar BBQ trip myself.

I did actually start the day quite normally, with a company tour to meet other relevant departments, getting the tax forms from HR, being shown the new but slow, beta-status content management system I will be using in the next couple of weeks, and even attended my first meeting. But then from about noon onwards we took the taxi out to the waterfront for our department team-building “day”, which was the canoe/ferry trip over to Centre Island for the BBQ for the rest of the afternoon.

We never actually got to official team-building activities involving some fancy baton. The ferry trip took at least a twenty-minute wait, and it seemed to take an hour getting canoes for those who took the canoe routes, then there was preparation of the site like hauling over two park benches to our park grill, pre-burning the grill, so it wasn’t until at least 2:15 that we finally brought out the nine hamburgers wrapped in foil with paper seperators in our cooler box to place on the grill. That was followed by the three veggie burgers before we started eating the meat hamburgers that were ready. There were two bags of twelve bread/hamburger buns each, minus one which was pecked away by an agressive seagull who punctured a huge hole in the bag while we weren’t looking.

We also took out the paper plates for the large, deep aluminum tray of salad. When the remaining hamburgers were ready we put them aside and brought out the ten or so chicken breast shishkabobs and three tofu ones to put on the BBQ grill, so those were eaten a bit later.

Apparently the shishkabob sticks should have been soaked in water to prevent them from charring and darkening when placed on the grill but Ian didn’t have time.

In addition to all of this food, Ian also distributed small individual brown bag snack kits beforehand at the start of the trip, each containing a bag of junk food, a juice drink, an apple and an orange, so all of this was more than adequate for our group of about eleven people.

By the time we finished eating it was already about 4pm and time to go.

Apparently there is a company-wide BBQ on the above-street porch on this week, but I’m not sure if I can handle another BBQ, as I always get so thirsty afterwards. Today at least, was a great first day at work. As my new colleagues say, tomorrow I will actually have to work!

Photo: Nine delicious meat burgers with garlic, basil, oregano, oatmeal and egg mixed into the meat by Ian

My graduation ceremony took place earlier this week on Tuesday in U of T’s Convocation Hall. It seemed like a very hectic day, because I was always moving non-stop. I remember moving from place to place taking photos with my parents, getting the gown, gathering and following the other graduands, walking up to get my handshake and furry hood placed over my head while watching my step and keeping pace, picking up the diploma backstage, and going for further picture-taking.

Most of the ceremony was rather boring, the one thing I do remember was that Douglas Wright, who reminded me of the bald spectacled scientist from the original Half-Life computer game, recieved an honourary Doctor of Laws degree at our ceremony. Apparently there is an entire U of Waterloo engineering building named after him and he had some large role in shaping current government policy. I remember he gave the usual career advice to follow our interests and abilities.

If there is anything I have learned here at U of T, it’s a deep appreciation of the first part of that advice, the interest aspect. I found that when I took a boring course such as some of those mandatory courses that I was not particularly interested in, I always ended up taking a billion times longer to actually finish the work such as an essay for that course, even if the work was simple. This is bad, because it means time that could have been spent on the more fun work, is being eaten away by time spent on the boring work. And it even brings down my total marks for all courses. Despite the greater time spent on the boring work, the boring work always brings low marks, while simultaneously, the inadequate time spent on the other more fun work means less marks for those courses as well.

In economic lingo, doing work you are not really interested in, whether for school or in your career is actually expensive, in terms of Opportunity Cost, the only worthy measure of expense. It costs you time out of your life that you could have been spending on doing something more fun, worthwhile and more productively, so that your total fun and productivity output goes down. So, I believe I should always strive to do what I am interested as I will accomplish the most when I do.

Returning to Douglas Wright, he also talked about being unconventional, and more importantly said “I recommend that you be ambitious”. After four years in this very traditional university academic environment and coping with barrage after barrage of endless essays, it was refreshing to hear someone talk again about being unconventional, and about being ambitious. I never forgot, but thanks anyway for the refresher!

Photo thanks to Alan.

Went to the IGDA Toronto’s very first Indie Game Showcase, which started about 7PM at the IAOD within the CBC Building on Front street. About 8 independent Toronto-based game developers presented quite a variety of games, ranging from arcade-like side scrollers to real-time 3D games both on PC and for windows mobile platforms.

I think it was set up very well. Two groups of presenters on either side of a main projection screen would alternate, so that when a team from one side presented, the next presenter would be getting ready on the computer on their side. Even when one or two groups did have technical difficulties, Anne-Marie the MC was able to either move on to further audience questions or switch to the next working group, so it all ran quite smoothly.

Each presentation ended with a short question period, and at the end of the presentations, around 8:50 pm it was the mingling period where we could go up and meet whichever presenter we wanted to mingle and chat with until about 9:30, when they had to close down the presentation hall. Regular students at the IAOD were still seen working late in the computer labs, but we had to leave.


Composite Photo, Top Left: Jim presenting his funny Juggling game; Top Right: U of T biz student Jerry with his Iron Nail side-scroller game; Bottom: The mingling period where we all swarmed the game developers.

Brought my parents downtown today for the Doors Open Toronto event, where we went to see about six buildings along Bay street. We only had half a day, so I chose that area because it was most densely packed with interesting buildings that I knew of, and all within walking distance of each other.

We started with the Toronto-Dominion Centre 54th floor tour with the spectacular city view. One disappointment was that the washrooms, part of the complete work of the Toronto-Dominion Centre architect Mies Van Der Rohe, were off-limits to the public, so my parents will only be able to see them from the photos I took last year when I was visiting as part of an architecture class field trip.

We headed south on Bay until reaching Front street to quickly glance at the Union Station exterior, as well as the Royal Bank building with its gold-coloured windows that apparently, according to tour guides back in the Toronto-Dominion Centre, actually contained real gold. We made a U-turn by crossing to the east sidewalk of Bay street and began walking north to the Santiago Calatrava-designed BCE place. These were not actually part of the Doors Open event, but were interesting buildings to see anyway and were open. We ate lunch at the BCE food court before touring the beautiful Galleria.

After BCE place we headed north to the CIBC site, where a Doors Open volunteer guided my parents around the grand, Roman-bath-like banking hall while I wandered off snapping pictures. The guide pointed out a few embedded fossils that I didn’t notice before in the central octagonal red marble flooring.

Then we left and crossed over to the west sidewalk of Bay street and headed a block north to visit another bank-type building, again with a grand banking hall but with a different, lighter look and gold grillwork doors everywhere - the Canada Permanent building. They had the original metal vault door installed and intact. You could see the inside of the vault door when you went into the vault room, which had been converted to a small meeting room and was accessible through another door that had been made in the vault wall.

The last major site we went to was the New City Hall further north on Bay/Queen, where the huge council chamber, resembling a flying saucer, was completely open so we went up to explore for a while.

It was getting late and so we left and started walking west on Queen, walking past Osgoode Hall and Campbell House, which were two other Doors Open sites, before finally reaching our car and heading home.

Photo: The lounging area behind the assembly area, all within the saucer-shaped Council Chamber in the New City Hall on Queen. In the foreground is the interesting structure where waiters may come out with food or take back dirty dishes when councilors lounge here.

Just got back from the Design Exchange (DX) where they held the launch of the digital/tech/arts exhibit WILD, the last part of the DigiFest series of events co-hosted by DX, the Harbourfront Centre and the OSC. I spent the time between eating the veggies and those delicious pseudo-potstickers served in wine glasses, chatting with Paola and other former co-workers at DX/DXNET, and exploring the various exhibits in the medium-sized exhibit area. This will be on display in the publicly accessible ground floor for an entire month until July, so feel free to visit them if you ever pass near the Bay/King downtown financial core area.

Kora, an artist from Belgium stood beside the two large hi-def flat-panel displays showing a virtual 3D environment, each with an on-screen avatar controlled by a computer keyboard and mouse on a table to navigate the same 3D world. The whole installation was part of a project in which live video of an event could be played in the virtual world, and that the ideal installation should have been actual projection screens boxing the user on all sides for a more complete immersive experience. I learned that the nVIDIA video card could handle the three screens, so long as you attach an additional adaptor to allow three VGA outputs for the three projectors. Found out that the 3D environment was created using Quake editor and 3D Studio Max, so I then wondered how they got a live video stream to play in Quake - it was a custom mod they coded. Nearly all of the usual Quake controls were absent, and navigation was done using the mouse controls.

This exhibit was particularly interesting for me because I’ve done similar work back in 2000, when Adobe released a beta authoring software for creating online 3D multi-user worlds called Adobe Atmosphere. It took an annoyingly long time to create, and the interact-able geometry had to be very primitive but I did manage to create a virtual art gallery for my renaissance art presentation as well as a virtual island for my end-of-year project. Now that I’ve seen Kora’s project, if I ever need to create a 3D multi-user world again then I will very likely look at using Quake, Unreal editor or some other well-established game modding-related tools due to their rich graphical features, ready-built interactivity features and general stability.

The other great exhibit was the Tom Tompson-themed rear-projection onto a painter’s canvas in which you used the painter’s brush on the canvas and the projected image of a Tom Thomspon image responded as if you were actually painting, building up the layers of the painting. The creators were a group of four who had met each other as students at the Canadian Film Centre. I noticed an ordinary SONY video camera aimed at the back side of the canvas, and connected to a Mac computer. I also noticed the camera had some kind of black filter, so I asked what it was and found out it was the magnetic disk from a floppy disk, serving as a makeshift infra-red filter. I asked further about how the infra-red comes into play in detecting the user’s brush location, and Trevor the one who set up the brush explained that there was an infra-red emitter embedded inside the brush head. USB supplied the power, which I remember is 5Volts. So it was this hidden infra-red emitter and the filtered video camera that allowed the computer to detect the user’s brush location and update the projected canvas image accordingly. Very neat.

All in all a great evening.

Then on the way home I saw another neat piece of technology, although this one was a mass-produced consumer product - an Ambush Warrior mountain board. My first time seeing a mountain board, which the girl explained was like a snowboard on wheels. I prefer to see it as a skateboard on wheels. I took a few pictures before getting off the subway car.

Tip about Doors Open Toronto: For this event happening this weekend in which historic or culturally important buildings all over Toronto are open to the public, one way to easily map out and find out what buildings are open in any particular area of interest is to use google maps, loaded to Toronto, ON and then local search type in the Doors Open Toronto buildings listings url (http://www.doorsopen.org/building/ ) and presto - you now have a custom map to plan your day. For some reason, the Toronto-Dominion Centre at Bay/King, which features a spectacular view of the whole city from the top 54th floor, does not seem to get plotted on Google maps. But most of the other ones get plotted so it can still be useful.

Picture on the right: Those delicious pseudo-potsticker things served in empty wine glasses at the exhibit opening event.