Spring time in Paris
I was in France last month, on my second honeymoon with my wife. We have been married for the last 10 years! It didn’t seem so long, but looking back at old photographs when we were still in school, and then pondering over these ones below made me really look at the collected creases in the mirror and how they reflected back on her face. Seeing how our lives intertwined and changed over the years made wonder how things would have been if I didn’t gather all my courage that one day 17 years ago and asked her to go out with me.
Anyway late spring is a great time in France, sunny weather yet not too hot to make you break out in sticky sweat. We went roaming around the countryside with Ying Chow and his Taiwanese friend, visting the beautiful Fountaine de Vacluse with its green wavy gushing spring and paper mill, the lavender fields Abbey of Senanque and the amazing wild poppy fields peppering the sides of the road as we rumbled merrily over the Provencal countryside in Ying Chow’s sturdy green Twingo.
Paris was a different matter altogether, with gray clouds and gloomy skies, but that was Paris, land of the Eiffel Tower and the Lourve the shopping malls of Hausmann Boulevard. We went roaming around by foot, taking in the sights and sounds of Paris and her monuments, strolling along Champs Elysees, drinking the marvelous French cafe and avoiding the jangling Eiffel Tower model touts.
JavaOne 2007, San Francisco, Day 2
This will be a short post. I’m tired, it’s almost 3am and I have another full day tomorrow (not to mention the After-Dark Bash, which I look forward to, since I’ve not been to one in the previous years). Today’s session for me have been filled with JavaCard related technical talks and one on software as a service (SaaS) with an experimental Sun project called Project Caroline.
Briefly, I learnt a great deal more on JavaCard 3 today. I attended 3 sessions on JavaCard and 2 of them are about JavaCard 3. It’s true — JavaCard 3 will have a servlet engine based on Servlet 2.4 and will be multi-threaded but it will require 32-bit microprocessors in the chip. Gemalto even has a pretty neat AJAX contact management servlet app running as a demo. This is a first glimpse of the architecture, as presented during a session by Joe Wei from the JavaCard team:
As you can see, it will have both ‘classic’ APDU protocol as well as the new ‘connected’ HTTP/S protocol stack. However there are lots of questions still unanswered.
I took my usual picture with Duke.
But the biggest surprise of the day was that I met Dennis. Yes, of all the people to bump into, it was him. He was here on a business trip and by chance he decided to drop into JavaOne as a pavillion visitor. But here he was. The first time I was in JavaOne was with Dennis 7 years ago and 7 years later here we are again, at the same place. Different, with the intervening years and both of us are much older and maybe wiser (?) and more experienced. We had dinner together at Mel’s Dine-In to reminisce on old times, of the heady days of past and the tumultuous days when the world crashed around us
Life is sometimes a funny thing.
A post from San Francisco
I’m in San Francisco now, for the JavaOne conference at Moscone Center and this is the third time I’ve been here. The first time was in 2000 with Dennis and his then girlfriend Soo Chen. The second time I came alone in 2003, like this time. Both times I had a busy side agenda and itinerary to meet up as many people as possible in the Valley. It was always rushed for meetings and missed conference sessions. This time round is more relaxed, I’m here just for the conference though I’m also meeting up with Watt this Friday since he has so kindly driven all the way from LA to meet up with me.
I spent the day roaming around the old places I’ve been to San Francisco the last two times. The last two times, my hotel was a bit far away from Moscone Center because of last minute arrangements; this time round Doreen arranged for me very much earlier and I had a nice hotel at Pickwick, which is just around the corner from Moscone. After collecting the conference passes and registering myself, I wandered around the area. Moscone Center is right at downtown San Francisco, near to Union Square and that was the first place I walked around.
Nothing much seem to have changed. The shops are almost exactly the same — Saks at Fifth Avenue, Macy’s Bloomingdale’s Nordstorm, Tiffany & Co, Macy’s, Niketown, Levis, Victoria’s Secret, Borders and so on.
I also took the famous cable car ride from Powell station up to Fisherman’s Wharf and walked around Pier 39, looking at the famous sea lions, peering over to Alcatraz and had the famous dungeness crab for dinner.
Nothing much has changed, which surprised me a bit though not a lot. Tomorrow is the conference proper. Let’s see how it goes. I hope it’ll be a good one this year.
Geek or what?
I had this moment of insight the other day when Pierre said to me something like, “You know you’re a geek when you have two laptops in front of you and you are using both of it at the same time.” My response at that point in time was something like, “Yeah, you should see me at home with 2 laptops and a desktop, with 3 more in their bags.” We shared a quick laugh over it but as I spring cleaned my desk at home, I realised that, wow, it’s true. If that’s the definition of a geek, I scored big time at it.
Vaibhav was telling me last week that he bought a 46″ Sony LCD TV, I presumed with his annual bonus, and saved the rest for a rainy day. I just realised that for me I blew my bonus at a spanking brand new 2.33 GHz 2GB Ram Intel Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro and then a wireless Mighty Mouse to go with it. I guess there’s no escaping it.
Thinking about it, I checked out the meaning of the word from Wikipedia and without really realising it, yes, oops I did it again.
Glowing Kawasaki Rose
This is an ‘enhanced’ version of the Kawasaki’s Rose I did a couple of months ago. The major difference between this version and the previous one is, of course, that it glows. Check it out below.
Glowing rose from side view.
Glowing rose from top view.
Quite a few people asked me for additional tips on how I created the previous rose so I took a few snapshots of the work in progress.
The glowing tip is really just a simple small light bulb I salvaged from an old toy torchlight. I took cable-tying wires and stripped off both ends to expose the naked wire, then stuff one end into the bulb holder. Since the stem is made of stiff wire, the stem itself conducts the small current it takes to light up the rose.
I didn’t have any soldering tools so I took a glue gun and stuck the stem to the end of the light bulb. Then I wrapped the wire around the stem.
The tail end of the stem is attached to a simple battery holder.
The rose itself is made from an old plastic bag, which allows it to glow nicely. You can try other materials if you like but if you want it to glow properly you should use something that is not too thick. I used some green-colored paper and made the leaf and petal base shapes (it’s not really origami, I know but most origami doesn’t glow either) and used my glue gun to stick them on. The stem, as before, is wrapped with crepe paper.
It’s still work in progress as I intend to make a nice vase as well as attaching a proper switch to the base.
Materials:
- Old red-colored plastic bag – free
- Stiff wire – 50 cents
- Green paper – 50 cents
- Green crepe paper -50 cents
- Battery holder – $1.20
- Batteries – $1.00
- Look on my wife’s face as I gave her a glowing rose on our 10th anniversary Valentine Day – Priceless.
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