Peter’s Blog V2

During the past month, I spent most of my subway rides playing the Medieval Kings Chess II on my Blackberry.  There are five difficulty levels:

• King Author (Beginner)
• Frederick II (Easy)
• Charlemagne (Medium)
• S. Mehmed II (Hard)
• Will the Conq. (Very Hard)
• Gengis Khan (Master)

Since I never really touched chess after high school, the “easy” level was killing me in the beginning.  After I got comfortable enough to beat each level, though, I moved on to the next.  Now I’m winning 17-10 at the “very hard” level and will soon move on to face Gengis Khan.

Just a few weeks ago, I could’ve done 2-3 games during my morning commute.  But now I can barely finish one.  The reason?  The computer got really slow - I think much faster than the Blackberry processor at this level.  Too bad there’s no timed game on this thing.

While impatiently waiting for my Blackberry to make its next move, I often wonder what algorithm a chess game implements.  Mine apparently just increases iteration to increase the difficulty, but are there more efficient chess algorithms out there?  I wonder what I can come up with… hmm… probably nothing good :-p

Randy Pausch, the CMU professor who gave the famous last lecture last year, has just passed away.

Coworker Ming told me about this lecture and I watched the entire video in one sitting. Then I watched it again. It’s very inspirational and makes me hope that more professors in the world could be influential like that. Especially Computer Science professors.

If you haven’t seen his last lecture, you can watch it here.  It’s more entertaining (let alone educational) than most Hollywood movies.

“So… you want 15 cheeseburgers in total?”  Asked the lady behind the McDonald’s counter, when Sue asked for 14 cheeseburgers and a Happy Meal.

The story began when Steve claimed that he could eat 7 McDonald’s cheeseburgers in one go.  Didn’t sound like a big challenge to me but was unbelievable to the petite Sue (who wasn’t there when our team dined with a client at Morton’s, by the way).  She took us on a bet.  Steve and I took her on because it’d be a free meal on her.  Yeah, we guys are cheap like that.

So we sat down in a conference room and finished the stuff in just under 20 minutes.  The burgers were made fresh, but didn’t taste all that good after the 2nd or 3rd.  That’s probably why they don’t sell a Seven-Cheeseburger Value Meal.  I really didn’t care about the 2,100 calories or the 84 grams of fat, but the 5,250mg / 217% daily intake sodium scared me a little.  I also completed my meal with a can of Coke.  Steve had a Diet (because he needed to be on one!). Sue had her single cheeseburger, small fries, and a small drink, and got “too full”.

Right before the grand finale

In the end, it wasn’t that difficult of a meal (certainly not at the level of TWO Philly Cheesesteaks…), but it was my first competition-styled meal where I consumed large quantities of the same stuff (dumplings don’t count).  What made it slightly challenging was that we had to go back to work right afterwards.

Thanks for lunch, Sue!

Over the weekend, I went to my neighborhood mall and bought three shirts, one pair of pants, and a belt from Express Men.

I like the design and love the colors from this store, but the stuff is so darn expensive!  $235 retail price for merely five items!  Thank goodness for sale deals, coupons stackable with sales, and multiple checkout, I walked out with my stuff after paying only $115.

I’m curious about the business model behind this type of clothing stores, Barnes & Noble, and those online florists… there is always a coupon available somewhere, so if you’re among the few who don’t know about it and end up paying full retail price, you’re screwed.  It’s sort of like street vendors in China and their margin for bargain.  Yet that’s considered evil business practice while stores like Express is “high class”?

Two years ago I posted one of these pictures on my old blog.  It’s now time to finish the collection.

2004-2005

• Course 1
• Exam FM

[Not Pictured]
[Imagine a random stack of paper]

2005-2006

• Exam M
• VEE - Microeconomics
• VEE - Macroeconomics
• VEE - Regression Analysis
• VEE - Time Series
• Exam C

2006-2007

• FAP Modules 1~5
• FAP Exam 1
• Associateship Professionalism Course
• FAP Modules 6~8
• FAP Final Assessment
• Exam CSP-GH (failed…)

2007-2008

• Exam DP-GH
• FSA Module - Healthcare System Overview
• Exam CSP-GH
• FSA Module - Pricing Reserving Forecasting
• FSA Captone Module - DMAC
• Fellowship Admission Course

Sit-down exams… about 40 hours excluding the re-take…
# of pages of papers… 98…

Things are always better when you look retrospectively

A few weeks ago, I got a Playstaion 3.  This is my first current-generation video game console in 12 years.  Compared to my PS2 Slim, it’s a monsterous beast.

After buying my PS2 last summer and Dreamcast near the end of college, I had no patience to wait for a second-hand PS3 in the PS4 era.  It’s all because of this one and only game - Dynasty Warriors 6.

Since DW5 was all Hong and I played in the past year, I supposed this would be a worthy investment.  We don’t have an HDTV yet so haven’t been able to fully appreciate the amazing graphics, but it sure is convincing enough to make my PS2 games look coarse.

Wall-E is yet another cute & hilarious Disney-Pixar masterpiece, and its storyline is one of the very best so far - on par with Finding Nemo and the two Toy Story classics.

I saw this with Phil and Julia over the opening weekend.  Coming out of the theater, I was speechless.  So I dragged Hong to see it with me again.  It’s a very rare feeling to be so engaged in the passionate adventures on screen, and these people managed it with a junky character who doesn’t even speak!

After a long period of inactivity due to study schedule, followed by server upgrades which seriously messed up stuff, I was finally able to pay some attention to kingofmath.com again.

So the blog is back with a brand-new look.  b2 had served me well, but it was approaching five years old, not to mention how its support ceased right before I even started using it.  It’s finally time for me to join the community of WordPress users and enjoy the convenience of off-the-shelf upgrades, plugins, and themes.  Hope this configuration will last me another five years

Given my work schedule that will for sure prevent me from posting when I want to post stuff, I’ll consider blogging in Tim-style - with lots of retrospective posts.  We’ll see how it works.