Childhood Drawings – T’Challa And Scorpion
I found some of my old hand drawings when I visited my parents’ house in Jakarta earlier this year. I used to draw a lot when I was still in elementary and junior high school, nothing awesome, but I guess it wasn’t too bad for someone at that age.
Back then I was really into soccer and basketball, and for a reason I can no longer remember, I often incorporated elements of a soccer ball or a basketball in my drawings.
Here’s two of them:
T’Challa from Marvel Comics, obviously holding a basketball with adjusted ribs forming the shape of claws.
Scorpion from Mortal Kombat. Notice the basketball ribs at the background of the Mortal Kombat dragon logo?
There’s one mystery, I’m not sure what the significance of the numbers, 91 and 4, on those characters was. I’m guessing 91 was Dennis Rodman‘s jersey number when he was playing for the Chicago Bulls and 4 was Takenori Akagi‘s at Shohoku High School, but yea, your guess is as good as mine.
XMas Lego Mindstorms
Last week we had an early XMas celebration over at Shine Technologies office, geekin’ it with some Lego Mindstorms.
We had to wire up some logic blocks for the Lego robot to use in a simple maze. The goal was to traverse a path within the maze, the challenge was to pass some obstacles like opening a gate, executing several turns, and opening a door handle.
Our robot, all kudos to @manishchhabra27 for revving it up.
The simple maze. This robot was using its light sensor to detect the black line.
We took a different approach by using the ultrasonic sensor to detect the wall, the reasoning behind it was that traversing the black line was by far a slower process (albeit safer). But we had one problem with our approach, our robot had bad tires that made it drift to the right and then hit the wall anyway. It’s a hardware problem!
Another team’s robot. Fetch the beer, my precious.
Indonesia Trip 2010
The last leg of my March travel was Indonesia. I went to Jakarta to see my parents, and then I took them to Bangka Island, to visit the birthplace of my mum. The pictures above were all taken on the island.
I felt a certain disconnect to the rest of the world when I was in Bangka Island. Perhaps it’s because I didn’t use the Internet at all, but then again, most of the locals I talked to didn’t give a jack about world news, social media, or anything else online that occupies our lives these days. It was quite refreshing.
Other than visiting some distant relatives I didn’t know about and some of mum’s childhood friends, I also had a chance to visit a semi-traditional factory producing fish and prawn crackers, to check out their machinery and to learn about their distribution system. It’s pretty awesome that that little factory had their products exported to several countries, including Australia.
After returning to Jakarta for a few days before finishing the trip, I just had to tick off the items on my TOEAT list. These were my most favourite food in the world, highly recommended!
The first one was fried wonton from Bakmi GM. My offer still stands, if they open a restaurant in Melbourne, I will have my lunch there everyday for two months in a row.
The next one was Padang food, probably one of the tastiest food on earth. The cow brain curry was not for the faint hearted :p.
And last but not least, the simplistic nasi goreng, my all time favourite. There must be tens of different types of nasi goreng in Indonesia, love them all.
So that ended my travel in March, ten flights (can’t wait for Star Trek transporter), four countries (stayed in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on four separate days for connecting flights), a pair of sore legs (for obvious reasons), and one great journey.
Taiwan Trip 2010
This short write up is long overdue, part of my travel in March. I still have four travel-related posts to go, better finish them before 2011 arrives.
After Siem Reap, Cambodia, the next stop was Taipei, Taiwan. I like Taiwan a lot, the locals were friendly, the night markets opened until late night, the food was great, the public transport system was top notch.
The best of them all, a bowl of rice with some minced beef. Truly heaven sent!
Trying out the large Google Maps touch interface at the station.
We stayed at the center of Taipei, right across Taipei Railway Station, which was very convenient for us to get to the other parts of the city. One place you must check out when you’re in Taiwan is Taipei 101, currently the second tallest building in the world at 508m in height, the night view of the city of Taipei from the roof was simply awesome, I loved it there.
I also enjoyed exploring Shilin Night Market and several other night markets in Taipei, yep, I had a go at tasting the infamous stinky tofu (deep fried), and yep, it sure was stinky but tasted pretty good actually. As for our history fix, we went to Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall and Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall.
A day before leaving Taiwan, we took a day trip to Wulai, a little rural town at the southern part of Taipei county. Again, friendly locals, great food. I particularly enjoyed the hike up to Wulai Falls.
I had a great time in Taiwan, it’s probably my second most favourite place to visit after Japan. I would definitely love to visit Taiwan again one day, but this time, it will involve more train rides, more cities, and of course more food :).
Studio Sign
This sign was bolted on the front wall up to the third letter before some body corporate police appeared out of nowhere and pointed out that it’s against their rules.
So we had to improvise and placed the sign above the door frame for now.
Time to start planning to overthrow the current body corporate.