Random Photos

Nothing technical, just some random photos I took that I found on my phone.

It snowed recently in the city I currently moved into. Though it quickly melted. It’s definitely a lot warmer here compared to where I am from.

Disassembling my laptop because I spilled coffee over it … nothing got damaged thankfully. Though if any components got damaged, it would be easy to repair (#Framework). Reminds me how I once destroyed my Lenovo P50 workstation years ago … the company did not give me an expensive laptop after that incident.

While I don’t use my pull-up bar as much as I should, it makes a good dry rack.

Snow in my “home city”, apparently this was in April based on the name of the image … the first real winter in a while. Winters in Canada, at least in my homecity, has been quite warm over the past few years unfortunately. Hopefully, we will see some normal winter this year.

I spoiled myself last month with Lego. I have not touched lego in over 15 years … I sure am old … The kit impressed me a lot.

One of my favorite PS1 games and games in general (I do not play much video games), Lunar the Silver Star and Lunar Eternal Blue, on the Switch. Luckily the game I preordered came just before I moved to another city for my internship. Great game, I hope they make a remake of Mana Khemia Student of Al-Revis. It seems like they made a remake of Final Fantasy Tatics recently :)

This is the game that got me into JRPG, I loved the dialogue and the storyline a lot. What is great about Switch games is that you can change the language easily so this was my first game all in French.

My Pokémon Gameboy Color collection. Most of the games were a Highschool birthday gift from my father. I grew up with Pokémon Yellow and Silver which explains why I have two copies of them. Pokémon Crystal is in Japanese so I never bothered playing it. Growing up, my Dad would periodically mail to my brother and I Japanese magazines and electronic kits. Though that never motived any of us to learn Japanese. Though I think my brother did learn a bit during the pandemic but stopped when he started his Masters. My parents know a fair bit of Japanese due to the after-effects of colonialism where Japanese was one of the language to learn to improve one’s career prospects when my parents were young similarly to how English is in Asia.

Also featured in the photo is my Pikachu pencil holder (the one in front of my tamagotchi) and some random Maplestory tokens that I am not sure what they are for. There are also some Hanafuda cards that you may have seen in Summer Wars. I forgot how to play the game. My grandmother would often play with Hanafuda cards alone, not sure what game it was. There is also a Digivice that I used to play with, I think it originally belonged to my sister. In kindergarten, I had the OG digivice but I have very little recollection of it aside from recalling of its existence. Too bad I no longer have my Golden Burger King Pokémon Cards, my mother gave it to some kid as punishment for not cleaning my room along with a bunch of my other toys. There is also Laputa Poker Cards in the background if you were wondering what anime that is from. Funny enough, I don’t think I ever watched Laputa in English just like how I never watched Totoro in English (no subtitles either) so I probably never understood the story properly.

An Elder Scroll t-shirt I won at one of the places I worked at. Unfortunately it’s 2XL, way too large for me. I have a knack winning t-shirts way too large for me at company events including a Raptors in 2019, the year the Raptors won the NBA Championship. This will probably end up as a gift or a cushion for my fragile items. On that day, I learned that Skyrim is part of Elder Scrolls. I am ignorant when it comes to video games as I don’t play them often.

A sticker I received on AMD’s 40th anniversary in Canada. It’s actually the 40th anniversary of ATI’s founding, a Canadian semiconductor company that specialized in developing GPUs which AMD bought. That is how AMD entered the GPU market. The Canadian office does a lot of CPU and GPU related design but I don’t think most Canadians know this.

An Ericsson branded car roaming around the community near their office. Ericsson is a Swedish company that is currently dominating the 5G market (if we disclude Huawei). Nokia and Huawei is within 10 mins walking distance from the Ericsson building I used to intern at. Canada used to be the best in Telecommunications with the likes of Nortel and Blackberry dominating the telecommunication and handphone market. Though poor management decisions caused the two to fall … Blackberry still exists but they pivoted markets. As for Nortel, as much as some may say Huawei stole their IP, it was ultimately mismanagement that brought down Nortel, and not from Chinese espion. Fun fact, Nortel HQ became the HQ for the Department of National Defense and it took the military some time removing all the “bugs” from the building. Another timbit, Nortel execs knew of Chinese espionage but did not care at all.

Continuing on the theme of companies I formerly interned at, here is QNX 8.0 running on a Raspberry PI. QNX Is a Real-time Operating System (RTOS) that was started in my “neighborhood” (not sure what to call it as it’s no longer considered a city but a suburb of a larger city). It’s primarily used in cars but it can be used in any safety critical devices such as in medical devices and in rockets (though I am not entirely sure of how widely adopted it is within the space industry). It’s one of the three widely-used Microkernels (from what I know), the other being Minix installed in every Intel chip and Apple. Apple has adopted some variant of L4 Microkernel OS for their ARM secure enclave so my previous statement is . Seems like SeL4 is used in many places as well so my statement about QNX may be false. There’s also WindRiver’s VxWorks. I never looked at the figures so my claim about QNX being one of the 3 most-used Microkernels could be entirely false.

Now that I moved closer to the city where I did my studies in Computer Science years ago, I decided to take a tour and see what has changed. It seems like there are a lot more robotic arms now. In my final year, I was one of the first students to take robotics in the department of Computer Science (officially called the Department of Math, Statistics, and Computer Science), and we had no robotic arms for use. It was all simulation but that might have been for the best. I definitely would have broken an arm or two with my terrible code and calculations.

Not sure what the trend was but when I visited my alma mater in the spring, the Computer Science profs have been posting Pokémon cards on their doors with cute name-tags.

At my current university, all the buildings are connected by tunnels, allowing students to avoid the snow during Winter. This is the old Math Society’s mural in the tunnel proudly featuring Tux the Linux Penguin. There is now a new Math Society mural but it looks like some ugly jail cell. My friends and I are clearly not artists …. Unfortunately, I don’t have photos of the new mural but perhaps I will take a picture when I return back to finish my final year of undergrad (hopefully). Trust me, you will be disappointed if you were to see the new mural. The new mural does not have Tux the Linux Penguin unfortunately due to my lack of skills. I was notified that if I don’t visit the university before I move, there would be no reference to Linux in the new mural. Therefore, I had to come and write “LINUX” in large font to overpower all the random math equations on the wall.

p.s. I ain’t going to verify if the first 4500 digits of PI was actually written correctly but feel free to verify yourself.

A friend doing graduate studies in Linguistics recently went to Japan in the summer and mailed me this postcard from there. I guess he was in Japan for a while. I got to know him from my Mathematics courses as he was originally a Mathematics student who had a well-diverse interest in science, music and languages.

While I rarely eat out due to costs, I found an anime styled drawing at McDonald’s kiosk which was surprising.