May 17, 2009
Year One University Life
I really haven’t updated my blog for a long time already. I’m still alive. Recently I’ve just finished the examination in semester two this year. I have no course in this summer, so I can say my university life of year one ended with the last paper examination already.
Maybe I need to sum up my university life this year. Actually my life this year is not really busy at all. For the programme I’m studying, that’s Surveying, I don’t have many assignments to do. But almost every subject requires students to finish a group project near the end of the semester, that’s why I’m free and relaxed when the semester just started, and busy to deal with meetings and works of the group projects at the end of the semester.
You may want to know whether my subjects are difficult or not. I can say most of them are quite easy to handle, except the law subjects, which I have one in each semester this year. My subjects are related to the construction and real estate industry, for example, the economic, the construction process, the management for building projects and environmental designs in sustainable buildings. You can see they’re quite wide-ranging. The law subjects are about the uses of land, statutory requirements in development and planning. As I have mentioned before, sometimes it’s quite interesting, but only for those related to your daily life, for example, the rights and obligations of landlord and tenant in a multi-storey building. But some topics are just boring to me like resumption of land. If I’m not wrong, I have 2-3 remaining laws subjects to study in the future. Anyway, I think it’s still a good chance for me to enrich my legal knowledge. And this type of expertise is especially essential for a surveyor.
May 1, 2009
Back
I moved to self host Wordpress again and I have abandoned Tumblr. I won’t make any updates there anymore.
Tumblr is actually a great web service which makes your blogging life more convenient. I loved the service. You may see sometimes I blogged really frequently, but you may also notice that I seldom write, especially something more about my personal life. One of the reasons may be the really handy reblog function integrated in Tumblr, with a few clicks, you can reblog other users’ popular and interesting posts. This function encouraged my laziness and finally I have lost my interest to write.
Of course, it’s not the only reason. I actually longed to run my CMS like Wordpress again because I can have more control over my blog. Wordpress also has the comment function. Although sometimes I don’t really concern the amount of comments I have received, I think it’s still an efficient way to get opinions.
As for my previous posts, you may still go to my Tumblr blog.
I don’t plan to move the posts to here as the format of these posts is quite different and I think it’s also a nice idea to have my old posts archived in Tumblr.I have moved some of the old posts manually to here. These are the posts I want to keep. Actually if you want to import all of your Tumblr posts to WordPress, you can use Tumblr2WordPress to generate a WordPress compatible XML file and import your posts using the file from the WordPress user panel.With this switch, I hope I have more motivation to write more.
The above is what I previously wrote on my Wordpress blog. But, after a few days using Wordpress, I still like simple blogging tools much more like Tumblr.
Mar 13, 2009
All caps in legal documents
I always wondered if there was some legal significance to this.
Some laws require that certain provisions of contracts be printed in a font that is larger than the remainder of the text, or in all caps, to avoid burying important terms in a bunch of small text.
Mar 3, 2009
Flickr: Video for all + HD!
Flickr has jumped on the HD bandwagon with beautiful AVC/h.264 encoding, and now everyone can post videos. (ex. Squirrel HD and Vigdel HDR Time Lapse)
Mar 1, 2009
This is the quintessential pencil sharpener. When I was growing up we had one at home, we had them at school — Panasonic owned the 80s sharpening market.
Feb 26, 2009
Safari 4 is 42x faster than IE 7
How Microsoft make their browser of that speed?
Feb 24, 2009
Safari 4 beta now available for Mac + PC
New features include a “Top Sites” view, Cover Flow (which looks great for browsing history), and Nitro, a newer, faster Javascript engine. The beta also sports a modified look with new UI elements and tabs across the top of the window, ala Google Chrome. The WebKit nightly web inspector has also been built-in, which I now consider an indispensable tool for development.
Feb 15, 2009
aja:
Footprints carved in wood, which locals believe were made by a worshipper who prayed at the same spot for decades, are seen at a monastery near Tongren, Qinghai province February 5, 2009.
Feb 8, 2009
Panasonic Lumix LX3
After struggling between Canon Powershot G10 and Panasonic Lumix LX3, I have finally bought the latter one. Actually both are great compact cameras, and you won’t go wrong with either. I really hope I can give you a review on this camera, but I think it’s not probable as I’m just a newbie to photography.
Jan 29, 2009
A Beautiful 2GB Panoramic Photo of Obama’s Inauguration Speech
pile:
Photographer David Bergman made a panoramic image showing the nearly two million people who watched President Obama’s inaugural address. To do so, he clamped a Gigapan Imager to the railing on the north media platform about six feet from my photo position. The Gigapan is a robotic camera mount that allows him to take multiple images and stitch them together, creating a massive image file.
The final photo is made up of 220 Canon G10 images and the file is 59,783 X 24,658 pixels or 1,474 megapixels. It took more than six and a half hours for the Gigapan software to put together all of the images on a Macbook Pro and the completed TIF file is almost 2 gigabytes.
Use the controls to zoom and pan around the photo. You can also double click to zoom in and double click again to get even closer.
Jan 29, 2009
Photographer Max Wanger poetically captures A Cup of Jo’s Joanna Goddard and fiancé Alex soon after their engagement in Los Angeles. The colour and tone of the set is perfect. (via Aja West)
Jan 23, 2009
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
“I was born under unusual circumstances.” and so begins “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”, adapted from the 1920s story by F. Scott Fitzgerald about a man who is born in his eighties and ages backwards. A man, like any of us, unable to stop time. We follow his story set in New Orleans from the end of World War I in 1918, into the 21st century, following his journey that is as unusual as any man’s life can be. Directed by David Fincher, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” is a time traveler’s tale of the people and places he bumps into along the way, the loves he loses and finds, the joys of life and the sadness of death, and what lasts beyond time.
I find it very difficult to have some comments on this movie because it is sort of literature. People may feel bored at some points in this 166-minute movie, but overall I think it’s worth watching to experience how Benjamin’s life is.
Jan 19, 2009
I just had a job interview for a post of Customer Relations Ambassador at the Hong Kong Jockey Club. The interview was conducted in group. The interviewers asked us to introduce yourself in English to test your English standard. They also asked your most impressive experience in your working experiences or college activities. The last one was a scenario question which asks how you handle if a guest wears a jean of colour between blue and black and wants to enter a restaurant, but the rule of dress code is that blue jeans are not allowed to enter the restaurant.
I’m not sure about my performance, but I think it may be helpful for you.
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Alfred Luk 2009 was written and edited by Alfred Luk. It only serves as an archive of my old posts before 2010. If you're finding something in particular, you may use the search form underneath. You can also head over to alfredluk.com for my latest update. Thanks for visiting.
