Month: September 2006

So now is the time of the year when the university relaunches itself as the best and cheapest shopping mall (!). They have already sold IBM and Lenovo laptops for a few weeks, now they are selling a wider selection of electronics. It can get really, damn cheap, if you excuse my french, and as a gadgeteer as myself it’s hard to keep my hands away from all those cheap gadgets… To give you a feeling of the general prices, check these out (if you find cheaper prices where you live, you can only live in mainland China 😉 ). Remember, Google tells us that 1 Euro = 9.8849483 Hong Kong dollars, or 1 Hong Kong dollar = 0.944389441 Swedish kronor.

• A 2GB Kingston Compact Flash card for 405 HKD, and 4GB for 760 HKD
• A 1GB Kingston SD Card for 170 HKD and a 2GB for 305
• A 1GB USB Drive for 170 HKD and a 2GB for 300 HKD
• SimCity 4 Deluxe, Battlefield 2 or Norton Antivirus for 240 HKD
• A Windows Mobile 5 Gigabyte G-smart smartphone, with WiFi, for 2880 HKD
• A 6 megapixel, anti-shake Samsung Digimax I6, that is also a video/mp3-player, and that can record DivX, is 1732 HKD, including 512 MB SD Card
• Portable pocket hard drives (2.5″) from LaCie, 100 GB for 950 HKD
• Bigger, portable hard drives, LaCie: 500GB for 1790 HKD, 300GB for 1100 HKD, 250GB for 880 HKD or 160GB for 750 HKD.
• Logitech DiNovo Cordless Desktop for 598 HKD!
• Samsung Notebooks, from 5000 to 11000 HKD
• (And while I’m at it, I can buy the best equipped MacBook Pro 17″ for around 15 000 HKD. Check your price at home 😉 )

I would buy all of that, and more, if it wasn’t for my legendary amount of self-control . If you badly, badly need any of these devices, I can of course arrange something, but note that my luggage capabilites on my homeward journey are very limited, I might have to pay extra for overweight and charge you appropriately for any expenses. In any case, what of above do I really have to buy?

After returning to Hong Kong I took some photos. To keep you updated, here are a few of them. As always, find all of my photos at Flickr.

All too often I forget that I currently live in a province of China, a country that has done horrible things to prevent democracy. China may be going forward, but they must deal with the horrors it’s regime have brought on its people throughout the century. This video of the Tiananmen Massacre, made me very sad. Maybe because of the creepy soundtrack that was used, but mostly because it really happened. Watch it, remember, give atleast a thought to those who are fighting for democracy. I’m glad to live in a part of China where I can watch a video like this without repercussions.

Unconstrained synthesis process. Kernel matrix K, similarity matrix S. Sub-clip extraction. Mel-frequency Cepstrum Coefficients. That, and more, is what fills my head now. I have just begun my second work week – of around 20 – on my master thesis. I set up a hard working regime – 40 hours a week, 6 days a week. Haven’t reached it so far, but already it feels like all I do is program Java.

So, what is it about? I don’t want to bore you, and to be honest, it isn’t all that clear yet. But the working title is Game Sound Effects Synthesis using Statistical Methods (the word Game being thrown in there just to reflect my childish hopes – it should probably be changed to An Advanced And Alltogether Abstract Non Relevant Theoretical Prototype Concerning…, well, you get the point). In readable English: I will construct a program that can interpret sound effects and generate new, similar-sounding ones.

In other words, I have my work cut up for me during the coming months. My internship here will end when this year ends, and then what? Well, that’s a topic for another post, I’m sure, because right now, I don’t have a clue. Still, I have more things to do, and do seriously, this autumn. I have to start looking for work, and before doing that, put together a decent portfolio showing what I’m capable of – in other words, digging upp all my projects hiding in My Documents, polish them a little and put online. Still, that’s nothing more than a short coffee break compared to my two other tasks – write two books (roleplaying books). Details about these books can be found elsewhere (noir.nu and sooner or later at neogames.se, both in Swedish). And when mentioning noir.nu – I am appointed webmaster and web programmer of said web site, something that surely will take its amount of work hours in maintenance during the autumn. To be honest, it has already taken all too many hours to be considered a side project. You can check it out, but don’t complain on the design – my graphical design skills are not something I’m that proud of (no, I didn’t do the graphics on the site, we have professionals for that kind of thing 😉 ).

By writing this I just stole 30 minutes from other needy projects. Shed a tear in the memory of those lost minutes. Remeber, keep a look out for bugs – you never know when they come back to bite you! (pun intended)