Some random thoughts...

- I enjoy watching the cities from an airplane. At thirty-six thousand feet, you don't lose track of the bigger picture; at a thousand kilometers an hour, you don't get attached to any particular place. You get a sense of detachment from the blind world below. You don't want to land.

缺月掛疏桐，
漏斷人初靜。
誰見幽人獨往來?
縹緲孤鴻影。

驚起卻回頭，
有恨無人省。
揀盡寒枝不肯棲，
寂寞沙洲冷。

- The moon is shadowed, so we gaze at the clouds;
The clouds turn into raindrops that fall upon the blooming flowers;
The flowers wither under the nightingale's mourning songs;
The nightingale sings until her voice dries up; in the twilight -
nobody remembers the moon.
(Mag Tsui, translated)

- You pop the activation record when you exit a function call, and push the activation record onto the stack as you call a new one. After much struggle, I've poped the activation record of last quarter and last summer... and I am back to the scope of the previous call. It's just the way it is. The current scope shadows the rest, and you realize after a long journey of pushing and popping that you are back to where you started...

You thought something is precious and everlasting, and tried to leave a trace of it, but little did you realize you're in the stack - what you get is a pointer to a memory from the previous scope, thrashed by the current context without mercy...

You should have called malloc.

- Life is a symmetric random walk. With probability 1 you end up where you started, but the expected time taken to reach there is infinite.

- The voice of wayside pansies,
that do not attract the careless glance,
murmurs in these desultory lines. (Tagore, fireflies)

- The world has opened its heart of light in the morning.
Come out, my heart, with thy love to meet it. (Tagore, stray birds)

- Why not get peace in mind?

Ans: the way we work is we need agitation in our mind. we need some craziness in our minds. peace is no good. the key is how to release the energy,

a friend. (lap fung chan quoting what I wrote on his ICQ info)

- One must have a little madness from within, in order to shine like a star. (Nietzsche)

- Finding a girl in Stanford is like finding a parking spot. The closest ones are occupied, the unoccupied ones are handicapped, and the rest are too far out there. (Some sketchy Stanford grad students)

- Amazon early adopters page. I helped design the ranking algorithm.

- SmartSoccer.net

- Newspaper cutting on SmartSoccer

- The death rate of SARS

- The unbearable lightness of being:
When a man has many desires and many choices, he finds life fruitful.
When a man has few desires and few choices, he finds life peaceful.
When a man has many desires and few choices, he finds life stressful.
When a man has few desires and many choices, he finds life unbearable.

- I like having opportunities, but I dislike making choices, because every choice made is an opportunity forgone.

- Sometimes I think God is playing minimax against me. (Lap Fung Chan)

- Unhappiness spreads like a disease among grown-ups who envy each other. They should just hang out with happier people like little kids.

- The reason I hate modern art is because I've seen enough of the real world; art should portray the purest form of beauty to remind mankind of what they have once possessed in their childhood.

- If you stop at my road, will you still be your own self? (Sally and Lam)

- You cannot measure both the momentum and location of a particle. (Heisenberg, the Uncertainty Principle)

- You suffer because you possess; they wither because you get flowers. (Twins)

- Wherever a kite flies, there is wind. (Twins)

- Knowledge -> Generalization -> Wisdom. Of coz... it's not mathematics... it's statistics (Lap Fung Chan)

- Give a man a fish, and you'll feed him for a day; give him a religion, and he'll starve to death while praying for a fish. (anon.)

- When do I realize I was God? Well, I was praying and I realized I was talking to myself. (Peter O'Toole, the Ruling Class)

- I am able to love my God
because He gives me freedom to deny Him. (Tagore, fireflies)

- God created the world in seven days. But he cheated because the concept of 'day' was not defined until a week before it is due.

- In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. (H.G. Wells, the Country of the blind)

- The worm thinks it strange and foolish
that man does not eat his books. (Tagore, fireflies)

- Every problem can be reduced to a search problem. (Daphne Koller)

- Every problem reduces to a parsing problem, when all you need to do is link together results from subproblems that are already solved by somebody else.