Welcome a new member to the neighborhood.
2021-09-23
2021-09-22
Middle-autumn zhongzi
Some delicious summer solstice treats arrived for autumn solstice.
2021-09-21
Blooming moon
I did this fun animation experiment over a photograph of an autumn-solstice full moon.
2021-09-20
Animated colorful ground markers
Saw these colorful ground markers the other day which I guess are for utility works.
2021-09-19
I joined NVIDIA 20 years ago
Around this time 20 years ago I got my first job in NVIDIA, an event memorable partly due to September 11 2001. (I was told on my first day of job that I was the only new member of the architecture group during the hiring freeze.)
More memorable are all colleagues whom I am grateful to work with.
Erik Lindholm and Walt Donovan were my de-facto mentors for the vertex and texture units, and I also learned a lot from other unit team members such as Henry Moreton, Simon Moy, Alex Minkin, Paul Heckbert, and Joel McCormack.
I would like to thank John Danskin for his management, and the Kumar dude who introduced the RTL book to me (sorry I couldn’t recall your full name even though I could recall your reaction to dogs).
Bryon Nordquist and Wei-Chao Chen, who worked closely with me in the adjacent units (front end and pixel), had to constantly tolerate my regression breaks.
Interactions with Jakob Nebeker (who claimed that PhD is useless but later got one himself), Will Newhall, Chris Donham (who discovered a bug caused by quantum interference), Trista Chen, and many others have made my job much more enjoyable.
Holding on to my NVDA stocks turned out to be one of the best investment decisions I have made (at this moment of writing) and the price fluctuations made a good mental training.
Bloom animation effect
Near Stanford Memorial Church there is a standalone bathroom with classical appearance.
2021-09-18
Sense of time during endeavors
I heard from this podcast about someone who became an elite ultra-runner after a brain surgery, as quoted from earlier article:
Her waning short term memory meant that she processed time and trail in a new way. With the ability to focus intensely on the pure task of putting one foot in front of the other over great distances, she soon established herself as one of the world’s most decorated ultra endurance runners in history.
Usually we need a sense of time/progress to manage a project, and this case provides a very interesting counter point: sometimes, not knowing the context might help us focus at the task.
2021-09-17
Daydream while driving on a highway
While driving on 101 south-bound at 2021-09-05 17:26:02 and listening to Shostakovich piano concerto 2 in the radio, I imagined being engulfed by sticky black liquid, and reproduced the visual effect afterwards via Adobe Ae.