- Food Review: Solo Sushi Ya -

I decided awhile back that distance shouldn't be a consideration when trying out new eateries. There are so unique restaurants around Toronto, so why limit myself to Scarborough?

With that in mind, we made our trek all the way to Newmarket to try out Solo Sushi Ya. I suspect most people have heard of Newmarket ("404 to Newmarket") but few people have actually been. I found that most of Solo Sushi Ya's clientele are either doctors in the area or out-of-towners like myself. Makes sense considering their main draw is their omakase.

Omakase is fairly common at mid to high end sushi restaurants. Essentially, there isn't a set menu and you're leaving it up to the chef to create the courses, so what you eat depends on the chef's whims and ingredients on hand. A unique experience (compared to other cuisines), and also quite expensive. The omakase here cost about $60 per person - already on the lower end of pricing.

The restaurant itself was very quaint - literally a mom and pop shop. There was the head chef making the food and his wife was the server. Everything about the shop felt personal: knickknacks along the sill, different chopstick holders for everyone, menus with a plea to pay with cash or debit, wasabi that was true wasabi - liquid and slightly sweet. The chef would drop by and ask us how we liked our food and talk about how business was slow because of the construction work outside.

The food was fresh and delicious. There was the standard sushi and sashimi, but also steamed egg with clams.

Interesting appetizers and desserts. Two types of white tuna - a sweet and spicy one. The spicy white tuna was our unanimous favourite.

No doubt other people's experiences will vary; they happened to have a lot of white tuna on hand.

Food: 4.5/5
Service: 5/5
Value: 3/5
TL;DR: Super pricy, but worth going to for a special occasion

- Food Review: Nazareth Restaurant -

I've been wanting to try out Ethiopian cuisine for the longest time, so I scanned through Yelp and picked out one of the (presumably) best Ethiopian restaurants in the city.

Nazareth was conveniently located near Ossington Station and a short walk from a Green P Parking. Then again, most downtown locations are a short walk from a Green P Parking so that's not really say much.

So, what was I talking about?

Right, food!

The food itself was incredibly slow to arrive. Thankfully we got here early, because if we had gotten here past seven o'clock, we would have easily waited three hours before we could eat - no joke. It's a long wait to get in because the seating at Nazareth is smaller than my bedroom, and it's a long wait for the food because they make everything fresh.

Once we finally got our food, we were surprised to see our three dishes served on a single big plate:

And of course, there was no utensils. Instead, there is injera - a spongy, sour bread that you rip into pieces, and scoop up the meats with. Similar to naan for Indian cuisine.

The meats were soft and flavourful - they fell right off the bone. I wasn't a fan of injera though - I might not have scooped up enough sauce, because the sour taste stayed long after the dinner was done.

The bill came up to about $10/person which is fairly cheap, considering it's a highly trafficked downtown restaurant. However, call me squeamish, but I really miss using utensils so for me this will purely be a one-off experience.

Food: 4/5
Service: 2/5
Value: 4/5
TL;DR: Try it if you're interested in Ethiopian cuisine. Would not go again myself.

- augmented reality -

After playing with the 3D TV in our manager's office, I realized I'm not a big fan of 3D. Actually, I realized that after watching a few 3D movies and playing with the 3DS. 3D stuff doesn't make me feel like I'm immersed in some virtual world - it makes me feel queasy.

On the other hand, I found augmented reality (AR) quite awesome. The 3DS comes with these augmented reality cards. You could place one on the table and it would turn into a box. And a dragon would come out and you'd have to shoot it down. Of course none of this actually happens - you see it through the 3DS.

So when my rotation with my current R&D-style team started, I made a brief mention of my interest in AR to my mentor. He mentioned while the technology is interesting, there's not much there for telcos to look into.

In the meantime, more and more stores are using AR for marketing - like American Apparel. I really wanted to check it out today, but (1) there isn't an American Apparel store nearby and (2) I don't have an iPhone.

I'm sure AR will take off in the near future (especially with Google Glass!) I can already imagine a bunch of really cool uses like

• Being able to draw up someone's profile just by looking at them
• RPGs where you defeat monsters in your neighbourhood
• Blue lines leading you to your destination

To be honest, once you start merging the digital right into your vision, the possibilities are almost endless. Vision is the one sense we rely on the most, and the one sense that this world is designed for.

- Vocal Familiarity -

In just the last few years, you can verbally shut down Xbox Kinects and Samsung Smart TVs; you can ask your smartphone to point you to the nearest gas station is; you can compose text messages by talking it out.

The point is speech recognition is becoming more and more common. But I've found that the accuracy is still pretty bad. By "pretty bad", I mean not 99% accurate. If it's not at least that accurate, I feel that I might as well type it out. As a sidenote, I have the same issue with predictive keyboards.

Considering there are a very limited number of pronounceable sounds (phonemes) in English, shouldn't we be able to vastly improve speech recognition by asking the user to speak out every phoneme as set-up?

- Mini Manga Review: Zekkyou Gakkyuu -

There are two things I learnt after reading this manga:

1. 99% of teenagers are psychopaths
2. The smallest moral mistake will cause you to die a gruesome death

Every chapter starts and ends with a floating girl reciting some moral lesson. Sounds pretty tame and boring, except each lesson is typically demonstrated with schoolgirls murdering each other or getting murdered.

The beautiful drawings, the twist endings and the creeping tension: all of this keeps you turning the page and prevents the story from feeling episodic.

In a nutshell, Zekkyou Gakkyuu is Aesop's Fables. Except with crazy schoolchildren instead of talking animals, and ten times more horrific.

- true to yourself -

You know the old saying "Fake It Till You Make It"?

I always hated that catchphrase.

It encourages deception and acting, and worst of all, it works.

For the uncurious and the attention-deficient, the link talks about how you can change who you are by changing your body postures. If you take up space, if you open up your body, if you go into what she calls "high-power poses" - your bravery goes up and your stress levels goes down.

If your normally fearful and stressed, you adopt "lower-power poses" which leads to more fear and stress. And it becomes a vicious cycle.

So the idea is fake "high-power poses" in order to feel more confident and calm.

The talk addresses the lack of authenticity by saying you don't "fake it till you make it"; you "fake it till you become it". Through these changes to body posture, you come out as a different person.

But that still isn't good enough.

In terms of changing who we are, I prefer to go the route outlined by this ex-smoker.

The key point in that post:

You need to change your mind-set. You must change from being a smoker who is trying to quit to being a non-smoker. This is fundamental...

Previously, when I tried to quit, I marked the date in my diary and counted the days. The downside to this is that it's like holding your breath underwater - you know that at some stage you will come up for air. Furthermore, when you do eventually succumb and have a cigarette, you will feel like you have failed and will be disheartened when you have to reset the counter.

You need to accept that you will be tempted from time to time to have a cigarette and there will be times when your resolution will be weak (late at night, after a few drinks), so it's eminently possible that you will have a smoke or two or more. It does not amount to falling off the wagon or a reversion to the habit. You need to consider it as an aberration and no different to any other non-smoker who has a cigarette. It happens, move on.

This isn't a matter of faking it till you make it or faking it till you become it. This is simply being it. Being it until your behaviours line up to what you already are.

The difference may be a technicality to most people, but it's fundamental for me.

Now to make up a catchphrase.

- the digital rebirth of print -

Traditional newspaper companies are experiencing an accelerated death and struggling with making money online. That's the difficulty of jamming a traditional square business plan into a round internet hole. So why not adapt to a proven money-making format? Get readers to decide what they want to read, then write it. Crowdsource your printing press. Traditional newspaper companies have an advantage over a random internet startup here. I'm not talking about their printing presses or delivery trucks; I'm talking about their brand. Prospective readers know New York Times has quality writing and would be willing to pay for the good stuff. And if the Big Traditional Print Companies don't move in this direction? Why don't journalism students band together to make this happen? There's a brighter future here than in print.

- the road most taken -

I was the grammarian for Toastmasters this week. On the most basic level, our club's grammarian is supposed to keep track of how many um's and ah's speakers are using. This helps the speakers because they become self-conscious about using filler words; this also helps me because it forces me to pay close attention to the speeches.

During a Breaking Bad Habits speech, the speaker said:

"We're programmed to follow the path of least resistance. So what should we do? Make our bad habits the path of most resistance."

That flipped a 100-volt lightbulb in my head. If we only do things that are easy to us, we should make bad habits harder to do. Hide the remote control in the drawer. Uninstall the games. Turn off the internets.

I already knew that self-discipline is over-rated and why building systems gives you a better shot at doing the right thing. That's the basis of "Getting Things Done" (GTD). The sequel ("Making It All Work") was supposed to explain *why* GTD works. But Toastmasters gave me the clearest explanation: GTD breaks down our goals into simple, easy pieces - pieces that form the path of least resistance.

- a mere planet in a galaxy of galaxies -

How do people decide what to do ? The logical steps would be to keep an open mind, try out as many different things as possible and then reflect on those experiences. My econ prof was advocate of trying out different things. He mentioned that people do generally try out different things... in the same area. His point was that you cannot do embedded development, web development, mobile development and say you've explored all your options.

The key here is to try different things that are as different as possible.

- a fat toolbox -

It's becoming a boxing day tradition to buy an external hard drive. This year I decided to splurge on a portable one - the type that can fit right into your pocket. So far it's been totally worth it:

- No longer feels like a brick
- Appears on My Computer in seconds
- No need to plug for power

I can't emphasize how much trouble that last point was in the past; I've been meaning to take regular backups but I didn't want to navigate through a maze of wires. Now that I no longer have to deal with wires, my new complaint is that copying over all my files takes A Really Long Time.

I *could* copy over just my new and changed files - if only there was something to do all that automagically for me. And then suddenly there is. I found SyncToy just today and the software's been insanely fast and intuitive to use. A++ Microsoft, never knew you'd come up with nice little gems like this.

Speaking of nice little gems, have you ever...

Needed to re-install a metric tonne of software on a new computer? Try Ninite. And then try everything listed on Ninite.

Hurt your eyes staring at the screen? f.lux matches the brightness to the hour

Wanted to search and load *anything* on your computer with a few keystrokes? Launchy. Ever since my friend installed this on my work computer, I can't stop alt-spacing to get to all my stuff.

Have you stumbled upon life-improving software lately?

- recipe for success -

Luck is the last ingredient, not the first.

Don't wait until you work isn't so busy to start a hobby your passionate about. Don't wait until you're perfectly energized to hammer out your project.

Barring life-threatening injury, if you want it badly enough, you can make the time and energy for it. If you're waiting for all the stars to align before setting off, you'll be stuck at the harbour.

What happens when you put in all the work and you do get a life-threatening injury?

That's what the last bit of luck is for.

- Of Air And Water -

My affinity is air
Made of dreams and ideas
Open and intangible
Aimlessly drifting or
Following the winds

What I need to be
Is more like water
Flowing relentlessly
Shaping the earth
While still reflecting the infiniteness of the sky

Soaking in regrets is the surest way to grow more of them.

- reaching the finish line -

I'm sure everyone has big goals they'd like to accomplish someday. Here's what I learnt from NaNoWriMo (and other delicious sources):

Visualize-able End Goal

You have to know what success looks like or you will never be able to know whether you've really hit your target. For NaNoWriMo, success was defined in an incredibly straight-forward way: write 50,000 words in November. Not everything will be that clearly scoped out for you - in most cases, you will have to define how success looks like yourself.

Action-able Steps

You have to know what is the immediate next step for your project. This may require brainstorming to figure out all the potential steps, and then analyzing which step is the best one to take. For NaNoWriMo, I had to figure out a general outline of the plot and sketch out my main characters. Then I simply wrote 1,667+ words a day.

Steps can be adjusted. When I could had nothing left to write about, "planning" replaced "writing" as my next step. When I lost ten days to non-stop overtime at work, I had to replace "1,667+" with "3,000".

Small Pieces Relate-able to Big Picture

Tying the two concepts above, you need to be able to keep in mind the overall goal when you work on your next action. Seeing a visual or numeric representation of your overall progress can be helpful here. This was easy for NaNoWriMo: I simply updated my word count every night and saw it slowly increasing to 50,000. A progress meter can be really motivating, which leads me to the last point...

You Have to Want it Badly Enough

If you want to complete something - as opposed to simply experimenting - you have to really want the end goal. Seeing your progress is worthless if you do not care about where that progress leads to. Novelty wears off quickly. Writers for NaNoWriMo are warned that the second week was the toughest and I can attest to that.

And that's it! Time for me to try this out on my next project.

- judging ourselves -

We are our own biggest supporters.

We believe that our strengths are unique and that our failures are either 1) not our own fault or 2) extremely common. Your classmate's high grades aren't that impressive - you could easily match those if you wanted to. Who cares if you don't get much done at work? Not like anyone else is putting up extra effort - and even if they did, they probably don't have as much going on as you do.

We fall victim to self-serving bias all the time. An interesting experiment my psych prof once recommended: take out a notepad and jot down every time you make an excuse for a failure. You'll be amazed at how long the list will get.

And that's exactly why self-serving bias not a problem: our self-esteem would be battered without that spiffy little mechanism. High self-esteem makes us think we can be great things. High self-esteem makes us think we can achieve big things. And if we believe we can do it, our chances of succeeding actually increase.

The key to balancing is to be our own biggest critic.

After all, criticism is easier to swallow when it comes from yourself.

- willpower index -

Numbers are a great invention - they can put real life events and ideas into a different context.

For instance, it's recommended that you write down your numbers when working out: how many push-ups or pull-ups you've done, what weights you used in various weighty activities, and so forth. The point of tracking is to know how far you can go (whether it be repetitions or the weight of your weights) for next time. After awhile, if you graph the data, it'll hopefully be a nice line going upwards and it'll be super motivating.

Similar to levelling up in a game (as xkcd already noted).

But what if we want to track mental rather than physical strength? It's just as - if not more - important, considering studies have shown that self-control is correlated to success and happiness.

Can it be measured? Call it self-control, self-discipline or willpower, that stuff seems to be abstract and untrackable. On the other hand, research has shown that willpower is like a muscle: it gets strengthened with exercise, and it gets depleted with over-usage.

So why not have a go at it?


[Has gained 1 experience point from writing this entry]

- the spider's toolbox -

Lately, I've been digging up and trying out online networking and sharing tools. All of the following already have a sizable chunk of users - some have been around for ages - so it's not like I'm trying to be cutting edge. The list is sorted by how much experience I've had with it and each item links to my page. Maybe you might find some of these to be useful or fun to use!

# Livejournal

An online diary that's good for writing down day-to-day events, and keeping in touch with friends. LJ makes filtering posts simple, so it's easy to write whatever you want and share it with people you have an acceptable comfort level with. Very spiffy for letting off steam and putting it in a box. The community feature is a nice touch. I use the uwaterloo one and people there are helpful and responsive. Seriously, if I ask about - say - a professor, I'd get replies within the hour.

Recommended Use: Journaling - especially for drama and angst. Keeping in touch with faraway friends or family (hi sis!)

# Blogger

At first, I tried using this like LJ to keep in touch with friends. But honestly, it's a major pain: you'd need to bookmark or link to your friends' blogs, whereas other places (see Livejournal, Facebook, Twitter) keeps all friends update on one page. What most or all blogging tools *will* do for you is give you freedom to customize your page. It's good for publishing your own content - writings, thoughts or news.

Recommended Use: Decently long thought-provoking and-or humorous entries. Or pseudo-intellectual, pretentious writing. The latter sums up my blog perfectly!

# Facebook

Facebook needs no introduction and everyone knows its many tricks. However, there are ways in which people are doing it wrong. In addition to what that dude said, I personally find LJ better for keeping track of friends: less cluttered and easier to read. Other than that, Facebook does many things well - which is why it's the market leader in social networking and killed off crappier attempts like Friendster.

Recommended Use: finding old friends, contacting people, organizing group events, sharing photos, stalking

# Twitter

Same as LJ except for people with ADD. Or likes constantly receiving updates on mobiles. Useful for tracking/talking to celebs. 140 char lim

# StumbleUpon [echoblaze]

As mentioned earlier in the facebook entry, StumbleUpon is good for discovery cool things on the web. If you have time to burn, you can continuously click that "Stumble!" button and be forever amused by the vast expanse that is the intertubez. Or if you have a lot of interesting content to share (i.e. whoring your own stuff), then you could attempt to push it here.

Recommended Use: killing time

# del.icio.us

Social bookmarking. You upload your bookmarks and share it with friends or others; you could check out cool stuff by looking at the most bookmark-ed items ever. To be honest, I didn't use StumbleUpon or this much because I don't have too much time to burn. Also, if you start having tons of bookmarks - it's honestly easier to search for what you want in Google.

Recommended Use: killing time

# LinkedIn [Emerson Cho]

I'd call this "professional networking" as opposed to social networking. On the recommendation of my coop advisor, I went and played around with this toy today. Functionality is similar to Friendster - the coworker recommendation system is similar to ye olde testimonials, but there's a lot of extra structure in place: job searches, sorting by companies or fields of work, finding coworkers. Not sure whether this will pay off - I find it more likely that people will add to their professional networks IRL. But if nothing else, it'll be good for keeping track of ex-employers and ex-coworkers.

Recommended Use: too early to tell. I suspect it will become an e-rolodex.

Not only do we want choice, we want the choice of when we want to choose.

The corollary to this is that sometimes not having a choice is preferable.

- The Burning Tower -

Because
I could not
bare to watch
the candle slowly
burning down,
I
gave
its
crimson
crown
a
puff;
the
smoul-
d'ring
wick
returned
my
frown.
And in the ensuing darkness I realized:
I am now truly alone.

- Prioritize This -

Procrastination is simply setting a task to the lowest priority - lower than checking Facebook and surfing the 'net. Addiction is simply setting a task to the highest priority - just below eating and sleeping, or possibly even above it. Once we realize this, we don't have to take a passive stance on procrastination and addiction:

- procrastination and addiction are simply setting priorities
- ultimately, we control our priorities
- if we want, we can defeat addiction by setting other things as "higher priority"
- ditto with procrastination

Incidentally, when a productive task becomes an addiction, great things can be achieved.