Z

I finally added some albums to my gallery. It’s been a while since I’ve done any work in that department, and I figured I’d share some highlights over the past few months. So in no particular order, here they are:

Zi’s trip to SF: The only thing better than terrorizing San Francisco is terrorizing San Francisco with Zi. And the only thing better than that is having Jennifer Love Hewitt there. In a thong.. rolling around in mud. I digress, what was I talking about again? Oh that’s right, Jennifer Love Hewitt.

Sky Diving: These are some fun pictures from the time just before jumping out of an airplane at 15,000 feet. While you’re at it, make sure to check out my skydiving video on the left if you haven’t already because that’s total evidence that polish people can fly. Because trust me, there was no parachute.

A word to those not Polish: even if you do use a parachute, you can still get a fleeting glimpse of what it would be like to fly like the Polish. And if that doesn’t inspire you to jump, I don’t know what will.

Yosemite: My sister and dad came out to visit me in California, and here is a small subset of the 483 million pictures we took. As if I don’t already take enough pictures everywhere I go, imagine combining that with my sister and my dad. The Paparazzi got nothing on us. Actually, my dad alone outdoes the Paparazzi. I had to hold him back from taking too many pictures of them because they started to get nervous. True story.

San Diego: Me, Philippe, Sandra, and Rae went out to San Diego a little while back, and I’ve decided to post up some pictures from that venture. San Diego is definitely a must see if you haven’t been there already… an absolutely stunning place. Honestly, I don’t see how anyone gets any work done there. Unless of course, laying out on the beach in perfect weather, watching the sunset, and having a spanish conquistador throw pancakes at you is your idea of work. Actually, the Spanish conquistador thing really did happen. I might be stretching the whole pancake bit, but who can differentiate fantasy from reality when you meet up with an authentic Spanish conquistador? And by authentic, I mean born and raised Filipino.

Lake Tahoe: The Nvidia intern group went out for some snowboarding - get this - in late May. Now I don’t know which is more mind boggling - snow boarding in may, or meeting up with a spanish conquistador. Both happened, you decide.

Ever wonder how modern society just isn’t conducive to humanitiy’s lack of self control? Ok, you’ll have to excuse the philosophical rubbish, but bear with me.

I really feel that nowadays people get away with pretty much anything, and it’s mostly because they’re lazy. Not only that, but its society that lets them get away with it. But Rafal, what do you mean?

I’m glad you asked.

One of the most frustrating issues I have is with people blowing off responsibility, especially when it comes to eating. First off, they eat way too much. Second, they get fat because of it. Third, they blame everyone other than themselves, including the neighborhood cat, for being fat… as if the cat wanted to be eaten. Don’t get me wrong, some fat people have the best personality. They just don’t go around sueing McDonald’s every time they look in the mirror.

So why is this a problem? Because we have no social mechanisms to control it. Gone are the days of natural selection.

You see, when we apply natural selection to the above situation as it would occur in the ‘wild’.. behold:

Sue McDonalds? Too late, you’re dead. Now how is that for incentive? It’s just too bad we don’t have equivalent social mechanisms like this in the real world. In fact, we do everything we can minimize our responsibility. And what do you know, the FDA just recently approved a weight-loss drug to help the crisis. Can it be the solution? Kansas.com sets it straight:

And Lazyboy summerizes it best:

Americans, let’s face it: We’ve been a spoiled country for a long time.
Do you know what the number one health risk in America is?
Obesity. They say we’re in the middle of an obesity epidemic.
An epidemic like it is polio. Like we’ll be telling our grand kids about it one day.
The Great Obesity Epidemic of 2004.
“How’d you get through it grandpa?”
“Oh, it was horrible Johnny, there was cheesecake and pork chops everywhere.”

83,428 cheesecakes and pork chops were eaten in the time it took you to read this post. Surprisingly, 90% of them were in Kansas.

My good friend Paul is running a sweet startup called Meetro, check it out yourself. It’s an add-on for AIM, Yahoo, etc., which allows you to check out who is around you. Not only that, but it allows for much cooler profiles (you can pretty much see everyone’s picture as you talk to them). Pretty sweet if you ask me… unless you’re talking to someone who is crazy ugly…

Not only that, but they just released their Lua-based Messaging engine, LuME. One package to abstract pretty much all of the major messaging protocols? I mean holy shit, that’s incredible. Digg it here.

Social networking is something I’ve always been really interested in, so I now live the experience vicariously through Paul. But do you know what makes it all so much cooler? Paul is my long lost polish brother. And that’s just mad cool. Respect.

Have you ever been listening to the radio and thought: What’s with all these stupid radio commercials? I know, sometimes I wish my antenna would just fall right off my car listening to these things.

So there I was, driving home from work listening to the radio… Sure enough, it didn’t take too long for a radio commercial to kick in:

“You can tell a lot about a person if they have an Ipod”

At this point, I normally do a ninja switch to the next radio station. But this time, I had to know more.

“I mean daaamn, he doesn’t have an ipod? He’s gotta be the poor kid!”

Wtf? Did I just waste 10 seconds of my life listening to this? What the hell is that supposed to mean?

You know what? I’ll tell you what it means.

Nothing.

In fact, significantly less than nothing. Because there can only really be three possibilities…

1. You’re “rich” enough to actually own an ipod, and you already own an ipod.

Clearly, you’re not targetting this crowd.

2. You’re “rich” enough to actually own an ipod, but you don’t have one.
Do they really think this radio commercial will make you think:
“Omg, I’m poor! I definitely need an ipod now!”

No.

It’s more like, “Good job with the insult there, Mr. Insightful”. Here’s what came to my mind:

3. You’re too poor to own an ipod.

Who are they trying to target here??

So there you have it, that pretty much exhausts all possibilities in the universe. Good job, Team Marketing!

Seriously, who comes up with this garbage?

So finally me and Philippe managed to move in and get our apartment geared up. Observe, European contemporary, with a delicate balance of Polish and French:

Seriously, how could you not want to rush home from work, grab a beer, and totally sit down and chill on that couch? You really can’t.. I mean look at it.. annnd again. Ok, one more time. You feeling it with me? Say it… you know you want to… ahhhhhhh.

Althought I’m a little biased, its not too shabby a beginning for the living room. Now I just gotta get some pictures up of the kitchen, it’s got quite the sweet setup as well. More to come..

So this topic has come up in past conversations, and I think I’d like to bring it up here now. If you’re not aware of the current situation of global oil production and usage, I strongly recommend taking a look at peakoil.org.

In short, we’re going to be running out of oil pretty damn soon (oil peak within a few years) if we continue our oil consumption trend - a trend that is the basis for our speciously ever-increasing economic growth.

It all stems from our entire economy, heck civilization, being entirely driven by consuption. Everything we do to improve our economic standing, beyond just driving our gas-guzzling SUVs to work, consumes a ridiculous amount of oil. And you might think SUVs is our biggest worry and be quick to point out the solution:
“Don’t worry Rafal, we’ll come up with hybrid/electric engines and that’ll save the day!”

But what we drive isn’t even the main factor of oil consumption. The biggest consumer of oil barrels is the transportation of goods - which , not too surprisingly, is positively correlated with the economy. And all our cheap Dell products rely on getting to our doorsteps at an affordable rate.. which isn’t going to be very easy when gas prices skyrocket. And there just isn’t a cheap alternative to oil, sorry. Replacing all those trucks/transport units with electric/alternative energy engines? Good luck.

So if everything is so intertwined with oil prices, what’ll happen when the price for a barrel goes up from 60 dollars to 180 dollars? The End of Suburbia? You tell me.

You might be quick to say, “But Rafal, that’s 3 times as much as it currently is?!?!”

True, and I’m no expert on how quickly the price of oil will go up when the demand is overtaking the supply. However, Bush’s energy advisor, Matthew Simmons, is stating:

“The figure I’d use is around $182 a barrel. We need to price oil realistically to control its demand. That is because global production is peaking.”

“If we price oil correctly it could give us time to find bridge fuels, fuels to fill the gap between an oil economy and a renewable economy. But I don’t see that happening.”

Source

He has more interesting insight on his page here.

Even Mr. Simmons thinks we’re such oil hungry consumers that at current our rate, we’ll be run dry before society will be able to adapt to a huge deline in oil production. That’s short for: it’s going to be one hell of a ride - real soon.

This has some serious implications on how the world is going to operate in the next few years. I don’t think our economic progress will continue to increase the way it has.. it’s just not possible, unless of course, we find some alternative fuel that is as affordable and efficient. Sorry NIF, not soon enough.

Something tells me that it’s about that time to start investing in gold.

I normally really like Apple designs. They provide, for the most part, some of the best looking consumer electronics.. hands down. But I really got a gripe with their new ipod nano.

I was truly excited to get my hands on it (given that my mini plummeted to its death when I was taking things out of my car), but when I did, all my feeling of excitement just went.. poof.

The nano is the cheapest feeling device I’ve ever placed in my hand. Seriously, it’s like cheap plastic.. what the hell?? My credit card feels more solid in construction than this thing.

So I ask myself, what constitutes good design?? Well, this probably isn’t an all inclusive list but it sure does include most if it.. and it requires all three:

1. Overall Looks
2. Durability
3. Utility

But Rafal, the nano looks ok, yeah? Well sure it does, if it weren’t made of cheap plastic softer than the lint in my pocket. There are reports of this thing being scratched in people’s pockets with nothing but bubble gum wrappers. Don’t believe me? Look at any nano at the mac store. You can barely read the screen on some of the units. Seriously, who decided to use plastic for this thing?

From the utility perspective, it’s nice.. why? because it’s a mini. And let me just bring one tidbit up since I digress. The mini had it right. It was perfect*. When I picked up my mini, it felt like a hermetically sealed device forged of metal from Mt. Doom. It was the epitome of design. Hell, even the original ipod design sucked compared to the mini. Yes, sucked.

So check this out. Here’s how I’d design the ipod nano which would make me lead designer at Apple: Take the mini and make it smaller. Boom, done. Promotion.

To whomever designed the mini, I kiss you. It takes genius to create something original. But to whomever designed the nano (given that the mini design existed), you make me angry.

But Rafal, can’t you just put a sleeve on it?!?!11! While this is a good observation and is something I’m actually considering, I can’t stand hiding an inferior design with a retarded, bulky case**. This is a nano.. a case would make it.. not so nano. The real issue, however, is a matter of principle. I could, technically, get any crappy looking player out there and put on it a stupid plasic/rubber condom on it. And what would I have as a result? A more feature-full device that looks just as crappy as your clunky, albeit protected, ipod. Lets hope the new cases would make this last point moot.

The reason why ipods rock is because of the design and simplicity. It just looks cool. It’s built well. It doesn’t feel cheap when you hold it. It would pain me to have to cover up a flawed design with a sleeve.

So does the Nano completely suck? Well of course not. I’m still torn because this thing is still hot despite my initial disappointment, and lets face it, I’m in desperate need to get something to replace my mini. But I’m pretty damn hesitant at this point.. I might even just get another mini. In all honesty, I’m just frustrated because Apple had such an amazing opportunity with this thing to get it right. Blech. It’s too bad other company designs suck more.

* The mini does actually had a flaw - it’s not solid state. But that’s not so much a flaw with it’s design rather than a fundamental limitation of the technology. It just wasn’t economical to produce a 4GB flash based device at the time. If they could stick a 4 GB memory card in this thing, I’d get it in a heartbeat over the nano.. even if it were exactly the same size.

** There are some nice sleeves coming out there like the invisi-shield, but it kills me to think that Apple could have spent just a few dollars to make this product as good in quality as the Mini - Brushed metal and glass.

You’ve been hearing a lot of talk about how men are dirtier than women. In all fairness (and this is in the general case, cause lets face it, not every woman can top Mr. Clean), it’s probably true. But what about another, indeed more profound, question:

Are women more evil than men? You tell me.

Job Opening

The FBI had an opening for an assassin. After all the background
checks, interviews and testing were done there were 3 finalists. Two men
and a woman.

For the final test, the FBI agents took one of the men to a large
metal door and handed him a gun. “We must know that you will follow your
instructions no matter what the circumstances. Inside the room you will
find your wife sitting in a chair. Kill Her!!!”
“The first man said, “You can’t be serious, I could never shoot my
wife” The agent said, “Then you’re not the right man for this job. Take your
Wife and go home.”

The second man was given the same instructions. He took the gun
and went into the room. All was quiet for about 5 minutes. The man came
out with tears in his eyes, “I tried, but I can’t kill my wife.” The agent
said, “You don’t have what it takes. Take your wife and go home.”

Finally, it was the woman’s turn. She was given the same
instructions, to kill her husband. She took the gun and went into the room.
Shots were heard, one after another. They heard screaming, crashing,
banging on the walls. After a few minutes, all was quiet. The door opened
slowly and there stood the woman, She wiped the sweat from her brow. “This
gun is loaded with blanks” she said. “I had to beat him to death with the
chair.”

Clearly, there’s no debate. You can thank Jason for sending me this.

I was passing by someone’s desk today and saw this on their wall. The geek in me couldn’t resist posting it, and I’m sure many nerds will appreciate

I stumbled upon a crazy link sent to our intern mailing list searching for something, and I felt like I just had to share this.. amazing talent. I mean seriously people, how do you get good at something like this? … Actually, I should ask.. how many tries did it take to film it?!

Looks like ATI just released the specs on their hot new card to compete with the Geforce 7800 lineup - (the 7xxx series is what I’m currently working on). You’d think after taking their dandy time, the 7800 would finally be dethroned.. but what do we really have from the ATI side?

Well for starters, it’s only packing 16 pipelines compared to the 24 of the 7800. Granted, the pipeline stage of the R520 seems tighter than the 7800 since it has a significantly higher clock rate (700 mhz vs 600). Hell, this is actually pretty dang fast for graphics cards.. I could only imagine how good the memory bandwidth on that sucker is. But honestly, I’m baffled by lack of pipelines. I’ve been hearing mixed reports that this is indeed their new architecture.. with a unified pixel/vertex shader pipe. But why 16? I mean, if you’re unifying it, I’d expect something much greater since at any given time, only the vertex program or pixel shader program could be utilizing them all… and I believe this is what they’re attempting with the XBox 360. Either way, new architecture or not, it still doesn’t meet up to standards with the 7800.. and it’s 100 bucks more expensive! I mean, it even fairs worse at HL2, and that’s totally optimized for ATI cards! Given our real competition will be the R580 in a few months, they better come up with something revolutionary beyond just tweaking the clock rate and adding pipes to the R520.. or seriously, I’m taking a vacation.

I must admit the contrast is stark - living in California compared to Atlanta, economically, is like comparing a Bently to a Civic. But in reality, what you get with California, is the Civic.. with 3 doors missing… with 192k miles, and the engine isn’t included in the price, sweet. Regardless, I’m happy to finally be here. Although I’ll be pushing around my engineless civic, at least I’ll get to do so in sunny California. Not the worst deal if you squint… really really hard.

Yet, I’ve still no place to live. We’ve come close to landing some really sweet deals out here in Palo Alto and Mountain View (like the engine actually was included?).. but deals like that get snatched up faster than a good looking single woman in a San Jose bar. And one doesn’t need to dive much further into that discussion. Lets just say fast doesn’t quite do the description justice.

But it’s all good. I’m very happy where I am right now and I’m looking foward to settling into my new Californian home. Exciting times up ahead, stay tuned.

I think it all started when my dad gave me some money for a new computer and found out I bought two Voodoo 2’s (old school SLI baby) and a Riva TNT 2 ( yeah it was kinda hard to explain that one, but it did have better 3d image quality). Although at the time I didn’t quite see the big picture, I’m sure he knew deep down inside what’s up. I guess it just took me a little longer (and some serious detours in school) to figure it all out. But somehow it all sorted itself out, and here I am. Welcome NVIDIA, I KISS YOU!!!

Yep, I’ve decided to do the big move and head to California where I’ll be joining the GPU architecture group. So here I am, looking over my relocation package.. thinking about how much I’ll miss the humidity and mosquitoes in GA. Actually, GA has grown on me over the many years of being here, kinda like a mosquito bite that gets bigger and bigger and you just keep wanting to scratch it. But no matter how much I’ll deny it, I’ll definitely miss certain aspects of GA - particularly being close to all my friends and family (the mosquitoes can stay, thanks). But alas, there comes a time when you just have to let go and start over. And in a way I’m very lucky, because NVIDIA makes that whole process just that much easier. Yeah, and sunny California doesn’t hurt either. Sweet.

So to all my peeps on the east coast, I bid farewell to all the memories we’ve shared. Just remember to make sure to let me know if you ever go out of the country and visit the western Californian continent. I’ll be around.

Wow, what can I say. Me and my legs are going through divorce right now… they’re not really fond of me in the slightest. But finally, the race is done.. at a lackluster 4:17:27. In the Mens, I placed 1948-3123. Wow, depressing.

Yeah ok, so it’s not very spectacular, but at least I finished the damn thing and jogged the entire time, save taking a leak in an extra scrumptious porta-potty, defecated by thousands of gel-sustained, sick-to-the-stomach marathon runners. Leaving that thing made me want run away.. fast. Hell, it was probably a big contributor to my second half time.

So it pretty much boiled down to this - first half was pretty bad. I started with 10 minute miles .. even though I knew that I could have run way faster in the very beginning. I resisted the temptation. It was pretty depressing running 10 minute miles when you know you can do better, but given I haven’t really run past 12 miles in months (honestly I’m thinking the farthest I went was 18 in one day, but that was 12, break, 6), hell if I knew how far I could go. Yep, I was convinced, 10-minute miles it was.

I then hit the golden gate bridge around mile 6. Damn it was packed. Even if you wanted to pick up the pace, you were locked into a slow 11-12 minute fast walk speed (although I resisted actually walking). Serves me right for starting with the 4:40 people.

But after finishing the half marathon finish line at a turtle-like 2:20ish, it cleared up - the half marathoners finished up, and the roads started getting wider. I then decided it would be a good idea to pick up the pace a little and try to break 4:00, so I did 8 minute miles for the next few. I realized, though, if I were really to break 4:00, I’d have to run the next half marathon in 1:40, which is pretty fast considering if I did that the entire time, it’d be like 3:20. Right, .. slow down.

My second half time was about 1:56ish. I’m not as embarrassed by this considering it’s already after having run 13.1 miles. But hey, it’s definitely a starting point upon which I can improve in the future. So I will say this now - SF Marathon 2006, I will definitely have you under 4:00. I just hope my legs didn’t hear that, ha.

So here I am, sitting at my computer in comfort with a piece of paper in front of me that says, Welcome to the 2005 San Francisco Marathon, your confirmation number is MARATHONONORDER-112115.

Damn.

So I did it. I’m ganna run this thing. Run it well? Probably not - I really haven’t been doing the training that is needed to ensure I’ll finish this thing. Most wouldn’t really call it training at all… it’s been way too crazy of a summer (a good thing!) to actually fit in real training. But hell, why not give it a shot? What’s the worst that can happen, Boston’s Children Hospital gets half of my 100 dollar registration fee? Not such a pity in my book.

After I collapse (hopefully after the finish line), I’ll be sure to let everyone know how badly I did. Check back soon, the big run starts in t-minus 30 hours. And pray tonight that my right ankle holds up..

I finally got around to posting pictures of our road trip. Posting this series was particularly difficult because we took so many pictures - I had to select just enough to not overload my server. Pity.

I will be quick to admit that this trip was without a doubt the best road trip we’ve ever had, so I hope you all enjoy viewing the pictures as much as we enjoyed having taken them.

I’ve finally got around to setting up my gallery (linked on the right side of the page).. although I haven’t added much yet (only a small gallery of building David’s supercomputer), more will be coming soon. I think I’ll try to start off by posting some road trip pictures and work my way up in time.. the only problem is there have been so many pictures since then, I just might end up running out of webspace! Stay tuned..

This is perhaps the fluffiest song I’ve ever heard, and to think it was required singing at Zi’s KPMG Dallas training!

With lyrics like:

KPMG, we’re strong as can be
A dream of power and energy
We go for the gold
Together we hold onto our vision of global strategy.

Doesn’t this just make you want to snuggle and hold hands!? Not quite the song I’d imagine for global domination created by a multi-billion dollar company. Zi, are you feeling the power and energy yet? Tell us all how you felt singing this one, LOL! You can thank Mr. Dave for letting this one out, haha… nice touch Dave, nice touch.

In fact, I just found out that the KPMG guys that made that MP3 just so happend to make this dance training video! SWEET!

What can I say, this is probably the most intense thing we’ve done this summer! I’ve gone ahead and posted the divx movie of my jump here. Remember, you’ll need divx to actually view this thing - and it’s fairly large because it’s 6 minutes.

When your feet are secure on the ground the entire week before the event, there are no worries.. you don’t really think about what you’ve gotten yourself into. However, when you’re actually in the plane ascending to 15k feet, it then hits you - you know that the only way out is through the door of the airplane…. and it’s at that point you start thinking, dude wtf am I doing?!

Once you’ve got your feet dangling off the side of the airplane, it’s pretty much too late at that point to worry about anything.. and you just go with it. The freefall is the most amazing feelings ever - it’s like riding on a cushion of air at 130 mph. The only part that really worried me was when we were gliding down in the parachute, just because if that thing unstrapped or something, lol… yeahhh. In reality though, you don’t have time to worry about anything. Your mind just wants to admire one of the most beautiful landscapes.. and you get to do it from such great heights. Gotta love it. Everyone should go skydiving at least once, you won’t regret it.