I really enjoy building things with the Zome construction set. In Vancouver you can buy it from me via Mindspark Enterprises, which has the most complete inventories of Zome in the Lower Mainland.
Nowadays I read mostly non-fiction. Areas of interest include
computers,
mathematics,
science,
graphic design,
and Chinese philosophy.
One book that has profoundly affected me is Douglas Hofstadter's "Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid".
My text adventure game "Beyond the Tesseract" was inspired by this book.
Light
On a lighter note, I find
Dave Barry's humour column very funny. I also like Rita Rudner's comedy.
Reference Works
I have a great interest in reference works,
in particular the following types.
visual dictionaries
CD-ROM reference works
thematically organized works
Here is a list of some of the reference materials I have compiled.
Roget's Thesaurus is probably the most well known thematic classification of words. However, there are many other classifications of words, which I found out after reading Tom McArthur's book "Worlds of Reference", about the history of lexicography. I started compiling this list in the early 1990's because I was fascinated by this way of looking at knowledge.
The motivation for this project came in 2004 when Sciam stopped publishing an annual index in their December issues. The first version of the index was derived from the annual indexes, and contain only the article title. The second version here was derived from the monthly contents from the sciamdigital website, and includes both article title and summary.
This started as a one-page companion to the Scientific American article index, showing the thumbnail cover art of the issues from 1993 onward. It gradually grown to include international editions of Sciam and cover art from over 90 other science magazines.
This is a basic periodic table, with the distinguishing feature of including the Chinese name of the element. The motivation for this project came in 2005 when I was studying and translating some Chinese science articles. I needed a handy resource for working with element names but couldn't find 1-page updated version of the periodic table with both English and Chinese, so I created one. There are two versions; one version is the conventional table, and the other includes placeholders for undiscovered elements with the theoretical g-block.
I enjoy watching action movies, in particular
Hong Kong action movies
involving Tsui Hark 徐克,
Ching Siu-Tung 程小東,
Jet Li 李連杰,
Jackie Chan 成龍,
and Yuen Wo-Ping 袁和平.
Tokusatsu
Japanese "monster" shows are still fun after all these years.
Up here in Vancouver BC we don't have access to much of it, but
one can only hope.
Ultraman.
So many Urutoraman in the last several decade:
Tiga, Dyna, Gaia, Agul, Neos, Seven 21, Cosmos, and now Noa and Nexus!
I was lucky to see "Tiga: The Final Odyssey" on VCD; excellent!
The last line in the movie is from Daigo (after passing Asuka)
"You must work hard. You're our new hope". Wonderful way to "pass the torch".
I discovered new age music in 1982, after a friend lent me his
soundtrack album to Carl Sagan's Cosmos TV series. About the same time,
I had the good fortune to listen to Kitaro's Silk Road double ablum.
I was hooked. Back then, the whole genre wasn't even called "new age".
I've seen stores put everthing under Rock, Electronic Music, and even
Alternative. I'm glad now there is at least a name for the genre,
even though the name mistakenly makes some people think this is just
elevator/healing music.
Besides new age music, my other musical tastes include the following.
Chinese pop (a by-product of learning about Chinese and Hong Kong).
Eric Chen 陳冠宇 (who play piano versions of Cantonese pop)
modern musicals (particularly Lloyd Webber and Schonberg)
classical (mostly Baroque and "popular favorites")
Toys
Books
Comic strips
Entertainment
Movies
Music
Screen Savers
Photography