Sunday, September 10, 2006
It's a good thing that I sold my share of the restaurant business. Although I truly enjoy cooking and preparing cuisines that are delicious, at the time when I was comtemplating about my stressful lifestyle and future, I was pretty messed up. I was always too stressed. In the day I was exhausting my brain doing research and thinking about complicated experiments and mathematical models. By about 4pm I had to leave my work and go to the restaurant for physical work. I did not have enough time for other things such as leisure and sports. I even had headaches and neck pains that required chiropractic sessions. Basically I was messed up.
It didn't take long for me to realise that this isn't the right thing anymore. Basically I've learnt everything about running a restaurant business including most of the culinary preparation skills. And my time would be running out for the completion of my PhD.
And it didn't take long for the results to turn positive. I've moved out to my own studio apartment close to uni. Here's a view from my room.
My research has progressed so significantly that we could probably wrap up the experiments by the end of the year. All robotics researchers know that achieving really accurate force control for a large robotic manipulator is damn difficult because of problems like torque ripple, dynamics and inertia due to the heavy mechanism, motor and gearing effects. With Shape Memory Alloys, we've achieved that. This material has always been considered slow and inaccurate. With the experimental set-up we have in the lab, we are doing many new experiments that were never thought of before and the results are simply breath-taking. Who would thought that Shape Memory alloys could even produce mechanical response in the audio range? Just listen to this.
I've submitted a paper for ICRA'07 (The International Conference for Robotics and Automation) which will be held in Italy next year. So I'm looking forward to attending this conference and doing some travelling in Europe.
I also plan to enrol in a vocational culinary course next year. I've always enjoyed cooking, so maybe it's just to fulfil one of my desires to have a formal 'qualification' and acknowledgement of my restaurant experiences. It would be interesting to have both a PhD in Robotics as well as a culinary diploma :)
Winter is almost over. I'm actually looking forward to spring actually. It's the time of Floriade in Canberra. A time when flowers bloom and the skies are blue. A good time to try out my new Landroller skates on the bicycle and jogging paths around the Lake Burley Griffin.
Okay, that's all from me for now. The next time I blog, I will probably be talking about our experiences doing hang-gliding, or maybe about the culinary experience we had in a Sydney Japanese-French fusion cuisine restaurant, whose chef and owner has been awarded the Three Chef's Hats honour, as well as being voted the best restaurant in Australia and the 5th around the world, Tetsuya's.
Cheers
Yee Harn
It didn't take long for me to realise that this isn't the right thing anymore. Basically I've learnt everything about running a restaurant business including most of the culinary preparation skills. And my time would be running out for the completion of my PhD.
And it didn't take long for the results to turn positive. I've moved out to my own studio apartment close to uni. Here's a view from my room.
My research has progressed so significantly that we could probably wrap up the experiments by the end of the year. All robotics researchers know that achieving really accurate force control for a large robotic manipulator is damn difficult because of problems like torque ripple, dynamics and inertia due to the heavy mechanism, motor and gearing effects. With Shape Memory Alloys, we've achieved that. This material has always been considered slow and inaccurate. With the experimental set-up we have in the lab, we are doing many new experiments that were never thought of before and the results are simply breath-taking. Who would thought that Shape Memory alloys could even produce mechanical response in the audio range? Just listen to this.
I've submitted a paper for ICRA'07 (The International Conference for Robotics and Automation) which will be held in Italy next year. So I'm looking forward to attending this conference and doing some travelling in Europe.
I also plan to enrol in a vocational culinary course next year. I've always enjoyed cooking, so maybe it's just to fulfil one of my desires to have a formal 'qualification' and acknowledgement of my restaurant experiences. It would be interesting to have both a PhD in Robotics as well as a culinary diploma :)
Winter is almost over. I'm actually looking forward to spring actually. It's the time of Floriade in Canberra. A time when flowers bloom and the skies are blue. A good time to try out my new Landroller skates on the bicycle and jogging paths around the Lake Burley Griffin.
Okay, that's all from me for now. The next time I blog, I will probably be talking about our experiences doing hang-gliding, or maybe about the culinary experience we had in a Sydney Japanese-French fusion cuisine restaurant, whose chef and owner has been awarded the Three Chef's Hats honour, as well as being voted the best restaurant in Australia and the 5th around the world, Tetsuya's.
Cheers
Yee Harn
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