Matfoo’s Weblog

Ace Kart is claimed to be the best Go Kart place in Melbourne, Australia. It’s located in the suburb of Albion-Sunshine (20 minutes drive from CBD). Their motto of Real Life Racing is no joke. You will eventually understand as you read along this post. If you have a group of 12 and above, you can place your booking and have the whole track to yourself for 25-40 minutes depending on the package you are interested in.

Enough of those introduction. The cell group organised a Go Kart experience as the social activity for this month.

Ace Kart – Real Life Racing

14 of us (including 3 invited friends) had the track to ourselves for 25 minutes. After trying Go Karting twice back in Malaysia, I always ended up last because of my weight and in addition to the kart used back home were of lower horsepower. Hence, the lighter you are, the higher the chances of you going fast. So, I assumed the similar thing would happen here. And I was wrong…..

When Ace Kart says, you will enjoy Real Life Racing, you ARE going to enjoy Real Life Racing. The Kart used were very powerful and it can reach the speed of 50-55km/h (I don’t know the exact speed I was traveling at but the simulator at Ace Kart website has the exact figure).

I’ve never seen such a high tech place for Go Karting. Using touch screens computer, we were to register ourselves before entering the track. After all the members of the group had arrived, then the track marshal gave us a safety briefing. The briefing took about 5-10 minutes. After the briefing, it was suit up time, and off to the pit and it’s racing time. The package we signed up for consist of 10 minutes of practice and qualifying and 15 minutes of racing.

*ahem…The Stig Malaysia, Me ready for practice/qualifying.

The Kart was really powerful and you can feel the G-force pushing you around as you negotiate the corner and over the chicane. I thought my years of training on the computer simulator (it’s actually F1 Games ) does come in useful for me to learn to the take the best racing line.

After qualifying, the marshal informed us of the our qualifying position. I qualified 6th. Not bad for a start considering you can do all sorts of daredevil in the computer games but not here .

P6 after qualifying.

When the race started, all the adrenaline was pumped up and all the excitement begins. I must say, I had a very enjoyable time battling with the 5th placing driver. All my attempts to overtake were cleverly blocked for good 10 laps before a lapped kart helped me to do my overtaking. It felt like how Hakkinen overtook Schumacher using the help of a lapped car of Zonta in F1Belgian GP in 2000. (You can watch how Hakkinen did it here). Hehehe…I’m dramatising it up.

On the 12th lap, there’s yellow flag situation with one of the safety tyre was no longer at the safety position and hence, a safety car situation was deployed. (Of course, there’s no real safety car but the scenario did look like one). So… after the marshal fix the incident, and the restart get underway.

Restart after a safety car situation.

So, the race continued. I lost out too much time trying to overtake the 5th position driver and the safety car didn’t help much as there were few lapped kart in between me and 4th place. So at the end of 15th minute, I ended up 5th without much progress. Negotiating through the lapped kart was also a challenge as there’s no blue flag

Anyway, it was a thrilling and exciting experience. I was quite amazed by the “seriousness” of Ace Kart with their motto. At the end of the race, there’s a podium ceremony and the top three were awarded with prizes by Ace Kart.

There’s even podium ceremony – don’t play play.

Unfortunately, due to the confusion by the Ace Kart staff, the 3rd place winner shown in the picture was not the podium finisher. The correct result was only clarified 10 minutes later where the photo taking sessions were already over. So, being a true sportsman, the 3rd place (in the pic) gave his winning prize to the original 3rd place winner. This scenario reminded me of Fisichella’s win being reinstated after 1 week of FIA clarification in 2003 F1 Brazilian GP.

Ace Kart even emailed us our time each lap we did in the circuit. How cool is that. This is indeed Real Life Racing.

Our time set each lap. The highlighted black color time indicates personal best time.

This brings back memories of yesteryears

BBC got the idea of The Stig from here?

Ok…Flora has finally written about our trip during the weekend escape. Hence, I include the links to all the 5 parts of her post and a final link to all the pictures that we had taken during the trip.

Weekend Escape Part 1

Weekend Escape Part 2

Weekend Escape Part 3

Weekend Escape Part 4

Weekend Escape Part 5

Weekend Escape Pictures

Enjoy…….

Finally a time for short break. A weekend escape to Lorne. To show how’s our journey for the weekend, refer to the map below.

From the map, A – Melbourne, B – Lorne, C – Port Campbell

You may be asking, any holidays? Special occasion? etc? Well, a friend of ours (a doctor) has a weekend job in the Lorne Hospital, so instead of him going alone, why not we tag along. And, yea, that’s how we ended up in Lorne. From the map, the journey from A to B to C is about 273km. We drove along the Great Ocean Road and the scenic view was just splendid. I will not show much of the pictures here and I will refer you to Flora’s blog for all the pictures. But I will post some of the pictures here as “sneak preview” to our weekend escape. These pictures were taken on our way back to Melbourne.

During the 2005, DeepaRaya holidays, we had no where to go. So when our pastor also cell group leader in CDPC invited us to join them for a trip to Batu Pahat, both our eyes went *ding*. To know where is Batu Pahat, as usual, maps of Batu Pahat below.

Map of Batu Pahat, Johor, Malaysia

Well, Batu Pahat means Chiseled (Pahat) Rock (Batu). Hence, you see this icon in the town.

Flora trying to imitate the icon with a little “help”….

We stayed overnight at pastor’s place so we can wake up early and leave early and reach early to eat breakfast… chai tou kueh (some kueh made from white carrots.. like carrot kueh like that lah). So, we left I think about 6am in the morning.. i can’t remember… you can see all the sleepyheads climbing into the van, one of them was me… that’s why I can’t remember what time we left!! So once in the van, the kids and I dozed off right away.

We reached Batu Pahat I think at 9am or something like that, pastor and wife wasted no time at all in tapaoing food from stalls after stalls… and you can bring outside food into cafe one you know… *culture shock*

Lontong and Nasi Lemak

Wantan Mee with Duck Meat

Kueh Chap (pretty much like the one in Kuching)

From the time we reached Batu Pahat until we fell asleep again, we ate and ate and ate and ate. I’ve never ate so “crazy” before. After finishing our eating here, get in the van, stop somewhere, eat again, get in the van, stop somewhere, eat again. The next morning, same thing!! Get in the van, stop somewhere, eat, eat, eat, eat, eat.

NOTE: I thought I learned something pretty useful. And hence, I’m sharing this in this post. If this method is already “normal” to you, then please bear with this long post.

CAUTION: Long winding reading may be needed to grasp the concept as my choice of explanation in this writing here may be limited by my choice of words. Sincere apologies about that.

Recently the University of Melbourne Graduate School of Engineering conducted a workshop on Literature Review. It’s a two, 3-hour session conducted over the span of two weeks. I ALMOST felt that this workshop is QUITE a waste of time as for the first 5 hours of the workshop, I thought the method used by the instructor to conduct the workshop was pretty impractical. The instructor split us into groups of year 1 postgraduate students and by asking ourselves what problem we faced in the stage of research, and discuss among ourselves what approaches we used to address it? Alright, probably I wasn’t paying much attention or I can’t really grasp what the instructor is trying to achieve. So…..the first 5 hours (at least in the group I’m in) was basically you look at me and I look at you kind of thing. With some polite smile and some attempt to break the ice. Some of the ice were broken way beyond the scope of the workshop as some students talked about child care and family. And the instructor would walk around the groups (I think there were about 10 groups) and imagine by the time she finished her round, it would be time to go.

My thought was, splitting us into groups without proper guidance was not such a good idea because we (students) are lumping problems on top of problems without much of the solution. It’s not like my approach is better than yours as we are all in the same boat. The only reason to stay on is because this workshop is COMPULSORY and LUNCH is provided

Thank God there’s 6 hours in this workshop. By the 6th hour, the instructor reached our group and I asked the instructor about our (at least mine) main problem.

Me: How can you read a journal paper which is 10-20 pages long bombarded with complex mathematical equations? Not to say write a good literature review about it.

Instructor: Ahh…. I’ll show you. Give me a paper. (All of use were asked to bring along 3 papers to the workshop).

So, I passed the instructor a journal paper of around 12 pages long. The instructor read the abstract and the conclusion loud and slow while sketching something on a piece of paper. The sketch is shown here.

(PLEASE CLICK ON THE PICTURE FOR THE FULL SCALE VIEW.) For those who are KEEN, the abstract and conclusions are presented here. Otherwise, just skip through this italic text.

The Abstract and Conclusion of the paper is as such:

Abstract:

In this paper, models of the water level in an irrigation channel are derived from system identification experiments. We present the complete system identification procedure from experiment design to model validation, taking into account prior physical information and that the intended use of the models is prediction and control. It is shown that first and second order models capture the main trends in the data well. It is also shown that a third order nonlinear model with the ability to represent wave dynamics gives remarkably accurate prediction.

Conclusion:

In this paper, system identification of irrigation channels has been considered. The complete system identification procedure from experiment design to model validation has been presented and prior information has been taken into account. It was found that a third order nonlinear model gave very accurate predictions. It was even able to predict waves. While the first and second order models were not able to capture waves, they represented the main trends in the data well. For the short pool a first order model was found sufficient, while a second order model gave better performance for the long pool.

The results obtained are very good. However, system identifications models are only valid under the operating conditions they were derived, and although the models presented here have been put to the test under varied conditions, there is still more work to be done. The most important areas are the drowned conditions when the top of the gate is below the downstream water level and undershot gates which are different types of gates where the water flows under the gates instead of over them. At the Haughton Main Channel, most of the gates cannot be drowned since there is considerable drop in bed elevation just after the gates, and hence we were not able to obtain data under such conditions.

Experimentation like the one described in this paper causes at times large variations in the water levels and this is rarely acceptable under normal operating conditions of an irrigation channel. Closed loop

As the results presented in this paper are very promising, there is a large potential for the use of system identification models in control design and decision support systems for better management and utilisation of water resources. identification is therefore an important issue, and it has been shown that reliable models can be obtained with short experiment times with only a few centimeters deviations in water levels from setpoint.

The instructor is a fan of pictorial/conceptual mapping. Just from the abstract and conclusion, she sketched out the details. The abstract were written in GREEN marker while the conclusions were in BLUE marker. The RED box is your objective. So, basically, based on the objective, you decipher from the abstract and conclusion of the paper on whether this paper is relevant to you or not? Only when your objective were sort of met in this paper, then you go into the details. The bonus is, at least you have a very general idea about  this paper and you can make a simple summary/literature review out of it. Voila! As straightforward as it is (says the instructor).

Once the instructor finished the sketches, we were all “enlighten”. “Oooo”-s and “Aahh”-s followed through. Currently, I’m practising this method and I thought it really helps me a lot. I hope this post is helpful. Cheers!

My Sample 1

My Sample 2

We had a tour to China from 20 August to 26 August 2005. Visited Beijing, Tianjin and Chengde. Here are some beautiful scenaries of the main landmark places we visited. To show where are all these places, here the map taken from Google Map.

Beijing, Tianjin and Chengde

Tiananmen Square

Forbidden Kingdom

Summer Palace

Great Wall of China

We are here! One of the wonders of the world, The Great Wall of China

Temple of Heaven

Cultural Street in TIANJIN

Splendid view at Summer Palace in CHENGDE

Julien completed his six months intership in Melbourne University and the research team threw a farewell dinner for him. We went to a Greek restaurant in Fitzroy to bid a Greek farewell for Julien.

Au revoir Julien

So the Greek restaurant that we visited is called Pireaus Blues. We ordered the banquet menu as indicated by the figure below.

The Banquet Menu

We were hungry that we indulged ourselves into the food that we forgot to take any picture of the food. Hence, based on the menu, I googled almost all the pictures of the dishes we had. The pictures I put here are the one that resemble almost 90% of the food we had in Pireaus Blue.

Selections of homemade dips with bread

Dolmades

Sagamaki

Spestofai

Grilled sword fish

Deep fried calamari

Greek Salad

Chargrilled lamb and chicken Souvlakia

Loukoumades

So, the restaurant looks like this (with the whole group).

While waiting for the food

While having the meal.

The food was not too bad. At least I have tried Greek food considering there’s quite a large Greek community in Melbourne.