Tips for Traveling with a Baby in Japan - Travel Gears

We traveled with Boyan, our 13-month son last month to Japan (for those who are wondering, yep, he is the main reason why this blog has been so quiet in the past couple of years. :-)) and spent a unforgettable 10 days there. Before I went there, I searched over the …

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Data-Oriented Programming (DOP)

JSON is arguably the world's most popular human readable data format today.  It has largely replaced XML as the data exchange format on the Internet. One of the key reasons for the proliferation of JSON is its simplicity.  The data structure are very limited: only arrays, enclosed with []; and objects …

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Museum and Cultural Tour of Bulgaria in 9 Days - Day 1 (More)

We were quite amazed by the National Archaeological Museum, especially the Thracian treasures. 

The museum is located in the largest and oldest former Ottoman Mosque in Sofia.

Thracian treasures. Can you believe that they were made before the Roman Empire?

Gold jewery

Gold wreath

Gold mask and ring from Thracian …

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How to get a kitty manicure

Speaker: Tom

Dear fellow kitties, I am going to show you how to get a kitty manicure and pedicure.

First of all, let me show you my beautiful finger nails. My mom polishes each and every one of them on a weekly basis. Such weekly pampering is essential for a …

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My First Encounter with Dirty Diaper

Today I have encountered dirty diaper for the very first time in my life and it is not pretty.  While doing routine cleaning of our guest bathroom, I was shocked to discover a stack of dirty diaper deposited in the trash can in our guest bathroom.  I am still struggling …

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Pursue of the Perfect Solution for Cat Hair (1) --- Vacuum

If you have one or more long hair cats at home, like our Mayori and Tom, you probably share the same dream as us --- a house without cat hair, at least a house without having cat hair everywhere.

Towards this dream, we have tried out various products. Here is a …

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High Resolution Image for Pdflatex

While preparing the camera-ready version for our CIKM demo, my colleagues and I found that the screenshot included in our paper appeared to be fairly blurry in the pdf version, even though the original .jpg file looks fine.

I searched online to try to find the solutions. After a few …

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Screen Saver Option Disabled on Windows 7/XP

For unknown reason, my machines would suddenly disable their screen saver options (e.g. with the "on resume, display log on screen" check box grayed out). Whenever this happens, it would trigger the security alert and I will get a warning from the IT department to fix the issue.

I …

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Machine Learning That Matters

I happen to come across this excellent article from this year's ICML on Machine Learning that Matters. I encourage everyone, especially computer science Ph.D students, to read it.

As an industrial researcher who draws a lot of job satisfaction by making both scientific and practical impact, I completely agree …

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Commonly Used Forms for Home Remodeling/Repairs

As a new home owner, we have been going through a lot of home remodeling and repair projects. I found myself often search online for the same set of forms again and again. This post is to record all the forms that I often use and sometimes difficult to found …

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