My Friends

Friendship is invaluable. We live and play together. We study in group and work in team. We share joys and tears. It is friendship that brightens our lives! Well, it is hard to measure friendship, but I believe that the best way to characterize it, is by looking at the roads we walked together, by counting the toils and cheers we enjoyed, and by recalling the episodes that weaved our lives together. I treasure every moment I spent with my friends.

In what follows, I grouped the pieces of description into some large sections. Some of them really belong to more than one section, so it is at my discretion to put them in the most appropriate one I think. Unless otherwise indicated, within each section, I tried to arrange them in chronological order that we met. Some exception are made to group related entries together. Lastname or surname or family name is capitalized, followed by first name or given name, and then middle name or English name or Christian name, if applicable. Nickname is enclosed in brackets.

If I missed out any of you, please kindly send me an email. Please also update me with your present homepage URL. Thanks.

More photos coming up
	University of Texas at Austin Computer Science Austin Chinese Christian Campus Fellowship Hyde Park Cantonese / Mandarin Fellowship
More photos coming up

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/fengyi/

He is the first Cantonese-speaking friend I made in UT. We had common chat topics because both of us major in Computer Science, and we lived just one block to each other. We took many classes in common, e.g. CS388G Algorithms: Techniques and Theory, CS395T Large Scale Data Mining, CS388L Introduction to Mathematical Logic, CS380D Distributed Computing, and CS395T Real-Time Systems. We worked on class projects together, encouraged and helped each other in studies.

He is very knowledgeable in Chinese literature, very good at sports, esp. basketball, and is a big fan of the NBA star Elliott. But above all, he is a very responsible and dependable person. No matter how difficult and time-pressed is the task, he would always complete it in time, even if he may have to stay awake for the whole night doing it. This is best illustrated in his class projects and TA works. His nice character is also manifested in every minute detail of his daily life. For example, he always washes the dishes immediately after each meal, and never leaves dirty utensils for his roommates even when he is in a hurry. Once he got very angry with me for not completing my part of the project in time. I felt so sorry and I promised him not to make the same mistake again.

Everybody likes his cheerful personality. He is easy-going and helpful so he attracted many friends around him. Once a while, he calls everybody to his house and we have hot-pot dinner together. After that, we may watch a VCD or DVD movie. In spring break 2002, we went to Big Bend National Park with some other friends, and we enjoyed our visit a lot.

http://fivedots.coe.psu.ac.th/~noppadon/

He has a vision -- a vision of an educationist in developing countries. He wants to revolutionize the living standards of the third-world through proper education, aided by the latest information technologies. Before he came here, he was already a university lecturer in Thailand. He received full scholarship for his studies in UT Austin, a large part of it was funded by the Thai government. Competition was very keen, but the Thai government awarded him the scholarship instead of many others who may do better in terms of academics, because he is the one who would go back to Thai and help the development of the country. While in UT Austin, he wrote several proposals to the Thai Ministry of Education describing how should IT be carried out in rural education in Thailand. He also asked me a lot about the educational system in Hong Kong, and the educational experience I had. He often go into thinking about the philosophical questions underlying education, world economy, religions especially Buddhism, and scientific development especially in the field of artificial intelligence. We visited San Antonio in May 2001. On our way back, we had a long discussion of various religions. It gave both of us new insights into the matter.

Actually he has a Chinese name. When translated into English, it becomes Li Guoquan (in Pinyin), or Lee Kwok-Chuen (in Cantonese). His nickname (Koo^) is taken from a Chinese character "Gu" (same pronounciation in Mandarin and Cantonese), meaning solid and secure. He is also a Thai poet and he published a lot of Thai poems. We also discussed a little bit on the difference between Thai, Chinese and English, and compared some of the Thai poems to Chinese poems.

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/gong/

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/xiangh/

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/laurk/

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/ywwong/

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/phchung/

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/ylee/

http://www.csis.hku.hk/~ccwan/

	University of Hong Kong Computer Engineering 2000 Dept of Computer Science & Information Systems Beijing Exchange Trip 1998 French Classes Computer Society, Students Union Information Technology Student Ambassadors

http://www.csis.hku.hk/~ychow/

http://www.csis.hku.hk/~moti/

http://www.csis.hku.hk/~llcheng/

http://www.hkucs.org/~kfkan/

	Sublime from Intellectual Quest to Olympic Spirit IOI 1996, Veszprém, Hungary IOI 1997, Cape Town, South Africa NOI 1997, Hong Kong, China HKOI 1998 to 2000

http://www.cs.umd.edu/~ycwan/

He was my teammate in IOI 1996. He is our big brother in informatics competitions. He started to represent Hong Kong in many programming contests ever since 1993, before I even bought my first computer! He taught us many useful strategies in Hungary, including how to utilize the DOS timer at address $40:$6C. If the problem demands a solution in, say, 20 seconds, then we write our program such that it runs for at most 19.5 seconds and then output the best solution it has found so far. Guess what? He forgot the exact address, so he found a computer, wrote a small program, and then continually dump out the memory with the DOS command debug. After a short while, he figured out the address already! Such trick was not taught in our trainings, but it is so important that I found contestants from nearly all countries using it!

We had an orienteering game in the whole city of Veszprém, Hungary. People all set out in twos and we were in the same group. I was amazed by his excellent ability to recognize directions and plan the best path to go. When it was my turn to read the map, I made a silly mistake of going to the top of a cliff. The checkpoint was directly below us and we saw it, but there was no way to go vertically down a cliff! Later, I found that all these information were implied by the map. He inspired me to learn map-reading, which proved very useful to me in later years.

IOI'96 was my first time representing Hong Kong, but it was already his sixth time and also his last time! He won a bronze medal then and I am sure this was the best gift for his 'retirement'. Afterwards, he became one of the trainers, and contributed to the growth of HKOI until he left Hong Kong for further studies in 1999. He has the power to call together HKOI and pre-HKOI training team members of all ages! So we had many social gatherings that strengthened the friendship between all training team members, past and present. He also initiated an HKOI mailing list, which I continued to maintain for a while after he left Hong Kong.

In summer 2001, I had internship in SRI International, Menlo Park, while he had internship in Xerox Parc, Palo Alto. We lived so close to each other that we usually went out to play together in weekend. We have been to many places, like Stanford and UC Berkeley, San Francisco and San Jose, Monterey and Big Sur, Muir Woods and Point Reyes, Stinson Beach and Half Moon Bay, Yosemite, Lake Tahoe, and Lassen Volcano. We had a great time in California.

http://www.mit.edu/people/ccheng/

Not many girls do very well in informatics competition, and Cheng Mansim is truely exceptional. When Hong Kong first participated in NOI as an observer team in 1995, she was there; and when Hong Kong officially started to join NOI in 1997, she was there too! She was selected to represent Hong Kong in NOI not because NOI's regulation requires at least one girl in each team, but because her performance was indeed among the top. She was my teammate in NOI'97. During our training sessions, she actively participated in our discussion. From the questions she asked and the solutions she proposed, I could see that she thinks very logically and carefully.

She was admitted to MIT so she left Hong Kong shortly after NOI'97. If she stayed in Hong Kong, she would have been selected to go to IOI'97, and hence become the first girl in IOI Hong Kong Team. In HKOI 2000, she set a question for the junior group final event. I was responsible for setting the test data of this question as well as grading it. Her original version was so difficult that people still score very low marks even though we have simplified it a lot in the real competition. We concluded that after receiving MIT education, she became so strong and she thought other people are equally good, that she started to overestimate the ability of others. After she left Hong Kong, she asked me to tutor his younger brother, Cheng Man-Hung Clifford, and we got together very well too. I had dinner with her and her family when she took a rest in Hong Kong momentarily. I heard a lot of interesting stories about MIT from her.

http://www.siulung.com/

I first met him in the 1st (and only) HKIAOC gathering in December 1997. He was in the IMO Hong Kong Training Team. I found him very keen on programming, so I persuaded him to participate in HKOI. Later, he represented Hong Kong in IOI 2000. He was also a reserve member of Hong Kong Team in IMO. So, he was among the few who did well in both IMO and HKOI Hong Kong Training Teams.

In 1999, he won a bronze medal in HKOI. However, at that time, only gold and silver medalists were invited to enter the training team. He asked us if he could sit-in and audit our training classes, and we made an informal arrangement to let him in, provided that there were enough computers for everybody to use. He did extremely well in the team formation test. But due to the rules of the competition, he was not an official training team member so he was not allowed to go to IOI'99. His case was brought to our attention in the trainers' meeting, so the next year, HKOI regulation was amended and we invite all medalists to join the training team. This time, he got a gold medal in HKOI! So if you are a bronze medalist in HKOI, you should really thank him for giving you the chance to officially enter the training team now.

Besides being a technical guy, he also has a business mind. He was working part-time on IT for a few firms when he was still in secondary school. Instead of choosing Computer Science or Mathematics, he majored in Business Administration, which was a big surprise for us. He has his own idea and opinion towards many things. Although sometimes I do not agree with him, I still appreciate his active participation in our discussions in the HKOI newsgroup. After harddisk failure in e-fever.org, he took over the task and migrated the newsgroup to his siulung.com server and became our newsgroup administrator.

http://www.csis.hku.hk/~kftam/

http://mrbadguy.e-fever.org/

You probably know him, or at least heard of his name, if you participated in some computer-related interschool activities. He was very active in this respect. To name but a few, he was a committee member of both Hong Kong Linux User Group (HKLUG) and Hong Kong Palm-Pilot User Group (HKPUG). He was active in the Joint School Electronics and Computer Society (JSECS) and was a South China Morning Post (SCMP) Student Programmer of the Year. When IOI swang from DOS to Linux, he helped a lot to train our team members on Linux. In order to witness this transition and better guide the future development of HKOI, he became our first observer in the history of IOI Hong Kong Team, and went to IOI 2001 in Finland.

Together with some of his friends, most of which are also ex-HKOI teammates, he founded the e-fever.org and initiated the HKOI newsgroup. He was our first newsgroup administrator. The newsgroup proved very effective in bringing together training team members, and also served as a good forum to discuss programming and algorithms. He was also the first one who advocates putting the HKOI application form online, so that students can download it themselves. I visited him and other teammates in NOI'99 in Beijing, and guided them to visit the Tsinghua University and the Xidan Book City.

I gave a public lecture on Black Holes shortly before I left Hong Kong. The talk has nothing to do with informatics, but with the consent of the majority, he and Mr. Matthew Lai cancelled a junior group training in the afternoon, led them all to the lecture theatre of the Hong Kong Space Museum, and listened to my talk!

http://www.csis.hku.hk/~cytse/

He is a superstar in HKOI. He joined HKOI in 1998, after I have 'retired', but I did not start to know him until 1999, when he joined the senior group. He is very diligent and incredibly concentrated when he works. He spent a lot of time in perfecting his programming skills, learning and trying new algorithms, so he knows many useful techniques well ahead of other teammates, and always out-perform them in selection tests by a wide margin. In HKOI 2000 senior group final event, he even scored full mark, which was more than 20% better than the second highest one! There was no such precedence in HKOI before, so in the next few years, his name scared many contestants in HKOI!

NOI'99 was held in Beijing. Incidentally, I was also in Beijing then. So I visited the Hong Kong Team in the competition venue, Beijing Association for Science and Technology, several times, and acted as a translator between Mandarin (i.e. Putonghua) and Cantonese for them during the evaluation sessions. Later, I guided them to visit the Tsinghua University as well as the Xidan Book City. Before I left Hong Kong in 2000, I guided the IOI 2000 Hong Kong Team to visit the University of Hong Kong. Tse Chi-Yung was the only one present in both cases.

He won the largest number of medals for Hong Kong among us all, and is the first one in HKOI who represented Hong Kong in IOI for three consecutive years. Before he 'retired', he also represented Hong Kong in these competitions for six times! After I left Hong Kong in 2000, he succeeded me to maintain the HKOI mailing list. He is also one of the few people I know who understands my Sixinone calculator program. Inspired by my way to deal with matrix operations and 3D coordinate geometry, he wrote a similar program himself from scratch!

He achieved all these with a 80386 laptop computer. Both harddisk and memory space are extremely limited that he could hardly install anything besides a Pascal compiler. I saw his computer in our training camp 2000. The computer was so old that the power switch was already malfunctioning. He had to insert a 5 dollar coin there every time he uses the computer in order to prevent it from automatically switching off! We made fun of it by saying that his computer asked for 5 dollars deposit before allowing anyone to use it. Well, his computer is slow enough so that he can test out his programs, and really feel the difference between a smart and a dumb algorithm.

http://hkoi.uhome.net/

http://www.csis.hku.hk/~hlchan/

	La Salle College, Hong Kong Classmates Mathematics School Team Computer School Team Science Society Kowloon Motor Bus

When I just entered La Salle College, I was inspired by his CASIO calculator programs before I met his real person. His program for quadratic equation is the first one I have seen that includes error handling steps to ensure a non-zero coefficient for x2 and a non-negative determinant b2-4ac. We then wrote many useful programs both for examination and for fun, often in competition with each other, notably Newton's Method for polynomials of degree up to 5, and binomial expansion of (a+b)c where a, b and c are real numbers. He also wrote a Solution of Triangle program -- A triangle is characterised by six values (sizes of three angles and lengths of three sides), while his program accepts any three (except three angles) out of these six and calculates the rest. He exchanged it for my Sixinone program. Besides being competitors in writing calculator programs, we also worked together in many other occasions.

He helped me a lot when I bought my first computer in October 1993. It was a 80486 DX2-66, with 250MB hard disk and 4MB RAM. I was a computer illiterate at that time, thinking that the monitor looks more like an electronic brain, while the case underneath is something non-essential! He taught me the internal operations of the computer as well as DOS commands one by one extremely patiently. We chose 4C, the only class without computer course, and then we studied the HKCEE Computer Science on our own. While others were still cramming for the Pascal codes, he sold his computer just before the HKCEE in order to better concentrate in other subjects. He got an A in HKCEE Computer Science by living with a printer only! Later, we became teammates in Computer School Team, and both of us entered the Hong Kong Training Team for international software competitions at that time.

He has a special love for Mathematics. In F.6, under his persuasion, we studied HKALE Applied Maths on our own, but I dropped out very soon (except for the GCE A-level Mechanics). From F.4 to F.7, we were teammates in Maths School Team. In his spare time, he solved countless interesting mathematical problems using techniques many years ahead of the school syllabus. He became Chairman of the Mathematics Society in F.6, and asked me to be the Treasurer for the club. We effectively promoted interest in Mathematics by holding various lectures and other activities.

We treasure those days when we struggled and argued over seemingly trivial but intellectually stimulating things. This period of time happened to be our Age of Exploration.

http://www.bol.ucla.edu/~tkyung/

http://www.csis.hku.hk/~chtyim/

http://www.cs.umd.edu/~cykoo/kcy/

http://www.csis.hku.hk/~smleung/

Wanted: group photo e.g. SSC Alumni Association Grand Reunion Dinner 2000	Wanted: group photo e.g. North House 90-91
	St. Stephen's College, Stanley, Hong Kong
Wanted: group photo e.g. Class photo from HK Schools Speech Festivals 1H 90-91 / 2C 91-92
Wanted: group photo e.g. SSCPS cultural exchange trip to Singapore in 1989

http://nonpong.uhome.net/

http://www.roychan.net/

I haven't seen him for a long time already. We lived together for only one year, but he has really impressed me deeply! He joined St. Stephen's College Preparatory School in primary 6 (when I was in primary 5). I know him because we were assigned to the same room in the dormitory. Normally, my school does not accept any new student in P.6, for fear that the new student may not have enough time to adapt to the new environment. However, Tsang Chiu-Chuen was exceptionally good that his case was beyond the worries of the school officials. We all recognize him as being the best in both conducts and academics during our time. He is amiable and polite, so everybody likes him. He is true and honest to everybody he meets, so he can get along well with everyone. He has a broad knowledge, so he can join into any conversation. He has a brilliant mind, so he can solve many problems and conquer all kinds of difficulties. I enjoyed chatting with him very much. At one time, every aspect of him had become my model for learning and immitation. I must admit that he helped me a lot in developing a better personality.

He brought a spider chess and played with us in the dormitory. I miss it a lot but I have never seen it again afterwards. The chess is playable by three persons, one of them acts as the spider. There is a spider net in the centre that can be rotated. The goal of the game is to cross the spider net and get to the opposite side while avoiding being caught by the spider. Well, I miss this game partly because I miss him. He introduced the game to me, and I enjoyed playing it very much. In summer 1989, we joined a cultural exchange program organized by the school and visited Singapore. Afterwards, he was promoted to St. Stephen's College while I had my primary 6 in the Preparatory School.

One year later, we met again briefly in the School Music Festival. It was in the backstage of the Music Hall in the Hong Kong Cultural Centre in Tsimshatsui. He told me that he was changing to another school, but I have forgot the name. Later, I tried to find him many times but in vain. Neither the old phone number nor the old address works, and I have never seen him again. Then in 2002, I have got a phone call from Pong Pong, saying that he met Tsang Chiu-Chuen in Sasoon Road. Tsang Chiu-Chuen went to New Zealand and majored in Medicine. He was then having internship in Hong Kong. But still, I don't have his contacts.

http://www.hshum.com/

http://ug.arch.hku.hk/~khleung/

http://www.belleliu.com/

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