Did you know that this year is the year of the sheep?

Yes! This year is the year of the sheep according to the Chinese zodiac signs, which is my year as I am born in the year of the sheep. And according to the Chinese beliefs, people who are born in the year of the sheep will be facing a lot of tough challenges and hurdles throughout this year. Hmm… I wonder whether this has anything to with the fact that this is my final year of my PhD…

Sorry everyone. I have been away on holiday (in Hong Kong and Shanghai) during Christmas. So I haven't been updating the website for awhile as some of you might have noticed. But don't worry. I am back and I promise to bring you more news than ever before.

Thanks to the support from everyone, our website is slowly growing. And this gives us a lot of encouragement in pursuing what we have been doing. This is especially the case when I noticed that there are daily hit counts on the wallpaper download page that I didn’t expect to be so popular. I was so thrilled when I realized that there are people who appreciate the things we do (and they are very labor intensive as well). I will be bringing more wallpapers to everyone as soon as I get my external harddrive back which I accidentally left in Hong Kong (stupid me).

We are currently in the process of constructing several parts of our website. One of them is the movie download page where people can visualize the different experiments we do in CPL. The movie pages that are working at the moment includes:

Phase Transition
Waves
Crystal Rotation
Vortex Motion
Plasma Diagnostics
Instabilities
Oscillations
Particle Diffusion

They are available in Windows Media Player and Realplayer format. Quicktime format will be available very soon.

We are going to create an introduction page for the people who have never heard of dusty plasma before. It would be nice if people can provide me with some suggestions. I was also creating a 3-D tour page last year, but I didn’t get enough time to take make it interactive yet. It is a very time consuming job as I have to take approximately 100 shots of photo in order to make the panoramic view of one location. Hopefully I will get some time this year to finish this (and I got a new Sony camera for this job as well… hehe).

Felix Cheung

28/01/2003