What "unexpected good/lucky moments" have happened to you or around you?

[talka20]

[ZXCwWRQWz]

Think my biggest was this idea I had in uni that turned out to be a gold mine. Just wanted to make something useful for people and didn't realize it would turn into such a huge success and turn my life upside down.

[talka20]

Im curious what it was

[ZXCwWRQWz]

My main area of research in uni was data mining and machine learning for bioinformatics. Then I dabbled in computer graphics and thought data mining techniques could apply there. So just for fun in my computer graphics course, I wrote a path tracer that uses data mining for what people today might call "importance sampling". It converged to noise-free images so fast back then compared to other techniques although there are so many better techniques now. Then I published free plugin for Maya, 3DS Max, and LightWave, and they became so widely-used that I was finding books at Barnes & Noble mentioning my name left and right and getting job offers up to my ears.

So I think it was an inter-disciplinary thing. I brought techniques unused in one field from another field and it turned out, very luckily, to work very well for the time.

[_Maya_]

I just so happened to be at the same restaurant at the same time as my best friend when she was proposed to. No, it was not planned. It was a complete accident I guess you could say that we were both at the same place. I suppose that was good and lucky to catch that moment. Very happy for her.

[talka20]

Wow that is really amazing !

[_Maya_]

Yep. It was pretty cool to see that.

[exitseven]

I met my wife despite very long odds.